Loss of Privacy

Art is subjective.  Whether or not you find a LEGO made recreation of a concentration camp by artist Zbigniew Libera art, is your own opinion.  Although Libera insists that it was sponsored by LEGO, LEGO says they did not.

I must admit, I found it quite interesting.  I don’t think I’d want to play with such a toy, however, I found myself drawn to the photos, particularly the ones of skeletons.  I wasn’t surprised by such a thing, nor was I repelled in disgust.  Instead, I found myself contemplating why someone would create such a thing, as well as recalling the vast information I have learned over the years about the Holocaust.  In the end, art is about reflection, so I would say, in this instance, Zbigniew Libera has done his job well.

Foreign Policy has an interesting article on five lessons in physics that President-Elect Barack Obama should know before making any decisions.  They include, terrorism, energy, nuclear energy, space, and global warming.

As a matter of fact, everyone should know and understand these lessons before they start arguing with others about them.

The entire collection of LIFE magazine’s photo archive is now online via Google’s image search.  Since only a small percentage of these photos have ever been published, there will be many hours of goof-off time at work spent looking at these new pictures.

Researchers have found 2,700 year old marijuana in a remote part of China.

The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly “cultivated for psychoactive purposes,” rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.

The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.

The extremely dry conditions and alkaline soil acted as preservatives, allowing a team of scientists to carefully analyze the stash, which still looked green though it had lost its distinctive odour.

The 18 researchers, most of them based in China, subjected the cannabis to a battery of tests, including carbon dating and genetic analysis. Scientists also tried to germinate 100 of the seeds found in the cache, without success.

The marijuana was found to have a relatively high content of THC, the main active ingredient in cannabis, but the sample was too old to determine a precise percentage.

I wonder if this guy knew the other Celts that lived in the area.