...more recent posts
Last week in Sehwan, a town in central Sindh, half a million Sufi pilgrams......They are followers, like most Pakistani , of the heterodox Barelvi school of Sunni Islam. And so they whirled, chantd prayers, blew kisses, and smoked massive quantities of dope.....We are so anti-Taliban, claimed Ahmed Bhutto, in a room thick with insence and rose petels. We stand for love, tolerance and the great infinity.....(the economist 9/16)
NICE!!!
Light on the science physics article about the confirmation of parallel universes:
Parallel universes really do exist, according to a mathematical discovery by Oxford scientists described by one expert as "one of the most important developments in the history of science".
The parallel universe theory, first proposed in 1950 by the US physicist Hugh Everett, helps explain mysteries of quantum mechanics that have baffled scientists for decades, it is claimed.
In Everett's "many worlds" universe, every time a new physical possibility is explored, the universe splits. Given a number of possible alternative outcomes, each one is played out - in its own universe....
...Commenting in New Scientist magazine, Dr Andy Albrecht, a physicist at the University of California at Davis, said: "This work will go down as one of the most important developments in the history of science."
the faint praise gambit, well played
President Bush, who was asked about the Jena case during a Thursday news conference, said he understood the emotions and that the FBI is monitoring the legal proceedings. "The events in Louisiana have saddened me," he said. "All of us in America want there to be, you know, fairness when it comes to justice."
Mysterious crater in Peru.
email blog from NOLA -- with a biting title for one post ... Nation-building over there so we don't have to do it over here
The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight tonight
The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to The Times and to some students and educators.
In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.
I have one leg that was chewed on, shaved and sewed up. And one that got popped out of it's socket, popped back in and taped to my side for the next 2 weeks. At least I'm on pain killers.
who am i?
Just returned from a picnic gathering of friends to watch the Vaux Swifts enter the chimney of Chapman School tonight
The Audobon Society of Portland claims that Chapman School houses the largest known roost of migrating swifts in the world.
linda is prob rite but i hope not.....
can woman play in MLB, or is mens only?
25 more minutes of Katrina
web urbanist
alex the parrot
Dog walking: good for you, good for your pet.
Not so good for birds, apparently.
Australian researchers have found that walking leashed dogs along woodland paths leads to a significant reduction in the number and diversity of birds in the area, at least over the short term.
Peter B. Banks and Jessica V. Bryant of the University of New South Wales surveyed birds along woodland trails near Sydney shortly after dogs were walked on them or after people walked alone. All kinds of dogs were involved, big and small, purebred and mutt. As a control, they also surveyed birds on trails that no one, human or canine, had recently walked on.
Dr. Banks said the study was an outgrowth of his interest in predator-prey interactions. “Here you have a predator that is being walked through the bush quite regularly,” he said.
The researchers chose trails in places where dogs were banned and in other areas where dog walking was common, expecting different results in each. “We thought that where there was regular dog walking birds would get used to it,” Dr. Banks said. “Well, they didn’t.”
Regardless of the type of area, dog walking led to a 35 percent reduction in the number of bird species and a 41 percent reduction in overall bird numbers, compared with the control. (People walking alone caused some disturbance, but less than half that caused by people with dogs.)
Lipkin set aside the bits and pieces of DNA from the bees and started sorting through what was left, searching for material found only in beehives infected by CCD. What they found, eventually, was a bee-killing virus first identified in Israel.
These findings have now been published online by the journal Science.
But both Pettis and Lipkin are quick to note that they have yet to prove conclusively that the Middle Eastern virus they found is the sole cause of CCD.
"Right now, we are claiming it is a marker in Colony Collapse Disorder," Pettis explains. "We have shown that it is present when colonies are collapsing, but we haven't shown cause and effect."
waterproof (birdwatching?) gloves
create your own snowflake
Many say the incident might not have happened if not for the nooses
Size of english language Wikipedia if you printed it out.
Kleiner Kerl spiel Gitarre
Another NYC panorama pic, this time from the annoyingly named Top of the Rock.
Grace Paley, Writer and Activist, Dies
they reprint some of the dialog from her stories. a very natural style.
To read Ms. Paley’s fiction is to be awash in the shouts and murmurs of secular Yiddishkeit, with its wild onrushing joy and twilight melancholy. For her, cadence and character went hand in hand: her stories are marked by their minute attention to language, with its tonal rise and fall, hairpin rhetorical reversals and capacity for delicious hyperbolic understatement. Her stories, many of which are written in the first person and seem to start in mid-conversation, beg to be read aloud.
sad irony alert:
More than 50 pit bulls seized from Michael Vick’s property must be claimed by today, or they could be euthanized.
Federal prosecutors filed court documents last month to condemn 53 pit bulls seized in April as part of the investigation into dogfighting on Vick’s property. No one has claimed any of the dogs, which are being held at several unspecified shelters in eastern Virginia.
Federal prosecutors declined to comment Wednesday on the seized dogs. Typically, when confiscated property goes unclaimed, the government asks the court to have the items declared forfeited. In this case, U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson will make the final decision on the dogs’ fate.
“There’s no dispute over who owns the dogs,” said Daphna Nachminovitch, a spokeswoman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “Obviously this is not going to be a process where someone steps forward and says, ‘This is my dog, can I have her back, please?’ ”
Although Hudson, who also is handling Vick’s criminal case, will determine what becomes of the pit bulls, Nachminovitch said it’s likely that they will be euthanized because they’re not adoptable as pets.
“These dogs are a ticking time bomb,” she said. “Rehabilitating fighting dogs is not in the cards. It’s widely accepted that euthanasia is the most humane thing for them.”