Saturday, May 26, 2012

Stories below the fold

Texas Teen Rahul Nagvekar, wins spelling Bee

And the Times of India is proud of him and the other scholars who places second and third:
(Vansh)Jain, a 13-year-old from Minocqua, Wis., will take home a $15,000 scholarship as runner-up. The eighth-grader was making his third appearance in the national geography bee.

"You have to love to look at maps," he said. In his spare time, he also is on the swimming team and plays the flute in his school band. The third-place finisher, 13-year-old Varun Mahadevan of Fremont, Calif.,
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Oil spill near Albuquerque three times larger than estimated, and twice as large as the Exxon Valdez.

Why no outcry? At an airforce base that was doing super duper top secret high tech research, no one noticed it for 49 years.
 In 1999, after the opening of a new bulk-fuel-storage facility at the base, a jet fuel leak was discovered from a broken 16-in. pipe. It was later learned that the pipe had been leaking fuel undetected since 1950.
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Neat photos of the American west in the good old days at the UKMAIL.

This one is the Shoshone Falls:

and this one is the Zuni Pueblo...



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This website has facts on the man tribes living in New Mexico, and includes this drawing of the traditional Zuni and Hopi houses:


Notice something about them? You enter the rooms via the roofs. I always thought that was for self defense, i.e. against nighit time predators, but the drawing suggests it was a way to keep cool...


Interesting factoid: The ancient city of Catalhoyuk,(7000 BC) in southern Turkey, also had houses that were entered only from the roof.

Place UFO conspiracy idea here.










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