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Sunday, June 28, 2009

Atlas Oscura: Concrete Park

The untrained eye married to the compulsion to create can produce the most strangely moving art. The Wisconsin Concrete Park is an outdoor museum housing 237 concrete sculptures built by the self-taught outsider artist Fred Smith. Smith was a retired lumberjack who didn't sculpt his first figure until the age of 65.

The subjects of his park, which are decorated mostly with shards of broken glass from beer bottles, are of American folklore, tradition, historical events, and nature, ranging from Native Americans, to miners, from soldiers, to woodland creatures. Smith created this concrete walk through American history unmotivated by money or fame, but built the masterwork, in his words, "...for all the American people everywhere. They need something like this."

link: Fred Smith's Wisconsin Concrete Park | Atlas Obscura


RIP Iz the Wiz

Iz the Wiz was a legend among graffiti artists, by almost all accounts “the longest-reigning all-city king in N.Y.C. history,” as the graffiti Web site at149st.com puts it. In other words, Iz put his name, or tag, on subway cars running on every line in the system more times than any other artist. Michael Martin — Iz the Wiz — died on June 17 in Spring Hill, Fla., where he had moved a few years ago. He was 50. The cause was a heart attack, said Ed Walker, who is working on a biography and documentary of Iz the Wiz.

link: Subway Graffiti Artist Iz the Wiz, Michael Martin, Dies at 50 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com


God Evolved and is Descended From. . . .

In his brilliant new book, “The Evolution of God,” Robert Wright tells the story of how God grew up. He starts with the deities of hunter- gatherer tribes, moves to those of chiefdoms and nations, then on to the polytheism of the early Israelites and the monotheism that followed, and then to the New Testament and the Koran, before finishing off with the modern multinational Gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Wright’s tone is reasoned and careful, even hesitant, throughout, and it is nice to read about issues like the morality of Christ and the meaning of jihad without getting the feeling that you are being shouted at. His views, though, are provocative and controversial. There is something here to annoy almost everyone.

link: Book Review - 'The Evolution of God,' by Robert Wright - Review - NYTimes.com

Quantum Computing Progress

A team led by Yale University researchers has created the first rudimentary solid-state quantum processor, taking another step toward the ultimate dream of building a quantum computer.

link: Scientists create first electronic quantum processor


Duck Indeed: Head Shrinkers Shrink Head to Cure Mental Illness

Lin Zongxiu, from the southwestern province of Sichuan, heard in 2008 that soup made with a man’s head could help cure her daughter who had suffered from psychiatric problems for years, the Chengdu Commercial newspaper reported.

Lin and her husband decided to enlist the help of a man in December who knocked unconscious a drunk 76-year-old passer-by before beheading him, the paper claimed.

The couple then gave their 25-year-old daughter soup made from the man’s head, and duck.

link: Chinese woman boiled man's head to cure daugther's psychiatric problems - Telegraph


The Ayatollahs Have a Squabble, Embroiling Not Less than Everything

Ayatollah Amoli belonged to a group of clergy who issued a fatwa stating that cheating in elections are forbidden (haram). Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, Ahmadinejad´s messianic ally, issued another fatwa saying that it is permissible (halal) to cheat, if its in the interest of the regime. Keyhan sides with Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.

link: RealClearWorld - The Compass Blog


95% of Salon Readers Want Goats; What Does That Tell You?

Ditching it all to move to the country and raise goats is probably the fantasy of about 95 percent of Salon readers. How were you able to make it work and overcome the seeming obstacles that life throws up in front of us?

We had a rent-controlled apartment in the East Village, but we were away from it whenever we could be. Both of us taught at universities part-time, so we had summers and long weekends at this cabin in West Virginia where we learned to grow our vegetables and generally live rurally. So moving to Vermont felt like moving to the suburbs compared to Appalachia; it's only a four-hour drive from New York. The goats were the final imprimatur. They were also the excuse for never having to go back to New York again because we had to watch the animals. The truth is if we didn't have other income from teaching and writing it'd be very hard to do this, certainly in the way we do it, which is seasonally and small-scale. It's not a weekend thing. That said, there are people we know up here we were inspired by who have a day job and as many goats as we do and make cheese.

link: Living the dream, with goats | Salon Life


Shouting Fire: A Documentary on Free Speech

Neil Genzlinger writes:

It is presumably an accident of timing, but in the documentary “Shouting Fire,” boy, do the scenes of protesters being arrested during the 2004 Republican convention in New York call to mind recent images coming out of Iran.

That will only add to the film’s leftward lean, at least in the eyes of any conservative types who happen to tune in, making them more inclined to dismiss it. Too bad, because the film, Monday on HBO, explores First Amendment issues that everyone should give some dispassionate, platitude-free thought.

link: Television Review - 'Shouting Fire' - In HBO Documentary, Some Speech Is More Free Than Others - NYTimes.com


Language and Thought

Lera Boroditsky writes:

Humans communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages, each differing from the next in innumerable ways. Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages?

These questions touch on nearly all of the major controversies in the study of mind. They have engaged scores of philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, and they have important implications for politics, law, and religion. Yet despite nearly constant attention and debate, very little empirical work was done on these questions until recently. For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.

link: Edge: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? By Lera Boroditsky


Bloggers Surveyed about Ethics

Overall, [the survey] results suggest that bloggers do expect a degree of ethical behavior from the community at large, and they practice (or at least they believe they practice) ethical behavior at an even higher rate. There are a number of ways to reconcile this with the poor reception that the proposed formal code of behavior received. It's possible that the loudest voices on the issue came from a minority within the blogging community, or their were objections to the specific aspects of this code. But the results of the survey suggest that people won't necessarily demand that the rest of the community adheres to the standards they set for themselves.

link: Blogger ethics: proper attribution > accountability - Ars Technica


Women are from the Garden, Men are from the Compost Heap: Women's Voices Make Tomatoes Grow

We may live in society that stresses equality between the genders, but when it comes to gardening, women seem to have an upper larynx. According to a recent experiment by the Royal Horticultural Society in England, tomato plants grow faster when they are crooned at. The sung-to tomatoes grew two inches higher than their unserenaded counterparts. Female voices worked especially well for hasty tomato growth. Male voices, on the other hand, couldn’t make the tomatoes grow as quickly, and in some cases, low-voiced males were able to stunt the growth of the tomatoes by warbling at them. This must be why we throw rotten tomatoes at horrible singers. Wokka Wokka.

link: Women Should Sing to Their Tomatoes. Guys Should Shut Up. : TreeHugger


You Mean It's Not Only Americans Who Don't Know This Stuff!? -- Brits Fail Bible Quiz

The public is widely ignorant of the stories and people who provide the basis of Christianity, a survey has found, despite 75 per cent of respondents owning a copy of the Bible.

The National Biblical Literacy Survey found that as few as 10 per cent of people understood the main characters in the Bible and their relevance.

link: Britain 'knows little about Bible' - News, Books - The Independent


Honduran Congress Appoints New President; Old President Denies Legitimacy of the Appointment

The Honduran Congress voted Sunday to strip President Jose Manuel Zelaya of his powers and named the president of the Congress, Roberto Micheletti, as provisional president.

Zelaya was removed from his residence Sunday morning by military forces who transported him to Costa Rica.

He said Sunday that he planned to continue carrying out his duties and would travel to Managua, Nicaragua, to attend a summit of Central American heads-of-state Monday.

Zelaya told CNN en Español that he denies that a letter of resignation read aloud in an emergency congressional session is his.

"Only the people can take away or give me power," Zelaya said at a press conference in Costa Rica, where Honduran military forces had transported him following Sunday morning's coup.

link: Honduran Congress names provisional president - CNN.com


Bridget, the Winged Dragon Cousin of Wall-e, to Rove Mars

A Devon university is hosting a summit of the European Space Agency (Esa) and the United States space agency, Nasa.

The University of Plymouth is providing the venue for the agencies' Bilateral Science Summit. About 20 delegates will attend from Monday to Wednesday.

Topics would include robotic exploration, the university said.

Bridget, a prototype for the ExoMars rover

link: BBC NEWS | UK | England | Devon | Uni summit reaches for the stars

Crop Circles Not Made By Opiated Wallabies or Stoned Hippies (god bless 'em) Actually Reveal Something

A thousand years older than nearby Stonehenge, the site includes the remains of wooden temples and two massive, 6,000-year-old tombs that are among "Britain's first architecture," according to archaeologist Helen Wickstead, leader of the Damerham Archaeology Project. Discovered during a routine aerial survey by English Heritage, the U.K. government's historic-preservation agency, the "crop circles" are the results of buried archaeological structures interfering with plant growth.

link: "Crop Circles" Reveal an Ancient Burial Site a Thousand Years Older Than Stonehenge - Boing Boing

RoboGod will Read Your Web

What if the wisdom of Web could be yours, without having to read through it one page at a time? That's what the military wants.

DARPA has hired a company to develop a reading machine to reduce the gap between the ever increasing mountain of digitized text and the intelligence community's insatiable appetite for data input.

BBN Technologies was awarded the $29.7 million contract to develop a universal text engine capable of capturing knowledge from written matter and rendering it into a format that artificial intelligence systems (AI) and human analysts can work with.

The military will use the Machine Reading Program, as it's officially called, to automatically monitor the technological and political activities of nation states and transnational organizations-which could mean everything from al-Qaeda to the U.N.

link: Reading machine to snoop on Web | Military Tech - CNET News


Female Iranian Police "Out In Force"

5:47 pm: According to a contact in Tehran, women police are now out in force. Not that the women protesters were free from being attacked, but now there is a special female force solely designed for them.

link: niacINsight


Some UK Embassy Staff Released

5:17 pm: Some British embassy officials released (VOA)

Iranian state media is reporting that authorities have released some members of the British Embassy staff in Tehran, one day after eight Iranian staffers there were detained for alleged links to the nation’s post-election unrest.

A report quotes the nation’s intelligence minister, Qolam Hosein Mohseni-Ejei as saying Sunday it has proof that some British embassy employees collected news about the recent protests.

It is unclear how many staffers remain in custody.

link: niacINsight


The Pope and St. Paul's Bones; Or, Nobody Ever Said the Mouthpiece of God on Earth Needed to be Logical

The first-ever scientific tests on what are believed to be the remains of the Apostle Paul "seem to conclude" that they do indeed belong to the Roman Catholic saint, Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday.

Archaeologists recently unearthed and opened the white marble sarcophagus located under the Basilica of St. Paul's Outside the Walls in Rome, which for some 2,000 years has been believed by the faithful to be the tomb of St. Paul.

Benedict said scientists had conducted carbon dating tests on bone fragments found inside the sarcophagus and confirmed that they date from the first or second century.

"This seems to confirm the unanimous and uncontested tradition that they are the mortal remains of the Apostle Paul," Benedict said, announcing the findings at a service in the basilica to mark the end of the Vatican's Paoline year, in honor of the apostle.

link: Pope: Scientific analysis done on St. Paul's bones - washingtonpost.com


Iran: "Tens of Thousands" in the Streets

1:53 pm: Clashes in North Tehran

(Via AP) Riot police clashed with up to 3,000 protesters near a mosque in north Tehran on Sunday, using tear gas and truncheons to break up Iran’s first post-election demonstration in five days, witnesses said.

Witnesses told The Associated Press that some protesters fought back, chanting: “Where is my vote?” They said others described scenes of brutality — including the alleged police beating of an elderly woman — in the clashes around the Ghoba Mosque.

The reports could not immediately be independently verified because of tight restrictions imposed on journalists in Iran.

According to one Iranian human rights activist, the Ghoba Mosque was full and there were “tens of thousands” in the nearby streets. She reports the police are beating people to disperse the crowd.

link: niacINsight


New Protests, Violence in Tehran

In spite of all the threats, the overwhelming show of force and the nighttime raids on private homes, protesters still flowed into the streets by the thousands on Sunday to demonstrate in support of Mr. Moussavi.

Mr. Moussavi, who has had little room to act but has refused to fold under government pressure, had earlier received a permit to hold a ceremony at the Ghoba mosque to honor Mohammad Beheshti, one of the founders of the 1979 revolution who died in a bombing on June 28, 1981, that killed dozens of officials. Mr. Moussavi used the anniversary as a pretense to call a demonstration, and by midday the streets outside the elaborately tiled mosque were filled with protesters, their arms jabbing the air, their fingers making a V symbol, for victory.

The demonstrators wore black, to mourn the 17 protesters killed by government-aligned forces, and chanted “Allah Akbar,” or God is great.

“There was a sea of people and the crowed stretched a long way onto the main street on Shariati,” said one witness, who remained anonymous because he feared retribution.

What started as a peaceful demonstration turned into a scene of violence and chaos by late Sunday, witnesses said.

Some described scenes of brutality, telling The Associated Press that some protesters suffered broken bones and alleging that police beat an elderly woman, prompting a screaming match with young demonstrators who then fought back. The reports could not be independently verified because of tight restrictions imposed on journalists in Iran.

The leadership seems to recognize that ending the street demonstrations is far easier that turning the clock back to the days before the election, when there was still some degree of trust in a system that sought to marry religious authority with popularly elected institutions, political analysts said.

link: Iran Escalates Its Fight With Britain; New Clashes Erupt - NYTimes.com


EU Warns Iran

Ian Black writes:

Iran was warned of a "strong and collective" EU response to the arrest of local staff working at Britain's embassy in Tehran, which was also condemned by the foreign secretary in the latest spat over post-election unrest.

David Miliband denied allegations that Iranian employees of the embassy had played a "significant role" in clashes between security forces and demonstrators complaining about the "theft" of the presidential poll.

"We have protested in strong terms, directly to the Iranian authorities, about the arrests," Miliband said. "The idea that the British embassy is somehow behind the demonstrations and protests that have been taking place in Tehran … is wholly without foundation."

link: Iran warned by EU after British embassy workers arrested | World news | The Guardian


Review: Factory Girls

At last, a book on China’s growth that doesn’t paint migrant workers as pathetic victims but rather as aspirational individuals who now have far more choices than marrying the village idiot.

link: sp!ked review of books | China’s factory girls: nobody’s victims

The Bicycle of the Soul; or, A Bicycle Without a Fish

"Alexander's Philosophy," says Garrett Hongo
Photo by Alexander Hongo

Hugo Chavez on Honduras: "We will bring them down"

The army in Honduras ousted and exiled its leftist president, Manuel Zelaya, yesterday in Central America's first military coup since the cold war, after he upset the army by trying to seek another term in office.

The US president, Barack Obama, and the EU expressed deep concern after troops came at dawn for Zelaya, an ally of the socialist Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, and took him away from his residence.

Speaking on Venezuelan state television, Chávez, who has long championed the left in Latin America, said he would do everything necessary to abort the coup against his close ally. He said he would respond militarily if his envoy to the Central American country was attacked or kidnapped.

"I have put the armed forces of Venezuela on alert," he said on state television. Chávez said Honduran soldiers took away the Cuban ambassador and left the Venezuelan ambassador on the side of a road after beating him during the coup.

Chávez said that if a new government was sworn in it would be defeated. "We will bring them down, we will bring them down, I tell you," he said.

link: Hugo Chávez vows to 'bring them down' after seeing Honduran ally ousted in military coup | World news | The Guardian


The Copyright Argument

Erick Schonfeld writes:

Of all the misguided schemes put forth lately to save newspapers (micropayments! blame Google!), the one put forth by Judge Richard Posner has to be the most jaw-dropping. He suggests that linking to copyrighted material should be outlawed.

No, Posner does not work for the Associated Press (which also has some strange ideas on linking). He is (normally) considered to be one of the great legal minds of our time. Posner is a United States Court of Appeals judge in Chicago and legal scholar who was once considered a potential Supreme Court nominee. He is someone who should know better. Yet in a blog post last week on the future of newspapers, he concludes there may be only one way to save the industry:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent . . .

Let me repeat that. He wants to “bar linking” to newspaper articles or any copyrighted material without the “copyright holder’s consent.” I am sorry Judge Posner, but I don’t need to ask your permission to link to your blog post or to a newspaper article online. That is just the way the Web works. If newspapers don’t like it, they don’t need to be on the Web.

link: How To Save The Newspapers, Vol. XII: Outlaw Linking

Dan Graham Retrospective evitcepsorteR maharG naD

HERE’S a good art-world quiz question, one that could stump many an astute insider: What do Sol LeWitt, Sonic Youth, Dean Martin, Mel Brooks, Merle Haggard, Hudson River School painting and midcentury New Jersey tract housing have in common?

The answer, Dan Graham — a Zelig of so many creative circles over the past four decades it is dizzying to keep track — sat recently sipping an iced tea and eavesdropping on conversations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where a retrospective of his work opened Thursday, finally adding him to the ranks of conceptual art’s thorny 1960s pioneers to receive a full-blown American career survey.

link: Art - A Round Peg - Dan Graham, With a Whitney Retrospective, Defies a World of Square Boxes - NYTimes.com


Virtual Mob Scenes

Michael Arrington writes:

The Internet has proven to be a frighteningly efficient tool to create virtual mobs. But we note two trends that suggest a bleak future: the increase in non-anonymous mob participation and the evolution of online services towards ever more efficient and real time communication platforms that facilitate mob creation and growth like never before. Things are changing online way too fast for society and culture to adapt. Something will eventually break.

link: FriendFeed, Syphilis And The Perfection Of Online Mobs


Beating Gunpowder into Beauty

Cai Guo-Qiang, the New York-based contemporary artist who grew up in China and has earned global acclaim for his gunpowder art, won’t be watching for fireworks this Fourth of July. The holiday displays “aren’t really his thing,” his studio assistant says.

Curators like Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, aren’t surprised: “Fireworks are fabulous and patriotic, but to him it’s an art form.”

Art lovers have until Sept. 20 to catch the final leg of Mr. Cai’s retrospective, “Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe,” at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, a show that drew over 341,000 people during its initial run at the Guggenheim in New York, the second-highest attendance in the museum’s history, Ms. Munroe says. (Only a 2001 Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit drew more.)

link: Chinese Artist Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao - WSJ.com


Time to Notice that Time is Not Time

Try this exercise: Put this book down and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you're looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here's the kicker: you never see your eyes move. What is happening to the time gaps during which your eyes are moving? Why do you feel as though there is no break in time while you're changing your eye position? (Remember that it's easy to detect someone else's eyes moving, so the answer cannot be that eye movements are too fast to see.)

All these illusions and distortions are consequences of the way your brain builds a representation of time. When we examine the problem closely, we find that "time" is not the unitary phenomenon we may have supposed it to be. This can be illustrated with some simple experiments: for example, when a stream of images is shown over and over in succession, an oddball image thrown into the series appears to last for a longer period, although presented for the same physical duration. In the neuroscientific literature, this effect was originally termed a subjective "expansion of time," but that description begs an important question of time representation: when durations dilate or contract, does time in general slow down or speed up during that moment? If a friend, say, spoke to you during the oddball presentation, would her voice seem lower in pitch, like a slowed- down record?

link: Edge: BRAIN TIME By David M. Eagleman

Revolutionary Guards the Real Engine of the Regime in Iran?

Gary Slick writes:

Iran’s supreme leader may have the most exalted title, but Gary Sick says the Islamic republic’s real engine is the Revolutionary Guard. They run the economy, own major industries, and brutalize their foes—and Khamenei almost never contradicts them.

There are many different ways to look at the developments in Iran. One perspective that seems to have been ignored is what I regard as the cardinal role of the Revolutionary Guards.

Over the 20 years that Ayatollah Khamenei has been the rahbar, or leader, he has allied himself ever more closely with the Revolutionary Guards—to such an extent that it is no longer apparent to me who is leading and who is following. The Revolutionary Guards have been granted extraordinary influence over all functions of the Islamic republic—military, political, economic, and even Islamic. Technically, they take their orders from the leader, but has he ever dared to contradict them? On the contrary, he seems always to court them by granting them ever-greater influence and responsibilities.

link: The Thugs Who Lead Iran's Supreme Leader - Page 1 - The Daily Beast


Israel Notes Virtue of Not Having Bombed Someone

Israeli Press – “Good we didn’t bomb Iran”

[E]verything happening at Tehran’s Azadi Square – the amazing coming together of young people, Internet culture, social ferment, and woman power – would not have happened had we listened to the regular bunch of hysterical screamers around here and attempted to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites

What would have happened then? Exactly what happens around here during times of war: The Iranian public would have rallied around the leadership, a wave of patriotic fury would have swept through the whole of Iran, and Ahmadinejad would not have needed to resort to any fraud in order to defeat the reformists.

link: niacINsight


Iran: Rafsanjani Issues Statement

Rafsanjani breaks silence, calls for fair and thorough examination of election complaints:

In Sunday’s statement, Rafsanjani praised a decision by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last week to extend by five days a deadline for Iran’s top legislative body to receive and look into complaints by the three defeated candidates.

“This valuable move by the Supreme Leader in order to attract the people’s trust towards the election process was very effective,” Rafsanjani told a meeting of families of victims of a 1981 bombing in Tehran that killed many senior officials.

“I hope those who are involved in this issue thoroughly and fairly review and study the legal complaints,” he said.

link: niacINsight

I Left My Heart On Twitter

Paul Miller writes:

What's creepier than automatically informing Twitter every time your unborn child kicks his mother's womb? Giving all your Twitter followers a live feed of your heartbeat, including canned messages to announce your death in case you cease pumping Cheeto-infused blood through your goth-nerdy veins. This Japanese DIY project has open source schematics and is designed to bypass a PC and send the news of your heart hiccups directly the the internet.

link: Device judges your pulse and Tweets its findings to your parents and Ashton Kutcher


Politics v. Wonder: Dead Sea Eliminated

The Dead Sea will be eliminated next week from a contest to choose the seven natural wonders of the world, because of a Palestinian boycott over the participation of an Israeli settler council.

link: Politics bars Dead Sea from World Wonders contest | Lifestyle | Reuters


Oldest Known Image of St. Paul Found

Vatican archaeologists using laser technology have discovered what they believe is the oldest image in existence of St Paul the Apostle, dating from the late 4th century, on the walls of catacomb beneath Rome.

Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano, revealing the find on Sunday, published a picture of a frescoed image of the face of a man with a pointed black beard on a red background, inside a bright yellow halo. The high forehead is furrowed.

Experts of the Ponitifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology made the discovery on June 19 in the Catacomb of Santa Tecla in Rome and describe it as the "oldest icon in history dedicated to the cult of the Apostle," according to the Vatican newspaper.

link: Rome catacomb reveals oldest image of St Paul | Science | Reuters


Iran Regime Detains UK Embassy Staff

Iran has detained several local British embassy staff, sparking a new row with Britain on Sunday that underscored the hardline leadership's effort to blame post-election unrest on foreign powers, not popular anger.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband demanded the release of all the staffers still held and said his European Union colleagues had agreed to a "strong, collective response" to any such "harassment and intimidation" against EU missions.

link: Iran sparks new row with Britain over election | International | Reuters


Iran's Guardian Council to Finalize Vote Verdict

More than two weeks after Iran's disputed presidential election, the Guardian Council - its highest electoral authority - is due to give its definitive verdict on the poll.

Meanwhile, opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi has again refused to support the Council's plan to hold a partial recount of the votes.

Mr Mousavi wants a re-run of the vote, but said on Saturday that he would accept a review by an independent body.

link: BBC NEWS | Middle East | Iran Guardian Council's poll verdict due


Peaceful Protest in Tehran

TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- About 5,000 protesters marched slowly and silently through Tehran on Sunday near a mosque where the government was allowing a demonstration for the first time in days.

Authorities were riding on motorcycles alongside the marchers, who are telling each other to walk slowly and drag their feet, a CNN producer reported. Police were telling the demonstrators to move faster, the producer added, who CNN is not naming for security reasons.

Some of the protesters were telling the police that they have the legal right to protest in peace, the CNN journalist said.

link: Thousands demonstrate silently in Tehran - CNN.com

Honduran President Arrested

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (CNN) -- The military arrested Honduras President Jose Manuel Zelaya on Sunday morning, the same day he vowed to follow through with a referendum that the country's Supreme Court had ruled illegal, local media reported.

The president was arrested at his residence and transported aboard a military plane to an unknown destination, the newspaper La Prensa reported.

Military soldiers were on the street around the capital, but there was no reported unrest, according to Radio America.

link: Honduras president arrested, local media report - CNN.com


Photo Essay: 20 Years

Caudia Smigrod writes:

On the morning of April 20, 1982, my husband and I purchased a house at 15 West Masonic View Ave., in the Rosemont neighborhood of Alexandria. That afternoon, I gave birth to my son Sam. Six weeks later, I found myself living on a street of front porches and abundant greenery, with my world becoming a series of still images played out on the sidewalk beyond my front door. Because photographers take pictures, I did exactly that. Fireworks on the Fourth of July, after-school play dates, backyard sprinklers on a summer afternoon. Over the years, the children matured into teenagers, of course, and they had little interest in having their pictures taken. The street population also was no longer a constant. The Wilsons, the Tighes and the Walkers, along with my family, moved from West Masonic View Avenue. Over the years, many of those participants scattered across the country. My younger son, Jake Dingman, returned home after a year in California. His brother, Sam, joined him for a reunion weekend in Alexandria in June 2007. Still the recorder of moments, I took their pictures again.

In June 2008, I realized 20 years had passed since I had begun photographing the young people of Rosemont. I set out to contact them all and photograph them as they returned to Alexandria that summer. Rather than simply create a group of pictures documenting the details of change, I wanted to give the participants the opportunity to reflect in writing on their thoughts, hopes, dreams, desires of 20 years ago and also to consider them now. I wanted to acknowledge their individual voices while also celebrating the coincidence of growing up together in the same neighborhood.

link: Washington Post Magazine: Alexandria Then & Now (washingtonpost.com)

See more photos at the link

"The Darker Edges of Political Ambition" and the Nixon Tapes

Francis X. Clines writes:

“I want control of these,” Mr. Nixon directs an underling in discussing the tapes the year before their disclosure forced him from office. “I want nothing ever transcribed out of this.” Fortunately for a nation that must always be vigilant to the darker edges of political ambition, that didn’t happen.

link: Editorial Notebook - 2,371 Hours and Counting - NYTimes.com


Leech Barometer

Barometer World is a store in Okephampton, England that specializes in the sale and repair of instruments that determine atmospheric pressure. After two years of research, its proprietor built a reproduction of one of the most whimsical weather-forecasting devices of all time, the "Tempest Prognosticator," a.k.a. the "Leech Barometer," a.k.a. the "Atmospheric Electromagnetic Telegraph.

link: Barometer store in England features reproduction of a "Tempest Prognosticator," a.k.a "Leech Barometer" - Boing Boing


Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Non-Musical; Extinction is a Serious Consequence

The flute was found in an area also inhabited by Neanderthals, who — according to the archaeological record — did not appear to be very musical. About 10,000 years later, they fell extinct.

link: Pondering Prehistoric Melodies - NYTimes.com