Tuesday, February 26
Bjorn Lomborg: Our priorities for saving the world
Where is your money best spent? Interesting stuff.
BjornLomborg.com
The Skeptical Enviromentalist
Author - The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It
One of the world's 100 most influential people - Time Magazine, 2004
'Young Global Leader' - World Economic Forum 2005
One of the "50 people who could save the planet" - UK Guardian in 2008
Former director - Denmark's Environmental Assessment Institute
Director - Copenhagen Consensus Center
Adjunct Professor - Copenhagen Business School
Sunday, February 24
Skin Aging Reversed in Lab Test
Skin Aging Reversed in Lab Test
Here's how the experiment worked.
First, Chang's team did some genetic detective work. They analyzed human tissue samples, looking for signs of gene activity related to aging.
A protein called NF-kB was "strongly associated with aging," write the researchers. That protein appeared to control several age-related genes.
Then, Chang and colleagues turned their attention to elderly mice. For two weeks, the researchers slathered a chemical that blocks NF-kB activity in the mice's skin.
Those mice developed younger-looking skin that was about as thick as the skin of a newborn mouse.
"We found a pretty striking reversal to that of the young skin," says Chang.
He adds that "the findings suggest that aging is not just a result of wear and tear, but is also the consequence of a continually active genetic program that might be blocked for improving human health."
But the study was short, and it's not clear if blocking NF-kB is safe for mice, let alone people.
The findings will appear in the Dec. 15 edition of Genes & Development.
Here's how the experiment worked.
First, Chang's team did some genetic detective work. They analyzed human tissue samples, looking for signs of gene activity related to aging.
A protein called NF-kB was "strongly associated with aging," write the researchers. That protein appeared to control several age-related genes.
Then, Chang and colleagues turned their attention to elderly mice. For two weeks, the researchers slathered a chemical that blocks NF-kB activity in the mice's skin.
Those mice developed younger-looking skin that was about as thick as the skin of a newborn mouse.
"We found a pretty striking reversal to that of the young skin," says Chang.
He adds that "the findings suggest that aging is not just a result of wear and tear, but is also the consequence of a continually active genetic program that might be blocked for improving human health."
But the study was short, and it's not clear if blocking NF-kB is safe for mice, let alone people.
The findings will appear in the Dec. 15 edition of Genes & Development.
Labels:
science
Friday, February 22
Look on the bright side
Rain, rain , rain...
In the poetry of the Hawaiians rain almost always is the rain of a particular place with a specific character and an allusion to an erotic element of some story draped with names.
The garden waits for the rain, responds to it at once, opens to it, holds it, takes it up and shines with it. The sound and touch and smell of the rain, the manner of its arrival, its temper and passage are like a sensuous visitation to the garden
WS Merwin 3/97 House and Garden (Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry in 1970)
In the poetry of the Hawaiians rain almost always is the rain of a particular place with a specific character and an allusion to an erotic element of some story draped with names.
The garden waits for the rain, responds to it at once, opens to it, holds it, takes it up and shines with it. The sound and touch and smell of the rain, the manner of its arrival, its temper and passage are like a sensuous visitation to the garden
WS Merwin 3/97 House and Garden (Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry in 1970)
Sunday, February 17
What does this mean?
The one candidate to re-engage the American People in the political process.
What does it mean? Representative government? I thought we already had that? You're gonna be able to tell Barack what to do? How? With some sort of Frank Luntz poll that gauges how people FEEL every step of the way? I don't think so.
So what does it mean?
What does it mean? Representative government? I thought we already had that? You're gonna be able to tell Barack what to do? How? With some sort of Frank Luntz poll that gauges how people FEEL every step of the way? I don't think so.
So what does it mean?
Labels:
politics light
Thursday, February 14
17 REASONS WHY FOOTBALL IS BETTER THAN HIGH SCHOOL
# 11. In football, the better players teach the less-skilled players.... why encouraging kids to practice and excel, and rewarding the results could be a model for education... seems appropriate today, Super Bowl Sunday.
One of my all time favorite articles: Author Herb Childress:
1. In football, teenagers are considered important contributors rather than passive recipients.
This is extraordinarily rare in teenage life, but central to both learning and to self-esteem. A football team is framed around the abilities and preferences of the players; if there's nobody who can throw the ball, but three big fast running backs and a strong offensive line, the team isn't going to have an offense that dwells much on passing. But the geometry class and every student in the geometry class has to keep pace with the same state-ordained curriculum as every other school, regardless of the skills and interests and abilities of the students. Football players know that they, and nobody else, will get the job done. Students know that they are considered empty minds, to be filled at a pace and with a material to be determined by others.
2. In football, teenagers are encouraged to excel.
By this, I don't mean performing up to someone's standards (which may already be limited), but to go beyond anything they've
ever been asked to do before, to constantly improve. There is no such thing as "good enough." We congratulate players on their improvements, but we don't give them much time to be complacent we ask them to do even more. In the classroom, we give them a test on polynomials, and the best result they can get is to score high enough to never have to deal with polynomials again.
3. In football, teenagers are honored.
Football players get extraordinary amounts of approval: award banquets, letter jackets, banners around the campus, school festivals, team photos, whole sections of the yearbook, newspaper coverage, trophies, regional and even state recognition for the best. The whole community comes out to see them. We put them on floats and have parades. That doesn't happen for the consumer math class.
4. In football, a player can let the team down.
Personal effort is linked to more than personal achievement: it means the difference between making the team better or making it weaker, the difference between making a player's teammates and coaches grateful for his presence or irritated with his apathy. A single player can make his peers better than they would have been without him. That's a huge incentive that we take away from the classroom with our constant emphasis on individual outcomes.
5. In football, repetition is honorable.
In the curriculum, we continually move forward, with not much opportunity to do things a second time and get better. Students have to do new things every time they get to class. In football, students do the same drills over and over all season long, and in fact get better at them. The skills get easier, and players start to use those skills to do things that are more complex.
6. In football, the unexpected happens all the time.
Every player will line up across from the same opposing player dozens of times during a game, but he knows that each time, his opponent could do something different and he'll have to react to it right in the moment. There's no opportunity to coast, to glaze out, to sit back and watch others work. Every player is required to be involved and absorbed in his work, and a talented player who holds back is typically regarded more poorly than his less talented but more engaged teammates. Contrast that with a normal class period, scripted out by a teacher with the idea that a successful class is the one that goes as planned with the fewest disruptions, and it's clear why apathy can be a problem in the classroom.
7. In football, practices generally run a lot longer than 50 minutes.
And when they end, there's a reason to stop: everyone works until they get it right, or until they're too tired to move anymore. There's no specific reason that a school class should run for 50 minutes instead of 35 or 85, and there's no reason why class should run the same length of time every day. The classroom schedule responds to pressures that come from outside the classroom state laws, other classes, even bus schedules. Football practice schedule is more internal they quit when they're done.
8. In football, the homework is of a different type than what's done at practice.
In the classroom, kids do worksheets in class and then very often take the same kind of worksheet home to finish it. Football requires a lot of homework that comes in the form of running and weight training, things not done at practice. Players work at home to find and build their strengths, and then bring those strengths to practice to work together on specific skills. The work done at home and the work done in common are two different jobs, and each is incomplete without the other.
9. In football, emotions and human contact are expected parts of the work.
When players do well, they get to be happy. When they do poorly, they get to be angry. Players are supposed to talk with each other while things are going on. But we have no tools to make use of happiness or frustration in most classrooms, and we generally prohibit communication except for the most rote exchanges. When we bring 30 kids together and ask them not to communicate, not to use each another as resources and exhort each other to go farther, then we make it clear to them that their gathering is simply a cost-effectiveness measure.
10. In football, players get to choose their own roles.
Not only do they choose their sport, they also choose their favored position within that sport. In the classroom, we don't allow people to follow their hearts very often. We give them a list of classes they have to take, and then we give them assignments within those classes that they have to do, and we don't offer many alternatives. We've set the whole school thing up as a set of requirements, but sports are a set of opportunities, a set of pleasures from which anyone gets to choose. Each one of those pleasures carries with it a set of requirements and responsibilities and difficult learning assignments, but kids still do them voluntarily, following their own self- defined mission of seeking their place in the world.
11. In football, the better players teach the less-skilled players.
Sometimes this is on purpose, but mostly this teaching is by example. Every player is constantly surrounded by other players who can do things well, and who love doing what they do. The really good players are allowed to show off in fact, it's demanded that they show off, that they work to their highest capacity. The people who aren't as good see that. Not only do they simply see skills they can learn, they often get swept up in it emotionally. They get to see another person not just the teacher but a friend who knows what they're doing and who loves to do it. In the classroom, the best students aren't often given a chance to publicly go beyond what everyone else is doing. They're smothered, held back, kept in pace.
12. In football, there is a lot of individual instruction and encouragement from adults.
A coach who has only the nine defensive linemen to deal with for an hour is going to get a pretty good sense of who these kids are, what drives them, what they can and can't do. And those players are going to see the coach in a less formal and more human frame; they get to ask questions when questions arise without feeling as though they're on stage in front of 30 other bored students.
Let's admit a basic truth: bigger class size makes personal contact more difficult. The school I was in had an average class size of about 27 students. That was considered pretty good, since the statewide average was about 31. But as I looked around the halls at the sports team photos in their glass trophy cases, the highest player-to-coach ratio I saw was 13 to 1; sometimes it was better than 10 to 1. There was one photo of the varsity football team with Coach Phillips and his three assistants surrounded by his 35 players; erase the three assistants from the picture, and you could have had a photo of any one of his history classes.
On the first day of freshman basketball practice, 23 kids tried out, and by the end of the first week, there were still 17. On the next Monday morning the coach said to me, "I sure hope some more of these kids quit. You can't do anything with 17 kids." True enough why do we make him do it five periods a day with 25, 30, or 34 kids?
13. In football, the adults who participate are genuinely interested.
The adults involved in football are more than willing to tell you that they love to play, that they love to coach. And they don't say it in words so much as they say it in their actions, in the way that they hold themselves and dive in to correct problems and give praise. But the teachers I watched (and the teachers I had from grade school to grad school) were, for the most part, embarrassed to death to say that they loved whatever it is that they did. It takes a lot of guts to stand up in front of 25 kids who didn't volunteer to be there and say, "You know, dissecting this pig is going to be the most fun I'm going to have all day."
We're candidates for the Geek-of-the-Month Club if we let people know that we really love poetry, or trigonometry, or theater, or invertebrate biology. And so we often hide behind a curriculum plan, a textbook and a set of handouts, and we say, "You and I have to do this together because it's what the book says we have to do." We armor ourselves in the appearance of not caring, so that we won't be hurt when they don't care either. But only in those few classrooms where the teachers said, both in word and in action, that they absolutely loved what they were doing those were the classrooms where the kids were engaged, where they learned.
I talked with a lot of kids and their teachers and their parents about what they loved to do, whether that was photography or surfing or hunting or reading, things that are real skills. And when I asked how they got involved in those activities, both the kids and the adults always answered that it was someone that got them interested, and not anything intrinsic in the event itself. They followed someone they respected into an activity that that person loved, and they discovered it from there.
14. In football, volunteers from the community are sought after.
No sports program in a high school could ever operate without assistant coaches, trainers, and other local people who aren't paid to help out. These guys give hours and hours to the school in exchange for a handshake, a vinyl jacket and a dinner at the end of the season. Volunteers become a natural part of human activity. There are almost never volunteers in the classroom, no adult who seems to believe that math or chemistry is so interesting that she or he would do it for free on a regular basis. There's no sense that anyone other than "the expert" can contribute to a discussion of ideas.
15. In football, ability isn't age-linked.
Freshmen who excel can play for the varsity. In the ninth-grade English classroom, an extraordinary student can't go beyond what the other ninth-grade students are doing, even if he or she could profit from what's being assigned to the seniors. When a student tries out for football, he gets a good looking over by several coaches, and if he's really good, they're going to move him up fast. In the classroom, if that same student is really good if he's inspired one person sees it and gives him an A. Big deal it's the same A that someone else gets for just doing the requirements without that inspiration. The pace of advancement in football isn't linked to equal advancement in another irrelevant area. If a kid is an adequate JV basketball player but an extraordinary football player, the football coach isn't going to say that he has to stay with the JV football team so that he's consistent with his grade level. No way the coach is going to tell that player, "come on up here, we need you." Have you ever heard an English teacher recruit a young student by saying, "we need you in this classroom?" Have you ever heard a science teacher say that "Your presence is crucial to how this course operates. We're not at our full potential without you?"
16. In football, there's a whole job to do at the end.
Players practice specific moves over and over in isolation, but they know that their job at the end is going to mean doing it all together in a way that's more than the sum of the parts. In school, we keep the parts separate. We don't show our students how a creative writer might use a knowledge of science; we don't show them how a historian might want to know about the building trades; we don't show them how a mechanic can take joy in knowing about American history. We don't let our students see the way that all of these different interests might come together into a worthwhile and fascinating life. We pretend they're all separate.
17. In football, a public performance is expected.
The incentive to perform in front of family and friends was a great motivating force for the athletes I knew. The potential for doing that performance poorly was another motivator nobody wants to be embarrassed in public. These kids were performing an important civic service for their small community, with over a thousand home fans at every game, and they took that responsibility seriously. But school work was almost always performed and evaluated in private. Both their successes and their failures were unseen, and their successes and failures were both irrelevant to the happiness of their neighbors.
No single one of these 17 patterns taken individually constitutes a magic potion for a good learning environment. But when we look at these patterns taken together, we can see that football has a lot to recommend it as a social configuration for learning. I'm not going to argue that we should give up on school and focus on football. What I am saying is that we have a model for learning difficult skills a model that appears in sports, in theater, in student clubs, in music, in hobbies and it's a model that works, that transmits both skills and joy from adult to teenager and from one teenager to another.
We need a varsity education.
Herb Childress lives in San Luis Obispo, where he does architectural and urban planning research with a small consulting firm. In 1996, he received his Ph.D. in Environment-Behavior Relations from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for research he conducted while living in Humboldt County; his book about that research is tentatively scheduled to be published in 1999. He misses Arcata a lot. This aticle first appeared in Phi Delta Kappan magazine in April 1998.
Herb Childress' book on Amazon: Landscapes of Betrayal, Landscapes of Joy: Curtisville in the Lives of Its Teenagers (Suny Series in Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology) (Paperback) ("Curtisville" is our town.)
(reposted by request)
One of my all time favorite articles: Author Herb Childress:
1. In football, teenagers are considered important contributors rather than passive recipients.
This is extraordinarily rare in teenage life, but central to both learning and to self-esteem. A football team is framed around the abilities and preferences of the players; if there's nobody who can throw the ball, but three big fast running backs and a strong offensive line, the team isn't going to have an offense that dwells much on passing. But the geometry class and every student in the geometry class has to keep pace with the same state-ordained curriculum as every other school, regardless of the skills and interests and abilities of the students. Football players know that they, and nobody else, will get the job done. Students know that they are considered empty minds, to be filled at a pace and with a material to be determined by others.
2. In football, teenagers are encouraged to excel.
By this, I don't mean performing up to someone's standards (which may already be limited), but to go beyond anything they've
ever been asked to do before, to constantly improve. There is no such thing as "good enough." We congratulate players on their improvements, but we don't give them much time to be complacent we ask them to do even more. In the classroom, we give them a test on polynomials, and the best result they can get is to score high enough to never have to deal with polynomials again.
3. In football, teenagers are honored.
Football players get extraordinary amounts of approval: award banquets, letter jackets, banners around the campus, school festivals, team photos, whole sections of the yearbook, newspaper coverage, trophies, regional and even state recognition for the best. The whole community comes out to see them. We put them on floats and have parades. That doesn't happen for the consumer math class.
4. In football, a player can let the team down.
Personal effort is linked to more than personal achievement: it means the difference between making the team better or making it weaker, the difference between making a player's teammates and coaches grateful for his presence or irritated with his apathy. A single player can make his peers better than they would have been without him. That's a huge incentive that we take away from the classroom with our constant emphasis on individual outcomes.
5. In football, repetition is honorable.
In the curriculum, we continually move forward, with not much opportunity to do things a second time and get better. Students have to do new things every time they get to class. In football, students do the same drills over and over all season long, and in fact get better at them. The skills get easier, and players start to use those skills to do things that are more complex.
6. In football, the unexpected happens all the time.
Every player will line up across from the same opposing player dozens of times during a game, but he knows that each time, his opponent could do something different and he'll have to react to it right in the moment. There's no opportunity to coast, to glaze out, to sit back and watch others work. Every player is required to be involved and absorbed in his work, and a talented player who holds back is typically regarded more poorly than his less talented but more engaged teammates. Contrast that with a normal class period, scripted out by a teacher with the idea that a successful class is the one that goes as planned with the fewest disruptions, and it's clear why apathy can be a problem in the classroom.
7. In football, practices generally run a lot longer than 50 minutes.
And when they end, there's a reason to stop: everyone works until they get it right, or until they're too tired to move anymore. There's no specific reason that a school class should run for 50 minutes instead of 35 or 85, and there's no reason why class should run the same length of time every day. The classroom schedule responds to pressures that come from outside the classroom state laws, other classes, even bus schedules. Football practice schedule is more internal they quit when they're done.
8. In football, the homework is of a different type than what's done at practice.
In the classroom, kids do worksheets in class and then very often take the same kind of worksheet home to finish it. Football requires a lot of homework that comes in the form of running and weight training, things not done at practice. Players work at home to find and build their strengths, and then bring those strengths to practice to work together on specific skills. The work done at home and the work done in common are two different jobs, and each is incomplete without the other.
9. In football, emotions and human contact are expected parts of the work.
When players do well, they get to be happy. When they do poorly, they get to be angry. Players are supposed to talk with each other while things are going on. But we have no tools to make use of happiness or frustration in most classrooms, and we generally prohibit communication except for the most rote exchanges. When we bring 30 kids together and ask them not to communicate, not to use each another as resources and exhort each other to go farther, then we make it clear to them that their gathering is simply a cost-effectiveness measure.
10. In football, players get to choose their own roles.
Not only do they choose their sport, they also choose their favored position within that sport. In the classroom, we don't allow people to follow their hearts very often. We give them a list of classes they have to take, and then we give them assignments within those classes that they have to do, and we don't offer many alternatives. We've set the whole school thing up as a set of requirements, but sports are a set of opportunities, a set of pleasures from which anyone gets to choose. Each one of those pleasures carries with it a set of requirements and responsibilities and difficult learning assignments, but kids still do them voluntarily, following their own self- defined mission of seeking their place in the world.
11. In football, the better players teach the less-skilled players.
Sometimes this is on purpose, but mostly this teaching is by example. Every player is constantly surrounded by other players who can do things well, and who love doing what they do. The really good players are allowed to show off in fact, it's demanded that they show off, that they work to their highest capacity. The people who aren't as good see that. Not only do they simply see skills they can learn, they often get swept up in it emotionally. They get to see another person not just the teacher but a friend who knows what they're doing and who loves to do it. In the classroom, the best students aren't often given a chance to publicly go beyond what everyone else is doing. They're smothered, held back, kept in pace.
12. In football, there is a lot of individual instruction and encouragement from adults.
A coach who has only the nine defensive linemen to deal with for an hour is going to get a pretty good sense of who these kids are, what drives them, what they can and can't do. And those players are going to see the coach in a less formal and more human frame; they get to ask questions when questions arise without feeling as though they're on stage in front of 30 other bored students.
Let's admit a basic truth: bigger class size makes personal contact more difficult. The school I was in had an average class size of about 27 students. That was considered pretty good, since the statewide average was about 31. But as I looked around the halls at the sports team photos in their glass trophy cases, the highest player-to-coach ratio I saw was 13 to 1; sometimes it was better than 10 to 1. There was one photo of the varsity football team with Coach Phillips and his three assistants surrounded by his 35 players; erase the three assistants from the picture, and you could have had a photo of any one of his history classes.
On the first day of freshman basketball practice, 23 kids tried out, and by the end of the first week, there were still 17. On the next Monday morning the coach said to me, "I sure hope some more of these kids quit. You can't do anything with 17 kids." True enough why do we make him do it five periods a day with 25, 30, or 34 kids?
13. In football, the adults who participate are genuinely interested.
The adults involved in football are more than willing to tell you that they love to play, that they love to coach. And they don't say it in words so much as they say it in their actions, in the way that they hold themselves and dive in to correct problems and give praise. But the teachers I watched (and the teachers I had from grade school to grad school) were, for the most part, embarrassed to death to say that they loved whatever it is that they did. It takes a lot of guts to stand up in front of 25 kids who didn't volunteer to be there and say, "You know, dissecting this pig is going to be the most fun I'm going to have all day."
We're candidates for the Geek-of-the-Month Club if we let people know that we really love poetry, or trigonometry, or theater, or invertebrate biology. And so we often hide behind a curriculum plan, a textbook and a set of handouts, and we say, "You and I have to do this together because it's what the book says we have to do." We armor ourselves in the appearance of not caring, so that we won't be hurt when they don't care either. But only in those few classrooms where the teachers said, both in word and in action, that they absolutely loved what they were doing those were the classrooms where the kids were engaged, where they learned.
I talked with a lot of kids and their teachers and their parents about what they loved to do, whether that was photography or surfing or hunting or reading, things that are real skills. And when I asked how they got involved in those activities, both the kids and the adults always answered that it was someone that got them interested, and not anything intrinsic in the event itself. They followed someone they respected into an activity that that person loved, and they discovered it from there.
14. In football, volunteers from the community are sought after.
No sports program in a high school could ever operate without assistant coaches, trainers, and other local people who aren't paid to help out. These guys give hours and hours to the school in exchange for a handshake, a vinyl jacket and a dinner at the end of the season. Volunteers become a natural part of human activity. There are almost never volunteers in the classroom, no adult who seems to believe that math or chemistry is so interesting that she or he would do it for free on a regular basis. There's no sense that anyone other than "the expert" can contribute to a discussion of ideas.
15. In football, ability isn't age-linked.
Freshmen who excel can play for the varsity. In the ninth-grade English classroom, an extraordinary student can't go beyond what the other ninth-grade students are doing, even if he or she could profit from what's being assigned to the seniors. When a student tries out for football, he gets a good looking over by several coaches, and if he's really good, they're going to move him up fast. In the classroom, if that same student is really good if he's inspired one person sees it and gives him an A. Big deal it's the same A that someone else gets for just doing the requirements without that inspiration. The pace of advancement in football isn't linked to equal advancement in another irrelevant area. If a kid is an adequate JV basketball player but an extraordinary football player, the football coach isn't going to say that he has to stay with the JV football team so that he's consistent with his grade level. No way the coach is going to tell that player, "come on up here, we need you." Have you ever heard an English teacher recruit a young student by saying, "we need you in this classroom?" Have you ever heard a science teacher say that "Your presence is crucial to how this course operates. We're not at our full potential without you?"
16. In football, there's a whole job to do at the end.
Players practice specific moves over and over in isolation, but they know that their job at the end is going to mean doing it all together in a way that's more than the sum of the parts. In school, we keep the parts separate. We don't show our students how a creative writer might use a knowledge of science; we don't show them how a historian might want to know about the building trades; we don't show them how a mechanic can take joy in knowing about American history. We don't let our students see the way that all of these different interests might come together into a worthwhile and fascinating life. We pretend they're all separate.
17. In football, a public performance is expected.
The incentive to perform in front of family and friends was a great motivating force for the athletes I knew. The potential for doing that performance poorly was another motivator nobody wants to be embarrassed in public. These kids were performing an important civic service for their small community, with over a thousand home fans at every game, and they took that responsibility seriously. But school work was almost always performed and evaluated in private. Both their successes and their failures were unseen, and their successes and failures were both irrelevant to the happiness of their neighbors.
No single one of these 17 patterns taken individually constitutes a magic potion for a good learning environment. But when we look at these patterns taken together, we can see that football has a lot to recommend it as a social configuration for learning. I'm not going to argue that we should give up on school and focus on football. What I am saying is that we have a model for learning difficult skills a model that appears in sports, in theater, in student clubs, in music, in hobbies and it's a model that works, that transmits both skills and joy from adult to teenager and from one teenager to another.
We need a varsity education.
Herb Childress lives in San Luis Obispo, where he does architectural and urban planning research with a small consulting firm. In 1996, he received his Ph.D. in Environment-Behavior Relations from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for research he conducted while living in Humboldt County; his book about that research is tentatively scheduled to be published in 1999. He misses Arcata a lot. This aticle first appeared in Phi Delta Kappan magazine in April 1998.
Herb Childress' book on Amazon: Landscapes of Betrayal, Landscapes of Joy: Curtisville in the Lives of Its Teenagers (Suny Series in Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology) (Paperback) ("Curtisville" is our town.)
(reposted by request)
Labels:
Reading material
Monday, February 11
Tagged
With a Blog Meme - thanks to Wollf, by way of KT...
The Rules for A Week, A Month, A Year, Half Your Life
Pick four places on the globe. The first you will stay at for a week, the second for a month, the third for a year and the last one you will live half your life. You can add photos or text if you want to illustrate why you would live there or you can just give one word responses. Link back to this post in your response. Tag three other bloggers and ask them to play. If you don't get tagged, but still want to play, then by all means do so. Let me know when your answers are up and I'll link back to you.
It's harder than you think! It's easy to pick four places you want to visit, or a place you'd like to live... So, I might take it a few at a time - problem being some of the dream places I'd like to live in forever are not the US, and I really treasure our Constitution and our Bill of Rights and our belief in people's rights to freedoms, and my dream place would have to have that... in my imagination I never have to worry about that, but in the real world, you do. The idyllic dream of living on an island somewhere... It's also hard to break away from the I'm here, my family is here, therefore I want to stay here train of thought.
Here's the first one:
I'll say a week, though it could be a place where you would live out your days... nah, let;s make this one a year
Here's #2
Ireland, I'd want to take my Dad and go for a month.
Norway - a family trip because my husband has family there, but not for a year, a week to 10 days, be about right...
Ya know, narrowing this to four is really hard - Maine, I'd like to go there... Venice, for a week, just to see the canals and how that all works...
The forever place? Hmmm, has to be near water, has to have property, enough for horses, a house big enough for family to come home with their families, it's more about the home and land than the place geographically.
Saturday, February 9
I'm just SO-O-O-O BUSY!
The spammers have a new "hook" to try to get you to open their email - reminders of appointments!
Why, just look at my schedule:
That Casino one kinda misses the point of pretending to be something they're not...
Why, just look at my schedule:
Winn & Hendrix Randall - Are you free on Monday
Shaver Scottie - Can we meet on Thursday
Wu Fern - Please don't forget Cornelius's reopening party, tommorow
Pettit Janice - Please don't forget Francisco's reopening party, tommorow
Ritter Nona - Tomorrowe we are invited to Gustavo's engagement party
Wood Abby - January meeting, tomorrow at 8.00 sharp.
Frieda & Heather - Remember, tomorrow we are invited to Estelle's engagement party
Clyde Gibson - The boss just called a meeting, tomorrow at 10.00.
Super Casino Jackpot - We are invited to Milo's engagement party, tomorrow - Super Casino Jackpot 1000.- start bonus to play over 100 different games Member-ID: 51'605 …
Alvin Leonard - Meeting, tomorrow at 10.00 sharp.
Hartman Rosario - Please don't forget Manuel's engagement party, tommorow
Duvall & Murphy Staples - Remember, tomorrow is Allie's birthday party
That Casino one kinda misses the point of pretending to be something they're not...
Labels:
spam
Thursday, February 7
Wednesday, February 6
Going to a concert?
You NEED a Wine Rack "...when a product involves boobies and booze, top retailers (okay, us) stand up and listen... Just think, secretly guzzling from your gazongas means no more waiting in line and paying for overpriced drinks at festivals, gigs and games. The savings from just one event will pay for your Wine Rack and still leave you with enough change to buy some pretzels - not that you'll be buying anything for yourself with a chest this impressive...." Just $29.95
h/t: Wollf and Grouchy Old Cripple
Labels:
shopping
Tuesday, February 5
If he wins
Photos SourceIf he wins the popular vote, but she gets the most delegates...
Will we be hearing about a stolen election for the next four years?
Labels:
politics light
Please don' throw me in that briar patch!
Photo sourceDo you think all this negative talk about McCain is kind of a "Please don't throw me in that briar patch!" kind of thing?
'Cause if it is not - how is this different from the way the Democrats threw Joe Lieberman under the bus just because he dared to step outside the box, and take a stand that they found unpopular?
Isn't that what we should WANT in a public official? Someone who doesn't JUST go for the party line?
I know there are all kinds of complexities that make the polarization necessary, but it also seems tremendously damaging to me.
Labels:
politics not so light
Tellin' it like it is!
Photo SourceThis guy doesn't think much of Code Pink...
"We are the defenders of democracy, the upholders of the Constitution," said Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink. "If it weren't for people like the people in Berkeley, standing up for what they believe, we'd be living under Hitler."
Well, well well. Is that right? YOU are the defenders of democracy. YOU uphold the Constitution. It’s you and the folks in Berserkely that have stood up against Hitler, eh?
Well listen up toots, and listen fucking good. It’s people like my grandfathers (and grandmother) who stood up for what they believed and actually beat THE REAL HITLER. It’s people like my father and my uncles who kept the forces of Soviet communism at bay. And it’s people like me who have raised their right hand and sworn to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and are putting in long hours away from family and friends to ensure that a piece of parchment that sits in a climate controlled, bulletproof case in Washington continues to be the guiding light for this nation. These are all things that you wouldn’t know shit about, you shriveled up, hideous waste of space.
And that's just the beginning...
h/t: Wollf
Labels:
politics not so light
Monday, February 4
Hoofbeats... Horses? Or...?
.
So, the ice is melting? Is it that SUV you're driving? Or is it earth's magma?
Interesting stuff - some good links - something to add into your thought processes: COLUMBUS , Ohio -- Scientists have discovered what they think may be another reason why Greenland 's ice is melting: a thin spot in Earth's crust is enabling underground magma to heat the ice.
They have found at least one “hotspot” in the northeast corner of Greenland -- just below a site where an ice stream was recently discovered.
The researchers don't yet know how warm the hotspot is. But if it is warm enough to melt the ice above it even a little, it could be lubricating the base of the ice sheet and enabling the ice to slide more rapidly out to sea....
...The ice sheet in northeast Greenland is especially worrisome to scientists. It had no known ice streams until 1991, when satellites spied one for the first time. Dubbed the Northeastern Greenland Ice Stream, it carries ice nearly 400 miles, from the deepest interior of the island out to the Greenland Sea.
“Ice streams have to have some reason for being there. And it's pretty surprising to suddenly see one in the middle of an ice sheet,” von Frese said.
The newly discovered hotspot is just below the ice stream, and could have caused it to form, the researchers concluded. But what caused the hotspot to form?
“It could be that there's a volcano down there,” he said. “But we think it's probably just the way the heat is being distributed by the rock topography at the base of the ice.” Read the rest...
BIG BANG IN ANTARCTICA -- KILLER CRATER FOUND UNDER ICE
KABOOM! ANCIENT IMPACTS SCARRED MOON TO ITS CORE, MAY HAVE CREATED "MAN IN THE MOON"
NPR audio Antarctic Crater Evidence of Major Meteor
So, the ice is melting? Is it that SUV you're driving? Or is it earth's magma?
Interesting stuff - some good links - something to add into your thought processes: COLUMBUS , Ohio -- Scientists have discovered what they think may be another reason why Greenland 's ice is melting: a thin spot in Earth's crust is enabling underground magma to heat the ice.
They have found at least one “hotspot” in the northeast corner of Greenland -- just below a site where an ice stream was recently discovered.
The researchers don't yet know how warm the hotspot is. But if it is warm enough to melt the ice above it even a little, it could be lubricating the base of the ice sheet and enabling the ice to slide more rapidly out to sea....
...The ice sheet in northeast Greenland is especially worrisome to scientists. It had no known ice streams until 1991, when satellites spied one for the first time. Dubbed the Northeastern Greenland Ice Stream, it carries ice nearly 400 miles, from the deepest interior of the island out to the Greenland Sea.
“Ice streams have to have some reason for being there. And it's pretty surprising to suddenly see one in the middle of an ice sheet,” von Frese said.
The newly discovered hotspot is just below the ice stream, and could have caused it to form, the researchers concluded. But what caused the hotspot to form?
“It could be that there's a volcano down there,” he said. “But we think it's probably just the way the heat is being distributed by the rock topography at the base of the ice.” Read the rest...
BIG BANG IN ANTARCTICA -- KILLER CRATER FOUND UNDER ICE
KABOOM! ANCIENT IMPACTS SCARRED MOON TO ITS CORE, MAY HAVE CREATED "MAN IN THE MOON"
NPR audio Antarctic Crater Evidence of Major Meteor
Labels:
Global Warming?,
Volcano
I just got a call from Scarlett Johannsen
Well, ok it was a recorded message, telling me to vote for Barack Obama. I've gotten calls from Mitt Romney, Arnold, and lots of others...
Do these recorded messages work? Or are you sick of them?
Labels:
politics light
Sunday, February 3
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