Recent Posts
Experts suspect that the hormone progesterone plays some part and studies are underway to test whether giving women more of this hormone during pregnancy cuts the risk of a preterm birth.
The latest work by researchers at University College London and King's College London, suggests monitoring progesterone levels in saliva could provide a cheap and convenient early marker for the condition.
link: BBC NEWS | Health | Saliva test for early birth risk
Ben Parr writes:
Google Wave will either succeed spectacularly or completely bomb. There is no middle ground for a tool that is supposed to be as omniscient as email. If all of your friends aren’t using it, then Wave isn’t as useful as email, which kills its purpose. But the opposite is also true: if your friends switch over to wave communication and email dies off, you have no choice but to get an account as well.
Is the world ready for Google Wave? The final answer to that question could change the very foundation of the web.
One more thing: if you want to be in on the action, you better sign up for an account soon.
link: Google Wave: Is the World Ready?
Howard Seftel and Megan Finnerty write:
Looking past the current economic downturn, optimistic restaurateurs believe downtown Phoenix is poised to compete in the next few years with Scottsdale as a dining destination.
The momentum has been jump-started by a group of independent chefs and entrepreneurs who believe in the area's potential. They, in turn, have inspired a fresh wave of high-profile names with big plans to rush in and stake a downtown claim.
New arrivals say downtown Phoenix has reached a tipping point, energized in part by light rail and the Arizona State University campus.
But some warn that the Valley has seen this sort of hopeful restaurant hype fail to live up to its promise before, pointing to troubles on Mill Avenue in Tempe and developments such as downtown Phoenix's Arizona Center and the Mercado that never flourished. Others think downtown's residential core is still not strong enough to support a restaurant community.
link: A growing appetite for downtown Phoenix dining
Accidental Mysteries writes:
THE NEXT TIME YOUR WIFE ASKS YOU TO PICK UP SOME HAND SOAP, order these creepy beauties from a site I found on Etsy.com. The fact that they are “baby-sized” would definitely turn off a lot of people, but not in our house. We might not set them out when we are expecting a visit from our minister—but we don’t have much worry about that. These “hand soaps”are are completely “hand-made,” so each set is slightly different with different hand-shapes & skin tones. The soaps range from about 1/2” to 2 1/4” tall. According to the site, you get at least 10 hands (at least/about 100 grams of soap). The soap is natural vegetable glycerin & has a very light scent. Order here, on Etsy, where artists and craftsmen sell their work.
link: accidental mysteries: Hand Soaps
Solar eclipse is seen in Yinchuan, capital of northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, at 8:33 a.m. on Wednesday, July 22, 2009. Photograph: Wang Peng/AP
link: Asia swathed in darkness with the longest total eclipse of the century | World news | guardian.co.uk
Jason Sheehan writes:
What are the odds that your next restaurant meal will be prepared by someone on drugs? Very high. An ex-chef and former addict on why cooks and coke go together like salt and pepper.
link: Chefs on Drugs - Page 1 - The Daily Beast
Riot police clashed with hundreds of pro-reform protesters in Tehran and arrested dozens of them yesterday, a witness said, in the latest unrest over last month's disputed election.
Demonstrators were chanting slogans against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the government, including: "Ahmadinejad – resign, resign" and "Death to dictators".
The witness said police beat protesters who had gathered in Haft-e Tir square in central Tehran, in defiance of a ban on such demonstrations put in place after the 12 June election, which the opposition says was rigged in favour of Mr Ahmadinejad.
"Riot police are taking dozens of protesters into their cars and they are taking them away," the witness said. "There are hundreds of riot police and plain clothes [security forces], beating people who gathered to support [opposition leader Mirhossein] Mousavi."
The clash erupted four days after similar confrontations between police and protesters for the first time in weeks on Friday after the former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani declared the Islamic Republic in crisis and said there were doubts about the election result. The authorities reject opposition charges of vote-rigging.
link: Police 'beat' pro-Mousavi protesters - Middle East, World - The Independent
With some fellow Democrats balking over his insistence that both the House and the Senate pass health legislation before the August recess, Mr. Obama has a tough decision to make: Does he take a hard line, demanding that lawmakers stick to his timetable — and risk losing the support of Republicans and moderate Democrats? Or does he signal flexibility, allowing lawmakers to take their time — and give opponents the chance to marshal their case against the bill?
“He’s got to be careful that while he ratchets up the pressure, he doesn’t bet his whole presidency on whether this gets done before the August recess,” said Kenneth M. Duberstein, who orchestrated President Ronald Reagan’s first-term legislative strategy. “He has a broad, broad agenda that he’s in a rush to enact, and if he’s not careful he will be viewed as a steamroller who tries to get things fast and not necessarily right.”
link: A Defining Moment Nears for President - NYTimes.com
The number of knife deaths in areas targeted by an anti-knife crime scheme have risen, the Home Office has said.
The government's Tackling Knives Action Programme was launched last July by 10 police forces in England and Wales.
In its first nine months, 126 people died after being attacked with a knife or other sharp object - seven more than in the same period the previous year.
Overall knife-related violence fell by 10%, but the number of deaths among teenagers remains unchanged.
link: BBC NEWS | UK | Deaths up during anti-knife drive
A proposed plan to solve California’s budget crisis would reduce the state’s prison population by 27,000, it was reported Tuesday, as opposition to the new fiscal deal mounted.
The Los Angeles Times reported that the budget deal, announced by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and bipartisan lawmakers on Monday, would involve the early release of thousands of inmates.
The Times said the reduction would be achieved through a combination of measures including allowing prisoners to finish their sentences on home detention and creating incentives for completion of drug rehabilitation plans.
The prison inmate proposal would help save the state 1.2 billion dollars in the coming fiscal year, the report noted.
link: Raw Story » Calif. budget deal would free 27,000 prisoners
Robert F. Worth writes:
In a sign of persistent fissures within Iran’s conservative ranks, Iran’s supreme leader has told President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to reverse his decision to appoint a top deputy, according to comments reported by Iranian news agencies on Tuesday.
Also on Tuesday, scattered opposition rallies took place in Tehran, the capital, and other cities, with a heavy presence by the police and members of the Basij militia apparently discouraging many from taking to the streets to protest Iran’s disputed June 12 election.
A senior member of Parliament said the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had sent a letter to Mr. Ahmadinejad telling him to dismiss the deputy, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, whose appointment was announced Friday, according to news reports.
“Without any delay, the removal or acceptance of Mashaei’s resignation must be announced by the president,” the deputy speaker of Parliament, Mohammad-Hassan Aboutorabi-Fard, told the ISNA news agency.
The appointment had provoked a storm of criticism from conservatives, who were angered last year when Mr. Mashaei reportedly said that the Iranian people were friends with all other peoples, including Israelis.
link: Ayatollah Tells Ahmadinejad to Drop Choice for Top Iranian Deputy - NYTimes.
Irish poet Seamus Heaney has spoken about how he cried, like a child, for his father after he suffered a stroke three years ago.
The Nobel prizewinner and his wife, Marie, had been in Donegal celebrating the 75th birthday of Anne Friel, the wife of playwright Brian Friel.
Heaney became ill during the night - he felt ill and discovered that his leg was twisted.
He had to be carried downstairs by friends to a waiting ambulance.
"I cried and I wanted my daddy, funnily enough," he admitted.
But even having a stroke had a certain beauty, he told The Observer newspaper.
The trip on the bumpy back road in the ambulance to Letterkenny Hospital with his wife beside him will stay with him always.
"Marie was in the back with me. I just wrote about it three weeks ago. To me, that was one of the actual beauties of the stroke, that renewal of love in the ambulance. One of the strongest, sweetest memories I have.
"We went through Glendorn on a very beautiful, long, bumpy ride."
Heaney, who celebrated his 70th birthday in April, looked back on the "stroke episode" of August 2006 and said that it had prompted him to take a year off. It was, he said, his "rest cure".
As he lay in hospital, who should walk in to visit him but former US President Bill Clinton.
"He strode into the ward like a kind of god. My fellow sufferers, four or five men much more stricken than I was, were amazed.
"But he shook their hands and introduced himself. It was marvellous really. He went round all the wards and gave the whole hospital a terrific boost."
link: BBC NEWS | UK | Northern Ireland | Poet 'cried for father' after stroke
CollectSPACE reports
Forty years to the day after it was found and collected by Neil Armstrong, a moon rock is helping NASA mark the anniversary of the first lunar landing from on-board a perch that is closer than any Apollo-returned lunar sample has come to its original home in decades.
As was learned exclusively by collectSPACE, the moon rock was secretly launched aboard a March 2009 space shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS), where on Monday night it will be revealed during a NASA 40th anniversary celebration of the Apollo program at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.
The 21 gram (0.7 oz) moon rock is only the second* out of the 842 pounds (382 kg) of lunar samples collected by the Apollo astronauts between 1969 and 1972 to be launched back into space. Its journey is planned as a round trip -- it will return to Earth as it came with a future shuttle mission -- in part to symbolize NASA's current effort to return astronauts to the Moon.
link: collectSPACE - news - "EXCLUSIVE: Moon Rock on a Mission"
Oren Shapira and Nira Liberman write:
Creativity is commonly thought of as a personality trait that resides within the individual. We count on creative people to produce the songs, movies, and books we love; to invent the new gadgets that can change our lives; and to discover the new scientific theories and philosophies that can change the way we view the world. Over the past several years, however, social psychologists have discovered that creativity is not only a characteristic of the individual, but may also change depending on the situation and context. The question, of course, is what those situations are: what makes us more creative at times and less creative at others?
One answer is psychological distance. According to the construal level theory (CLT) of psychological distance, anything that we do not experience as occurring now, here, and to ourselves falls into the “psychologically distant” category. It’s also possible to induce a state of “psychological distance” simply by changing the way we think about a particular problem, such as attempting to take another person's perspective, or by thinking of the question as if it were unreal and unlikely. In this new paper, by Lile Jia and colleagues at Indiana University at Bloomington, scientists have demonstrated that increasing psychological distance so that a problem feels farther away can actually increase creativity.
link: An Easy Way to Increase Creativity: Scientific American
Abraham Lustgarten writes:
Building a railway across the unstable soil of the Tibetan Plateau was an improbable endeavor from the start, but an army of Chinese government engineers did it anyway.
Now, with the frozen soil disturbed by the process of laying down the rail and a warming climate on the plateau, some scientists question whether the $4-billion rail line will survive as is or require major reconstruction.
Three years after the railway opened in 2006, international research shows that the Tibetan territories are among the fastest warming, and fastest melting, on the planet. The research into the fate of glaciers and the permafrost soils—done by the United Nations, China's scientific agencies, and several independent scientists—is not focused on the railway. But the work raises concerns that the warming ground could lead to a buckling of the railway.
link: Will Global Warming Melt the Permafrost Supporting the China-Tibet Railway?: Scientific American
THE Great Barrier Reef and Uluru have made the final round in a global contest to select the new Seven Wonders of Nature.
The Australian natural landmarks were selected from a shortlist of 77 top spots around the world to be among the 28 finalists in the New7Wonders of Nature competition.
Only 21 finalists were expected to be announced, but the number was higher because of high levels of participation.
There were originally 441 nominees from 222 countries when the campaign began, with the entrants whittled down by public voting.
The contest now proceeds to the final round of voting, with an announcement due in mid-2011.
link: Uluru, Great Barrier Reef in line for Seven Wonders | News.com.au Top stories | News.com.au
Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands are the least happy of any Moroccan immigrants in Europe and their children are even more dissatisfied, the NRC reports on Monday.
The paper says a survey by an organisation called the Council of the Moroccan Community Abroad concludes that the relationship between society as a whole and second generation Moroccan immigrants is 'significantly more tense' than in other countries.
The researchers looked at the position of Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.
In Europe as a whole, 50% of immigrants and their children said they felt rejected by society but in the Netherlands almost two-third said they were sidelined.
The survey also showed that while second generation immigrants are less likely to attend mosques than their parents, in the Netherlands children are more likely than their parents to actively practice religion (...)
link: Moroccans in Holland are most unhappy | EuropeNews
The Daily Galaxy writes:
"I can hear DNA on the internet." No, it's not Philip K. Dick's facebook status: it's what you could say too, listening to the broadcast of an entire human genome online. A project that's already started, and is going on right now.
The fantastic folk over at DNA-Rainbow have rendered the entire DNA code in audio form and are livestreaming it from their site 24/7. It's not a sound file or a download, it's a live broadcast (thinking about it, probably the "livest" thing ever to be broadcast) of a computer reading out the code, and at three characters per second it will take twenty three and a half years to complete. It will run all the time until 2032. That's how much information is carried in almost every cell in your body.
Katrin and Jens Bierkandt are the embodiment of cutting-edge - a biotechnologist and an internet developer, their powers combined to communicate the advances of science to the masses of the public. Their previous project, the DNA-Rainbow, rendered the entire thing as a four-color picture the public could see patterns in. (Well, five colors when you count the grey for bits we don't have info for yet - exactly the sort of information anyone can gain from these projects).
We're just waiting for someone to stick a drum and bass line on the broadcast. You've got the heart of a total techno hit right there, and the fact that it's driven by pure science and internet-juice just makes it that much more awesome.
link: DNA Radio -Now Broadcasting Live
Ptak writes:
Thinking big thoughts in dreams is generally not a common thing, as anyone who has read their own semi-conscious half-awake memory notes of a dream-based inspiration could attest. But it does happen: Paul McCartney1 dreamed the song Yesterday, Gandhi dreamed the source of non-violent resistance, Elias Howe dreamed of the construction of the first sewing machine, and Mary Shelley the creation of her novel Frankenstein... For good or for ill, William Blake was evidently deeply influenced by his own dreams; on the other hand, Rene Magritte was deeply influenced by dreams but didn’t use any of his own for his paintings. Otto Loewi turned an old problem into not one in a dream, finding a solution to the prickish problem of whether nerve impulses were chemical or electrical (and resulting in the Nobel for medicine in 1935); the fabulous discovery of the benzene ring came to August Kekule in a dream as well.
Artists have been representing people in dreams and dreamscapes for many centuries: Durer depicted a dream in a 1525 watercolor, for example, and thousands of artists have depicted famous biblical dreams (Joseph of Pharo) for long expanses of time.
What struck me, though, in this illustration found on the other side of the page of the Illustrirte Zeitung2 (for August 1932) that I used for yesterday’s post about damming Gibraltar and Shakespeare’s memories, was the depiction of someone dreaming mathematical thoughts…or at the very least, dreaming numbers. People have undoubtedly dreamed much in mathematics, but I can not recall seeing illustrations of these dreams.
link: Ptak Science Books: Dreams of Mathematics
A woman pulled out a gun when a dog started to smell her dog while they were at a Surprise dog park on Friday, officials said.
At the park near 14600 block of West Paradise Lane the woman pulled out the gun and pointed it at the male owner as well as the dog. The woman told him to get his dog away, said Sgt. Mark Ortega, police spokesman.
The man pulled his dog away and left. No one was injured, Ortega said. The man was not able to provide a description of the woman to police.
link: Surprise police: Woman pulls gun over dog park incident
Mark Zuckerberg says people use Facebook "to stay updated on what's happening around them and share with the people in their lives."
Turns out it's true. According to AddToAny, a company that provides Web publishers tools to let their users share content, more people use Facebook to share links than any other service -- including, to our surprise, email.
But watch out, Facebook. As a means of sharing content, Twitter is already about half as popular with only about one-tenth as many users.
link: CHART OF THE DAY: How People Share Content On The Web
LocalHarvest is a comprehensive one-stop resource for finding locally grown food in the continental U.S. The site provides a customizable search feature on its homepage, and a simple zip code input provided me with a description and link to my closest Community Supported Agriculture option. Other search options include farmer’s markets, restaurants that serve food made with organic ingredients and grocery co-ops.
link: Cool Tools: LocalHarvest
Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. cast his recent arrest in his home in Cambridge, Mass., as part of a "racial narrative" playing out in a biased criminal justice system. The professor who has spent much of his life studying race in America said he has come to feel like a case study.
"There are one million black men in jail in this country and last Thursday I was one of them," he said in an exclusive interview with The Washington Post Tuesday morning. "This is outrageous and that this is how poor black men across the country are treated everyday in the criminal justice system. It's one thing to write about it, but altogether another to experience it."
He was still outraged but he said he has had time to take a step back and will now apply the scholarship that has been his life's work to the issue of race in the criminal justice system.
link: Gates Says He Is Outraged by Arrest at Cambridge Home - washingtonpost.com
Black Eyed Peas Have Officially Written The Worst Song Ever
link: Black Eyed Peas Have Officially Written The Worst Song Ever - Funny Videos | Cracked.com
These works come from the seemingly-rare book Prints of Heilongjiang: An Appreciation of Modern Chinese Prints (Wanchai, Hong Kong: Sunglow Design/Pub. & Culture Company, btw. 1988 and 1995). Read about Heilongjiang on wikipedia.
link: Google Reader (10)
A religious court in Malaysia has sentenced a tearful Singaporean Muslim model to six strokes of the cane after she drank beer in a nightclub, reports said Tuesday.
Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno, 32, pleaded guilty to consuming alcohol at a hotel nightclub in the eastern state of Pahang last year, the New Straits Times newspaper reported.
“We feel the sentence is fair after going through the prosecution’s argument and since the rotan (cane) is provided for in the law,” Pahang Sharia High Court judge Abdul Rahman Yunus said, according to the paper.
“The rotan is aimed at making the accused repent and serves as a lesson to Muslims,” he added, also fining Kartika 5,000 ringgit (1,412 dollars).
The model, who cried when the judgement was delivered, said she would appeal.
State religious officials could not be reached for comment on the case.
link: Raw Story » Beer-drinking model faces caning in Malaysia
A prosecutor is dropping a charge against prominent Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. after Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the city's police department recommended that the matter not be pursued.
In a joint statement, Cambridge and the police department said they made the recommendation to the Middlesex County district attorney and the district attorney's office "has agreed to enter a nolle prosequi in this matter," meaning that it will not be pursued.
Gates was arrested last week on a charge of disorderly conduct after a confrontation with an officer at his home, according to a Cambridge police report.
link: Charge against Harvard professor dropped - CNN.com
1898
Sara Carter, vocals (c&w)
b. Flat Woods, VA, USA.
d. Jan. 8, 1979.
née: Sara Doughtery
Member: 'The Carter Family'.
Biography ~by Craig Harris As a member of the Carter Family, Sara Dougherty Carter laid the foundation for modern country music. During the fourteen years (1927 to 1941) that she recorded with then-husband Alvin Pleasant "A.P. " Delaney Carter and her cousin and A.P.'s sister-in-law Maybelle, Carter helped to turn the sounds of rural America into an international phenomenon.
link: ON THIS DAY IN JAZZ AGE MUSIC!: JULY 21ST...
A weather advisory was issued Tuesday morning for central Maricopa County, where scattered thunderstorms produced heavy rain, mainly along Interstate 10 and the Superstition freeway.
A flood advisory was also posted for several hours for east central Maricopa County, specifically the communities of Tempe and Guadalupe.
Significant flooding was reported at US 60 and Greenfield, with pooling on the freeway.
Tempe received more than one inch of rain, forecasters said.
link: Inch Of Rain Falls In Tempe Area - Phoenix Weather News Story - KPHO Phoenix
The planet Jupiter shows evidence of having being hit by a large object, either a comet or asteroid.
A dark mark has appeared in its atmosphere towards the southern pole.
It was first seen by Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley on 19 July, and was then quickly followed up by others including the US space agency.
link: BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Jupiter 'struck by large object'
