Kentucky Lawmaker Wants to Make Anonymous Internet Posting Illegal

Kentucky Representative Tim Couch filed a bill this week to make anonymous posting online illegal.

The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.

Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.

If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.

Representative Couch says he filed the bill in hopes of cutting down on online bullying. He says that has especially been a problem in his Eastern Kentucky district.

Action News 36 asked people what they thought about the bill.

Some said they felt it was a violation of First Amendment rights. Others say it is a good tool toward eliminating online harassment.

Represntative Couch says enforcing this bill if it became law would be a challenge

[via wtvq]

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Daylight savings is found to waste energy

March 5, 2008 For decades, conventional wisdom has held that daylight-saving time reduces energy use. Now a university study of a unique situation in Indiana has provided compelling evidence challenging that view. Daylight savings may actually waste energy.

The Wall Street Journal is running a story on a study that unambiguously concludes that Daylight Saving Time not only doesn't save any energy, it actually wastes it and costs more. The study mirrors recent findings in an Australian university and it's a big shame because the concept first championed by Benjamin Franklin more than 200 years ago is now not just conventional wisdom but in widespread usage.

Last year the US switched to summer time, three weeks earlier than usual and added another week at the other end to cut fuel consumption and help the environment. The concept is that electricity demand falls in the evening because of the extra hour of usable daylight.

DST was signed into law with the Energy Policy Act and was expected to save US$4.4bn in energy bills over 15 years and avoid the need for three electric power plants. So someone has done their sums wrong - either the Government has unknowingly destroyed enough resources to feed a third world nation, or the new studies are wrong.

There are of course, many other factors to consider in this equation – there are documented social benefits to daylight-saving time such as more recreation time and increased economic activity, and others that claim it results in less crime and even less traffic accidents.

[via gizmag]

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101 Year Old Man Runs 13 Mile Marathon & Stops for a Beer.

Buster Martin is an unlikely candidate to set a marathon record. He drinks beer, smokes cigarettes and stays out late. And he's 101.

But Martin expects to shatter, or at least ease past, the record next month when he runs London's marathon. And he is counting on having a beer at the finish line.

"He smokes, drinks, stays out late, which is probably why he is still alive," said Charlie Mullins, the managing director of the plumbing company where Martin cleans vans.

When not working three days a week for Mullins, Martin can be found in a nearby boxing gym working with a pair of trainers in preparation for April's run. He refuses to be impressed by the fact that he is still running.

"I am not doing anything unusual. I am just running a marathon," he told ABC News.

Age is no more an obstacle to Martin's running than that strip of winners tape at the finish line. "You are never too old to do what you enjoy."

And Martin likes running, "but not as much as I like my beer," he added.

He is already a man of many firsts. Martin holds three world title records for the oldest person to run the 5K, 10K and the half marathon.

Martin says that in the last weekend, he's completed a 13-mile half marathon that took him a little more than five hours. It would have been faster, he says, but he says he stopped for a beer and a cigarette.

Martin runs in the name of charity. He is raising money for the Rhys Daniels Trust, which provides a "home from home" for parents of children having treatment for life-threatening illnesses.

Mullins describes him as a "remarkable chap, unbelievable. He's an ordinary fellow but remarkable at the same time especially for someone at his age to get involved in this sort of charity."

Martin is also the father of 17 children, which also doesn't impress him. "Pity I didn't have anymore kids," he said with a sigh.

He "likes to live life to the full. … He is as sharp as a razor," Mullins said. He told ABC that Martin's got "unbelievable hearing."

To his colleagues, at 101 years old, Martin is a "great inspiration, he's got a million stories to tell, he is so knowledgeable," his manager said.

[via abc]

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Teen back from the dead!!

A Florida teen says he still can't grasp that he was medically dead for several minutes. WTLV's Jeannie Blaylock reports.

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Living snowflakes: bacteria important to snow formation

With winter still in effect, the enthusiasm with which one greets fresh snowfall has tended to diminish. Every snowflake may be unique and beautiful, but when millions of them are standing between you and your car, beauty can be ignored. Now a team of scientists has taken a closer look at the particulates that cause snow to form, and it seems that most of them are... alive.

Ice formation in the troposphere doesn't tend to happen on its own if the temperatures are higher than -40˚C (coincidentally -40˚F), but biological particulates can catalyze ice formation at higher temperatures by acting as a nucleus. A new study, published in Science, examines samples of fresh snowfall from sites in Montana, France, the Yukon, and Antarctica in order to get a better idea as to the makeup of those ice nucleators.

Compared to remote sites, snow samples from Montana and France contained higher concentrations of particulates--more than 100 per liter. Antarctica, by contrast, averaged just four parts per liter. Biological cells made up around one percent of these particulates, with Pseudomonas syringae being the most common bacteria.

DNA-stained cells of P. syringae (green dots) frozen within individual ice crystals. Image courtesy of Shawn Doyle and Brent Christner, Louisiana State University

Exposing the particulates to lysozymes—enzymes that disrupt cell walls—or 95˚C heat reduced their ability to act as ice nucleators. Both of these treatments would affect living cells but not inorganic particulates such as dust, sand or soot.

One of the authors of the study, Prof. David Sands, postulates that forming rain or snow is part of the bacterial life cycle; "We think if (the bacteria) couldn't cause ice to form, they couldn't get back down to the ground," Sands said. "As long as it rains, the bacteria grow."

Sands suggests that changing bacterial populations may affect rainfall; for example, overgrazing during a summer could reduce the bacterial population, resulting in lower raindrop formation, although more work would need to be done to firm up this theory. Regardless, it is an interesting glimpse into the world of the snowflake.

[via arstechnica]

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