masterwork hyena

She wrote,

“Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind . . . and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to show . . . that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being.”

flag of a new people

1816 — first flag of Canada.

First flag of CanadaFlying about 150 years before their Maple Leaf.

The infinity symbol over sky blue symbolizes the fusion of native and immigrant peoples toward a vigorous and cooperating new society that will exist forever.

Never strutting heraldry nor religion, Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, thought that using heraldry or religious symbols in public affairs is exhibitionist and arrogant.

brain muscle

Meditators were found to have thicker cortex in the dorsal anterior cingulate and bilaterally in secondary somatosensory cortex.

Yes I think I can be pretty sure you read it here first.

not to mention pants

  • Toilet seat: 49 germs per square inch.
  • Copy machine: 69 germs per square inch
  • Fax machine: 301 germs per square inch
  • Mouse: 1,676 germs per square inch
  • Keyboard: 3,295 germs per square inch
  • Desktop surface: 20,961 germs per square inch
  • Phone: 25,127 germs per square inch

Touched equipment.

new eye of the needle

Side Threading. Why didn’t I think of that?

Spiral Eye Needle invented by Pam Turner“Why can’t someone invent a better needle? We’ve been to the moon for goodness sake.”

Pam Turner’s Spiral Eye Needle is attracting crowds at trade shows. The Patent Office is showcasing.

The needle can be threaded with your eyes closed.

an elevator pitch

We are each the executive HQ of the milieu, the agency of action, the liquid reciprocity of benefits and rights.

In the domain of the oak, the ox and the eagle, we make worthiness a conflict with perfection beyond the warrior’s urge to destroy, worthiness, the undreamt reward to the victor while subjugating the right to deny the loser, worthiness in charge of the civilization, that’s the deal we make, the inescapable onus on the individual to participate in the benefit of the whole, to scorn the myriad dynasties that misunderstand the miracle that can do that, worthiness, folding history’s duration into the critical mass of the free !

[pullquote]We must push for character.
Otherwise it’s Enema 2.0… numb in nodes of decision trees… tolls, polls and policy rolls… capitalist, christian and cowboy lost in the covert power of cue. BORING.[/pullquote]Some say we are the ‘probabilistic logic for the synthesis of reliable organisms from unreliable components’, a dismaying sprawl of uncoined vigor.

Beta of lobe and icon of belly, we are precious order and chaos. I’d say we are debugging space time toward the function of character, toward worthiness, the curiosity of breathing.

force a WordPress line break

Here is  how to force a line break in WordPress.  An easy solution too!

<br clear=”none” />

Switch to the HTML editor and place this snippet at the end of the line. Validated code? I don’t know. It just works.

When I first shuddered at <?php echo get_settings(‘home’), I wholeheartedly agreed, because there’s much involved to install and adopt a premier community platform, but I wouldn’t have expected WordPress to be abandoning the carriage return. I was up all night trying plugins and raw PHP and HTML code snippets or switching off the TinyMCE Visual editor. Fail. The wpautop filter simply will not allow conventional <BR /> and <P> tags.

Here’s a css stylesheet solution:

p{
padding-bottom:7px;
}

Why? A padding of 7 pixels is average line height of a carriage return. Adjust accordingly.

And for special fun:

<p align=”left”> </p>

Pay attention now.  This is NOT your mother’s alignment. Do you see the space?  When wrapped in <code> tags using the WordPress HTML editor, wpautop sees %20, a blank line of one character, ASCII 255, the beloved transparent GIF, a preserved space. One is enough to fill a line.

Wpautop is a rat under the floor. Switching from the HTML editor to Visual might strip inserted code, sometimes and sometimes not.

ten trillion little gossips

Going anywhere, doing anything, we leave a trail of ‘our unique bacteria’.  And yes, law enforcement has discovered we leave a ‘germ print’ as useful as our fingerprints.

wave it to each other

first USA flagThis is the first de facto USA flag, and what the pioneers of Massachusetts truly believed. The 1636 colony agreed they had the right to any flag they wanted. Without exception, they voted to remove the cross. The 1780 Seal of the State of Massachusetts carried the inscription:

Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty

the kid who created

Andrey Ternovskiy, Creator of ChatrouletteHow long did it take to build?
It took me three days. I built it on an old computer I had in my bedroom.

Then what happened?
I showed it to my friends and they criticized it; they asked why anyone would want to use it. So I went onto a few forums and asked people to try the site, and I got 20 people to try it.

How many users do you have now?
Well, after the initial 20 users the site doubled and it continued to double every day since then. Last month I saw 30 million unique visitors come to the Web site and one million new people visit each day. It continues to multiply and I just couldn’t stop it from growing.

What were you thinking while this was happening?
I woke up one morning and checked my computer and saw all of these news articles about Chatroulette. I yelled to Mom to come and look at my computer. At first she was very nervous, but she doesn’t really understand it very well and asked me why I’m not going to school.

we moan and lament

NakedCapitalism:

Why aren’t our government “leaders” talking about slashing the military-industrial complex, which is ruining our economy with unnecessary imperial adventures?

And why aren’t any of our leaders talking about stopping the permanent bailouts for the financial giants who got us into this mess? And see this.

And why aren’t they taking away the power to create credit from the private banking giants – which is costing our economy trillions of dollars (and is leading to a decrease in loans to the little guy) – and give it back to the states?

If we did these things, we wouldn’t have to raise taxes or cut core services to the American people.

false shrinking

The Bush years and Republican outsourcing.

What about these contractors?

About 7.6 million people earned their paycheck through federal government contracts in 2005, a 50 percent increase since 2002.

In 2000, federal spending on all government contracts was $208 billion rising to $457 billion by 2007.

And their lobbyists?

The Washington Post reports that the number of registered lobbyists in Washington doubled between 2000 and 2005, to nearly 35,000.

Six of ten richest counties and twelve of the top 25 richest counties are around Washington DC. In one county alone, there are:

  1. 183,900 worth between $2 million and $10 million;
  2. 24,887 worth between ten and fifty million;
  3. 7,200 ‘really rich’ between a 100 and 500 million;
  4. 500 tycoons, lobbyists, lawyers, owners worth about a billion.

well in a city

New York City has rolled 350 carts loaded with fresh, local vegetables into its food deserts.

nose for nonsense

I was talking to myself while reading this that if you were Howard Hughes you would want to hire a writer exactly like the writer that knew his job the way this writer knows and if you were Howard Hughes somebody should tell you there’s a writer you want:

“But. I cannot figure out from the release or from press coverage very much of how the process, identified as potentially useful for batteries with an energy density far higher than anything we have now, works and what’s left after it works or how one would throttle such a thing.

“Science writers, in addition to the nose for nonsense, hype, and scam that any reporter needs if he or she is worth a paycheck, need to work particularly hard at sheer explanation. That’s our added value – ability to boil the technical jargon and concepts of biology or physics or chemistry that terrify most reporters and reduce it to reasonably simple English. Throw in some narrative on the discovery process and its context you have a story.

“If a phenomenon is new to science or merely to the layman, this means taking the reader inside the genomes or stellar cores or combustion chambers or atoms and molecules and widgetry to provide a sense, however shielded in metaphor and simile, of what in tarnation is supposedly going on.

“Sometimes it’s almost impossible. But in this case it seems doable, even on deadline. This did not, it appears, get much pickup in mass media. Where it did, there is heat but little light.

Yo. The story might or might not be important. But p-p-please notice the writer, Charlie Petit, offers no shuck.

we send them there

True Slant:

Congressmen spend between 5 and 7 hours a day on the phone begging for money.

And by the way, when you’re a freshmen, you have to fill out sheets of everybody you call, and how much money per hour, and they have coaches that teach you how to get more money from each one of your phone calls, and who to call, and what data points to have on them to tickle them to make them more apt to give you money.

It is out of control.

And it’s legalized.

more quakes?

AP’s Science Writer says, “Not more quakes, just more people in quake zones”.

“Tectonically, the Earth is up to no particular mischief”, says MIT’s Charlie Petit.

thinmk about this

If Obama can enact health reform, at least it will restrict how premium dollars can be spent on profits and overhead by requiring health insurance companies to spend 80-85% of the money they take in on care. “That’s worth keeping in mind.”

two stories


  1. High net worth families — those with at least $5 million — grew 17 percent last year to 980,000. The 7.8 million with a net worth of $1 million or more, excluding their primary residence, jumped 16% last year.

  2. For employees, 27 percent say they have less than $1,000 in savings, up from 20 percent last year, while 54 percent of Americans now have less than $25,000, excluding their primary home.

link

disgusting crimes

Mike Stathis submits:

I have discussed the financial industry on numerous occasions. My sentiment has not changed.

I can tell you that I have NEVER personally invested in banks and I don’t ever plan to because I feel they are parasites. I could go on and on how criminal this industry is, but I don’t have the time to write volumes of books.

But let’s have a look at what they’ve been up to lately.

Despite raising fees and credit card interest rates while paying out essentially nothing for deposits, these criminals have not been satisfied.

infection alert

Why vitamin D is crucial:

T cells rely on vitamin D to become active. Or they’ll remain dormant and unaware of an infection if vitamin D is lacking in the blood.

vitamin D thumbnail“This means the T cell must have vitamin D or activation of the cell will cease. If the T cells cannot find enough vitamin D in the blood, they won’t even begin to mobilize.”

Almost half the world has low levels of vitamin D. The problem increases as we spend more time indoors. No daily dose studies are definitive. Experts say 25-50 micrograms.