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The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee voted 13 to 6 Tuesday to recommend Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., was among those voting against President Barack Obama’s pick.
link: Kyl votes 'no' as committee OKs Sotomayor - Phoenix Business Journal:
Armoured crickets have a bizarre and striking way to avoid being eaten.
To become unpalatable, the insects squirt toxic blood out of gaps in their body and make themselves sick by throwing up food they've just eaten.
A few insect species including beetles and katydids actively bleed when attacked, but the benefits of taking such extreme measures were not clear.
Now scientists have shown the tactic really does work to deter predators such as lizards.
link: BBC - Earth News - Insect defence all blood and guts
The only daughter of poet Dylan Thomas died of cancer at the age of 66. Aeronwy Thomas-Ellis was heavily involved in the Dylan Thomas Trust and often ran poetry reading events and lecture tours about her father's poetry.
link: BBC NEWS | UK | Wales | 2003: Aeronwy on Dylan Thomas
$75,000 in prizes awarded to five young poets CHICAGO — The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine are proud to announce the five recipients of the 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowships: Malachi Black, Eric Ekstrand, Chloë Honum, Jeffrey Schultz, and Joseph Spece. Among the largest awards offered to aspiring poets in the United States, each Lilly Fellowship carries a $15,000 scholarship prize for fellows to use as they wish in continued study and writing of poetry.
The editors of Poetry magazine selected the winning manuscripts from over 550 applications. In announcing the winners, Poetry editor Christian Wiman remarked, “2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships, and the quality of work the program attracts is more impressive every year. Being able to recognize and support five such talented young poets is a real pleasure, surpassed only by reading their work.”
link: 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship Winners Announced : The Poetry Foundation
U.S. Coast Guard officials in boats, airplanes and a helicopter scoured the warm, shallow waters off the Turks and Caicos Islands on Tuesday for dozens of missing Haitians whose overloaded sailboat capsized. Rescuers pulled 113 survivors from reefs, and police recovered 11 bodies.
An estimated 200 people were aboard the boat when it capsized, said Petty Officer 1st Class Jennifer Johnson, a Coast Guard spokeswoman in Miami. The Coast Guard was searching with a helicopter, a jet and the cutter Valiant, which was sending out smaller vessels. A C-130 aircraft was on its way.
"We're really hoping we can find as many people as possible," Johnson said.
One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.
There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.
When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.
Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.
When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
link: Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
At a recent town-hall meeting in suburban Simpsonville, a man stood up and told Rep. Robert Inglis (R-S.C.) to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.”
“I had to politely explain that, ‘Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by the government,’ ” Inglis recalled. “But he wasn’t having any of it.”
link: Why Americans hate single-payer insurance - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com
