FINEST KIND CLINIC AND FISHMARKET.... Discussing medicine, culture, and the joys of cooking Pansit.
Mr Warner starts work by drawing his ideas on paper. He then buys the produce and spends between one and three days assembling it with the help of pins and superglue. He then photographs it layer after layer from the foreground to the background and assembles them into one image in post-production.
Nothing new in any of this: Christ said if we think angry thoughts about our brother, we are the same as murderers, and Buddha insisted The thought manifests as the word; The word manifests as the deed; The deed develops into habit; And habit hardens into character.
Does contemporary society give rise to conditions more conducive to evil than in the past? Do science and technology, in particular, dehumanise us? ... Take the internet, for example; it's right here. In recent years the malevolent online behaviour of internet trolls and vitriolic commentators, hiding behind their pseudonyms, has become a much-discussed cultural phenomenon. ...
As usual, Plato has something to contribute to this debate...
The story of Gyges's ring seems to suggest that evil is a simply a fact of human nature. When anonymity releases us from responsibility for our actions, we will gladly abandon morality and harm anyone who obstructs our pursuit of what we think will make us happy. ... Plato had to resort to a myth, and a magic ring, to illustrate the conditions under which our tendency to evil manifests itself. In our own time, technology has worked its magic, and the fantasy of invisibility has become an everyday reality.
The eleven fiber optic cables from Europe to the United States all pass through two facilities in the blackout area. One facility is at 16th Street and 8th Avenue and the other is three kilometers (two miles) to the south on Hudson Street. These places also contain servers for many major Internet sites.Luckily they stayed working...this time....
(An under-reported fact: Darwin proved that seeds did move across continents before transatlantic voyages, via the guano of migrating birds.)---------------------------------
Sun-dimming industrial pollution from China and greenhouse gases trapping less heat than expected may help explain an apparent slowdown in global warming since 2000, experts say.Coal-fired power plants emit sulphate pollution that dims sunlight and so offsets warming
Because we all know the real reason for the "season": Merchandising merchandising!
- Lego advent calendar | Advent Calendars
- This year's LEGO Advent Calendar goes right back to tradition: santaclaus, snow and more: based on the theme of a Christmas market.
- Cartoon advent calendar | Advent Calendars
- There's just no celebrating the countdown to Christmas without an advent calendar. There are all kinds of fun advent calendars available, but perhaps cartoon advent calendars are the best of all. Children also love toy advent calendars like the My Little Pony advent calendar.
- Wooden advent calendar | Advent Calendars
- I don't know about you, but for me the ideal advent calendar is made of wood, so it can be reused year after year. There's just something homely about wooden toys in general that fits the holiday season.
- Barbie advent calendar | Advent Calendars
- Barbie is of course the ultimate girl toy - from baby girls to adults, in fact. Barbie advent calendars are a great pink way to count down the days to Christmas for girly girls.
- Littlest pet shop advent calendar | Advent Calendars
- There are two advent calendars available from Littlest Pet Shop:Littlest Pet Shop Advent Calendar Includes 3 Pets! Over 20 Surprises! and Littlest Pet Shop Advent Calendar
- Playmobil Advent Calendar| Advent Calendars
- Playmobil lends itself well to advent calendars: those dolls, their getups%u2026 The scenery%u2026 There are two Playmobil advent calendars that simply walk off the shelves this year
A grandson of Genghis Khan, Kublai's realm stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Black Sea, covering a fifth of the known world. In 1279, he became the first non-Chinese emperor, establishing the Yuan Dynasty and ruling over China, present-day Mongolia, Korea and other Asian regions. But his ambition to occupy more lands led to one of his worst defeats when he sent his warships to invade Vietnam in 1288. Now, 725 years later, Australian archaeologists are helping excavate the site where the mighty Kublai Khan's invasion fleet of 400 was destroyed by the Vietnamese. They had lured the Mongols up the Bach Dang River just as the tide was starting to ebb. The Vietnam army had driven hundreds of sharpened wooden stakes into the bed of the river that were invisible at high tide; when the tide turned and began to ebb, the entire fleet was holed and sunk, captured or burnt by fire arrows. "
Santiago de Cuba (Agenzia Fides) - For several days the media have been documenting the devastating force of Hurricane Sandy in its passage in New York and other U.S. cities. Little or nothing is said instead of the damage the hurricane has caused in Santiago de Cuba (Cuba) and Haiti (see Fides 29/10/2012), countries that do not have certain infrastructure and financial resources to assist the displaced and to begin reconstruction.---------------------------------
Today is Election Day. Millions of people across the country will be going to the polls today to elect new legislators, judges, sheriffs, school board members, and of course, the president....
John Quincy Adams said: "Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost."...
Mark Twain said: "If there is any valuable difference between a monarchist and an American, it lies in the theory that the American can decide for himself what is patriotic and what isn't. I claim that difference. I am the only person in the 60 millions that is privileged to dictate my patriotism."----------------------------------------
Michaelangelo put the five Sibyls of antiquity on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel"The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies... "
—The Aeneid, book VI, Virgil
Written in 19 BC, the Aeneid chronicles the adventures of Trojan warrior Aeneas, including his encounter with a mysterious ancient fortune teller. It was said this oracle, or sibyl, dwelt in the mouth of a cave in Cumae, the ancient Greek settlement near what is now Naples.
"A spacious cave, within its farmost part,
Was hew'd and fashion'd by laborious art
Thro' the hill's hollow sides: before the place,
A hundred doors a hundred entries grace;
As many voices issue, and the sound
Of Sybil's words as many times rebound."
In the poem, the Sibyl acts as a kind of guide to the underworld, to which Aeneas must descend to seek the advice of his dead father Anchises and fulfill his destiny.
This was not the first appearance of the Cumaean Sibyl in art and literature, nor the last. The most famous story dates to the time of the last Roman King, Tarquinius Superbus, around 500 BC.
According to the story, the Sibyl approached the king with nine books of prophesy, collected from the wisest seers, available to the king for a very dear price. The king haughtily refused her price. In response, the sibyl burned three of the books, then offered the remaining six books at the original high price. Again he refused. Of the remaining six books, she threw three more onto the fire, and repeated her offer of the final three books, at the original price. Afraid of seeing all the prophesy destroyed, he finally accepted.
The Sibyls were prophetic women who were resident at shrines or temples throughout the Classical World. The five depicted here are each said to have prophesied the birth of Christ. The Cumaean Sibyl, for example, is quoted by Virgil as declaring that "a new progeny of Heaven" would bring about a return of the "Golden Age". This was interpreted as referring to Jesus.[39]The Cumaean Sibyl of Virgil is an old lady, given immortality but not youth from one of the gods:
The Romanian tourist board is to use links between the British Royal family and Count Dracula to lure in UK tourists, it has emerged...
“Transylvania is in my blood,” he jokes in an interview first shown on satelite television last year. “The genealogy shows I am descended from Vlad the Impaler, so I do have a bit of a stake in the country.”
According to Royal Highness, a book published in 1982 by Sir Iain Moncreiffe, the former chairman of Debrett’s, the Prince is a great grandson 16 times removed to Vlad III.
He can trace his lineage back through his great grandmother Queen Mary, the consort of George V, to Vlad IV, the half brother of the notorious ruler.
In 2010, the District of Columbia tested online voting and asked computer experts to try to hack the system. The result? You guessed it: The hackers were successful and the program was suspended.
Two ways of looking at this:
- When locals move cash, it's because they fear a crash, and who knows the local situation better?
- The rich fear for their wealth in China. They know they've amassed "too much" and/or they know the Party won't do what is necessary to protect it with rule of law (see, Bo Xilai).
Either way, not a good sign.on the other hand, China has started pumping oil in Afghanistan...
Members of the Georgia Army National Guard prepare their CH-47 Chinook heavy-lift helicopter for a flight from Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, N.J. to Staten Island, N.Y. at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, N.J., Nov. 3, 2012. The helicopter crew is supporting members of the National Search and Rescue Task Force, which will conduct house-to-house searches in Staten Island, N.Y. U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Parker GyokereAlso helping out: The PAANG from nearby Pennsylvania
The Army Times reported more than 11,000 National Guard troops have been deployed to the Northeast for recovery efforts.More HERE.
The National Guard is tasked with support type jobs, and are usually called up to help in disasters, and theoretically are under the orders of the governors, whereas the regular military need special permission to be deployed in civilian areas...
National Guard support to states, local first responders and the Federal Emergency Management Agency includes providing communications; shelter and engineering support; evacuation and security support; high-water vehicle support; high-water search and rescue; power generation; food distribution; debris removal, transportation and delivery of essential equipment and supplies.
National Guard Civil Support Teams are on stand-by for hazardous materials responses and providing Joint Incident Site Communications Capability. JISCC provides a communications bridge between first responders and other local, state and federal agencies.
The lingerie company is scheduled to hold a fashion show at the guard’s Manhattan armory on Wednesday, and that turned out to be great timing when Hurricane Sandy hit last week. When the armory was left without power or communications post-storm, Victoria’s Secret threw all their on-site resources at the problem. They loaned the regiment two huge mobile generators, hooked up their T1 microwave Internet connection, and even loaned a forklift to distribute emergency food bundles for flooded-out New Yorkers. Victoria’s Secret deserve a medal. But there’s almost nowhere we could pin it on. [Source]The bad news? The show was rescheduled and the show must go on, even if it means kicking out the NG...
The 15 year old Malala Yousufzai is now in Britain, along with her family, to receive better care and protection from Taliban threats to hunt her down and finish the job. The Taliban are now boasting that they will go after another teenage girl (who has been given police protection) who has also been outspoken about female education. The Pakistani Taliban insists they have the right to kill women who criticize Islamic radical ideas. The Taliban responded to the media uproar over the Malala Yousufzai shooting by declaring war on journalists (especially foreign ones) and promising murder attempts against the most troublesome journalists.Hmm...wonder if they know Kadija was a successful business woman?
In Saudi Arabia, where infidel churches (and open practice of other religions) are forbidden, outright hatred of infidels is widely preached.The dirty little secret is that there are a million Christian foreign workers in Saudi who have no church to worship in...
By now another Coast Guard airplane had arrived to replace the first one on the scene and was soon followed by an MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter, piloted by Lt. Cmdr. Steve Cerveny and Lt. Jane Peña, and carrying Mr. Haba, the rescue swimmer, and Mike Lufkin, a hoist operator. In the dark sea below, they saw broken bits of brightness: the locator lights on the rafts and survival suits....Soon Mr. Haba was swimming to one of the life rafts and identifying himself to the huddled survivors as, simply, the Coast Guard. Soon Mr. Lufkin was hoisting other Bounty crew members — two, three, four, five — into the Jayhawk. With fuel levels dropping, the Jayhawk then flew back to land, while another Coast Guard rescue crew picked up nine more people.
What separates barbarism from civilization? About 96 hours without power, it turns out.
So she has stuff folks needs, is staying in a hotel room that is probably better used to house refugees from unheated tenements, but hey, she finally will get the chance to give away a couple of batteries and cans of dog food...By Saturday afternoon Rooney was over her disappointment and looking forward to a charity run on hard-hit Staten Island that she had found advertised on the Internet.On Sunday, Rooney planned to run with a backpack full of dog food, cat food, batteries and some water donated by her hotel, the Ritz-Carlton across from Central Park."I truthfully at this point don't care if I run. I just want to give this stuff out," she said.
...Tuesday morning the city’s churches assembled to begin relief efforts. Hope for New York, a nonprofit affiliate of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, is helping coordinate relief efforts between churches and nonprofit groups, posting needs on its website (hfny.org/hurricane). All Angels Church on the Upper West Side requested hygiene kits and blankets. New York City Relief asked for clothing and food. Other churches in Queens sent out foot patrols to check on their neighbors...Catholic charities website.
For years the audio was trapped on the piece of foil you see above. There was no device that could play it and even if there had been, doing so would have likely ruined it. This summer, at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, physicist Carl Haber and his team were able to create a 3D picture of the foil whose topography could then be translated into sound using techniques of mathematical analysis and physical modeling to calculate how a needle would have played the recording. They were able to do so "without physically having to touch them," he explained to me. "And that's kind of the key issue, because these things are so old and fragile and torn-up, broken, and delicate that in many cases it just would not be possible to play them back in any of the more standard ways."
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy is always in effect: "In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely." Almost all this form-filling out serves no useful purpose; for the hero to put in a list that will allow him access to a facility, for instance, is a very rare subversion.
The land forms here are examples of the granite formations, which dominate Zimbabwe's land form as "crenellated ridges, dwalas or hump-backed domes, and what look like randomly heaped boulders which have evolved in various forms over millions of years of weathering." The most impressive Balancing Rock formation in these granite ranges is of the Motabo Hills, which is the inselberg of "Mother and Child Rock formation".[4] The Balancing Rocks found here are described as the best granite outcrops in "Dali-esque compositions of lichen streaked balancing rocks."[7]
Visitors and scientists alike flock to one of Libya’s most remote corners for the numerous pictographs that are found all over the mountains. These images are found seemingly everywhere – at the base of the mountains, under overhanging rocks, in mountain caves, and in the many canyons of the Acacus Mountains.
The pictographs depict animals, hunting scenes, and social gatherings. However, they are not merely prehistoric paintings. The date of their origin can roughly be put into four different time periods.
The oldest images, from the so-called Wild Fauna Period (12,000 – 6000 BC), were created when the Sahara was covered in a plentiful savannah, with Elephants and Giraffes roaming the wide plains. During this period, carvings depicting those animals were scrawled across the desert cave walls.
The Round Head Period (8000 – 6000 BC), named after the images of rather formless bodies in the depictions of humans, forms a transition period between the age of Hunter-Gatherers and the creation of permanent settlements. The Pastoral Period (5500 – 2000 BC) followed, during which the climate of the Sahara grew much more arid. Human figures dominating and taming the forces of nature were painted during this period, including depictions of domesticated cattle and social festivities.
Horse and chariot depictions majorly date from the Horse Period (1000 BC – AD 1), during which means of transport made a leap forward, allowing the beginning of large Trans-Continental trade routes in Africa. The final period is called the Camel Period (200 BC – present), during which the Sahara finally became the arid desert that it is today.
...Although the incident took place near the headquarters of Saudi Arabian National Guard and Prince Nayef Arab University for Security Studies, officials speaking on state television said it was an accident.and the good news: Maybe the Marcos money and assets in the US will be finally confiscated to pay his victims.
and the latest health scare: Tainted Korean Ramen noodles.
"The size of the grain controls the actual sound," Dagois-Bohy concluded.----------------------------------
Why exactly this happens, and how the sound itself is created, is still uncertain. However, the Parisian group suspects that, during an avalanche, grains of sand move together down the dune—each grain colliding with and rolling around its neighbors, creating a constant stream of collisions. Larger grains of sand move around each other at slower rates, and vice versa for smaller grains.
The data obtained would fit a model in which a pre-domestication took place in the Andean region, with the domestication being completed in Mesoamerica. Subsequently, the Spaniards took plants from Mesoamerica to Spain and from there they were exported to the rest of the world.This is called the Colombian exchange...
Before the Columbian Exchange, there were no oranges in Florida, no bananas in Ecuador, no paprika in Hungary, no tomatoes in Italy, no potatoes in Ireland, no coffee in Colombia, no pineapples in Hawaii, no rubber trees in Africa, no cattle in Texas, no donkeys in Mexico, no chili peppers in Thailand or India, and no chocolate in Switzerland.
I’ve been begging for follow-up on Sean Smith’s now famous chat-room message, sent on the morning of 9/11, claiming that a Libyan guard had been seen taking photos of the compound. “Assuming we don’t die tonight,” he said glibly at the time. Until today that was the only hard evidence of an inside job by the skeleton Libyan security staff that State forced Stevens to make do with. Had Smith overreacted to something he saw, maybe, or were others at the compound also concerned? Now we know.
They were so concerned, in fact, that they alerted not only the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but the local police chief too.
Traffic Personnel wearing Halloween Masks manning traffic along EDSA yesterday. Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) Chairman Francis Tolentino said the personnel of the MMDA will be deployed in strategic places near cemeteries to ease traffic this All Saint and All Soul's Da. (KJ ROSALES)
Sending artwork to the tapestry mill for the usual process of in-house translation into weaving code would have taken far too long and would have put another hand between the artist and the finished work. To meet the time deadlines involved and to make the weaving reflect the source images directly, Nava, working with Bay Area artist Donald Farnsworth, developed a method of making weavable digital files of the tapestry designs. These final weaving files were then e-mailed directly to Flanders Tapestries near Bruges, Belgium from Nava's studio in Ojai, California. What would have taken in the 16th century decades to make with scores of weavers and dozens of looms, took twenty months of designing and two months of weaving.
Nava and Flanders Tapestries developed a custom palate of two hundred forty colors based on sixteen colors of fiber going in two directions to create the images. Multiple tests and "a hair-raising," as he describes it, twenty months of intense work brought about a precise calibration of the computer monitors and the woven output so that what Nava saw in his studio was what the mill would produce.
All of the tapestries are made from cotton with a small percentage of viscose to ensure the colors, a subtle interplay of neutral tones evocative of the ancient frescoes of Italy, will remain true. Cloth woven from cotton by the Egyptians has survived intact for thousands of years.
and also links to the site where Odysseus and others may have visited the dead.
Johann Konrad Dippel was rumored to create potions, perform electrical therapies, and partake in gruesome experiments involving stolen body parts from the graveyard. Born in the Castle Frankenstein in 1673, it’s disputed whether or not he was the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s mad scientist of the same name, who did some cadaver experiments of his own.
Although there were many oracles in ancient Greece, there is only one known oracle of the dead. It was an entryway to the underworld, and a place where the shades of the dead could - under special circumstances - reveal the future to the living. It was the place that Homer sent Odysseus to seek advice from a long-dead oracle, and where he was horrified by visions of Hades, and it also appears in a sordid chapter of Herodotus' Histories.
The site rests atop a hill near the confluence of the Acheron ("River of woe" in Greek), Pyriphlegethon ("Flaming with fire") and Cocytus ("River of wailing"), three of the five rivers associated with Hades, was identified in 1958 by the Greek archaeologist Sotirios Dakaris.
--------------------------------A seven-hour firefight in a city is sustained combat engagement. It indicates the attackers had plenty of ammo. I've also learned that two of our dead were former SEALs, two Americans with the will and military skill to take on several hundred militiamen. The seven hours they fought is plenty of time to dispatch reinforcements -- at the minimum an air strike. Did they request support, as one news report claims? If so, were their requests denied? Who denied them? Was military support denied because it might violate Libyan sovereignty? These are reasonable questions that demand honest answers.
Yes, we had commercial satellite coverage in Oklahoma for both cable TV and internet... and it is available in the Philippines, but quite expensive, at least when I looked into it a few years ago when we were spending a lot of time in the farm...cheaper and easier to just surf via the local cellphone company...
Equipment for doing this has been getting more and more portable and inexpensive year by year since 1991. The most recent development is a satellite phone and a separate mini-router device that allows you to quickly establish a wi-fi hotspot (within 30 meters of the “Hotspot” router). Currently, Thuraya sells a phone (for about $800) and a router (for $300) that makes this happen. Data rates are not cheap, costing $3-$4 per megabyte. Thuraya satellites only cover Eurasia and most of Africa
