Thursday, March 31, 2011

A Cultural History of the Moon

The book "Moon: A Brief History," with its wide variety of illustrations from classical texts, science fiction and other sources, describes not just the history of the celestial body but the ways it inspired the human imagination to take flight, fueled, as Proust put it, by "the ancient unalterable splendor of a Moon cruelly and mysteriously serene."

Begin Slide Show »

 

my favorite is:

Lunar Ambitions
After 1968, about 90,000 people registered for Pan American World Airways' First Moon Flights Club. Departure was scheduled for the year 2000; Ronald Reagan was one of the first to reserve a seat. The fare for the trip was projected to be $14,000. Pan Am went out of business in 1991 and never had to fulfill its lunar obligation.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/12/21/science/20101221-Moon.html
 

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Humor from The Onion

 Even Newt Gingrich A Little Depressed By Prospect Of Him Running For President
 
WASHINGTON—Expressing a reaction similar to millions of other dismayed Americans, Newt Gingrich admitted Monday that he too was feeling "pretty bummed out" about the prospect of a Newt Gingrich presidential campaign.
 
While confirming his ardent desire to be president, the former Speaker of the House told reporters the mere fact that American voters were seriously considering Newt Gingrich to be a viable Republican candidate in 2012 was a fairly distressing development that made him question the direction the country was moving in.
 
"Even when I see my name on a list of potential candidates, I think, you gotta be kidding me—Newt Gingrich?" said Gingrich, frowning and shaking his head in disbelief. "People are actually getting excited about the guy who engineered the 1995 government shutdown? I'm sorry, but that's just sad.".
 
"Hell, look at me: I'm a public relations nightmare," said Gingrich, adding that, for many years in the late '90s and early 2000s, his name was basically a punch line. "Remember that whole thing with me divorcing my wife while she was still in the hospital recovering from cancer? For my campaign's sake, I hope people have forgotten about that. But c'mon, it's a pretty bleak political landscape when the presidential campaign of a known philanderer is actually getting off the ground.".
 
 
full @ http://www.theonion.com/articles/even-newt-gingrich-a-little-depressed-by-prospect,19837/
 
 
 
 

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Tuesday, March 29, 2011

'Muffin top,' 'banh mi,' and 'California roll' admitted into English dictionary‏

 http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/muffin-top-banh-mi-and-california-roll-admitted-into-english-dictionary-2253408.html
 
Here's a list of food-related words and terms that have made the cut in the latest Oxford English Dictionary updates (but have yet to be accepted by spell check programs).

Muffin top: 1. The top portion of a muffin, or sometimes a muffin cooked in a special shallow tin so that it consists exclusively of this top part, without the soggy bottom whose relative undesirability once inspired an episode of 1990s Seinfeld.
2. The second sense is figurative, referring to a protuberance of flesh above the waistband of a tight pair of trousers ("spare tire" or "love handle"), which may sometimes be attributed to an excessive appreciation for muffin tops in the literal sense.
Banh mi: Vietnamese sandwich
Taquito: A crisp-fried Tex-Mex snack
Kleftiko: Greek dish of slow-cooked lamb
Eton mess: The British dessert "consisting of whipped cream, pieces of meringue and fruit"
Doughnut hole: Balls of doughnuts cut from the center of doughnuts
California roll: Maki sushi rolls containing cucumber, crab, avocado and fish roe
Flat white: A common term from Australian English, the flat white is a style of espresso drink with finely textured foamed milk
Lashed: Drunk
On the lash: Engaged in a bout of drinking
Cream-crackered: Knackered or exhausted
Crème de cassis: Blackcurrant-flavored liqueur
Gremolata: An Italian garnish of finely chopped garlic, parsley and lemon zest usually sprinkled over slow-cooked braised meats
Rugelach: A Jewish, crescent-shaped pastry stuffed with cinnamon, raisins or chocolate and made with cream cheese
Roulade: A culinary term for meats or cakes that are normally stuffed and rolled into a log

 
 
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/muffin-top-banh-mi-and-california-roll-admitted-into-english-dictionary-2253408.html
 


Friday, March 25, 2011

Holding down two jobs


   
Did you hear about the Los Angeles police woman who was a stripper on the weekends?

Her t-shirt said
 
LAPD
 
on the front and
 
ANCE
 
on the back.
 
 




Thursday, March 24, 2011

squeeze box humor

 
An accordion player is driving to a gig.

He pulls into a convenience store to get a cup of coffee.

While he's in line, he suddenly realizes he left his accordion in the back seat, and the window's down.

He rushes out to the car, but it's too late.

Someone has tossed in another accordion.



Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth Crying In Rage

My friend MC Itch sent this one:
 
 
 Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth Crying In Rage

  http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/03/18/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage?sc=emaf

  
 

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Music is all in the mind - from Nature News

A brain–computer interface allows paralysed patients to play music with brainpower alone
 
A pianist plays a series of notes, and the woman echoes them on a computerized music system. The woman then goes on to play a simple improvised melody over a looped backing track. It doesn't sound like much of a musical challenge — except that the woman is paralysed after a stroke, and can make only eye, facial and slight head movements. She is making the music purely by thinking.
 
This is a trial of a computer-music system that interacts directly with the user's brain, by picking up the tiny electrical impulses of neurons. The device, developed by composer and computer-music specialist Eduardo Miranda of the University of Plymouth, UK, working with computer scientists at the University of Essex, should eventually help people with severe physical disabilities, caused by brain or spinal-cord injuries, for example, to make music for recreational or therapeutic purposes. The findings are published online in the journal Music and Medicine1.
 
"This is an interesting avenue, and might be very useful for patients," says Rainer Goebel, a neuroscientist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who works on brain-computer interfacing.

Therapeutic use

Evidence suggests that musical participation can be beneficial for people with neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia and Parkinson's disease. But people who have almost no muscle movement have generally been excluded from such benefits, and can enjoy music only through passive listening.
 
The development of brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) that enable users to control computer functions by mind alone offer new possibilities for such people (see Mental ping-pong could aid paraplegics). In general, these interfaces rely on the user's ability to learn how to self-induce particular mental states that can be detected by brain-scanning technologies.
 
Miranda and his colleagues have used one of the oldest of these systems: electroencephalography (EEG), in which electrodes on the skull pick up faint neural signals. The EEG signal can be processed quickly, allowing fast response times, and the instrument is cheaper and more portable than brain-scanning techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging and positron-emission tomography.
 
Previous efforts using BCIs have focused on moving computer screen icons such as cursors, but Miranda's team sought to achieve the much more complex task of enabling users to play and compose music. Miranda says that he first became aware of the then-emerging field of BCIs more than a decade ago while researching how to make music using brainwaves. "When I realized the potential of a musical BCI for the wellbeing of severely disabled people," he says, "I couldn't leave the idea alone. Now I can't separate this work from my activities as a composer."
 
The trick is to teach the user how to associate particular brain signals with specific tasks by presenting a repeating stimulus — auditory, visual or tactile — and getting the user to focus on it. This elicits a distinctive, detectable pattern in the EEG signal. Miranda and his colleagues show several flashing 'buttons' on a computer screen, which each trigger a musical event. The users push a button just by directing their attention to it.
 
For example, a button could be used to generate a melody from a preselected set of notes. The user can alter the intensity of the control signal – how 'hard' the button is pressed – by varying the intensity of attention, and the result is fed back to them visually as a change in the button's size. In this way, any one of several notes can be selected by mentally altering the intensity of pressing.
 
With a little practice, this allows users to create a melody as if they were selecting keys on a piano. And, as with learning an instrument, say the researchers, "the more one practices the better one becomes".

Back in control

The researchers trialled their system on a female patient who has locked-in syndrome, a form of almost total paralysis caused by brain lesions, at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in London. During a two-hour session, she got the hang of the system and was eventually playing along with a backing track. She reported that "it was great to be in control again".
 
Goebel points out that the patients still need to be able to control their eye movements, which people with total locked-in syndrome cannot. In such partial cases, he says, "one can usually use gaze directly for controlling devices, instead of an EEG system". But Miranda points out that eye-gazing alone does not permit variations in the intensity of the signal. "Eye gazing is comparable to a mouse or joystick," he says. "Our system adds another dimension, which is the intensity of the choice. That's crucial for our musical system."
 
Miranda says that although increasing the complexity of the musical tasks is not a priority, music therapists have suggested it would be better if the system were more like a musical instrument — for instance, with an interface that looks like a piano keyboard. He admits that it is not easy to raise the number of buttons or keys beyond four, but is confident that "we will get there eventually".
 
"The flashing thing does not need to be on a computer screen," he says. It could, for example, be a physical electronic keyboard with light-emitting diodes on the keys. "You could play it by staring at the keys," he says.
 

Quote of the Day

 
 
from Jimmy Fallon, referring to Prince William's bachelor party:
 
"It's gotta be weird stuffing money into a stripper's bikini when every bill has a photo of your grandmother printed on it."
 

 

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

The Legacy Of The CD: Innovation That Ate Itself

The CD was invented by hardware manufacturers Sony and Philips. At first, executives at the major record labels didn't like the new format. But they started to come around — thanks in large part to Jac Holzman, the founder of Elektra Records who will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame next week. Holzman was a big advocate for the CD when he was at Warner Music Group.
 

excerpt from article:

 

 
"The CD was sexy. And it would bring higher prices — from about 8 dollars for cassettes or LPs at the end of the '70s, to about $15 in the early '80s," Holzman says. "You could resell your best catalogue again. CDs were lighter and cheaper to ship, which is a big consideration."
 
All of that meant giant profits for the music industry in the 1980s and '90s. "The CD sold so well. And it created this gigantic boom in the industry," says Steve Knopper, the author of Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. "And everybody got rich. And people just got incredibly accustomed to this. To the point where in the late '90s, the only way that you could get the one song that you liked was to buy the 15 to 18 dollar CD at the Tower Records."
 
At first, Knopper says, people didn't mind paying a lot for the new format. "You didn't hear the outcry at the time of, 'Hey, we're getting price-gouged.' Instead the public was going, 'this is much better sound.'"
 
The record labels promised that the price of CDs would come down eventually. And the discs did get cheaper — to make. But the labels kept retail prices - and profits - high. Jac Holzman says that was a mistake.
 
"It's fine to keep that up for two or three years. But the labels kept it up far too long. And I think it was a fraud on the public, and on the artists."
 
Sales peaked in 2000. Back when the disc was designed, no one in the music industry thought much about ripping or burning on a personal computer. But CDs were the first widely available format that allowed consumers to free digital copies of songs from a physical object. Which led to the rise of the mp3, and Napster, and other peer-to-peer networks.


 
full @ http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2011/03/09/134391895/the-legacy-of-the-cd-innovation-that-ate-itself

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

... and "Oy" goes Erin

 Corned Beef and Cabbage is basically an American tradition on St. Patrick's Day started by irish-Americans in the mid 1800's

Some Irish people feel that corned beef and cabbage is about as Irish as spaghetti and meatballs.

Since cows were used for milk rather than meat in poor times in Ireland, beef was a delicacy that was fed to kings. It was more common to celebrate a holiday meal with what they call a ham (Gammon) or bacon joint. ( a cured but unsmoked piece of pork) with their cabbage and potatoes.

 

When many Irish Immigrants came over in the mid 1800's they couldn't find a bacon joint like they had in Ireland, so they found that Jewish corned beef was very similar in texture, and they used that for their holiday celebrations.

 

 http://www.kitchenproject.com/history/CornedBeef.htm
 
 

Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Does Falafel make you Feel Awful ?

Falafels are safe after all – in small doses, research on rats shows.

 

A study called  Effect of a popular Middle Eastern food (Falafel) on rat liver  is now available to the public.

Focusing strictly on the medical consequences (for rats) of eating "chickpeas paste seasoned with garlic, parsley, and special spices, then deep fried in vegetable oil", it's a 10-page journey from delight to despair, and finally to indifference.

Frying oil samples and falafel patties were collected from 20 restaurants. They homogenized the falafel, soaked it for 24 hours, filtered it through cheesecloth and centrifuged it. This produced the experimental material – concentrated falafel – with which they performed two experiments.

The first experiment assessed the short-term effect of eating falafel, short term in this case meaning five days. Janakat and Al-Khateeb extracted the oil from some falafel patties, and force-fed it to some rats for the whole five days. Then they killed those rats, and did post mortems to get at the livers. The livers (happily, in a sense) looked in pretty good shape. Thus, the report says, the short-term effects of eating falafel are pretty benign.

The second experiment aimed to clarify the long-term effect of falafel consumption. A fresh batch of rats got to eat lots of falafel – as much as they pleased, whenever they wanted it – for a month. That was their entire diet: falafel, falafel, falafel. Then they were killed. Here, the post mortem results were ugly. The study intones that "long-term consumption of falafel patties (30 days) caused yellowish discoloration of the liver distinctive of liver necrosis", suggesting that "the consumption of falafel as the sole source of nutrition for a long period of time ... can generate a hepatotoxic effect leading to liver necrosis".

That may sound like bad news, but apparently it's not. The very next sentence – nearly the last thing said in the report – is this: "Falafel consumption in moderation and in conjunction with other food items or beverages containing high antioxidant levels can be considered as safe."
 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/feb/14/falafel-food-improbable-research
 
 

Do Falafels make you Feel Awful ?

 

Falafels are safe after all – in small doses, research on rats shows.

 

A study called  Effect of a popular Middle Eastern food (Falafel) on rat liver  is now available to the public.

 

Focusing strictly on the medical consequences (for rats) of eating "chickpeas paste seasoned with garlic, parsley, and special spices, then deep fried in vegetable oil", it's a 10-page journey from delight to despair, and finally to indifference.

 

Frying oil samples and falafel patties were collected from 20 restaurants. They homogenized the falafel, soaked it for 24 hours, filtered it through cheesecloth and centrifuged it. This produced the experimental material – concentrated falafel – with which they performed two experiments.

 
The first experiment assessed the short-term effect of eating falafel, short term in this case meaning five days. Janakat and Al-Khateeb extracted the oil from some falafel patties, and force-fed it to some rats for the whole five days. Then they killed those rats, and did post mortems to get at the livers. The livers (happily, in a sense) looked in pretty good shape. Thus, the report says, the short-term effects of eating falafel are pretty benign.
 
The second experiment aimed to clarify the long-term effect of falafel consumption. A fresh batch of rats got to eat lots of falafel – as much as they pleased, whenever they wanted it – for a month. That was their entire diet: falafel, falafel, falafel. Then they were killed. Here, the post mortem results were ugly. The study intones that "long-term consumption of falafel patties (30 days) caused yellowish discoloration of the liver distinctive of liver necrosis", suggesting that "the consumption of falafel as the sole source of nutrition for a long period of time ... can generate a hepatotoxic effect leading to liver necrosis".
 
That may sound like bad news, but apparently it's not. The very next sentence – nearly the last thing said in the report – is this: "Falafel consumption in moderation and in conjunction with other food items or beverages containing high antioxidant levels can be considered as safe."
 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/feb/14/falafel-food-improbable-research
 
 

Monty Python: "I've finished cutting-Cutting-CUTTING... your hair."

A Connecticut man who was halfway through a haircut allegedly stabbed another man in the back with a pair of scissors, according to police.
 
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/haircut/mid-haircut-connecticut-man-stabs-victim-pair-scissors

Tuesday, March 08, 2011

C'est WHAT ?

When we don't understand something, we say, "It's Greek to me."
What do they say in Greece?
What do they say in other countries?
 
answer:  http://www.omniglot.com/language/idioms/incomprehensible.php



C'est WHAT ?


When we don't understand something, wee say, "It's Greek to me."
What do they say in Greece?
What do they say in other countries?
 
answer:  http://www.omniglot.com/language/idioms/incomprehensible.php



Monday, March 07, 2011

Internet History: Google Earth's WWII aerial images

Aerial photographs of European cities during World War II have been made available on Google Earth, giving internet users a real glimpse of the smashed-up landscape of war.

 

Taken between 1935 and 1945, the snaps record a series of chilling views: Warsaw's ghetto and bombed-out old town; the decimated Renaissance bridge in Florence; and bomb craters in Berlin.

 

The Royal Air Force and United States Air Force took the photographs, primarily for reconnaissance but also for post-bombing damage assessment, and the images were then stitched together by hand and kept as a record of the devastation.

 

Images of the 39 cities can now be compared with modern day Google Earth pictures, charting what a spokesperson for the Historic Centre of Warsaw described as "a near-total reconstruction of a span of history covering the 13th to th 20th Century".

 

 

 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/internet-history-google-earths-wwii-aerial-images-1889708.html

Yeah, it's yet another one of those "3 people" jokes

from my friend John
 

A chemist, a physicist, and an economist are stranded on a desert island with nothing to eat.

After several days a can of beans washes ashore, and the three academics apply their disciplines to the problem of opening the can.

The physicist offers the first solution: "Raise the can and let it drop.  Its potential energy will be converted into kinetic energy according to mgh = (mv^2)/2, and for sufficiently large h this energy upon impact will be enough to breach the can."

The chemist replies "That's all very well, but we have no means to raise the can much higher than our heads.  Besides, there is a simpler way.  Build a fire and place the can in it.  The volume of the can being fixed, the pressure in the can will increase according to Boyle's Law, PV = nRT, until it is large enough to breach the can."

The economist replies, "But that would scatter the beans all over the sandy beach.  Besides, we have no means to build a fire.  Besides, there is a simpler way.  Assume we have a can opener... "

 

Friday, March 04, 2011

hmmmm

Using the encoding A=1, B=2, C=3, etc, the sum of the codes of the letters in the words "BIG BANG" is 42.

A gopher that wears sunblock will never bark at the space shuttle.

 

Jargon Watch: Lightfoils, Gelivable, Particle X

Lightfoils n. pl.
Nanoscale glass rods designed to fly on a ray of light. Like solar sails,
lightfoils are propelled by the pressure of photons. Unlike solar sails, they bend light, giving them controlled lift like airplane wings. Arrays of lightfoils could someday power micromachines.

 

Gelivable adj.
Chinese Internet slang for "cool." Based on the characters gei and li, for "giving power," gelivable recently made news when it was used in a headline on the front page of the linguistically traditional People's Daily.

 
Exposome n.
The master list of toxins encountered by the typical human body over a lifetime, ranging from environmental pollutants to natural byproducts of metabolism. The exposome may be bigger than the genome, and it almost certainly has a greater influence on health.

 
Particle X n.
A supermassive particle theorized to be the common ancestor of all matter. Shortly after the big bang, it decayed to make everyday atoms as well as the elusive dark matter that gives galaxies most of their heft.

 
Jonathon Keats (jargon@wired.com)

Yeah, it's another one of those "3 people" jokes

There was a mad scientist who kidnapped three colleagues; an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician, and locked each of them in seperate cells with plenty of canned food and water but no can opener.

A month later, returning, the mad scientist went to the engineer's cell and found it empty. The engineer had constructed a can opener from pocket trash, used aluminum shavings and dried sugar to make an explosive, and escaped.

The physicist was still in the cell. She had worked out the angle necessary to knock the lids off the tin cans by throwing them against the wall. She was developing a good pitching arm and a new quantum theory.

The mathematician had stacked the unopened cans, and had a surprising solution to the problem. His dessicated corpse was propped calmly against a wall, and this was inscribed on the floor in blood:  Theorem: If I can't open these cans, I'll die.

 

Thursday, March 03, 2011

Charlie Sheen vs Muammar Gaddafi

Who said it ?

Take the Quiz:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/quiz/2011/mar/01/muammar-gaddafi-charlie-sheen-quiz

 
 
 
Now compare some of the craziest things each of them have said: 
 
example:
Gaddafi: "They give them pills at night, they put hallucinatory pills in their drinks, their milk, their coffee, their Nescafe."
Sheen: "There are parts of me that are Dennis Hopper."
 
 

FW: A Phrase A Week - What's not to like?


What's not to like?

Meaning

A rhetorical question, suggesting that what is being spoken of is without fault.

Origin

What's not to like? Well, many people don't like this clichéd phrase, which has become as overused as 'wake up and smell the coffee', 'think outside the box' etc.

It sounds like, and is, of American origin and has been in use there since at least the 1960s, possibly earlier and is in the mould of a Jewish rhetorical phrase, like 'What am I, chopped liver?' or 'Is the Pope Catholic?'.

The earliest example of 'what's not to like?' that I've found in print is in Dorothy Kilgallen's review of the film Charade in the 'Voice of Broadway' column in the New York newspaper The Dunkirk Evening Observer, September 1963:

It has Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, Paris in living color, and a beautiful score by Henry Mancini. So what's not to like?

'What's not to like?' has spread to other English-speaking countries. Like many clichés, it has become so hackneyed as to have taken on an ironic meaning. In the USA, where it is still more common than in other regions, it is frequently applied to things that the speaker doesn't consider in the least bit likeable. 'What's not to like?' is often a preamble to 'Well, apart from ... [this, that and the other]... nothing'.

What's not to love?The 'what's not to love?' spinoff variant started in 1974, as part of Volkswagen's advertising copy for a limited edition range of Beetle models that were styled on the Love Bug that featured in Disney's eponymous 1968 film. According to that same copy, the vehicle was painted in "luscious lime-green" - so, in my eyes, there was at least one thing not to love about it.


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Tuesday, March 01, 2011

Iran claims London 2012 Olympics logo spells the word 'Zion'

Almost four years after the logo's launch, Tehran threatens to boycott the Games unless the design is changed.

Iran has threatened to boycott the London Olympics unless the organisers replace the official logo, which Tehran claims spells out the word "Zion".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/28/iran-london-olympics-logo-zion

=====

Dear Iran,

There's the Exit door.

Buh-bye !

Bob