The few who are lucky enough to spend some time on the International Space Station sure do have the best view ever:
The post on Towleroad where I got this video from also mentions that a company is working to equip the IIS with high definition camera that will be able to stream live views from the IIS down to us 24/7 starting sometime next year. Exciting!!
Happy birthday to a legendary artist.
I love her voice, her songs, her movies, her activism, and her personality.
She’s one of the few artists to ever earn an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony). Specifically, during her impressive career Ms. Streisand has collected five Emmys, eight Grammys, two Oscars, and a Tony!
From Wikipedia:
She is one of the most commercially and critically successful entertainers in modern entertainment history, with more than 71.5 million albums shipped in the United States and 140 million albums sold worldwide. She is the best-selling female artist on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) Top Selling Artists list, the only female recording artist in the top ten, and the only artist outside of the rock and roll genre. Along with Frank Sinatra, Cher, and Shirley Jones, she shares the distinction of being awarded an acting Oscar and also recording a number-one single on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart.
According to the RIAA, Streisand holds the record for the most top-ten albums of any female recording artist – a total of 32 since 1963. Streisand has the widest span (48 years) between first and latest top-ten albums of any female recording artist. With her 2009 album, Love Is the Answer, she became one of the rare artists to achieve number-one albums in five consecutive decades. According to the RIAA, she has released 51 Gold albums, 30 Platinum albums, and 13 Multi-Platinum albums in the United States.
Really impressive!
A new paper links the elevated consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in today’s foods with the rise in autism diagnoses:
In a provocative new peer-reviewed study published in Clinical Epigenetics, researchers led by a former FDA toxicologist purport to have found a very real link between HFCS consumption and autism.
The study’s argument is complicated but deeply disturbing. It pieces together what’s known about the genetic and metabolic factors involved with autism, including the growing evidence of a link between autism and mercury and organophosphate pesticide exposure.
Essentially, HFCS can interfere with the body’s uptake of certain dietary minerals — namely zinc. And that, when combined with other mineral deficiencies common among Americans, can cause susceptible individuals to develop autism.
The basic idea is that the protein that’s in charge of eliminating heavy metals from the human body requires zinc to function. But HFCS interferes with the body’s ability to absorb zinc, which causes the protein to be less effective and may also reduce the amount of that protein in the body. An increased heavy metal load in the body — especially when first experienced at the fetal stage — can start a chain of genetic disturbances that affect development. HFCS also interferes with calcium absorption (and not just because soda is displacing milk as the drink of choice for young kids). Calcium is crucial to elimination of organophosphate pesticides, which are also linked to developmental disorders like autism.
Now, this is just one paper. And a full understanding of it requires far more expertise in biology and genetics than I possess. But I certainly think it shifts the HFCS debate in an unexpected and troubling way. Industry wants to us to believe that if no harm is proven, no harm is done. Yet scientists are discovering ways that highly processed foods, foods we did not evolve eating, may have alarming genetic effects.
And while we can undoubtedly expect the food industry to go on the offensive by dismissing and belittling these findings, we should all be very wary of eating foods that are full of unnatural substances.
Who knows the kind of damage they do to our bodies.
More at the source.
While Hollywood studios are constantly obsessed with their products’ box office receipts, which keep rising year after year thanks to inflation and the occasional new gimmick (like the current 3D craze), a more indicative gauge of their success is how many people actually purchase what they have to offer.
Yesterday, I read this very interesting tweet:
In 1946 4-billion movie tickets were purchased in America. Today the number is about a third of that.
Interesting…
That’s the dire opinion of Google co-founder Sergey Brin:
The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned that there were “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world”. “I am more worried than I have been in the past,” he said. “It’s scary.”
He said the threat to the freedom of the internet came from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry attempting to crack down on piracy, and the rise of “restrictive” so-called walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly controlled what software could be released on their platforms.
[…] He said five years ago he did not believe China or any country could effectively restrict the internet for long, but he had been proven wrong. “I thought there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle, but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle,” he said.
[…] Brin’s comments come on the first day of a week-long Guardian investigation of the intensifying battle for control of the internet that is being fought across the globe between governments, companies, military strategists, activists and hackers.
From Hollywood’s attempts to push through legislation allowing pirate websites to be shut down, to the British government’s plans to monitor social media and web use, the ethos of openness championed by the pioneers of the internet and worldwide web is being challenged on a number of fronts.
[…] He reserved his harshest words for the entertainment industry, which he said was “shooting itself in the foot, or maybe worse than in the foot” by lobbying for legislation to block sites offering pirate material.
There’s a lot more in the article on Raw Story.
A very interesting explanation of what brought the famous liner down:
There was no wind, and thus there were no waves. It was a flat calm. It was also a dark moonless night, which made it difficult to see an iceberg in the distance. On such a night, waves would have made the iceberg more visible. Even small waves would have caused a bright phosphorescent line around the base of the iceberg, due to the millions of dinoflagellates that migrate to the ocean surface at night.
These tiny plankton glow brightly even with the slightest disturbance. (Sailors had seen this phosphorescence many times as they rowed through such waters, every stroke causing a glow that clearly outlined each oar.) On that night there was not even a gentle swell that could have caused a phosphorescent line around the iceberg.
More at OMG Facts.
A new study just confirmed what many of us already suspected:
Negative attitude towards homosexuality is likely to be more pronounced among individuals who harbor unacknowledged attraction towards the same sex, and who grew up in conservative authoritarian households which forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies have found.
The study, which analyzed four separate experiments conducted in the US and Germany, provides empirical evidence to suggest that in some individuals homophobia is the external manifestation of repressed sexual desires they feel towards their own gender.
"Individuals who identify as straight but in psychological tests show a strong attraction to the same sex may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar tendencies within themselves," Netta Weinstein, a lecturer at the University of Essex and the study's lead author, explained.
"In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves and they are turning this internal conflict outward," added co-author Richard Ryan, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who was involved in the study, in which about 650 college students participated.
The researchers said it may not be just a coincidence that several vehemently homophobic public figures are often caught engaging in homosexual acts. They cited examples of Ted Haggard, the evangelical preacher who opposed gay marriage but was exposed in a gay sex scandal in 2006 and Glenn Murphy, Jr., the former chairman of the Young Republican National Federation and vocal opponent of gay marriage, who was accused of sexually assaulting a 22-year-old man in 2007.
"We laugh at or make fun of such blatant hypocrisy, but in a real way, these people may often themselves be victims of repression and experience exaggerated feelings of threat," Ryan said. "Homophobia is not a laughing matter. It can sometimes have tragic consequences," he said, pointing to cases such as the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard or the 2011 shooting of Larry King.
Very interesting study. You can read more about the methodology used at International Business Times.
What a cool idea this user had, and what brilliant execution!!
Rear Window Timelapse from Jeff Desom on Vimeo.
I finally found the time to read the source material for one of the best movies, best love stories, and best gay-themed films I’ve ever seen, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.
Annie Proulx’s short story is well written and captivating, and was closely adapted for the big screen by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, who won an Oscar for their wonderful work.
To anyone who loved Brokeback Mountain’s film version I’d recommend reading Ms. Proulx’s story, but be ready to relive all those strong emotions all over again, which might actually be the main reason to pick this up.
Grade: 8
I got the idea for the new banner when I saw this picture go by on my digital frame:
All the different stripes of clouds in the sky up top, white and blue, contrasted nicely with the brown dirt and black pavement below and looked really cool. I figured a vertical stripe that encompassed them all, enhanced by the straight white line on the pavement would show a lot of texture and look really cool:
Somehow thought I’m underwhelmed by the results. I like the new banner, but I’m not crazy about it, but I decided to leave it up anyway. Any comments?
Picture details: f/4 @ 1/1250, ISO 200, 17 mm., taken in November, 2010, in Arizona, during the fourth road trip with my friend Vittorio.
