Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day described Iggy Pop, center, as “the most confrontational singer we will ever see."
Moody's warns nations to cut spending or risk AAA ratingsWashington Post Foreign ServiceTuesday, March 16, 2010The United States and other top world economies need to make potentially painful government spending cuts or risk losing the high-grade credit ratings that have kept borrowing affordable, the Moody's rating agency said Monday.
Called electro-hypersensitivity, the condition means the afflicted have severe physical reactions — from dizziness, nausea and headaches to breathing problems, heart palpitations and flat-out fainting — to the electromagnetic radiation produced by consumer electronics such as computers, televisions and cell phones.
According to a stunning new article in Popular Science, Sweden is the only country in the world to recognize EHS as a functional impairment. The article explains the plight of Per Segerbäck, one of the three percent of Swedes with the condition.
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If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients.
I am so glad I found this little book - small in size, but not in value of content.
I especially adore many entries in the partial register of what Kopp describes as his eternal truths (Page 223):
Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, poses the theory that the more intelligent people are, the more likely it is for them to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values in response to the challenges of the times.
Kanazawa says that humans are evolutionarily programmed to be conservative - to care mostly about family and friends, to believe in a supernatural power or God because of their paranoia about what they perceive as "unnatural" phenomenon, and, for men, to be polygamous.
"General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions," says Kanazawa. "As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles."
H/t to Humorzo
SmartPlanet reports... (emphasis mine) In a report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Albany, N.Y.-based renewable energy consulting firm AWS Truewind, wind turbines in the continental U.S. could generate 37 PWh (petawatt-hours) per year — far more than the 3,816,000,000 MWh (or about 3.8 PWh) per year currently required to power the nation, as estimated in 2005.
The report also inspected how the 48 contiguous states stack up in wind power potential.
Here are the Top 10:
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.
This bear, Dolores, from the Leipzig Zoo has lost her fur, and no one knows why.Reposted from All Creatures [great and small]
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In a nutshell, Warden’s data analysis showed that Facebook users in the U.S. can be roughly segmented into seven regions, which he named facetiously:
OneStonedCrow Pics
Succulents On The Namibian Coastline
After the good rains in 2006, the usually drab coastal area near Luderitz was transformed by the appearance of these succulents. Unfortunately I arrived about a week too late to catch them at their best. They look like they're made out of plastic hey? photo album GGGo
Old Tokyo neighborhoods like Zoushigaya are full of plant lovers who manage to create gardens where there is almost no space. This type of passion for gardening cannot be replicated by large scale developers. What is amazing is the ingenuity and sheer variety of plants grown by residents.
Above there are five or more plants growing vertically along a narrow path that would otherwise be a grim cinder block and metal siding wall between properties. The gardener seems to have used large blue laundry clips to espalier these hardy plants.
Mozilla Explains Why it Doesn't License h264"Even if we were to pay the USD 5000000 annual licensing cost for H.264, and we were to not care about the spectre of license fees for internet distribution of encoded content, or about content and tool creators, downstream projects would be no better off," Shaver explains.
Here’s how it works:
And that’s it.
Report: Google China Hack Might Be Inside Job
3:40 PM - January 19, 2010 by Marcus Yam
Washington sends "diplomatic note" to China asking for an explanation on Google hacking incident.
As the topic of Google and China litter the headlines, we continually wonder whether or not the search giant will continue business in the censorship-filled country. But before Google can go any further, it needs to investigate what happened when it had its networks attacked by hackers.
New wire Reuters today published a story that cites its own sources as saying that the hacking of the networks may have been an inside job.
"The sources, who are familiar with the situation, told Reuters that the attack, which targeted people who have access to specific parts of Google networks, may have been facilitated by people working in Google China's office."
Security analysts also told Reuters that the malicious software used in the hack was a trojan called Hydraq.
Yellow journalism is a type of journalism that downplays legitimate news in favor of eye-catching headlines that sell more newspapers. It may feature exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, sensationalism, or unprofessional practices by news media organizations or journalists.
At the age of 77, "just sitting at his desk" at his home in Cambridge, Mass., according to an email sent out by a representative of his U.K. publisher Quercus, Robert B. Parker is dead. The news of Parker's death on Monday was confirmed by Parker's U.S publisher, Putnam; on Twitter, a representative wrote: "R.I.P beloved author Robert B. Parker. You were indeed a Grand Master, your legacy lives on, and you will be missed by us all."
In a statement released late Monday, Parker's longtime editor at Putnam, Christine Pepe, said: “What mattered most to Bob were his family and his writing, and those were the only things that he needed to be happy. He will be deeply missed by all us at Putnam, and by his fans everywhere.”The thriller writer Joseph Finder also confirmed the news directly with Parker's family, said to be "in shock."And the Bookseller quotes Parker's UK editor, Nick Johnston: "He was a great talent who will be mourned by all his many fans."
I'm really not sure how to process this. Not at all. I suppose it's exactly the way the author best known for his Spenser private detective novels, who by the latter portion of his career was up to publishing three novels a year, working at a five to ten page-a-day clip, should die - doing exactly what he was doing, day in, day out.
He is survived by his wife, Joan, and his sons, David, a choreographer, and Daniel, an actor. Several more novels will be published in 2010, including SPLIT IMAGE, the newest Jesse Stone novel (out February 23) and BLUE-EYED DEVIL, an Appaloosa novel (out on May 4). In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Community Servings, 18 Marbury Terrace, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130. As well, Parker's literary agent, Helen Brann, told the Associated Press that a private ceremony will take place this week to remember the author, and a public memorial, a "celebration of his life and work," is planned for mid-February in Boston.
“Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but he’s a molder of consensus. And on some positions, cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expedience asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’
“But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?”
 AP In this image of a photomicrograph of muscle, tissue shows muscle fibers are seen diagonally from lower left to upper right. The blue dots are the nuclei of the cells, the yellow color is the result of an overlay (green and red) of two of the most important proteins in skeletal muscle, actin and myosin. |
LONDON - Call it pork in a petri dish — a technique to turn pig stem cells into strips of meat that scientists say could one day offer a green alternative to raising livestock, help alleviate world hunger, and save some pigs their bacon.
Dutch scientists have been growing pork in the laboratory since 2006, and while they admit they haven't gotten the texture quite right or even tasted the engineered meat, they say the technology promises to have widespread implications for our food supply.
"If we took the stem cells from one pig and multiplied it by a factor of a million, we would need one million fewer pigs to get the same amount of meat," said Mark Post, a biologist at Maastricht University involved in the In-vitro Meat Consortium, a network of publicly funded Dutch research institutions that is carrying out the experiments.
A MOCKED-UP image of how Osama Bin Laden may look today has been withdrawn by the US State Department after the FBI admitted it was partly based on a photograph of a Spanish MP taken from the internet.
The Photofit image of an older, greying Al-Qaeda leader bore a striking resemblance to the left-wing politician Gaspar Llamazares, a member of Spain’s Communist party and a critic of the US “war on terror”. It turned out Llamazares’s grey hair, jaw line and forehead had been simply cut and pasted from an old campaign photograph by an FBI technician.
The FBI originally claimed it used “cutting edge” technology to come up with new images of terrorist suspects for the State Department’s Rewards for Justice website.
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I can hardly speak well, either. My writing is no better than my speaking. I cain't spell and I don't got good grammer, neither.
My current excuse? Why, I live in Kentucky. Which actually is no excuse at all - except for one teeny-tiny lil' detail mentioned in an article he wrote called Only a poltroon despises dedantry. David Mitchell, the guy what wrote that there piece hit the ol' nail on the head. Talking about grammar and the like he said, "...the rules do matter - it's just that obeying them doesn't." 'Ceptin he didn' say it quite right, he shoulda said, 'the rules matter some, just ya don' has to obey 'em much.' Which leads me to my real point in offering this linguistic and grammatical send up. It seems that as a society we Joseph Averages in our egalitarian splendor have accepted the reward but little of the responsibility of rugged individualism. 'I cain do what I wants as long as I don' git caught.' is the same as suggesting that the 'rules do matter - it's just obeying them doesn't.'
H/t to 
Koko, the sign language specialist with the original "Yes we can" Mister Rogers. 
Great site for silly signs... 
Hat-tip to 
Posted at 
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