Friday, May 24, 2013

Factoid of the day

IdleSpeculations blog points out that Norman Rockwell's picture of Rosie the Riviter is posed similar to that of Isaiah in the Sistine Chapel:


Dieselpunk.org website has the two pictures side by side:



the history of Rosie from the library of congress.

;becaause of copyright issues (Rockwell's picture was on the front of the Saturday Evening Post) usually the "war bond" version of Rosie is more famous...

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Family news

Both Joy and I have some kind of the flu, so blogging will be light.

Factoid of the day

You know about the Hound of the Baskervilles,

but do you know about the "Typeface" of the Baskerville?





more HERE

 Baskerville used his new typeface and printer to make a beautiful Bible, which is ironic since he was an atheist.

he had to redesign the printer to get the letters crisp and clear,
And EnglishHistorical FictionBlog discusses his career, and the wanderings of his corpse...

and it is not known why the Sherlock Holmes used his name for the story, but if you want to listen  to it, you can download it from Archives

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Your tax dollars at work

NASA funds 3D pizza printer.


http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/dea2/action/2177b13/

So a future Captain Kirk will be able to eat pizza

jounolist? We don't need no stinkin' journolist

Instapundit quips:

JOURN-O-LIST CAVALRY TO THE RESCUE! Spotted: @joshtpm @CapehartJ @ezraklein & other lefty columnists headed into the West Wing as a group. POTUS coffee? Carney meeting? Anyone?
Watch for even-more-unified weaponized Administration-excusing talking points, coming soon to a publication near you!
Posted at 4:19 pm by Glenn Reynolds
he's a libertarian, so has lots of tea party photos too...

FYI: The tea party is libertarian, of small business entrepeneurs, not the KKK or even the religious conservatives. But don't expect the press to notice.

Mollie from GetReligion (a blog on religious reporting) has this article at IR:

How to be a lousy journalist for fun and profit.

Remember Your Job Is to Advance Narratives, Not Report Facts

related item:

And PJMedia say the backstory of Benghazi is not about shipping missiles to Syria, but the CIA trying getting them back from Alqaeda after the state department let them get them. And yes, the military was told to "stand down"...

Factoid of the day

 was the oldest Zero written down in a Cambodian artifact from 683 AD?

Inscription K-127, from Sambor on Mekong. Photo Credit: Debra Gross Aczel


The history of "zero", why it is important.

Attention conspiracy buffs

Did a cosmic impact cause the temporary stop of global warming 12000 years ago and help kill off the mammoths?
About 12,000 years before the Younger Dryas, the Earth was at the Last Glacial Maximum – the peak of the Ice Age. Millennia passed, and the climate began to warm. Then something happened that caused temperatures to suddenly reverse course, bringing about a century’s worth of near-glacial climate that marked the start of the geologically brief Younger Dryas.
theory has been around for awhile, and this short termed "swing" of climate has been postulated as the reason man started farming...

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Yes, 'climate change" is to blame for the tornado, says Mom Jones....

of course, LAST year "climate change" was blamed for the lack of tornadoes... change".
(the reason it is now called "climate change" is because it stopped warming over a decade ago... and as Drudge points out, thirty years ago, tornadoes were blamed on global cooling.

Because they never had tornadoes in Tornado alley in the past.






 Surrender, Dorothy!

Ironically, I think that pollution and degradation of the environment is a major problem but when someone says "global warming" or climate change, what they imply is that we should implement another agenda, run by experts, of course...


photosource
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if you like Alex Jones, why not find the real thing?

 Carroll Quigley's stuff has been posted on Internet archives. and no, he isn't a weirdo, but Bill Clinton's professor at Georgetown.

 includes the Anglo American establishment:

 summary:

Quigley exposes the secret society's established in London in 1891, by Cecil Rhodes. Quigley explains how these men worked in union to begin their society to control the world. He explains how all the wars from that time were deliberately created to control the economies of all the nations.

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Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Musical Interlude of the day

LINK


or this one



Rembrant flash mob

LINK






Headsup Briansibley

Hate speech against those needing help

LINK


what is worse is that 52 people retweeted it, and over 20 marked it as their favorite.

She has since "apologized"...after being caught by the right wing blogosphere.

but as the BMJ (link posted earlier) notes: one shouldn't criticize those who suggest killing babies: they should be allowed to propose such things under the guise of academic freedom:
The real problem is the fact that some stupid ordinary people get mad at them and threaten them...
Describing support for infanticide as ‘madness’ is problematic because it appears to fail to respect the serious arguments being put forward by our opponents (italics mine)...
Furthermore, though clearly not as egregious as the inexcusable death threats and other hate speech, describing our opponents in this way allows the focus to shift away from their actual arguments



In a world where learned academics support killing infants (and adults with Alzheimers)  why is Ms. W's "tweet" so terrible?

maybe because ordinary people love their children? And because most of us mourn children whose lives are taken from them?






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State Medical Examiner: 37 People Dead, Death Toll Expected To Rise

View Comments
MOORE, Okla. (CBS Houston/AP) — A monstrous tornado at least a half-mile wide roared through the Oklahoma City suburbs Monday, flattening entire neighborhoods with winds up to 200 mph, setting buildings on fire and landing a direct blow on an elementary school. At least 37 people were reported killed.

KFOR-TV reports that up to 24 children are believed dead at the Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore and that it has turned into a search and recovery effort. The storm tore off the roof, knocked down walls and turned the playground into a mass of twisted plastic and metal. Several children were pulled alive from the rubble, however. Rescue workers passed the survivors down a human chain to a triage center in the parking lot.
At least seven of the children drowned after being found at the bottom of a pool at Plaza Towers, according to KFOR.
The storm laid waste to scores of buildings in Moore, south of the city. Block after block of the community lay in ruins. Homes were crushed into piles of broken wood. Cars and trucks were left crumpled on the roadside.

(TM and © Copyright 2013 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2013 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

In our prayers

My patients in Oklahoma have been hit by tornadoes. The severe weather in the midwest is continuing for the second day.




and no, it is not due to global warming: It is normal weather in tornado alley...
 

the problem is that the funnels can appear before the radio announces it...we used to keep an eye on the weather channel maps (usually the local stations kept the maps in the corner of the programs) to know if we were in the danger zone, but the joke is that in small towns and rural areas, you just go outside and look for funnels, while you get the kids in the shelter.

Our house was brick, but not good enough for a larger tornado: the public shelter was downtown three blocks away, and the ground water meant we didn't have a basement, but Lolo was slow, so the neighbors left us hide in theirs, along with six kids, three women, two dogs and a cat, while I stood out at the entrance with the three husbands. Quite scary, sinceit was hailing and raining and we couldn't even see across the street.

all of a sudden, in the hail storm the sky/air turned green, and we heard a noise, and closed the door; a minute later the hail had stopped and it was only lightly raining. The smallish tornado hit half a mile up the street, luckily missing the high school and the hospital. But the very huge tornadoes are too large to "see": they can be half a mile wide.

Ironically the only tornado I ever "saw" was while with the National Guard in North Dakota, where we watched one form, and we busy taking photos when the local NG chased us into the shelter. Why weren't we in the shelter? Because no one told us where it was, so we figured to stay in the clinic's inner corrider....No, that one didn't touch ground.

The ground water problem keeps a lot of folks from having a basement, so the shelter is a concrete box in the ground. If you are rich, you can build a "safe room", but the average safe room costs more than what I paid for my home...

last night, I was keeping an eye on the reports on FreeRepublic, who has "real time" reports from the right wing freepers.

The folks in Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas and the other states hit by the supercells are in our prayers, especially the families of the schoolkids killed or injured in Moore OK...

Monday, May 20, 2013

Insomnia download of the day

Quick, before the copyright cops find it:

Someone put some of the Percy Jackson audiobooks on youtube.


Factoids of the day

Starts with a bang blog has a nice article on earthquakes that includes this factoid:

Well, guess what we notice about the Earth after each-and-every measurable earthquake?
By just the smallest of amounts, the rotational period of a day shortens. For example, the 2011 Japan earthquake (including aftershocks) shortened the day by 1.8 microseconds, the 2010 Chile earthquake shortened the day by 1.26 microseconds, and the 2004 Sumatra quake shortened the day by an astounding 6.8 microseconds!

These are tiny numbers, of course, considering that we lose about 14 microseconds from the 24-hour-day each year just due to tidal friction from the Moon-Earth-Sun system,

Welcome to the culture of death

The BMJ has an entire issue discussing infanticide.

There are a few with fuzzy arguments why this is wrong.

None seem to have a religious argument (such as "Well, the Lord God said it was a no no to kill your babies" (this one dismisses religion as being against "questioning" things, therefore we need to discard all religious arguments, and then dismisses what he thinks their arguments are, not what religions actually believe.)

"Every murder or other injury, no matter for what cause, committed or inflicted on another is a crime against humanity."

of course, they use a "hat trick" by redefining murder as the killing of a person, and then redefine who is a person according to their own ideas.

The problem? Who died and made them king? Why do we allow these people the "right" to remove the right to live from huge segments of humanity?

Hannah Arendt in her book Eichman in Jerusalem actually predicted this would happen, that in the future experts will devise criterias for personhood and then arrange to kill those who don't meet the criteria.

Sigh.

all of this reminds me of this song:







Sunday, May 19, 2013

Lectures of the week

Harvard has several lectures by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, about technology and culture of New England women at the time of the revolution.

Her books include a lot of information on a woman's work in the economics of those days, and a book on Margaret Ballard, a local midwife, which was made into a PBS film.


alas, they are only "streaming" video, which is hard for us when the internet is acting up.

For those who are visually handicapped, a "Daisy" book can be downloaded from internet archives LINK

A Vimeo lecture can be found HERE.

and a google talk can be found HERE.






Yes I've read the book in the past, and one of the books I brought with me here was the age of Homespun, which is more about what women had to do in those days...

Nano Flowers

Image courtesy Laura Hendriks and Wim Noorduin

Image courtesy Wim Noorduin

Image courtesy Wim Noorduin

  Image courtesy Wim Noorduin 
from Nat geo

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Cat item of the day




Toxel links to SushiCats.










Stuff around the web: where are the families?

There is a podcast about CSLewis HERE.
discussing the abolition of men essay. I haven't listened to the podcast yet, but the essay laments the loss of the TAO, or the way morality and wisdom is ignored in the modern educational system.

Lewis is important, but I find his essays superficial in some ways, because he does not include in them any hint about the importance of family: the academic ideas are what matter...
And this is found in his fiction too: So at the end of Narnia I, the kids are (unmarried) kings and queens of Narnia who hunt the white stag.

Contrast with Tolkien, where the LOTR ends with Sam coming back to Rosie and his kids.



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The Pope speaks of the "gentrification" of the heart, and urges the self satisfied to get off their tushies and help the poor.
Pope Francis warned against “gentrification of the heart” as a consequence of comfortable living, and called on the faithful to “touch the flesh of Christ” by caring for the needy.
As an ex-missionary, I sometimes want to shake comfortable people and tell them to look around and notice the poor too, but ironically, in my practice of medicine, I see another picture: a lot of people care for the "needy" by quietly caring for their own families....and a lot of these "comfortable" people care for children, the elderly, neighbors, with little notice or applause.

According to estimates from the National Alliance for Caregiving, during the past year, 65.7 million Americans (or 29 % of the adult U.S. adult population involving 31 percent of all U.S. households) served as family caregivers for an ill or disabled relative.
and that statistic doesn't include busy mothers...


and one thing I fault the Post Vatican II church for is because it lauds "charity work" as the way to heaven, but ignores becoming holy in the duty of our daily lives (See Theresa's "little way", which was popular before the Vatican council).

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Making a life, making a living, making a difference.

Again, fine, but ignores family life as a source of meaning. I am reminded of one lady humorist who wondered why, in the post feminist world, working eight hours a day at a department store is supposed to be more meaningful than raising kids...

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Open sex is destroying eroticism?

Uh, sex is not about eroticism, but about expressing in one's "lovemaking" the care for the other at a deeper depth, and of course, it is about babies. Without noticing the disconnect, you make it merely something that is fun but lacking humanity....

Discussing sex without noticing babies (or noticing how many of the girls end up with abortions, end up becoming single moms, or end up with a nasty STD) is ignoring reality.

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ComeAwaywithme has lovely photos.
and this reminder:
Every child comes with the message
that God is not yet discouraged of man.
~Rabindranath Tagore

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