a modest achievement by sentient Earth humans: we expand Pi to trillions of decimal digits!

Click to enlarge Chudnovsky Formula

We know -- yes, with certainty -- that we're not alone as the only intelligent organic species in our
Nilky Way Galaxy. We share the Melkweg with tens of thousands of intelligent civilizations. Here on Earth, using radio, we search for others, and we could, within decades, get lucky and tune in on some her Mozart or some other Hawking, at long last answering the ancient, haunting question: Are we
alone?

But as other SETI races tune in on Earth's radio transmissions -- listen to our music, decode our alphabetic text, read our novels and our poetry -- they have chosen a sad era to make contact with their intelligent neighbors. For in this era, they are watching MTV's "Skins" as a representative of Earth sentient culture.

And they are learning about an Earth whose noisiest achievement is a race for more nations and Non-State-Actors to develop nuclear weapons and delivery systems to send them halfway across Earth and detonate them against humans we hate for religious or political reasons.

And on the conventional warfare side, Earth's greatest sovereign superpower is waging two wars in Asia - in Iraq and in Afghanistan -- both wars dragging on longer than World War Two, neither war with an end in sight.

Embarrassing, shameful, frightening -- that we have learned so much, and done such pathetic things with it. Our neighbors in the Milky Way, eavesdropping on us, decoding us ...

It's mostly bad, car bombs, oaths to annihilate one another ... this is the focus of human brilliance ...

But it's not all bad. It's not all Embarrassment Earth. Here on Earth, 2010 wasn't entirely a race to blow ourselves up on market day, a race to fill up hospital wards with maimed children -- on orders from God, who goes by a variety of aliases.

* * *

Late in 2010, sentient races in the Milky Way would have eavesdropped on this modest achievement by human beings who, just like us, live on Earth. Using desktop computers -- modest boxes just like yours and mine -- human beings used a mathematical equation and expanded the digital decimal expression of the ratio pi into TRILLIONS of decimal digits. (And won a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records for their efforts.)

The same planet that spends most of its time trying to murder thousands of its citizens, on orders from Allah, Eloheynu, Jesus ... some of us have better things to do. Rather than make home-brew high explosives, some of us find the precise ratio between the circle's circumference and its diameter.

In an environment entirely free of hate, in a zone free of killing, we ask the deepest questions about the fundamental riddles of mathematics.

Here, on Planet Mozart, we did something brilliant and beautiful again, and not a single explosion, not a single wound, not a single corpse.

Don't get the wrong idea. There are a lot of mathematicians on Earth who think that expanding the decimal expression of pi to trillions of places is ridiculous, worthless, useless, mathematical nonsense. There are lots of brilliant professional mathematicians who think the Chudnovsky Brothers, using an equation from around 1910 by the self-taught Hindu mathematician Ramanujan, have accomplished ... well, nothing.

I'm not one of them. The Chudnovsky Brothers, with Ramanujan's equation, and not a single human corpse, took a fundamental mathematical puzzle farther than the most brilliant human beings had ever taken the question before.

However far we got with this question, it's worth a delicious Guinness stout, and a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records.

It's worth a grafitti scrawl on Earth for what we did, and we did it entirely non-violently.

=============================

5 Trillion Digits of Pi - New World Record -- Pushing the limits of personal computing ... How much further can we go?

By Alexander J. Yee & Shigeru Kondo

(Last updated: September 26, 2010)

This is a followup to our previous announcement of our computation of 5 trillion digits of Pi. This article details some of the methods that were used for the computation as well as the hardware and the full timeline of the computation.

Some of you knew this was coming... It was just a matter of when. (and how many digits)

Although we were very quiet about this computation while it was running, anyone who followed my website or my XtremeSystems thread between February and May would have easily guessed that we were attempting a world record.

3.
1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 : 50
5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679 : 100
2962457053 9070959679 6673211870 6342459769 2128529850 : 999,999,999,950
2976735807 0882130902 2460461146 5810642210 6680122702 : 1,000,000,000,000
9354516713 6069123212 1286195062 3408400370 1793492657 : 1,999,999,999,950
8386341797 9368318191 5708299469 1313121384 3887908330 : 2,000,000,000,000
3840840269 5893047555 2627475826 8598006396 3215856883 : 2,699,999,989,950
9256371619 3901058063 3448436720 6294374587 7597230153 : 2,699,999,990,000
8012497961 5892988915 6174704230 3863302264 3931687863 : 2,699,999,990,050
3126006397 8582637253 6739664083 9716870851 0983536511 : 2,699,999,990,100
5628334110 5221005309 8638608325 4364661745 5833914321 : 2,999,999,999,950
9150024270 6285788691 0228572752 8179710957 7137931530 : 3,000,000,000,000
5209957313 0955102183 1080456596 1489168093 0578494464 : 3,999,999,999,950
3638467628 3610607856 5071920145 5255995193 8577295739 : 4,000,000,000,000
2597691971 6538537682 7963082950 0909387733 3987211875 : 4,999,999,999,950
6399906735 0873400641 7497120374 4023826421 9484283852 : 5,000,000,000,000

Click here for access to some of the digits.

Shortcuts:

    * Numberworld Home
    * Computation Statistics
    * Purpose... Why?
    * The Software: y-cruncher -
      A Multi-threaded Pi Benchmark
    * Contributing Computers
    * Formulas Used for Computation  
    * Sufficiency of Verification
    * Arithmetic Algorithms
    * Maximizing Scalability
    * Error-Detection and Correction
    * Checkpointing + Restartability
    * Opportunities for Improvement
    * Detailed Timeline (With Screenshots)
    * Frequently Asked Questions
    * Special Thanks
    * About Me
    * Questions or Comments

Computation Statistics - All times are Japan Standard Time (JST).

Here are the full computation statistics. As with all significant computations that are done using y-cruncher - A Multi-Threaded Pi Program, a screenshot and validation is included. Since the computation was done in multiple sessions, there is no single screenshot that captures the entire computation from start to finish. The screenshot provided here is simply the one that shows the greater portion of the computation.

The main computation took 90 days on Shigeru Kondo's desktop. The computer was dedicated for this task.

Over the course of the computation, one error was detected and corrected via software ECC. Since the error was corrected, the final results are not affected. The computation error is believed to be caused by a hardware anomaly, or by hardware instability.

Due to the size of this computation, a tremendous amount of memory was needed:

  - Roughly 22 TB* of disk was needed to perform the computation.

  - Another 3.8 TB of disk was needed to store the compressed output of decimal and hexadecimal digits.

If the digits were stored in an uncompressed ascii text file, the combined size of the decimal and hexadecimal digits would be 8.32 TB.

*All units used in this article are binary:

GB = 230 bytes

TB = 240 bytes
Pi - Computation
90 days
Start :  6:19 PM (JST) May 4, 2010
Finish:  1:12 AM (JST) August 3, 2010
Pi - Verification
64 hours (Primary - Bellard's BBP)
66 hours (Secondary - Plouffe's BBP)
Start :  See Detailed Timeline
Finish:  See Detailed Timeline

Computation Step     Time
Series Summation:     73 days
Square Root:     63.3 hours
Final Multiply:     41.6 hours
Base Conversion:     8.2 days
Verify Base Conversion:     45.6 hours
Total Time*:     90 days

Validation File: Validation - Pi - 5,000,000,000,000.txt

Note that the multicore efficiency % is inaccurate. The actual efficiency is about ~85%.

*The total time also includes the time needed to output the digits to disk as well as the time needed to recover from the computational error.

For a detailed timeline of events related to this computation, see here.

Purpose... Why?

Because it's Pi... and because we can!

On a more serious note:

After Fabrice Bellard's announcement of 2.7 trillion digits on a "relatively cheap" desktop, it was pretty clear that the limit of personal computing was a lot higher.

Shigeru Kondo and I wanted to see how much better we could do if we used some more powerful hardware.

Both of us are hardware fanatics. And both of us (especially Shigeru Kondo) had some very powerful machines at our disposal.

So with that, we decided to see how far we could push the limits of personal computing using personally owned hardware.

Unlike Fabrice Bellard's record which focused on efficiency and getting the most out of a small amount of hardware. Our computation focused more on getting the most performance and scalability from a LOT of hardware.

How much hardware can we cram into one machine and still make it faster?

The main challenge for a computation of such a size, is that both software and hardware are pushed beyond their limits.

For such a long computation and with so much hardware, failure is not just a probability. It is a given. There are simply too many components that can fail.

So the questions become:

    * How much can the hardware be expanded while maintaining an acceptable level of reliability?

    * Is it possible to build enough fault-tolerance into the software to cover for hardware failure?

Hardware: Shigeru Kondo's Desktop

Shigeru Kondo's computer had the following specifications:

Processor
    2 x Intel Xeon X5680 @ 3.33 GHz - (12 physical cores, 24 hyperthreaded)
Memory
    96 GB DDR3 @ 1066 MHz - (12 x 8 GB - 6 channels) - Samsung (M393B1K70BH1)
Motherboard
    Asus Z8PE-D12
Hard Drives
    1 TB SATA II (Boot drive) - Hitachi (HDS721010CLA332)
    3 x 2 TB SATA II (Store Pi Output) - Seagate (ST32000542AS)
    16 x 2 TB SATA II (Computation) - Seagate (ST32000641AS)
Raid Controller
    2 x LSI MegaRaid SAS 9260-8i
Operating System
    Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise x64

============================

Software: y-cruncher - A Multi-Threaded Pi Program/Benchmark

Software for Computation:

The program that was used for the main computation is y-cruncher v0.5.4.9138 Alpha.

See main page: y-cruncher - A Multi-Threaded Pi Program

y-cruncher is a powerful multi-threaded program/benchmark that is becoming an increasingly popular tool within the computer enthusiast community. As of this writing, it also holds the world record for most digits computed for several other famous constants. (These include: e, Square Root of 2, Golden Ratio, Euler-Mascheroni Constant, Natural Log of 2, Apery's Constant, and Catalan's Constant.)

There are several aspects of y-cruncher that set it apart from most other similar Pi-crunching programs:

    * It uses state-of-the-art algorithms to achieve never-before-seen computational speeds. Many of these methods and algorithms are newly developed and first-time tested in y-cruncher. Therefore they are not yet used by other programs.
    * y-cruncher is scalable to many cores. Most other multi-threaded Pi programs do not scale well beyond several cores and are unable to fully utilize many core machines such as the 12-core/24-thread computer that was used for this Pi computation.
    * y-cruncher supports the use of multiple hard drives to use as distributed memory storage for very large computations.
    * y-cruncher is fault-tolerant to hardware errors. It is able to detect and recover from minor computational errors that are caused by hardware anomalies or instablity. This is important for extremely long computations where the chance of hardware failure is non-negligible.

The exact version that was used for the computation is:

y-cruncher v0.5.4.9138 Alpha (PB) - x64 SSE4.1 ~ Ushio

This version was a very early private-beta for v0.5.4. It was slightly modified to display more detail on the progress of the computation. (All public versions display only a percentage.)

Software for Verification:

The program that was used for the verification is y-cruncher BBP v1.0.119.

See main page: y-cruncher BBP

This program implements the digit-extraction algorithm for Pi using the BBP formulas. It's sole purpose was to verify the main computation.

Both programs are written by me (Alexander J. Yee) and are available for download from their respective pages.

For those who have used y-cruncher before and are curious at how it works:

This webpage is the first article I have written that reveals significant details on the inner workings of y-cruncher... Enjoy!

The Long Wars: We kill them, they kill us -- and we kill us. 2010 was a record year for US troop suicides.

Sgt. 1st Class Gregory Giger was one of at least 22 Fort Hood GIs to commit suicide in 2010. / Photo: COURTESY PHOTO / SA


The military of the United States is fighting two wars in Asia. They are Long Wars, and have lasted considerably longer than the US military and its allies took to achieve the unconditional defeat and surrender of all its combatant enemies (Germany, Japan, Italy and other Axis nations) in World War II.

Wars can end with formal surrender ceremonies. But when our enemies are not politically organized into governments and nations which can surrender -- for example, al Quada and the Taliban, different combatant groups in different nations, affiliated, but with different leadership goals and structures, guerrilla irregular combatant forces referred to as Non-State Actors -- then our progress in these Long Wars must be measured less precisely and less dramatically, and more analytically. 

Are we winning at any given moment? Are we losing? We count our battlefield casualties and combat deaths, and as accurately as we can, we count the enemy's battlefield casualties and combat deaths. Defeat and victory at each given season become matters of simple arithmetic -- not because this kind of analysis is a clear indication of winning and losing, but because arithmetic is the best we can do in these kinds of Long Wars. Someone -- political leaders, the press -- wants an accountability of the progress of the Long Wars, and the best response is to crunch our numbers, our dead soldiers and their dead soldiers, our maimed Marines, their wounded soldiers. We also tally combat troops in the field -- how many of our troops versus our estimate of how many enemy troops we face and engage.

In this kind of un-clear, fuzzy winning-losing war analysis, there are odd but very important catagories of the War Arithmetic. In all our Hollywood movies about the great victories of World War II, there was never a mention, never a whisper, of this category: troop suicides.

But in all wars, there are soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines who finish off their service by taking their own life. Despite war's generous distribution of firearms, typically troop suicides are by hanging, often by bootlaces from barracks rafters.

Nor are our troop suicides limited to enlisted men. Commissioned officers -- lieutenants, lieutenant colonels -- take their own lives.

Nearly every year during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, troop suicides have reached such high levels that the Pentagon has declared a Stand-Down Day service-wide, for commanders and specialists to spend 24 hours to draw attention to the troop suicide problem, and to the official resources service personnel can call on to steer themselves away from suicide.

Asking for official help with thoughts of suicide is a difficult request. In traditional leadership structures, asking for psychiatric help can be equivalent to exiting the career military. You don't get help with your suicide problem -- you get no help, and you get tossed out of the military.

But this is part of how the US military wins or loses a Long War. The enemy kills some of our combat soldiers. And some of our combat soldiers kill themselves.

======================

The San Antonio Express-News
daily broadsheet, San Antonio, Texas USA
Thursday 20 January 2011
[US Army Fort] Hood,
Army suicides hit record mark

At least 22 confirmed last year in and around Fort Hood, doubling the post’s total from 2009.

Suicides continue to plague the Army, with 2010 setting a new record. Fort Hood, which has repeatedly sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, led all posts worldwide, with 22 GI taking their own lives.

by Sig Christenson / Sigc@express-news.net

KILLEEN, TEXAS -- Sgt. 1st Class Gregory Eugene Giger was a “tall quiet Texan” even after his wife filed for divorce while he was in Iraq, his mom says.

Still, he was devastated.

“The only thing that I know is when she sued for divorce, she charged him with $2,000-a-month child support and insisted that he pay half of the house,” said Helen Giger, 71, of Chandler, east of Dallas. “And by the time she got through charging him with various things, he had very little money left over, not even hardly enough to pay for his rent.”

Authorities found Giger, 42, of Houston dead in his apartment near Fort Hood, hanging by necktie. He was one of at least 22 GIs from the post to commit suicide in 2010.

The Fort Hood mark is a new record for the post and contributed to the Army’s worst year for suicides. There was, however, a sign of hope in the grim tally. Slightly fewer active-duty soldiers died by their own hand compared with 2009. But there was bad news, too: The number of suicides in the National Guard and Army Reserve rose sharply.

The Army’s vice chief of staff, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, told the San Antonio Express-News that suicides at or near Fort Hood have increased as more soldiers have returned from combat.

Fort Hood’s 22 confirmed suicides, meanwhile, doubled its 2009 mark and was eight more than Fort Bragg, N.C., which had the second-largest tally.

And the Fort Hood mark could grow since some deaths haven’t been resolved. Others will remain mysteries, like that of Sgt. Bradley Dale Penman, 34, of Punxsutawney, Pa. Justice of the Peace Garland Potvin of Killeen said that Penman’s body, found last summer, was so decomposed no cause of death could be determined.

The Pentagon has launched mental health and suicide-prevention programs and created an Army task force in hopes of turning the tide. In 2008, the Army began a five-year study with the National Institute of Mental Health. That research effort examines risk and resilience factors associated with suicides. A new military research consortium will test and develop interventions.

So far, however, little has changed. The vast majority of the victims were men, with the bulk of the soldiers coming from lower enlisted ranks.

Eighteen of last year’s 301 suicides were women, prompting Chiarelli to tell reporters on Wednesday that resiliency among females in some cases “seems to be higher” than for men. That could explain “why we have a lower suicide rate in women based on the number that we have deployed,” he said.

Time in the war zone is one factor in the deaths. Roughly two in three active-duty soldiers committing suicide have gone to war, while nearly half of all guardsmen have fought. But other issues also are in play, including depression, alcohol and drug abuse, failed or failing relationships, financial woes, and legal or disciplinary troubles.

The Army Reserve’s chief, Lt. Gen. Jack Stultz, said his troops often are far from their units when not on duty. Leaders now must maintain greater contact with their troops, he said.

“Dwell” time at home is another factor. Chiarelli predicted that “when we put more time between deployments, that is going to be a huge factor in helping us get at these problems.”

Giger had spent close to a quarter-century in the Army and been to Iraq three times since 2004, receiving two Bronze Star medals for valor. If he felt stress from the divorce and financial problems, he didn’t let on.

“I think he probably had a lot going on that he just stuffed down inside of him,” Helen Giger said.

Chiarelli told reporters that he believes the programs instituted by the Army in recent years have saved lives, but Col. Carl Castro, director of the medicine research program that established the suicide consortium, said no one is sure of their effectiveness.

“We think they’re effective,” he told the Express-News, “but we haven’t done the research to demonstrate that they may in fact be effective.”

Chiarelli pointed to the Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, which offers screening tests for soldiers, family members and Army civilian workers, as one successful effort. He said research comparing soldiers who committed suicide against a control group showed that, “broadly speaking, resilient soldiers do not complete suicide.”

The Army has pocket guides on suicide awareness, and Fort Hood has started its own stress-reduction programs and a soldier “resiliency campus.”

The post’s senior commander, Maj. Gen. Will Grimsley, ordered commanders to inspect soldiers’ cars and on- and off-post homes after four GIs committed suicide over three days in September.

A trend of increasingly public suicides last year, one in the restroom of a Killeen sandwich shop and another at the end of a police chase near Waco, was a concern for Grimsley, who sought to identify GIs who might be suicide risks.

“I worry about the trend,” he said in October. “The violent nature of it concerns me only because the potential is that it’s bad enough if a soldier chooses to kill himself by violence but the potential impact on others, that that notion of violence could spread to somebody else either by accident or by design.”

- 30 -

COMMENTS:

7:57 AM on January 20, 2011

$2000 in child suppoert, holly crap how many kids did they have together??
Spouses and their lawyers should be held accounted for if they file divorce and the soldier commits suicide during or after deployment. The story lacks some info regarding to why she filed for divorce but by her wanting all his money is crazy. Hope the system doesn't give her what she wants, she needs to be stoned to death

9:40 AM on January 20, 2011

How about the VA LISTEN TO THE SOLDIERS?

The soldiers don't want to be on Psycho-Wacko meds that don't work.
The soldiers don't want to be labeled for life CRAZY, ADDICTED, & ALCOHOLIC.
The soldiers don't want never-ending group therapy nonsense.
The soldier don't want anything to do with the 12-Step Religious Cult
LISTEN TO THE SOLDIERS ISSUES! NO MORE ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL!

muttley_saen
Muttley

9:29 AM on January 20, 2011

Congratulations to the former Mrs. Giger! You discovered a legal way to commit murder. I hope your greed is finally quenched by the blood of your childrens father.

Mark Twain was wrong, so an Auburn University professor will fix Twain's choice of werds in "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"

The New York Times
(daily broadsheet, New York City USA)
Wednesday 5 January 2011

 

Editorial:

 That’s Not Twain

 

Next month, you will be able to buy the single-volume NewSouth Edition of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” edited by Professor Alan Gribben of Auburn University at Montgomery [Alabama]. It differs from other editions of those books because Mr. Gribben has turned the word “nigger” -- as used by Tom and Huck -- into “slave.” Mr. Gribben has also changed “Injun” to Indian.

 

Mr. Gribben says he wants to make these American classics readable again -- for young readers and for anyone who is hurt by the use of an epithet that would have been ubiquitous in Missouri in the 1830s and 1840s, which is when both books are set. He says he discovered how much Twain’s language offended readers when he began giving talks about “Tom Sawyer” all across Alabama in 2009. He has also acknowledged that what he calls “textual purists” will be horrified by his sanitized versions of the two classics.

 

We are horrified, and we think most readers, textual purists or not, will be horrified too. The trouble isn’t merely adulterating Twain’s text. It’s also adulterating social, economic and linguistic history. Substituting the word “slave” makes it sound as though all the offense lies in the “n-word” and has nothing to do with the institution of slavery. Worse, it suggests that understanding the truth of the past corrupts modern readers, when, in fact, this new edition is busy corrupting the past.

 

When “Huckleberry Finn” was published, Mark Twain appended a note on his effort to reproduce “painstakingly” the dialects in the book, including several backwoods dialects and “the Missouri negro dialect.” What makes “Huckleberry Finn” so important in American literature isn’t just the story, it’s the richness, the detail, the unprecedented accuracy of its spoken language. There is no way to “clean up” Twain without doing irreparable harm to the truth of his work.

 

- 30 -

 

A version of this editorial appeared in print on January 6, 2011, on page A26 of the New York edition.

 

"Twain scholar" Alan Gribben edits new edition of "Huckleberry Finn," substitutes Twain's "nigger" for the word "slave"

Professor Alan Gribben

English Department

Auburn University

 

Dear Professor Gribben,

 

I was shocked not by what you did to "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," but to discover that you are an English professor -- and often described as a leading Twain scholar -- at Auburn University.

 

The first responsibility of a literary scholar is to preserve, respect and protect the original text of a literary classic.

 

When the classic requires translation between languages. certain liberties in word choice are allowed and even necessary.

 

But Twain wrote "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" in a historically immediate and universally comprehensible dialect of our American English. Every word he chose, he chose for a reason. He did not rely on copyright law to protect his writing. He relied on the demands and expectations of his appreciative readers, who would have been horrified and disgusted at the slightest text changes to his published writing which Twain himself did not make and authorize.

 

That these changes to "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" occur one century after the author's death -- one century after Twain lost his living ability to defend his text from attack and perverse change -- is frankly cowardly and ghoulish, and is certainly not characteristic of anyone daring to call himself a scholar.

 

A scholar protects both his author and his author's historical times, as the author scrupulously chronicled them.

 

Must I remind you that the shame and embarrassment of "nigger" in "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" are there, by Twain's choice, to shock and shame his readers for all time as Twain chronicled the details and vocabulary of American life under slavery?

 

You have no right to pass yourself off as a scholar, you embarrass Auburn, and worst of all, you pervert the right of an author to speak clearly to his readers across the span of time.

 

Sincerely,

 

Robert Merkin

 

Chesterfield, Massachusetts USA

 

The Tooth Fairy Project rears its violently controversial head again! Is it total crap? Or ... maybe not ... and that ain't good ...

Through absolutely no agency or blame attributable to me, The Tooth Fairy Project and its subsequent morph studies have come alive again on the e-List Ionizing Radiation Afficianados -- and, as always happens, has immediately been responded to by a cannonade of criticism and attack.

Ah, screw it: I don't know what's True and what's Not True. I didn't collect these thousands of baby teeth, grind them up, soak them in nitric acid, and perform chemical analyses on them, looking for the rare and unnatural biproduct of the nuclear age, Strontium-90.

I just love controversy.

And in nuclear tech and nuclear power industry circles, The Tooth Fairy Project is the Mother Of All Heated, Irate, Angry, Never-Ending Controversies. Grown men with crewcuts, in suits and ties, with pocket protectors, leap up and scream: "Liar Liar Pants On Fire!" 

And the USA federal government chimes in with its own study attacking every aspect and conclusion of the Tooth Fairy Project.

And that should settle the matter once and for all.

If you always believe the USA federal government.

Please, if you bother to read this story at all, if any of it grabs your interest, read it all the way to the end, for a wonderful, wonderful quote applicable to any and all scientific controversies.

~ ~ ~

where the Tooth Fairy
takes those baby toofs
and what she does
with those baby toofs

[image] 
The element Strontium, the nuclide (what used to be called an isotope) Sr87. Add 3 neutrons, and you get the Hot Stuff Sr-90 (Strontium-90 is also the title of a Sting/Police LP). It probably doesn't exist naturally, or if it exists naturally, it exists in a barely perceivable ratio to the natural non-radioactive nuclides.

On Earth, adding the 3 neutrons to the SR87 nucleus and thus making it Hot Sr90 is a process that only occurs inside a nuclear pile or in an atomic or hydrogen bomb explosion. If you want Sr90 from a natural source, you have to fly to the surface or interior of a star.

So nobody on Earth ever had to lose sleep over Sr90 until the first atomic bomb explosion, above ground, in the desert of New Mexico in summer 1945.

Hot Stuff is funny shorthand for an atom which emits ionizing radiation capable of inducing chemical changes in the molecules of living things. So what you thought was a nice healthy Nitrogen atom suddenly becomes an Oxygen or Carbon atom in a biomolecule where one shouldn't be. The chemical sequelæ of this can generate a cancer, or linger in the reproductive DNA to be passed on to newborns as a genetic mutation.

This of course is a drawing based on accepted theory. We really can't see or directly perceive or image an individual atom at this scale. For one thing, if a proton or a neutron was displayed on a computer screen as 2 x 2 pixels, the nearest electron would probably be down by the nearest bus stop from your apartment.

A large atom can be directly imaged through several high-energy bombartment techniques, and produces a very fuzzy shadowy vague foggy black sphere (on a flat image, its 2D shadow, a circle). They've imaged individual atoms since around 1955, but crispness, color, detail and clarity still evade the physicist's Arte. At this scale and tinier, Nature employs fundamental protections -- Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle -- to prevent us, apparently forever, from looking through the window while she's dressing.

Well-confirmed Theory tells us that important things -- transmutations, transitions, changes from being one thing to another -- are occuring at these tiny scales, but we theorize that some, for example, take place in less than 0.000003 seconds. These are generally referred to as virtual particles -- a thing theoretically as real and significant as a tree or a baseball, but whose existence is so brief that we can only guess that it ever existed, sandwiched between real things that last longer. (I just made that fraction up, but you get the idea.) Try imaging something as speedy as that. Now do it again, that first image was too fuzzy.

JRW forwarded this story to the Yahoo List Ionizing Radiation Afficianados and claims his childhood dentist harvested his lost baby teeth and likely passed them on to this Tooth Fairy.

I am an Ionizing Radiation Afficianado. I have TWO Geiger Counters. And you don't have any. (If you do, by all means, Leave A Comment.)

~ ~ ~

The New York Times
Tuesday 11 November 2003

In Baby Teeth, a Test
of Fallout; a Long-shot
Search for Nuclear Peril
in Molars and Cuspids

by Andy Newman

Joseph J. Mangano does not even notice the smell anymore. It hits you the moment you walk into his tiny, tidy apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, something musty and a little acrid, though not entirely unpleasant.

It is the smell of 3,000 human baby teeth and the crumbling 50-year-old envelopes that hold them, each one scribbled with a few bits of information: cuspid or molar, intact or rootless, milk-fed or breast. The teeth - some split or brown-streaked, some improbably pearly - sit in boxes inside boxes atop his bookshelf, waiting for the next phase of research to see if they contain life-threatening amounts of nuclear fallout.

Mr. Mangano runs the Radiation and Public Health Project Inc., a shoestring organization with offices mostly on his kitchen table, that has spent the last 18 years questioning the safety of nuclear power.

In 2001, the group acquired custody of thousands of baby teeth collected from America's young mostly during the 1950's and 60's for a study of the effects of atom bomb tests.

The original survey, known as the Tooth Fairy study, found many teeth with elevated levels of strontium 90, a radioactive and carcinogenic yellowish metal isotope that bonds to tooth and bone. Mr. Mangano's group is looking to track down donors and find out if levels of strontium 90 correlate with cancer in later life.

But that is only half of the Radiation and Public Health Project's mission - the less provocative half. They are also measuring strontium 90 in the teeth of modern-day children, sick and healthy, to determine the relative levels in children born or reared near nuclear power plants.

Mr. Mangano's group thinks the dual effort might show something that few people want to hear: that the nation's 100-plus nuclear power reactors, when operated under normal conditions, are giving people cancer. They say they have already found signs: disproportionate drops in infant mortality after reactors close; parallel trends in childhood cancer rates and strontium 90 levels.

"We're not trying to scare anyone," Mr. Mangano said last Friday. "We're trying to inform people."

The group's work is, to say the very least, controversial. Though members of the group have published a handful of articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Archives of Environmental Health, their credibility with the scientific establishment hovers near zero. Detractors say they obsess over amounts of radiation that are insignificant compared with the dose humans receive each day from cosmic rays, soil and other natural sources.

And their few government contracts have left a short trail of dissatisfied local officials sharply critical of their methods, their scientific objectivity and their results.

"What they do is what's popularly referred to as junk science," said Dr. Joshua Lipsman, the health commissioner in Westchester County, home of the embattled Indian Point nuclear power plant and, according to the Radiation and Public Health Project, children with the highest strontium 90 readings in the region. "We found a number of scientific errors both in measurement and process in their proposals."

Mr. Mangano, 47, who has a master's degree in public health, defends the group's work. He is not surprised to meet resistance from the military-industrial-energy-pharmaceutical-governmental complex.

"It's something that government does not do, measure radiation levels in the bodies of people living near reactors," he said. A 1991 National Cancer Institute study of disease patterns found no general increased risk of death from cancer for people living near 62 reactors. But Mr. Mangano said the study, while comprehensive, focused on disease patterns, which can have causes other than radiation, and that in any case the most recent data used in it is now 20 years old and needs to be updated.

Zdenek Hrubec, a biostatistician who worked on the 1991 study, said that while the study had its limits, it was difficult to imagine

[a kind of logical and statistical argument and criterion, I guess. the Vleeptron High Non-Junk Science Council likes it, and will use it in the future when necessary. thanks, Zdenek!]

a case where reactors caused an increase in cancer that was hidden in the statistics. "You'd have to postulate that there was a deficit of smokers or industrial pollutants in the same places where there were nuclear reactors," he said.

The Radiation and Public Health Project keeps trying, and with the help of its friends, including left-leaning celebrities like Alec Baldwin and Susan Sarandon, it is surviving. Tomorrow at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, the group will announce the receipt of a $25,000 state grant to collect and analyze 50 teeth from children with cancer and compare them with the teeth of healthy children.

Gov. James E. McGreevey is scheduled to speak. Almost more encouraging, Mr. Mangano said, is that a state finance official told him on Friday that the first check was in the mail. "By Tuesday I'll know if he's telling the truth," Mr. Mangano said.

The original Tooth Fairy study goes back to the height of the Red Menace, when scientists began to complain that the government was regularly exploding atomic bombs over domestic soil -- more than 100 nuclear tests were eventually done -- without knowing their effects on people.

In 1959, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, including Barry Commoner, one of the founders of environmentalism, started a campaign to collect baby teeth. Each donor received a button saying "I gave my tooth to science."

Strontium 90 was chosen as a proxy for the dozens of slow-decaying radioactive compounds in nuclear fallout because it was relatively easy to test for.

The researchers determined that from 1945 to 1965, strontium 90 levels in baby teeth had risen 50-fold, a finding used in the successful push for a nuclear test ban. But no one followed up on the health of the donors, and the program was discontinued in 1970.

The Radiation and Public Health Project was founded in 1985 by Jay M. Gould, a retired statistician. The group's first tooth study, done in Suffolk County in 1999, found that strontium 90 levels had dropped steadily in the first 20 years after the nuclear test ban but had been creeping up since the mid-1980's, a finding that Mr. Mangano said has been repeated in every study they've done since then, across several states.

In 2001, a cache of 85,000 old teeth turned up in an old munitions bunker in, believe it or not, Eureka, Mo. Dr. Commoner recommended that they be given to Mr. Mangano's group for analysis. Mr. Mangano said it would cost about $50,000 to track down and study the health of 400 of the old donors. (The 82,000 teeth not in Mr. Mangano's living room are being stored upstate.)

The Radiation and Public Health Project has its teeth tested at a radiochemistry laboratory in Ontario. There they are washed, dried, ground, dissolved in nitric acid and treated with chemicals that help locate the strontium.

But John Matuszek, a retired director of the New York State Health Department's radiological sciences laboratory who was hired by Suffolk County to evaluate the Radiation and Public Health Project's research proposal there, said he found that the proposal had a host of basic scientific flaws.

Dr. Matuszek said that the proposed sample sizes -- a single tooth, as opposed to the 90-tooth batches used in the St. Louis study -- were too small to yield detectable amounts of strontium 90. And that the detectors they used were incapable of differentiating between strontium 90 and some naturally occurring radioactive compounds, and that the error margins they claimed were implausible.

The conclusions the group drew, Dr. Matuszek said, "have nothing to do with cancer cases."

Hari Sharma, the radiochemist the group uses, said the precautions he had taken were more than adequate to screen out false positives and other errors.

Mr. Mangano said Dr. Matuszek had been enlisted by health officials in Suffolk County who "were determined that we not receive those funds and test those teeth."

The group has its defenders. Samuel Epstein, chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition and a professor of environmental and occupational medicine at the University of Illinois, has reviewed some of Mr. Mangano's papers for journals. He called the group's research "good, careful work."

"While they were somewhat overexuberant in their initial stuff," Dr. Epstein said, "they've calmed down and I think they are producing solid scientific work that stands critical peer review."

In the eyes of Mr. Mangano's group, it is the government that has the proven credibility problem. For decades, he said, officials lied or withheld the truth about the extent of civilian exposure to nuclear tests and its health consequences. In 1997, for example, the government belatedly acknowledged that radioactive iodine from nuclear fallout caused thyroid cancer in 10,000 to 75,000 Americans.

"National security considerations are sometimes placed before health concerns," Mr. Mangano said. "These are very inflammatory comments but that's the way it is."

Matt Ahearn, the Green Party assemblyman from Bergen County who shepherded the group's $25,000 appropriation through the budget process, said the debate over their work did not bother him.

"There's corporate junk science and the people's junk science," he said. "Take your pick."

- 30 -

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

high spike in birth defects associated with 2004 US military battle in Fallujah, Iraq / Depleted Uranium early suspect

 

This scientific study is so early in its infancy as to beg criticism, controversy and dismissal. This is The Guardian's article about it; I listened to the BBC World Service's version of the story, with an interview by the lead researcher, a few hours ago.

Notice that the image accompanying The Guardian story is of a 2004 white phosphorous attack, though the study's primary suspect is Depleted Uranium / DU. As a former newspaper editor, I suspect the most trivial reason for the white phosphorous photo: A white phosphorous attack is highly colorful, while  DU armaments are less photogenic, in visible light comparatively invisible.

In any case, the researchers are reticent to blame any particular chemical or armament for the documented rise in birth defects among families in Falluja (also commonly transliterated Fallujah).

I predict DU will be the next generation's Agent Orange. For decades we can expect American and international NGO advocates both for US military veterans, and for native people -- in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans -- who live in former battlefields that were saturated with pulverized DU armaments.

Of particular interest, however, will be the response of the US Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs to veterans' claims of health problems blamed on DU contamination. Will the Agent Orange response be repeated? Will it become the model for our postwar government response to scientific research into and medical treatment for exposure to these substances?

In any case, expect much more media and scientific journal coverage of this issue. The scientific and medical truth -- if it ever emerges clearly -- is one thing. The political controversy surrounding the widespread military use of DU is quite another thing.

 

=====================

guardian.co.uk home
The Guardian
(UK broadsheet daily newspaper)
Thursday 30 December 2010

Research links rise

in Falluja birth defects

and cancers to US assault

• Defects in newborns 11 times higher than normal
• 'War contaminants' from 2004 attack could be cause

by Martin Chulov

[image]
US Marines prepare for Fallujah offensive White phosphorous smoke screens are fired by the US Army as part of an early morning patrol in November 2004 on the outskirts of Falluja, Iraq, in preparation for an offensive against insurgents. Photograph: Scott Nelson/Getty Images

A study examining the causes of a dramatic spike in birth defects in the Iraqi city of Falluja has for the first time concluded that genetic damage could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults that took place six years ago.

The research, which will be published next week, confirms earlier estimates revealed by the Guardian of a major, unexplained rise in cancers and chronic neural-tube, cardiac and skeletal defects in newborns. The authors found that malformations are close to 11 times higher than normal rates, and rose to unprecedented levels in the first half of this year -- a period that had not been surveyed in earlier reports.

The findings, which will be published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, come prior to a much-anticipated World Health Organisation study of Falluja's genetic health. They follow two alarming earlier studies, one of which found a distortion in the sex ratio of newborns since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- a 15% drop in births of boys.

"We suspect that the population is chronically exposed to an environmental agent," said one of the report's authors, environmental toxicologist Mozhgan Savabieasfahani. "We don't know what that environmental factor is, but we are doing more tests to find out."

The report identifies metals as potential contaminating agents afflicting the city -- especially among pregnant mothers. "Metals are involved in regulating genome stability," it says. "As environmental effectors, metals are potentially good candidates to cause birth defects."

The findings are likely to prompt further speculation that the defects were caused by depleted uranium rounds, which were heavily used in two large battles in the city in April and November 2004. The rounds, which contain ionising radiation, are a core component of the armouries of numerous militaries and militias.

Their effects have long been called into question, with some scientists claiming they leave behind a toxic residue, caused when the round -- either from an assault rifle or artillery piece -- bursts through its target.

However, no evidence has yet been established that proves this, and some researchers instead claim that depleted uranium has been demonstrably proven not to be a contaminant.

The report acknowledges that other battlefield residues may also be responsible for the defects. "Many known war contaminants have the potential to interfere with normal embryonic and foetal development," the report says. "The devastating effect of dioxins on the reproductive health of the Vietnamese people is well-known."

The latest Falluja study surveyed 55 families with seriously deformed newborns between May and August. It was conducted by Dr Samira Abdul Ghani, a paediatrician at Falluja general hospital. In May, 15% of the 547 babies born had serious birth defects. In the same period, 11% of babies were born at less than 30 weeks and 14% of foetuses spontaneously aborted.

The researchers believe that the figures understate what they describe as an epidemic of abnormalities, because a large number of babies in Falluja are born at home with parents reluctant to seek help from authorities.

One case documented in the report is of a mother and her daughter who after the 2004 battles both gave birth to babies with severe malformations. The second wife of one of the fathers also had a severely deformed baby in 2009.

"It is important to understand that under normal conditions, the chances of such occurrences is virtually zero," said Savabieasfahani.

Iraq's government has built a new hospital in Fallujah, but the city's obstetricians have complained that they are still overwhelmed by the sheer number of serious defects. The US military has long denied that it is responsible for any contaminant left behind in the city, or elsewhere in Iraq, as it continues its steady departure from the country it has occupied for almost eight years.

It has said that Iraqis who want to file a complaint are welcome to do so. Several families interviewed by the Guardian in November 2009 said they had filed complaints but had not received replies.

The World Health Organisation is due to begin its research sometime next year. However, there are fears that an extensive survey may not be possible in the still volatile city that still experiences assassinations and bombings most weeks.

"An epidemic of birth defects is unfolding in Fallujah, Iraq," said Savabieasfahani. "This is a serious public health crisis that needs global attention. We need independent and unbiased research into the possible causes of this epidemic.

"We invite scientists and organisations to get in touch with us so that we may gain the strength to address this large global public health issue."

City's spike in deformity rates

Birth-defect rates in Falluja have become increasingly alarming over the past two years. In the first half of 2010, the number of monthly cases of serious abnormalities rose to unprecedented levels. In Falluja general hospital, 15% of the 547 babies born in May had a chronic deformity, such as a neural tune defect -- which affects the brain and lower limbs -- cardiac, or skeletal abnormalities, or cancers.

No other city in Iraq has anywhere near the same levels of reported abnormalities. Falluja sees at least 11 times as many major defects in newborns than world averages, the research has shown.

The latest report, which will be published next week in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, says Falluja has been infected by a chronic environmental contaminant. It focuses on depleted uranium, used in weaponry during two US assaults in 2004 as a possible cause of the contaminant. Scientific studies have so far established no link between the rounds, which contain ionising radiation to burst through armour and are commonly used on the battlefield.

The study focuses on metals as a potential conduit for the contaminant. It suggests a bodily accumulation of toxins is causing serious and potentially irreversible damage to the city's population base, and calls for an urgent examination of metals in Falluja as well as a comprehensive examination of the city's recent reproductive history.

- 30 -

   
Related

31 July 1999: Uranium shells warning for Kosovo alternative maybe: [UK Ministry of Defense] accused of hiding truth

17 May 2004: 'Dirty dozen' toxins are banned by UN pact

22 January 2010: Iraq littered with high levels of nuclear and dioxin contamination, study finds

Earth continues to struggle to defeat Sin & Evil / but a few places surrender to Satan & Sanity

The Associated Press (US newswire)
Monday 27 December 2010

News from planets that 
don't shoot themselves 
in the foot anymore




[image]
In this Nov. 10, 2010 picture, a drug addict who identified himself as "Joao," holds used needles to exchange for new ones in Lisbon's Casal Ventoso

by Barry Hatton And Martha Mendoza, Associated Press

LISBON, Portugal -- These days, Casal Ventoso is an ordinary blue-collar community — mothers push baby strollers, men smoke outside cafes, buses chug up and down the cobbled main street.

Ten years ago, the Lisbon neighborhood was a hellhole, a "drug supermarket" where some 5,000 users lined up every day to buy heroin and sneaked into a hillside honeycomb of derelict housing to shoot up. In dark, stinking corners, addicts — some with maggots squirming under track marks — staggered between the occasional corpse, scavenging used, bloody needles.

At that time, Portugal, like the junkies of Casal Ventoso, had hit rock bottom: An estimated 100,000 people — an astonishing 1 percent of the population — were addicted to illegal drugs. So, like anyone with little to lose, the Portuguese took a risky leap: They decriminalized the use of all drugs in a groundbreaking law in 2000.

==========

EDITOR'S NOTE — This is part of an occasional series by The Associated Press examining the U.S. struggles in its war on drugs after four decades and $1 trillion.

===========

Now, the United States, which has waged a 40-year, $1 trillion war on drugs, is looking for answers in tiny Portugal, which is reaping the benefits of what once looked like a dangerous gamble. White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske visited Portugal in September to learn about its drug reforms, and other countries — including Norway, Denmark, Australia and Peru — have taken interest, too.

"The disasters that were predicted by critics didn't happen," said University of Kent professor Alex Stevens, who has studied Portugal's program. "The answer was simple: Provide treatment."

================

Drugs in Portugal are still illegal. But here's what Portugal did: It changed the law so that users are sent to counseling and sometimes treatment instead of criminal courts and prison. The switch from drugs as a criminal issue to a public health one was aimed at preventing users from going underground.

Other European countries treat drugs as a public health problem, too, but Portugal stands out as the only one that has written that approach into law. The result: More people tried drugs, but fewer ended up addicted.

Here's what happened between 2000 and 2008:

• There were small increases in illicit drug use among adults, but decreases for adolescents and problem users, such as drug addicts and prisoners.

• Drug-related court cases dropped 66 percent.

• Drug-related HIV cases dropped 75 percent. In 2002, 49 percent of people with AIDS were addicts; by 2008 that number fell to 28 percent.

• The number of regular users held steady at less than 3 percent of the population for marijuana and less than 0.3 percent for heroin and cocaine — figures which show decriminalization brought no surge in drug use.

• The number of people treated for drug addiction rose 20 percent from 2001 to 2008.

Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates, one of the chief architects of Portugal's new drug strategy, says he was inspired partly by his own experience of helping his brother beat addiction.

"It was a very hard change to make at the time because the drug issue involves lots of prejudices," he said. "You just need to rid yourselves of prejudice and take an intelligent approach."

Officials have not yet worked out the cost of the program, but they expect no increase in spending, since most of the money was diverted from the justice system to the public health service.

In Portugal today, outreach health workers provide addicts with fresh needles, swabs, little dishes to cook up the injectable mixture, disinfectant and condoms. But anyone caught with even a small amount of drugs is automatically sent to what is known as a Dissuasion Committee for counseling. The committees include legal experts, psychologists and social workers.

Failure to turn up can result in fines, mandatory treatment or other sanctions. In serious cases, the panel recommends the user be sent to a treatment center.

Health works shepherd some addicts off the streets directly into treatment. That's what happened to 33-year-old Tiago, who is struggling to kick heroin at a Lisbon rehab facility.

Tiago, who requested his first name only be used to protect his privacy, started taking heroin when he was 20. He shot up four or five times a day, sleeping for years in an abandoned car where, with his addicted girlfriend, he fathered a child he has never seen.

At the airy Lisbon treatment center where he now lives, Tiago plays table tennis, surfs the Internet and watches TV. He helps with cleaning and other odd jobs. And he's back to his normal weight after dropping to 50 kilograms (110 pounds) during his addiction.

After almost six months on methadone, each day trimming his intake, he brims with hope about his upcoming move to a home run by the Catholic church where recovered addicts are offered a fresh start.

"I just ask God that it'll be the first and last time — the first time I go to a home and the last time I go through detox," he said.

Portugal's program is widely seen as effective, but some say it has shortcomings.

Antonio Lourenco Martins, a former Portuguese Supreme Court judge who sat on a 1998 commission that drafted the new drug strategy and was one of two on the nine-member panel who voted against decriminalization, admits the law has done some good, but complains that its approach is too soft.

Francisco Chaves, who runs a Lisbon treatment center, also recognizes that addicts might exploit good will.

"We know that (when there is) a lack of pressure, none of us change or are willing to change," Chaves said.

===========

Worldwide, a record 93 countries offered alternatives to jail time for drug abuse in 2010, according to the International Harm Reduction Association. They range from needle exchanges in Cambodia to methadone treatment in Poland.

Vancouver, Canada, has North America's first legal drug consumption room — dubbed as "a safe, health-focused place where people inject drugs and connect to health care services." Brazil and Uruguay have eliminated jail time for people carrying small amounts of drugs for personal use.

Whether the alternative approaches work seems to depend on how they are carried out. In the Netherlands, where police ignore the peaceful consumption of illegal drugs, drug use and dealing are rising, according to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction. Five Dutch cities are implementing new restrictions on marijuana cafes after a wave of drug-related gang violence.

However, in Switzerland, where addicts are supervised as they inject heroin, addiction has steadily declined. No one has died from an overdose since the program began in 1994, according to medical studies. The program is credited with reducing crime and improving addicts' health.

The Obama administration firmly opposes the legalization of drugs, saying that it would increase access and promote acceptance, according to drug czar Kerlikowske. The U.S. is spending $74 billion this year on criminal and court proceedings for drug offenders, compared with $3.6 billion for treatment.

But even the U.S. has taken small steps toward Portugal's approach of more intervention and treatment programs. And Kerlikowske has called for an end to the "War on Drugs" rhetoric.

"Calling it a war really limits your resources," he said. "Looking at this as both a public safety problem and a public health problem seems to make a lot more sense."

There is no guarantee that Portugal's approach would work in the U.S. For one, the U.S. population is 29 times larger than Portugal's 10.6 million.

Still, an increasing number of American cities are offering nonviolent drug offenders a chance to choose treatment over jail, and the approach appears to be working.

In San Francisco's gritty Tenderloin neighborhood, Tyrone Cooper, a 52-year-old lifelong drug addict, can't stop laughing at how a system that has put him in jail a dozen times now has him on the road to recovery.

"Instead of going to smoke crack, I went to a rehab meeting," he said. "Can you believe it? Me! A meeting! I mean, there were my boys, right there smoking crack, and Tyrone walked right past them. 'Sorry,' I told them, 'I gotta get to this meeting.'"

Cooper is one of hundreds of San Franciscans who landed in a court program this year where judges offered them a chance to go to rehab, get jobs, move into houses, find primary care physicians, even remove their tattoos. There is enough data now to show that these alternative courts reduce recidivism and save money.

Nationally, between 4 and 29 percent of drug court participants will get caught using drugs again, compared with 48 percent of those who go through traditional courts.

San Francisco's drug court saves the city $14,297 per offender, officials said. Expanding drug courts to all 1.5 million drug offenders in the U.S. would cost more than $13 billion annually, but would return more than $40 billion, according to a study by John Roman, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center.

The first drug court opened in the U.S. 21 years ago. By 1999, there were 472; by 2005, 1,250.

This year, new drug courts opened every week around the U.S., as states faced budget crises exarcebated by the high rate of incarceration on drug offenses. There are now drug courts in every state, more than 2,400 serving 120,000 people.

Last year, New York lawmakers followed counterparts across the U.S. who have tossed out tough, 40-year-old drug laws and mandatory sentences, giving judges unprecedented sentencing options. Also, the Department of Health and Human Services is training doctors to screen patients for potential addiction, and reimbursing Medicare and Medicaid providers who do so.

Arizona recently became the 15th state in the nation to approve medical use of marijuana, following California's 2006 legislation.

==============

In Portugal, the blight that once destroyed the Casal Ventoso neighborhood is a distant memory.

Americo Nave, a 39-year-old psychologist, remembers the chilling stories his colleagues brought back after Portuguese authorities sent a first team of health workers into the Casal Ventoso neighborhood in the late 1990s. Some addicts had gangrene, and their arms had to be amputated.

Those days are past, though there are vestiges. About a dozen frail, mostly unkempt men recently gathered next to a bus stop to get new needles and swabs in small green plastic bags from health workers, as part of a twice-weekly program. Some ducked out of sight behind walls to shoot up, and one crouched behind trash cans, trying to shield his lighter flame from the wind.

A 37-year-old man who would only identify himself as Joao said he's been using heroin for 22 years. He has contracted Hepatitis C, and recalls picking up used, bloody needles from the sidewalk. Now he comes regularly to the needle exchange.

"These teams ... have helped a lot of people," he said, struggling to concentrate as he draws on a cigarette.

The decayed housing that once hid addicts has long since been bulldozed. And this year, Lisbon's city council planted 600 trees and 16,500 bushes on the hillside.

This spring they're expected to bloom.

- 30 -

133 Comments

      RobertG
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      RobertG 5 minutes ago Report Abuse

          This solution is too sensible and too humane in the US. Any solution other than criminalization, arrest and imprisonment is not to be considered. The government must find ways to fill those prisons they are building. "The Economic Elite v. the People of the United States" reports that (paraphrasing) "our prison population is 2.3 million people, more people incarcerated than any other nation in the world. This is about 700 per 100,000 citizens. China has 110 per 100,000, France has 80 per 100,000, Saudi Arabia has 45 per 100,000. The prison industry is thriving and expecting major growth over the next few years. A recent report from the Hartford Advocate titled “Incarceration Nation” revealed that “a new prison opens every week somewhere in America. Many of these are for drug offenses, mostly marijuana use or possession. By the way, it is sickening when the US must go to countries like Portugal and Peru to learn how to humanely treat and deal with a human problem.

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      Stephen
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      Stephen 46 minutes ago Report Abuse

          Decriminalizing use makes sense - but only if you continue hard time for those who sell. Get people into treatment, not a prison cell.

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      Cusanus
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      Cusanus 50 minutes ago Report Abuse

          The only drugs I've ever seen being used or sold were by a bunch of punks running a so called research company next to the DOJ, really just a telemarketing sweat shop. The DEA ignored my story, and it was a weird one for sure. How do you work five years as a supervisor when you have to work five years to get to be a supervisor, and how do you manage to buy a ritzy pickup and a farm on $7/hr? Ok, cover blown, these are rookie FBI retards trying to set up a reverse sting. Smart move, Einstein, I don't do drugs, but how about all the kids working at that place? Have you managed to get them hooked? I doubt any of them are stupid enough to be taken in. Sad, USA, really really sad.

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      Dan L
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      Dan L 59 minutes ago Report Abuse

          Something peculiar happens to drug addicts that causes them to be so hopelessly addicted to drugs, the same with the alcoholic. Psychiatry has classified it as a mental disorder for decades now, and its time society gets educated as well.

          Harsh penalties are of no avail, because essentially the addict no longer has a choice to use or not. for the addict, whether or not to use is not an issue. For the addict it becomes a question of getting, using, and the means to get and use more.

          This is where the public health approach comes in. We need treatment and rehabilitation, not criminal penalties. Do we put people in jail for other psychoses? No. Its clearly a matter of getting correct information out that is key to changing policy.

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      JG in Canada
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      JG in Canada 1 hour ago Report Abuse

          It is good to experiment elsewhere. I did notice that there was no mention of any rise in "driving under the influence", something that is scary and could lead to more death. I spent some time in places that have benevolent attitudes about drug addiction and I know that in the morning the gutter near my hotel was filled with discarded needles. I am very suspicious of "success" stories, and programs need to be judged on times scales of 10 or more years.

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      Me
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      Me 1 hour ago Report Abuse

          In the US they give a slap on the wrist. Maybe if they gave life behind bars for using and the dealth penalty for selling it would change things. Death at least for selling to minors.

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      almostnuts
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      almostnuts 1 hour ago Report Abuse

          no way. judges will miss their bribes, equipment mfging will suffer. the intelligence groups will not have an excuse to develop xray, listening, restraining, disabling devices, comm companies will suffer with their subsidies for being good citizens, confiscation of land and other assets would halt causing financial hardship for counties and the rigged bidding system, helicopter sales would plummet, and the sociopaths masquerading as concerned citizens would be out of work. lets keep building those private prisons and filling them up. we should be number one at something, and if we run out of criminals we just need to make some new laws, we can't let something like that pesky constitution and bill of rights keep us from being free. the war on drugs, one hundred dollar bills stuffed into a boxcar till full, make a train eleven miles long, and thats how much money we have spent losing this war. america has gone from being the home of the free and land of the brave to the home of the fee and land of the knave. support your local militia, or read the gulag and see your future america. matter of fact read all the oppressors from the last seventy five years, a club and a jail cell would have saved millions of lives with the simple act of clubbing a lunatic when they first took power. read mila 18 in the warsaw ghetto, there was twelve, or some ugandans that were invited to dinner as the main course, the list is endless and unless we wake up we are going to see acts you thought unbelievable in this country by your own people. stalin starved over twenty million people in relocation camps, but fdr thought stalin was a great man, go figure. wake up, wake up, god almighty please wake up america. you can't be first but you can be next.

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      Adolf Hitler
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      Adolf Hitler 1 hour ago Report Abuse

          Legalize gambling, prostitution, heroin, marijuana, crack,cocaine,meth and other drugs. Then everyone will be happy.

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      gracie
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      gracie 2 hours ago Report Abuse

          "You just need to rid yourself of prejudice and take an intelligent approach."
          If that is what is required, then this policy has no chance of working in the US.

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      ZZZ
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      ZZZ 2 hours ago Report Abuse

          This article has a misleading beginning. If you read through it, there is nothing new. The article makes it sounds like Portugal has legalized drugs. All they are doing is decriminalizing drug users.
          California has done the same thing. There is no need to go to Portugal to learn anything "new". If you look at California, the success is questionable at best. So Lindsay Lohan got caught using drugs and go to rehab. I am not sure what kind of message we are trying to teach our kids. You be the judge.

          Here this is the most important quote buried inside the article.
          "Drugs in Portugal are still illegal. But here's what Portugal did: It changed the law so that users are sent to counseling and sometimes treatment instead of criminal courts and prison."

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Bob's Health Woes / Death drops by for a cup of coffee, leaves without doing the dishes / masked men and women will stick tubes up my wazoo / am I scared? You bet I'm fucking scared!

Click on image, it will 

get bigger and clearer. 

The Tree of Life is a series 

of nine Armenian ceramic tiles. 

First Day Issue: Tierra de los Sueños

First (or maybe Last) Day Issue:

Bob's Really Big Surgery

I hate the early morning. Notice the ghastly time stamp for this post, but it couldn't be helped.

In an hour S.W.M.B.O. bundles me into the car and drives me to a hospital in Springfield (guess which Springfield, every state in the USA has a city called Springfield), where masked men and women are going to give me local anesthesia -- in other words, I'll be awake -- and then perform an angiogram on me, snaking a tube and, I think, a camera up my arm and into my heart. 

My left ventrical isn't pumping enough blood, something's blocking the blood flow. If the blockage is easy to find, they might open the blockage with a balloon, or install a stent, a plastic or metal cylinder to force open the blockage.

If my troubles are more complicated than that, I'll go home, recover for a week or two, and then undergo a more complicated procedure, a bypass. That's all I understand about this scary business. I'm sure I've made at least six significant mistakes, but this is what I understand from what the doctors have explained to me.

What I'm hoping for the most is that, whatever happens today, I'll be allowed to return home this evening and won't have to spend more time in the hospital. I just spent a week or two in this hospital, and it was a total Toby Hooper Texas Chainsaw Massacre Nightmare. I've had enough of hospitals, and rehabilitation facilities, for awhile. Home is where I want to be.

My first surgery was on my right leg, and it's healing excellently, but until it's completely healed, and the pain disappears from my right foot, I can't drive; poor S.W.M.B.O. is my chaufeusse, and poor Bob can't go anywhere (like the Whately Ballet) that S.W.M.B.O. doesn't agree to drive me to. This coming month is going to be a stone drag.

As the foot and leg heals, I'm all doped up on synthetic opiates. They work. They're not fun, they're not much as Party Drugs, but they banish the pain, for which I'm enormously grateful.

If you pray, pray for me. If you don't, then just wish me well. If all this works out as planned, I've been promised another ten years of Life, and a return of my walking and physical stamina -- terribly important to me, because I live to travel, and I'm terrified of slowing down and missing a train or plane or ferry, of not being able to get to really strange places. My motto for the last decade has been:

IQALUIT OR BUST

Meanwhile I'm starving to death -- no food or drink from now until the angio. When it's over, I'll be strongly tempted to eat a nurse. (I hope it's a female nurse, I suspect male nurses don't taste too good.)

My health troubles are reminiscent of the old cowboy who told the doctor: 

"I would have taken much better

care of my health if I'd known

I was going to live this long." 

From age 18 I was a newspaperman, and to show me how much they appreciated me at the newspaper (The Washington DC Daily News, a Scripps-Howard tabloid rag so that Republicans could have something to read at lunchtime, long extinct) my older colleagues would take me to the bar across the street and teach me to drink alcoholic beverages. At parties at night we strictly obeyed The Newspaperman's Creed: A reporter can get as drunk as he or she wants -- but you MUST report to work the next day. (In those days, the legal drinking age in DC was 18.)

Okay, that's all for now. If there are no more posts from VleeptronZ, it means something went wrong in the surgery and I'm dead. Please try to keep all my books together, give them to any library or school which promises to keep all my books together. I don't want them orphaned and scattered in hundreds of different directions. My books have been together for many decades, and they're used to being together. I can't bear to think they've been scattered.

But my doctors tell me I'll almost certainly live through this procedure, and even emerge from it with much better health. I've finally stopped smoking, which got me into most of this trouble to begin with. What next? A vow of poverty and chastity? Cleanliness? Beatification? Sainthood?

what u gonna do when you get out if jail? / i'm gonna have some fun / what do you consider fun? / Fun, natural fun!

Tom Tom Club will be celebrating thirty years as a band in 2011.  They will be launching their anniversary year by taking it back to where it all began: New York City.  Along with a performance on Jimmy Fallon Live on January 11th, they will also be headlining a show at Irving Plaza in New York City on January 12th.

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE TICKETS BEFORE THIS SHOW SELLS OUT!

Join the Facebook event page here!

This concert will be a homecoming show of sorts for Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth as Talking Heads were the first rock band to play Irving Plaza back in 1978!

“At that time, our manager was looking for the right place for us to play, somewhere in size between CBGBs and the Beacon Theater,” Chris explains. “He took us to see Irving Plaza and we agreed that it was perfect. It had been an Eastern European social hall and included all the right ingredients for some great shows. So, our manager promoted the show himself and it was a huge success. The next band to play there were our friends The B52s. It became THE place to play when you had graduated from CBGBs. It will be a blast to return there with Tom Tom Club.”

This past fall, Tom Tom Club rocked their first U.S. tour in 10 years and released their new album ‘Genius of Love.’ The album features select tracks from classic album ‘Live At The Club House’ as well as a  remix tribute to the smash hit, “Genius Of Love.”

Get the double CD for only $9.99 at the new Nacional Records store HERE

Or buy the digital version on iTunes for only $7.99 HERE
European fans:  iTunes UK, iTunes France

Stay tuned for more 30th anniversary events happening in 2011 including more tour dates in the U.S., Europe and the rest of the world!

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