Monday, October 1, 2007

Dog,Horse Or Daughter " Everything Is Fine For That Man"

An Edmonton-area man who repeatedly raped his daughter and had sex with her dogs and a horse will face a dangerous offender hearing, court heard yesterday.

Crown prosecutor Tania Holland told a judge she has filed in court the required approval from the Alberta attorney-general to proceed with the hearing.

Dates were set in March to deal with the admissibility of records and the two-week hearing will begin in June.

Defence lawyer Laurie Wood said her client was OK with the lengthy wait because he knows he is facing a long prison term and could be tagged a long-term offender.

But, she said: "I don't think he's a dangerous offender."

Wood added that her 53-year-old client is doing fine in the Edmonton Remand Centre, where he is being kept in an area commonly referred to as the "old-timer's unit."

While dangerous offenders are handed indefinite prison sentences, people designated long-term offenders are subject to supervision in the community for up to 10 years following the completion of their prison sentence.

The man, who cannot be named to protect the victim's identity, pleaded guilty in May to committing incest and sexually assaulting his daughter over a 14-year period.

He also pleaded guilty to committing bestiality with dogs and a horse over a nearly 16-year period, forcing his daughter to commit bestiality with a dog and trying to get the victim's younger sister to sexually touch him.

Court heard the man had earlier served a two-year sentence in the 1990s after being convicted of sexually assaulting the daughter and other children.

After being let out, the man was allowed to live with his family in a trailer west of the city. On his second day out, he raped his then-eight-year-old daughter, an event which occurred almost nightly for the next 14 years.

According to agreed facts, the victim tried several times to tell her mother what was going on, but then always denied it out of fear when her mother confronted her father.

Court heard the man regularly showed pornographic movies to the victim and her younger sister.

According to the agreed facts, the man always owned female dogs and had sex with them all. Court documents said, "If the dogs would not have sex, he would beat them with chains or bats. He would choke the dogs to try to get what he needed. If the animals would not have sex with him, the animal would end up dead."

The victim said she often saw her dad having sex with their dogs and her horse and on one occasion, he raped her and tried to make her have sex with the dog.

However, she began crying hysterically and the dog almost bit him.

The victim, now 23, was last raped in August 2003, but continued to live at home over concern for her sisters.

In 2005 she moved out and, after arranging for her mom and sisters to secretly leave, she went to police.
Posted by Ajay :: 6:02 PM :: 0 comments

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---------------oOo--------------- Lost For 70Years

A WOMAN was locked up and “lost” for 70 years after being wrongly accused of stealing 13p.

Jean Gambell, 85, was “certified” indefinitely in 1937 over claims she had taken the cash while cleaning at a doctor’s surgery.

The money was found — but Jean still spent 70 years in a maze of care institutions.

She was “found” when brothers Alan, 66, and David, 63 — who thought she was dead — read a letter sent by a care home to their mother, who died 25 years ago.

David said: “I was about to throw it in the bin when I saw a name in the corner — Jean Gambell. I rang and they said our sister was there.”

The two brothers travelled from their homes in Liverpool to see Jean at the home in Macclesfield, Cheshire. Staff warned them she was deaf and may not remember them.

David said: “We were very nervous. We wrote on a piece of card ‘Hello Jean, we’re your brothers’. But she took one look at us and said, ‘Hello Alan, hello David’ — and flung her arms around us.”

He added: “Nowadays there are appeals — but back then a doctor could sign away a life with the stroke of a pen.

“They basically locked her up and threw away the key and she was stuck in the system.

“She just got moved from one institution to another.

“What a waste of a poor, innocent girl’s life.”

Jean had a stroke after meeting her brothers, believed to have been sparked by the shock of the reunion. She is said to be recovering.

Posted by Ajay :: 5:56 PM :: 0 comments

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---------------oOo--------------- How big is the universe? Could it be infinitely large?

How big is the universe? Could it be infinitely large? If the universe has an edge, what is beyond the edge? And if the universe had a beginning, what was going on before that?

Our experience of the everyday world does not prepare us to grasp the concept of an infinite universe. And yet, trying to imagine that the cosmos actually has a boundary does not make things any easier.

There is an edge to what we are able to see and could ever possibly see in the universe. Light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second. That's top speed in this universe—nothing can go faster—but it's relatively slow compared to the distances to be traveled. The nearest big galaxy to our Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy, is two million light-years away. The most distant galaxies we can now see are 10 or 12 billion light-years away. We could never see a galaxy that is farther away in light travel time than the universe is old—an estimated 14 billion or so years. Thus, we are surrounded by a "horizon" that we cannot look beyond—a horizon set by the distance that light can travel over the age of the universe.

This horizon describes the visible universe—a region some 28 billion light years in diameter. But what are the horizons of a civilization that inhabits the most distant galaxies we see? And what about galaxies at the limits of their vision? There is every reason to think that the universe extends a long way beyond the part of the universe we can see. In fact, a variety of observations suggest that our visible patch may be a small fraction—maybe an infinitely small fraction—of the whole universe.

This view of the universe fits with the currently popular idea that the universe began with a vast expansion of size. The idea describes a kind of undirected energy present in the vacuum of space, called scalar fields, that somehow got channeled into a process called "inflation." By conservative estimates, the universe expanded so much during this period that something the size of an atom inflated to the size of a galaxy.

If this grand idea is correct, then the universe is larger than we ever could have imagined. But the question remains: Is there a boundary, and if so, what lies in the voids beyond? The answer, according to some cosmologists, is truly mind-boggling. If the universe sprung forth in this manner, then probably inflation has occurred in other places, perhaps an infinite number of places, beyond our horizon and outside of our time. The implication is that there are other universes, perhaps similar to ours or vastly different, each in its own space and begun in its own time.

The universe began with a vast explosion that generated space and time.
Inflation implies a vastly expanded concept of what the universe is. But the concept is also helping us to understand the universe we see around us. Take, for example, the recent observation that the universe is not only expanding—a fact astronomers have known for over seven decades—but actually accelerating outward. That discovery is the subject of NOVA's program "Runaway Universe."

While we can never directly "see" the whole of the universe or glimpse its farthest horizons, we can discover how it is behaving—how fast it's growing, whether its growth will one day come to a halt, and what forces have been driving its evolution on the largest of scales. The evidence for the cosmic acceleration—the observations of distant exploding stars called supernovae (see Birth of a Supernova)—provides a window onto these behaviors.

The discovery of cosmic acceleration was made by examining the light of supernovae. We astronomers believe we know the intrinsic brightness of a particular kind of supernovae, called "Type Ia," so we can calculate how far such an object must be from us by its apparent, or measured, brightness. We also know how fast the supernovae—and the galaxies they're in—are rushing away from us by measuring their "redshift." Redshift refers to a color shift in the light of galaxies toward the red end of the spectrum as they race away from us. The faster a galaxy is moving away, the redder its light becomes. (For more on this phenomenon, go to Moving Targets.)

What we are looking for in this combination of redshift and distance is the "growth rate" of the universe going back in time. This growth rate tells us about the gravity of all the matter in the universe—if there is a lot of matter it will slow down the growth rate over time.

Take the case of a universe with so much matter that gravity arrests the expansion and everything finally collapses in on itself. We call that a "closed" universe. In such a universe, the expansion would have once been much faster. To get to the separations between galaxies that we see now would have taken a relatively short time. Granted, the numbers associated with "relatively short" might still seem daunting.

A second possibility might be a universe that is practically empty, often called an "open" universe. Yes, there must be enough stuff in it to permit the existence of observers like us, but suppose the total amount of matter has negligible gravitational influence on the expansion. This universe is just cruising at the same expansion rate now as in the past. Compared with the first possibility, the closed universe, expansions in the past would have to have been slower to get the presently observed separations between galaxies. And it would mean that a distant supernova observed to be rushing away from us at such-and-such a speed (redshift) is farther away in this case, compared to the dense, closed universe case. In the closed universe case, since expansion was faster in the past, one doesn't have to go so far away (back in time) to arrive at a specified redshift.


So does either of these possibilities describe our universe? No! The one that comes closest is the "open" universe. However, the supernovae are too faint—that is, they are so far away that even that model doesn't allow the supernovae to travel as far away as astronomers observe. Our universe, the real one, must have been loitering after its initial inflationary period, but then put its foot to the accelerator recently to produce the present separations of galaxies.

Whatever could produce that acceleration? Certainly there is nothing in our Earthly experience that prepares us for such a possibility. This is where the theory of inflation comes into play. Now about two decades old, inflation entertains the idea that there is a kind of energy that causes space to expand. This energy competes with gravity, though certainly not on local scales. However, should this form of energy come to dominate, watch out! While gravity tries to crush, this energy—call it vacuum energy, or the scalar field, or the energy represented by the Cosmological Constant in Einstein's equations describing the dynamics of the universe—tries to expand the fabric of space, pushing everything apart. The basic proposition of the inflation model is that this form of energy once dominated gravity and caused our universe to burst forth.

It turns out that the basic inflation picture satisfies a number of observed facts about the universe. One fact is particularly interesting because the better our observations become the more tightly they agree with a prediction of the inflation model. This is that the universe should be "flat"—no overall curvature of space. Spectacularly convincing evidence—recent measurements of irregularities in the microwave background radiation—supports this proposition.




More about experiments on microwave background radiation.
The microwave radiation comes to us from the time in the past when the universe was a primordial fireball. We see a "surface" like we see the "surface" of the sun. We can't look into the sun (or a cloud in the sky) because of scattering of light. As with the sun and its spots, the surface of last scattering of the primordial fireball had structure caused by localized regions that were hotter or cooler, less or more dense. The most pronounced of these structures at the cosmological surface of last scattering were governed by the distance that acoustic (pressure) waves could travel in the age of the universe back then, when the universe was about a half million years old. The size of these irregularities gives us a ruler! The radiation was emitted so long ago, so far away, that it has been redshifted down to millimeter wavelengths. So now millimeter experiments determine the angular size of the clumps caused by acoustic oscillations in the cooling universe at the surface of the last scattering.

We know how big the clumps were—a couple hundred thousand light years across. The relation between their real size, their distance, and the angular size that we observe is governed by the geometry of the universe. A universe dense with matter will distort the final size one way, an empty or almost empty universe will distort another way, and the flat universe of the inflation model will produce yet a different image, which we would intuitively call undistorted. Lo and behold, the results are in agreement with the flat universe of inflation.

This is not the full story. The theory of inflation predicts a precise recipe of how structure would form from little things merging into big things and tells us how many little things there should be for each big thing. The observations match with expectations if the mix of energy and matter is the same as that suggested by the supernovae experiments. Inflation also solves the old controversy over the Hubble Constant, the relationship between the rate galaxies are flying apart and the distances between them. If the Hubble Constant is large then galaxies are relatively close together and the implied age of the universe is way too short if the universe has been briskly expanding. The universe cannot be younger than things in it. However, if the universe has been loitering and is now accelerating, then it is old enough and a large Hubble Constant is still possible. And we can actually make a direct measurement of the mass density of the universe by looking at the motions of galaxies that slosh in the gravitational wells of the matter. We find something that has come to be called "dark matter" there. If the universe is "flat," then this state is achieved through the sum of the mass and energy density. Measurements of gravity perturbations reveal just the needed complement of matter offsetting the repulsive energy indicated by the supernova measurements.

The last couple of years have seen a remarkable convergence of evidence, all suggesting that we live in a universe with a few percent of the normal matter of our everyday experience, maybe 25% of something called "dark matter," which is a name given to hide our ignorance of what it is, and 75% of this energy that wants to push space apart—call it "dark energy." If true, then relatively recently in the history of the universe the "dark energy" has become dominant over "dark matter." During the transient dominance of dark matter, it caused the collapse into all the structure of the universe that we have come to know and appreciate.

Maybe we should be less enamored of dark energy. But it is the delight of physicists because it might provide a laboratory for the moment of creation. It may be that the present source of repulsion is quite different from the primordial situation. Certainly the energy density levels and time scales are vastly different. However, if we can understand the mechanism of the present acceleration perhaps we can get a clue about the acceleration at the first instant of our time.

A complicated scenario indeed! So how big is the universe in the inflation model? It begs the question of what is going on at the boundaries and whether information could be communicated across universes. We suppose not. It may well be that only a tiny part of even our own universe is in our horizon, within the domain that we might hope to know.

Posted by Ajay :: 9:56 AM :: 0 comments

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---------------oOo--------------- Nobel Prize Winner Was Under LSD Effect When He Discoverd Secrets Of Life

Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced the double-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago.

The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American co-researcher James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in March 1953 by running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to the nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of bitter that they had discovered the secret of life.

Crick, who died ten days ago [2004-07-28], aged 88, later told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD, then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy, to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD, not the Eagle's warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.

Despite his Establishment image, Crick was a devotee of novelist Aldous Huxley, whose accounts of his experiments with LSD and another hallucinogen, mescaline, in The Doors Of Perception and Heaven And Hell became cult texts for the hippies of the Sixties and Seventies. In the late Sixties, Crick was a founder member of Soma, a legalise-cannabis group named after the drug in Huxley's novel Brave New World. He even put his name to a famous letter to The Times in 1967 calling for a reform in the drugs laws.

It was through his membership of Soma that Crick inadvertently became the inspiration for the biggest LSD manufacturing conspiracy the world has ever seen the multimillion-pound drug factory in a remote farmhouse in Wales that was smashed by the Operation Julie raids of the late Seventies.

Crick's involvement with the gang was fleeting but crucial. The revered scientist had been invited to the Cambridge home of freewheeling American writer David Solomon, a friend of hippie LSD guru Timothy Leary, who had come to Britain in 1967 on a quest to discover a method for manufacturing pure THC, the active ingredient of cannabis.

It was Crick's presence in Solomon's social circle that attracted a brilliant young biochemist, Richard Kemp, who soon became a convert to the attractions of both cannabis and LSD. Kemp was recruited to the THC project in 1968, but soon afterwards devised the world's first foolproof method of producing cheap, pure LSD. Solomon and Kemp went into business, manufacturing 'acid' in a succession of rented houses before setting up their laboratory in a cottage on a hillside near Tregaron, Carmarthenshire, in 1973. It is estimated that Kemp manufactured drugs worth £2.5 million — an astonishing amount in the Seventies — before police stormed the building in 1977 and seized enough pure LSD and its constituent chemicals to make two million LSD 'tabs'.

The arrest and conviction of Solomon, Kemp and a string of co-conspirators dominated the headlines for months. I was covering the case as a reporter at the time and it was then that I met Kemp's close friend, Garrod Harker, whose home had been raided by police but who had not been arrested. Harker told me that Kemp and his girlfriend Christine Bott by then in jail were hippie idealists who were completely uninterested in the money they were making.

They gave away thousands to pet causes such as the Glastonbury pop festival and Release.

"They have a philosophy," Harker told me at the time. "They believe industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the answer is to change people's mindsets using acid. They believe LSD can help people to see that a return to a natural society based on self-sufficiency is the only way to save themselves.

"Dick Kemp told me he met Francis Crick at Cambridge. Crick had told him that some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to new ideas. Crick told him he had perceived the double-helix shape while on LSD.

"It was clear that Dick Kemp was highly impressed and probably bowled over by what Crick had told him. He told me that if a man like Crick, who had gone to the heart of human existence, had used LSD, then it was worth using. Crick was certainly Dick Kemp's inspiration."


Shortly afterwards I visited Crick at his home, Golden Helix, in Cambridge. He listened with rapt, amused attention to what I told him about the role of LSD in his Nobel Prize-winning discovery. He gave no intimation of surprise. When I had finished, he said: "Print a word of it and I'll sue."

Posted by Ajay :: 9:54 AM :: 0 comments

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