Posts Tagged ‘biological’
Dugway Base for chemical/biological weapons on lockdown
Skull Valley sheep kill 1968
A Utah military facility that tests chemical and biological weapons was locked down “to resolve a serious concern,” and authorities were working to reopen the base, officials said Thursday. All base personnel were safe and working, and no evacuation was needed, said spokeswoman, Bonnie Robinson. She would not say why the base was locked down…
About 1,500 employees and contractors are stationed at the base.
Dugway commander Col. William E. King IV said earlier authorities were “working as quickly and as thoroughly as possible to resolve a serious concern within the Test Area” but he didn’t elaborate.
“As you know measures like these (lockdown of our gates) are not taken lightly. No one is in immediate danger but these steps are required.”
The proving ground covers 798,214 acres and is located in the Great Salt Lake Desert, around 85 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.
Also a historic center for the development and testing of chemical and biological weapons.
Watch the movie “Rage” sometime – starring George C. Scott. Based on events in the good old Cold Warrior days when a release of one of our All-American weapons of mass destruction killed thousands of sheep.
Dugway has been a test site for weaponized anthrax as recently as 1998.
Disgusting crook gets 10 years probation – no jail time!
File photo
An Atlanta businessman was sentenced and fined for abandoning more than three tons of human limbs and medical waste at a suburban storage facility.
Christopher Lee, who operated Biotech Corp., was sentenced to 10 years’ probation and ordered to pay $14,124 in restitution, including the costs of properly disposing the biowaste, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
DeKalb County Superior Court Judge Michael Hancock also forbade Lee from working in the waste-management business during the term of his probation, the newspaper said.
Thermo King Corp., which makes temperature-control systems for trucks, trailers, shipboard containers and railway cars, reported in 2003 Lee had abandoned a trailer at its DeKalb County storage facility, the state Attorney General’s Office said.
The trailer was found to contain 292 containers of amputated limbs and organs, chemotherapy waste and soiled dressings and tubes, the Attorney General’s office said.
Eeouw. Yuck! Make him work off his time in a sewer plant.
Cultural evolution [can] continue throughout life
No spooky apparitions on my toast!
By successively acquiring culture in the form of values, ideas, and actions throughout their lives, humans influence future learning and the capacity for cultural evolution. The number of learning opportunities a person is exposed to is of great importance to that individual’s cultural evolution during his/her lifetime, according to researchers at Stockholm University…
“Since there are many similarities between biological evolution and cultural changes, the research community has often suggested that the theory of biological evolution can also be applied in relatively unaltered form as a model for cultural evolution. Using these methods, genes are replaced by so-called memes, which are small cultural elements, and then the same methods are used as in biological evolutionary theory,” says Magnus Enquist, professor and director of the Center for the Study of Cultural Evolution at Stockholm University…
With many learning opportunities, the individual’s opportunities to actively choose among different cultural variants are of great importance to his/her development. Earlier choices form a foundation for choices to come, and clear differences can be discerned between the cultural evolution of different individuals that can be tied to how often they are exposed to cultural influences.
The factor that is of the greatest importance in the development of theory is the so-called frequency of exposure, which shows that the fewer occasions for exposure an individual encounters, the weaker that individual’s evolution is. In such cases the capacity for dissemination is what determines evolution, in the same was as with biological evolution.
“One finding that surprised us was that who the individual inherited the culture from did not have any direct impact on the results. In other words, it made no difference whether the culture was passed on by the parents, from peers, or from the collective. The very fact that the cultural heritage is not tied to the parents, which has been regarded as the most important difference between biological and cultural evolution, also strengthens our theory.”
Another important conclusion in the article is that there is no simple principle that can predict all cultural evolution in the same way that biological fitness predicts biological evolution. However, a simple variable was able to predict the prevailing cultural variant when the number of learning opportunities was great.
“Hopes of being able to create a theory of cultural evolution or change have often been dashed. With the ideas presented in the article, which are less tied to biological evolutionary thinking and allow cultural evolution to have its own peculiar characteristics, we have a greater chance to succeed in fashioning such a theory,” says Magnus Enquist.
Cripes. More science I have to catch up to – in my so-called spare time.
This sounds like some of the discussions I’ve had with scientists on “why we are smarter than anyone who preceded us” – because we can access the sum of all pre-existing knowledge.
On the other hand, there are at least as many people voting for and determining the government that administers our society – who stopped learning how to learn in the 6th grade – limit their philosophical source information to spooky crap hundreds of years out of date – and rely on one TV channel to fill-in the missing bits of contemporary information.
