>>Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday that he would not recommend taking any commercial flight or riding in a subway car “at this point” because swine flu virus can spread “in confined places.” A little more than one hour later, Biden rushed out a statement backing off.<<
Instant messaging with Gorilla Boy.
I have a Peking, its a beautiful white innocent thing that poops in
unbelievable quantities. Never mind about a bio-filter, you are going
to need a sewerage system suitable for a small town to deal with what
this duck is going to do to your pond.
Look closely at the general design of your average duck, notice that
the cranium is small. It is my belief that if you could take all the duck
brains in the world and combine them in a sort of super organic
computer you would basically have a machine with a loose bowel and a
vocabulary
limited to: "quack". A duck is a natural born lobotomy.
If you do get a duck be sure to turn on the lights at night before
your walk across the lawn. One of the most unforgettable experiences you
can have is tripping over a sleeping duck in the dark.
>Astronomers have spotted the most distant object yet confirmed in the universe – a self-destructing star that exploded 13.1 billion light years from Earth. It detonated just 640 million years after the big bang, around the end of the cosmic "dark ages", when the first stars and galaxies were lighting up space.<
>Mayor Bloomberg went ballistic Monday after the U.S. military - without any warning to the public - buzzed New York City with one of the presidential planes trailed by an F-16 fighter jet.Flying in as low as 1000 feet to 150 feet above New York City and taking photographs along the way, the planes circled the Statue of Liberty and flew over Manhattan, Staten Island, and New Jersey - then vanished.
Before they were gone, hundreds of frightened people had jammed the emergency lines, thousands of terrified people evacuated from buildings in the city and across the river in Jersey, and many New Yorkers had flashbacks to the 9/11 attacks.<
>WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama on Monday promised a major investment in research and development, with the goal of spending 3 percent of the nation's gross domestic product on scientific innovation.<
This one I submitted. That's *our* table you have those coffee cups on, guys!
So today I confirmed what I've always thought ->Spyware, also sometimes known as tracking software, is an application that gathers information about users without their knowledge. Such applications are most often downloaded onto a computer when users are visiting websites or downloading software. The primary function of these applications is to collect personal information stored on your computer or monitor websites you visit and items you purchase online. This information is transmitted largely to advertisers and used for marketing purposes. Spyware has become a leading security problem for Internet users and is now more widespread than spam or virus infections.<
Just another one of my long list of complaints - junk mail, junk catalogs, commercials that jack up the sound, commercials that pop up on the tv screen, many computer ads that leap out at you if your mouse strays across them.
I still love the Afleck duck...
Our bank is one of the ones who got gazillions of dollars to bail them out.
The Supreme Court has seen pressure from Congress in the past and requests from the C-SPAN public affairs network and others, but justices have never allowed television broadcasts of oral arguments before the nation's highest court. While Thomas indicated that not all justices were reflexively opposed to airing oral arguments, he also did not suggest that cameras would be coming to the court anytime soon.....
Breyer suggested that "serious social science research" could determine whether broadcasts would add or detract from people's understandings of the court's functioning.<<
I'd like to see someone design that study. Let's get with it people! I want to see what you are doing. I think I can handle it.
These little monster mussels, quagga mussels and zebra mussels, are wrecking havoc all across the country.
>Cash-strapped zoo officials told a New York City Council committee Thursday that they need to send away deer, bats, foxes, antelopes and other creatures to zoos around the country.
Women have fought to be able to do a lot of things they've not been allowed to do in the past.The IOC rejected the women's bid to compete in 2010, saying the sport wasn't developed enough internationally to meet the criteria for inclusion.
Ski jumping is the only winter Olympic sport not open to both genders.<
Oh, well. If it is good enough for men to fling themselves off a mountain, it is good enough for the women.
He is having the garage doors replaced. NOT because they look like the above picture. I only
I loves Sir Tim Gunn. Oh my, here is some more of him to love.
Apparently we have the largest colony of bats, in Eastern Washington, right here on the nuclear reservation. They are living in a former underground water storage facility. This facility was slated to destroyed as part of the big nuclear clean up. But the bats have a lease and the thing checked out okay for radioactivity.
This is an interesting article --> Ivy Leaguer infiltrates Falwell's Liberty University.
There are certain cells in the human brain that you need to activate in order to understand fractions.
I'm having trouble getting to Dan's page. The computer freezes every single time. I really wanted to discuss Miss California - maybe she lost because she could not complete a coherent thought. And got her facts wrong. And Perez - you blew it honey, when you went on MSNBC yesterday and announced not only did you decide to keep on calling her the 'b' word but were adding in the 'c' word. You tipped over the edge there from edgy and relevant to crass and bullying. All in all, a bad day in popular culture.
The new law would let victims take their pets when they remove personal effects to leave abusive situations.<
We aren't sure how this happened...
Mike Rowe and Dave Barsky (whose potential for greatness is sadly ignored) are coming to Rocky Reach Dam. The dam is about an hour from here. It is one of about 150 hydro projects along the length of the river which originates in Canada.
This time of year, in our second grade reading program, we've finished all the materials and we start adding games to our mix. I bought a bunch of letter tiles and G and I set about making words out of them. G worked very hard on his word and wouldn't let me see it, covering it with his hand. Finally he was done and he proudly said, 'look at my word!!!'
>THIS is a tale of two spacecraft. Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972; Pioneer 11 a year later. By now both craft should be drifting off into deep space with no one watching. However, their trajectories have proved far too fascinating to ignore. That's because something has been pulling - or pushing - on them, causing them to speed up. The resulting acceleration is tiny, less than a nanometre per second per second. That's equivalent to just one ten-billionth of the gravity at Earth's surface, but it is enough to have shifted Pioneer 10 some 400,000 kilometres off track. NASA lost touch with Pioneer 11 in 1995, but up to that point it was experiencing exactly the same deviation as its sister probe. So what is causing it?
Nobody knows. Some possible explanations have already been ruled out, including software errors, the solar wind or a fuel leak. If the cause is some gravitational effect, it is not one we know anything about. In fact, physicists are so completely at a loss that some have resorted to linking this mystery with other inexplicable phenomena.<
SPOKANE PARK PLANS TO DETONATE THE SQUIRRELSSo the Parks and Recreation department is going to use a special machine to detonate some of the 100 to 150 rodents that are tearing up the grounds.
The machine is called the Rodenator Pro. It pumps propane and oxygen into the tunnels of squirrels, then sends an electric spark that causes an explosion. The shock waves kill the squirrels and collapse their tunnels.<
The mind boggles.
This is interesting.... "There were more than a few moist eyes and tight throats," employee Patrick O'Neill wrote back to the class. "To have reached out to us in such a heartfelt way is really a testament to your individual and collective humanity."
A jump from economics to empathy.
I went to the same university Gorilla Boy is at now. I lived in the last sorority on Greek Row. Surrounded by fraternities. The fraternity Gorilla Boy is looking at was in our backyard. It was the fraternity which got the nickname 'Animal House'. And it absolutely fit. Sounds like a perfect place for Gorilla Boy. oh, gawd...
They've been fighting about it for over twenty years. Fish stocking in the North Cascades. The fisherman hike in miles to stock mountain lakes with trout. The state wants them to stop. The fish aren't native to those lakes. They will harm salamanders, insects and zooplankton. If the fisherman continue to do it, without federal permission, the state will poison the lakes with pesticide, killing the fish - and the salamanders, insects and zooplankton. But it's the principle of the thing, don't ya know.
One of Eldest's friends is studying fashion design. Last time I saw him he was dressed as young Elvis in peg leg red plaid pants. And he's color blind. He'd make an excellent contestant.
>>FOR evidence of religion's centuries-old hostility toward science, Galileo is the go-to guy. His belief in a Copernican universe led to his imprisonment and torture at the hands of the church, or so the story often goes. But is it true? In his contribution to Galileo Goes to Jail, Maurice Finocchiaro explains that while Galileo was interrogated, forced to recant and sentenced to house arrest, he was never (with the unlikely but possible exception of three undocumented days) jailed or subjected to torture.<<
National Organization for Marriage - or NOM?
>All terrestrial life forms share the same 20 amino acids. Biochemists have managed to synthesise 10 of them in experiments that simulate lifeless prebiotic environments, using proxies for lightning, ionising radiation from space, or hydrothermal vents to provide the necessary energy.
Amino acids are also found inside meteorites formed before Earth was born.
Paul Higgs and Ralph Pudritz at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, point out that all these experiments produced a subset of the same 10 amino acids and calculate that these 10 require the least amount of energy to form.
This, they argue, suggests that if alien life exists it probably has the same 10 amino acids at its core.<<
Cool. :-) Full story here.
Nobody knows, yet, how the American crew fought off the pirates. And the captain is still being held hostage so the situation is still fraught with peril. Crossing all fingers for his safe return. We can but hope they think twice before trying to get a hold of an American ship again. Here's a link to an interesting background story on the whole modern day pirate situation.
Photographer and hair stylist glamorize a few horses.
>SPERM should be subject to the same product liability laws as car brakes, according to a US judge who has given a teenager with severe learning disabilities the go-ahead to sue the sperm bank that provided her with a biological father.<
New, two hour episode, of Mythbusters tonight. We loves this show.
>Humans could soon be realising Dr Doolittle's dream of talking to the animals
A British acoustics engineer claims he may be close to deciphering the clicks and whistles that make up "dolphin speak".
In a lab in his Cumbrian cottage, John Stuart Reid showed me his Cymascope, a new invention which transforms sounds into pictures.<
This image is from my brother's website. He is a professional photographer in San Francisco. You can visit his website, 30acreimaging, here.
Gastric cancer thus joins a long list of malignancies for which studies have shown a reduced risk associated with a diet that contains broccoli -- including cancer of the esophagus, bladder, skin and lung, among others.<
It's really not your fault - why you can't resist bacon.>A complex chemical interaction in the meat is what produces the winning combination of taste and smell in a bacon sandwich, according to an expert.
The reaction between amino acids in the bacon and reducing sugars in the fat is what provides the simple snack with its appeal, according to Elin Roberts, science communications manager at the Centre for Life education centre in Newcastle.<
Experts have pinpointed the part of the brain that guides people when they are battling with difficult moral dilemmas, according to a study.
Highly-sophisticated brain scans show that the response is linked to certain areas usually associated with primitive emotions of sex, fear and anger....
Professor Jeste admitted the possibility that wisdom and free will are based on the make-up of someone's brain rather than metaphysics is unsettling.<
Back when the tribe were all pre-school age we had The Snake Incident.
The black blob, to the right, is Rosie. Supervising.
Reading this right now. Kind of a mixed breed of a cozy mystery and hard bitten detective novel. The dog, Chet, tells the story and there are a lot of laugh out loud funny lines in it, especially if you love dogs. Set in the desert area of an unnamed Western state.
Time magazine has an article on legalizing marijuana posted here.
JBS Haldane entering a deep-sea diving chamber on 1 January 1941 - repeated bouts of decompression would leave him prone to seizures, partly deaf, and able to blow smoke through one of his ears (Image: Hans Wild / Time Life Pictures / Getty)
>Four people designated to administer lethal injections to death-row inmates at the Washington State Penitentiary have resigned, apparently worried that their identities could become public in court....In December the state prison system's chief physician, Dr. Marc Stern, resigned because he said preparing for an execution would violate medical ethics.<
You're about to be accessible to millions of people!Police were called to Broughton in Buckinghamshire yesterday, after furious villagers blocked one of the cars, complaining it was an invasion of their privacy and that the photographs would attract burglaries.<
I remember getting on Google streetview in San Francisco and 'driving' right by my brother's house. It was a strange feeling. I could also go drive by my nephews' school.
is Bravo's offering to replace Project Runway. Read all about it on the Rungay Guys' page.
