Charity and bankruptcy

Proposed settlement calls for schools, creditors to split Kathy Cox's $1 million prize

By Bill Rankin 

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

11:27 p.m. Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Three schools for blind and deaf children would receive half of the $1 million that Kathy Cox won on a TV show when she was the state schools superintendent, under a recently proposed court settlement.

A legal tug of war over the prize winnings has been going on for more than a year in the Chapter 7 bankruptcy case filed by Cox and her husband, John Cox, a home builder.

On Wednesday, Kathy Cox said she was angered by the agreement.

"I'm happy that the schools will get $500,000, don't get me wrong on that," she said in a telephone interview. "But all of it should have gone to the schools."

In August 2008, Cox appeared on the game show "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?" and aced it, correctly answering all 11 questions and winning the $1 million prize. Cox had said that if she won she would give her winnings to the Georgia Academy for the Blind in Macon, the Georgia School for the Deaf in Cave Spring and the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf in Clarkston.

All three schools, while state-run, do not rely on local funding. Cox said she wanted the money to help build nest eggs for scholarships.

Two months after the game show appearance, the Coxes filed for bankruptcy protection, citing more than $3.5 million in liabilities and less than $650,000 in assets. Last year, Gary W. Brown, the Chapter 7 trustee, filed suit seeking to claim the $1 million for the Coxes' creditors. The suit said that Cox, acting on her own and not as school superintendent, executed a document allowing her prize winnings to be transferred to a charitable gift fund.

Since February, the money has been deposited in the registry of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court. The proposed settlement must ultimately be approved by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge W. Homer Drake in Newnan. All parties and creditors in the case had to file a response to the court by Wednesday if they had an objection.

Brown, the trustee, said an Oct. 8 hearing has been set to consider the proposed settlement.

"I think it is a satisfactory resolution and hope it will provide meaningful distribution to the creditors and satisfaction to other interested parties," he said.

Kathy Cox said she is not a satisfied party.

"It actually makes me angry," said Cox, who is now chief executive officer of the U.S. Education Delivery Institute, a Washington think tank.

"If anybody had watched the show, it was so clear I was there as the state school superintendent," she said. "That money had nothing to do with what was happening to us personally."

Cocooned planet

Amazing article about silk at this link, to Seed Magazine.  Until 1999, when the silk producing genome was transcribed (maybe that is not the right word) all the silk came from silkworms, which were kept in confined conditions--still are,--where they are fed a diet of  mulberry leaves, and then killed after they spin their cocoon.
Now scientists can transplant the silk producing gene into other organisms, like potatoes, which turn out to be ideal. The silk harvested this way has many incredible qualities, same as the product of silkworms.Silk is a unique and wonderful product of this planet.

Startling emptiness at heart of our galaxy

Scientists are puzzled by the vacancy they observe around the black hole at the center of our own galaxy. Though this is what I would have thought you'd expect, it turns out that physicists were expecting other stars to fill in the vacuum left by the stars sucked up by the black hole. This article, at New Scientist, briefly excerpted below, talks about the issues.

 ....

Let's not forget that, until now, there has only been indirect evidence for a black hole at the centre of our galaxy. We know that something massive lurks there because its gravity affects the motion of nearby stars, and the most likely culprit is a black hole. But we need direct evidence to be sure. Now the hope is that stars like S2 will not only provide that evidence but also allow us to test our most cherished ideas about black holes.

Among them is the idea, known as the no-hair theorem, that black holes are essentially so simple that they can be described adequately by their mass and how fast they spin. Theorist Clifford Will of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, suggests that we could test the theorem, and therefore general relativity, by examining the orbits of stars close to the supermassive black hole. One way to do this would be to watch a star complete many orbits around the galactic centre. Einstein's theory predicts that the star's point of closest approach to the centre should progressively shift from one orbit to the next. If the no-hair theorem is correct, the rate of this "precession" depends on the mass and spin rate of the black hole, and nothing else. Even better, says Will, would be to track two stars (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, vol 674, p L25). That way, you can use the relationship between both stars' orbits to cancel out the mass of the black hole, so the precession depends only on its spin. If it turns out that the precession depends on something more complex, then the no-hair theorem is wrong. And if that is true, then general relativity is also wrong. ...

Another way to test relativity is to use pulsars. These super-dense remnants of supernova explosions spin very rapidly, sweeping a lighthouse beam of radio waves across the sky once every turn. This makes them fantastically precise timekeepers. If any exist in the centre of the galaxy, then we might be able to pick up another relativistic effect - gravitational time dilation, where the passage of time slows down in the warped space-time surrounding a massive object. Spot this and we would have evidence of a massive black hole.

Star-spotting

Unfortunately, pulsars are intrinsically faint, making them difficult to detect in the dusty galactic centre. But astronomers have just embarked on an attempt to detect all the pulsars in the Milky Way, and they are hopeful of observing pulsars in the centre of the galaxy ...

Marcus Chown, author of the above excerpted article,  is the author of We Need to Talk About Kelvin (Faber & Faber, 2010). 

Check the shipping cost before you order one

From the BBC, a wonderful story, a science story, about an object in our galaxy, an object measuring about 5000 miles across, which has a huge diamond inside, an object mainly composed of this diamond core. The picture at the BBC makes it so much clearer than the article below.

Twinkling in the sky is a diamond star of 10 billion trillion trillion carats, astronomers have discovered.
The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised carbon, 4,000 km across, some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus.
It's the compressed heart of an old star that was once bright like our Sun but has since faded and shrunk.
Astronomers have decided to call the star "Lucy" after the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
...
"You would need a jeweller's loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond," says astronomer Travis Metcalfe, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the team of researchers that discovered it.
The diamond star completely outclasses the largest diamond on Earth, the 546-carat Golden Jubilee which was cut from a stone brought out of the Premier mine in South Africa.
The huge cosmic diamond - technically known as BPM 37093 - is actually a crystallised white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon.
For more than four decades, astronomers have thought that the interiors of white dwarfs crystallised, but obtaining direct evidence became possible only recently.
The white dwarf is not only radiant but also rings like a gigantic gong, undergoing constant pulsations.
"By measuring those pulsations, we were able to study the hidden interior of the white dwarf, just like seismograph measurements of earthquakes allow geologists to study the interior of the Earth.
"We figured out that the carbon interior of this white dwarf has solidified to form the galaxy's largest diamond," says Metcalfe.
Astronomers expect our Sun will become a white dwarf when it dies 5 billion years from now. Some two billion years after that, the Sun's ember core will crystallise as well, leaving a giant diamond in the centre of the solar system...

Let's Just Get a Pitcher

The evidence of antibiotic use, found in Nubian mummies from 2000 years ago, did not result from accidental intake,  according to the article excerpted below:

...Said co-author George Armelagos, a biological anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta.
""They may not have known what tetracycline was, but they certainly knew something was making them feel better."

Armelagos was part of a group of anthropologists that excavated the mummies in 1963. His original goal was to study osteoporosis in the Nubians, who lived between about 350 and 550 A.D. But while looking through a microscope at samples of the ancient bone under ultraviolet light, he saw what looked like tetracycline -- an antibiotic that was not officially patented in modern times until 1950.

At first, he assumed that some kind of contamination had occurred...

His team's first report about the finding, bolstered by even more evidence and published in Science in 1980, was met with lots of skepticism. For the new study, he got help dissolving bone samples and extracting tetracycline from them, clearly showing that the antibiotic was deposited into and embedded within the bone, not a result of contamination from the environment.

The analyses also showed that ancient Nubians were consuming large doses of tetracycline -- more than is commonly prescribed today as a daily dose for controlling infections...  The team, including chemist Mark Nelson of Paratek Pharmaceuticals, reported their results in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

They were also able to trace the antibiotic to its source: Grain that was contaminated with a type of mold-like bacteria called Streptomyces. Common in soil, Strep bacteria produce tetracycline antibiotics to kill off other, competing bacteria.

Grains that are stored underground can easily become moldy with Streptomyces contamination, though these bacteria would only produce small amounts of tetracycline on their own when left to sit or baked into bread. Only when people fermented the grain would tetracycline production explode. Nubians both ate the fermented grains as gruel and used it to make beer.

The scientists are working now to figure out exactly how much tetracycline Nubians were getting, but it appears that doses were high that consumption was consistent, and that drinking started early. Analyses of the bones showed that babies got some tetracycline through their mother's milk.

Then, between ages two and six, there was a big spike in antibiotics deposited in the bone, Armelagos said, suggesting that fermented grains were used as a weaning food.

Today, most beer is pasteurized to kill Strep and other bacteria, so there should be no antibiotics in the ale you order at a bar, said Dennis Vangerven, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

But Armelagos has challenged his students to home-brew beer like the Nubians did, including the addition of Strep bacteria. The resulting brew contains tetracycline, tastes sour but drinkable, and gives off a greenish hue.

There's still a possibility that ancient antibiotic use was an accident that the Nubians never knew about, though Armelagos has also found tetracycline in the bones of another population that lived in Jordan. And VanGerven has found the antibiotic in a group that lived further south in Egypt during the same period...

Bog Manuscript connects Irish Christianity and Egyptian Christianity

This excerpt about a manuscript found in a bog can be read in full at www.irishcentral.com

CATHY HAYES,
IrishCentral.com Staff Writer

Published Monday, September 6, 2010, 8:06 AM
Updated Monday, September 6, 2010, 8:17
The Faddan More Psalter

A 1,200-year-old manuscript has revealed remarkable evidence of a connection between the early Christian Church in Ireland and the Middle Eastern Coptic Church.

The Faddan More Psalter was found in a north Tipperary bog four years ago when it was unearthed by Eddie Fogarty in July 2006 in the townland of Faddan More, near Birr.

The discovery was claimed by Dr. Pat Wallace, the director of Ireland’s National Museum, as the “most important day in the history of the museum since 1868 when the Ardagh Chalice came in".

The fragmented illuminated vellum manuscript is a book of psalms and dates back to the late eighth century. Its origins remain a mystery.

The manuscript was found upright in the bog for over 1,000 years suggesting it was hidden that way by someone on the run.

The painstaking four-year conservation process, led by Irish book conservatorJohn Gillis, has revealed tiny fragments of papyrus in the lining of the Egyptian-style leather binding of the manuscript, the first tangible link between early Christianity in Ireland and the Middle-Eastern Coptic Church. The discovery has confounded many accepted theories of early Irish Christianity.

"It was a miraculous thing that the manuscript survived at all. It was found by Mr. Fogarty who was cutting turf,” Dr. Wallace told the Sunday Independent.

"It was also remarkable that Mr. Fogarty and the family he was working for, the Leonards of Riverstown, were familiar with the work of the National Museum and knew exactly what to do to protect a manuscript found in wet bog.

"They immediately covered it with wet turf and this was absolutely vital in preserving the manuscript. If they hadn't done that it would have been obliterated in a few hours in the sunshine.

Crates of art, letters, and such unpacked after a century

This article, edited enough I hope, for me to get by claiming fair use, still has all the credits intact. It interested me not because of the items, but what the story says about stuff in general, how it is viewed, and the nature of families, and family stuff, and also the glimpse into the lives of aunts. Or as the headline has it:

Worcester auction has historians and collectors abuzz

By Joseph P. Kahn, Globe Staff  |  September 5, 2010 An extraordinary collection of items belonging to Worcester native Andrew Haswell Green — a visionary who helped remake New York City in the 19th century — will be sold this week in an unprecedented four-day auction at the DCU Center in Worcester. Among the thousands of documents, artworks, china, clothing, and toys being sold are handwritten correspondence to and from four presidents... From Green’s death in 1903 until 2009, virtually none of the items had ever been uncrated and examined. Packing boxes sealed more than a century ago were opened only after the death last summer of Julia Green, his great-great-grandniece and distant heiress. What was discovered has collectors and historians buzzing: an 1810 letter from President James Madison to James Monroe containing the first reference to a White House gardener, a rare 1850 daguerreotype of Green, and an 1875 George Inness oil painting of Mount Washington, among other treasures. It was a time capsule buried in plain sight for a hundred years. “In my 40 years in the auction business, I’ve never seen one person have so much damn stuff,’’ said Richard Oliver, who will preside over the auction.... The items carry no reserve prices — they’ll be sold to the highest bidder, period. “And that’s rare,’’ said Oliver, standing in Julia Green’s basement in Kennebunk, Maine, surrounded by 400 years of Green family history. Of the many public figures departing Massachusetts for New York over the years, from Babe Ruth to Bobby Kennedy, few are more significant than A.H. Green, whom Theodore Roosevelt once admiringly called “the Father of Greater New York City,’’ yet whose legacy has fallen into obscurity. Green spent his entire professional life in Manhattan, and his achievements were monumental. Last February, New York City set aside $4.5 million for an East River park memorializing A.H. Green. He oversaw the creation of Central Park and cultural initiatives leading to the establishment of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, and American Museum of Natural History. He was the first to recommend consolidation of the city’s five boroughs and as city comptroller fought against the corrupt political machine run by William “Boss’’ Tweed. At his family’s 600-acre Worcester estate, to which Green repaired regularly, he also amassed a museum-worthy collection of Americana. Green died violently at the age of 83, cut down by an assassin’s bullet in a case of mistaken identity. Unmarried and childless, he had bequeathed his estate to a nephew, Dr. Nathan Green. In 1905, Green’s family sold the Worcester estate to the city of Worcester, which turned it into a municipal park. In 1956 the estate’s sprawling mansion burned down. Fortunately, Nathan Green had long since put his uncle’s effects safely in storage. Upon his death, the storage containers, still mostly unopened, passed to Nathan’s son, Thomas Dudley Green, and eventually to his three children, one of whom was Julia Green. Julia, a museum professional whose employers included Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, neither married nor had children. Taking custody of the Green collection, she never seemed curious about its contents, either, according to her nephew John Green, a lobster dealer and restaurant owner in Kennebunk. Most artifacts, save for a few paintings and pieces of furniture, were kept sealed and stored in her Brookline home. After moving to Maine four years ago, Julia’s modest Kennebunk townhouse became the latest, and last, repository of the Green collection. It passed along to John and his sister upon their aunt’s death. “She could never have known the full contents, but she had a feel for its importance,’’ recalled John, showing a visitor a Civil War battle flag, two miniature swords, and a hand-embroidered man’s purse made in 1760. He began hiring experts to assess the collection a year ago. ..... In addition to more than 10,000 pieces of correspondence, the collection includes rare books and pamphlets, antique toys and games, Tiffany silver, vintage clothing, stamps, and coins. One of Green’s most prized works of art, a 1770 painting by Winthrop Chandler titled “General Timothy Ruggles estate in Hardwick, MA,’’ has been donated to the Worcester Art Museum, as stipulated in Julia’s will. The collection actually spans 10 generations, harking back to A.H. Green’s forebear Thomas Green, who died in 1667. Among the rarest items is Washington’s will, published in Worcester in 1800 by Isaiah Thomas, of which only 13 copies are known to exist. The cache of presidential letters came to Green through his friend John Cadwalader, a New York judge. One dated Jan. 16, 1820, was sent from Thomas Jefferson to President James Monroe, complaining about pestering letters Jefferson had been getting from an unnamed Revolutionary War officer. It is estimated to sell for $2,000 to $4,000. .... Estimates of individual auction items range from a low of $50 to $50,000 and up, yet even Oliver professes to have no idea what the four-day total might be or how many bidders may get involved, in person or online. Just last week, for instance, he came upon a 17th-century Hebrew book estimated to bring $200 to $400. Soon after the book’s description was posted on the auction website (www.rwolivers.com/green) Oliver received calls from Israel, Egypt, and France expressing interest in it. The book could now sell for 10 times his initial estimate, he said. John Green anticipates a total sale of $1 million or more. But to Bill Ralph, an Essex-based historian assisting with cataloging the collection, the significance of what has been preserved, coupled with the story behind its preservation, makes the auction about much more than money and memorabilia. For one thing, he says, it evokes fantasies of finding a Winslow Homer canvas at a roadside yard sale. “This is the fodder that keeps the antiques business going strong,’’ he said. “I hear the lament that there’s nothing new out there. But I tell people this was all packed up in 1905 and taken on this dilatory journey, and they’re amazed.’’ Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com.

© Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
 

How singular the singularity

This article summarizes an old idea in the scientific community, dating back I suspect before the 1980s, though I haven't researched the origins of this verbal formulation of a much older idea. 

The link to the whole article  explaining what scientists mean by "a singularity," may go to a page you have to sign in to so here is part of the article, written by Wally Bahny, a blogger for techrepublic.com

Moore’s Law (i.e., the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit will double approximately every two years) has been expanded to anything technology related. As a matter of fact, Moore’s Law is expected to continue for at least five more years and perhaps much longer. The question becomes, though: What will be the change that causes us to deviate from that theory?Some say it will be a dramatic slowdown in technological advancement. The human race will eventually hit a wall, and we’ll be stuck at a technological level. This might happen centuries from now, or it may be next year, but we will come upon that point; our brains can only handle so much advancement and innovation. Entomologist and population biologist Paul Ehrlich gave a lecture on June 27, 2008 in San Francisco during which he stated that the human brain has not changed much in about 50,000 years. Cultural evolution information such as this leads to the wall-type theory: But, what if the opposite happened? What if that wall was beyond the point where humans could create autonomous, thinking, self-advancing machines? Machines could reprogram their own source code and essentially learn freely without human intervention (think Data on Star Trek). This point in technology could trigger what has become known as The Singularity (or the Technological Singularity). If it is possible for humans to reach this point in technological advancement, the machines could create new, better versions of themselves (thus advancing their intelligence) or simply rewrite their source code to advance their intelligence. Without the limitations of the human brain, the cap on intelligence could be infinite.

Reverse engineering this idea, so to speak, makes me wonder if the idea of god always had this combo horror/ joy effect. But that's a subject for another blog.