IsaacAsimovTrue30yearsagotruenow..jpg (JPEG Image, 495 × 600 pixels) Giraffe Picture -- Tanzania Photo. July 13, 2013 Photograph by Peter Stanley, National Geographic Your Shot This Month in Photo of the Day: Animal Pictures I was sitting on the grass photographing a powerful sunset when I looked back to see this curious giraffe slowly approaching. The distant storm was glowing with the last light of the day, and as I lifted my camera, the giraffe froze for one photo before turning toward the hills of Mikumi, Tanzania.
This photo and caption were submitted to Your Shot. Check out the new and improved website, where you can share and connect with fellow photographers from around the globe. Get tips on photographing wildlife »See pictures of wildlife around the world » The typographic works of Tomasz Biernat - Typography & Quotes. Halliburton Pleads Guilty To Destroying Gulf Oil Spill Evidence. One Hundred Questions: A Toolkit for Conversations. It’s hard to meet people in your 30s, and sometimes even harder to meet new friends or find great couples to hang out with. Sometimes that awkward silence creeps up and you don’t know what to do.
The the best way to start a conversation is to simply ask a question. That’s when you bust out One Hundred Questions. It’s a toolkit for conversations by The School of Life that will have you talking into the wee hours of the night. Or doing other stuff, if you know what I mean (wink, wink). Or, maybe simply helping you realize incompatibilities before things go too far. These beautiful cards have a hundred of the best questions to help start meaningful conversations, and entertaining ones, too! Get your set at Southbank Centre Shop. 9 Rules for Success by British Novelist Amelia E. Barr, 1901. By Maria Popova “Genius is nothing more nor less than doing well what anyone can do badly.” The secret of success — like its very definition — remains amorphous and forever elusive. For Thoreau, it was a matter of greeting each day with joy; for Jad Abumrad, it comes after some necessary “gut churn”; for Jackson Pollock’s dad, it was about being fully awake to the world; for entrepreneur Paul Graham, it’s about purpose rather than prestige; for designer Paula Scher, it means beginning every day with a capacity for growth.
But perhaps, above all, success is about defining it yourself. Still, those who have succeed — by their own definition, as well as history’s — might be able to glean some insight into the inner workings of accomplishment. Men and women succeed because they take pains to succeed. For more of history’s timeless wisdom on writing, see H. Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter.
New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More By Scanning Your Shopping Cart. Buycott shows you a product's corporate family tree while you shop. In her keynote speech at last year’s annual Netroots Nation gathering, Darcy Burner pitched a seemingly simple idea to the thousands of bloggers and web developers in the audience. The former Microsoft MSFT +1.51% programmer and congressional candidate proposed a smartphone app allowing shoppers to swipe barcodes to check whether conservative billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch were behind a product on the shelves.
Burner figured the average supermarket shopper had no idea that buying Brawny paper towels, Angel Soft toilet paper or Dixie cups meant contributing cash to Koch Industries Koch Industries through its subsidiary Georgia-Pacific. Similarly, purchasing a pair of yoga pants containing Lycra or a Stainmaster carpet meant indirectly handing the Kochs your money (Koch Industries bought Invista, the world’s largest fiber and textiles company, in 2004 from DuPont).
More on Forbes: + show more. Today in Bizarro-world: North Korea wants to re-open Kaesong. Photo by nellynette. Depression, Not Ended. “I had no power to say ‘that’s not okay:’” Reports of harassment and abuse in the field | Context and Variation. It was getting late, the student center all but deserted. My old friend and I had a table to ourselves, awkwardly wedged among the chairs that had been set in a circle for an invited talk I had just given to some undergraduates about issues for women in science. My friend alluded to having a challenging field site. Her face, which was usually open and bright, with a smile so infectious and delighted and thoroughly optimistic you couldn’t help but love her, was subdued, careful. She talked around it for a while. Then she told me of her sexual assault in the field. The table felt too big. Another day, another story.
You know these women, because they have shared their stories on my blog. From there, Heather Shattuck-Heidorn and M. Biological anthropology has a long, feminist tradition of women and men interrogating sexism in the workplace, as well as researching and prioritizing female behaviors and friendships and reproductive strategies in human evolution. Overall climate. Next steps. Clinical Notes: U.S. Infant Mortality Drops. Rates of infant mortality declined by 12% in the U.S. from 2005 to 2011, CDC statisticians reported, with signs that the drop is continuing. Also this week: A silver lining seen in a failed asthma drug study. U.S. Infant Death Rate Takes Dive Infant mortality in the U.S. declined steadily from 6.87 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2005 to 6.05 per 1,000 in 2011, the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) reported last week.
"After a plateau from 2000 through 2005, the... rate declined by 12%," according to an NCHS data brief. "Provisional infant mortality counts for the first half of 2012 suggest a continued downward trend. " The largest percentage declines were seen in babies born to non-Hispanic black women and, geographically, in southeastern states with traditionally high rates of infant death, the agency indicated. SIDS showed the sharpest drop, to 43.3 per 100,000 population from 53.9 per 100,000 in 2005 -- a decrease of almost 20%. Eosinophil Counts Predict Xolair Success.
How the World Treats Terrorist Suspects. Yesterday the White House settled the debate about whether Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would be designated an enemy combatant with a forceful no. Instead he will be tried as a civilian in federal district court, charged with using weapons of mass destruction (with more charges likely to follow). At Tsarnaev's hospital bedside, Judge Marianne Bowler informed him of the charges, then read the defendant his rights and appointed him a lawyer. If Tsarnaev had been assigned enemy combatant status, he would have been subject to military law and could have been detained without charge until his status as an unlawful combatant was determined by a military commission.
Tsarnaev would have had access to a lawyer in such an instance, but the trial process itself would have likely been extended considerably. Of the 169 detainees still being held at Guantanamo Bay as of 2012, some of whom have been held for over a decade, only 6 have been formally charged. Israel Russia India China. Jeffrey Goldberg's Exclusive Interview With King Abdullah Of Jordan. It’s always tough to get a revealing personal interview with a political figure. It’s even rarer for that political figure to be a sitting head of state. But when you have a revealing interview with an absolute monarch that may be the hardest achievement of all. In the April edition of Atlantic Monthly, Jeffrey Goldberg landed a major interview with King Abdullah of Jordan. The interview captured Abdullah’s struggle to try to convert his troubled Middle Eastern monarchy into a modern democratic state.
Goldberg does his best to capture the man and the monarch: He seems in many ways to be a contradiction—an Arab king who happens to be a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, evangelizing for liberal, secular, democratic rule. The article goes on to capture Abdullah’s personal feelings on topics as wide-ranging as the Muslim Brotherhood to various other heads of states from the region. So honest was Abdullah’s take and how much of it was simply a smokescreen? Gates Foundation puts out call to make better condoms. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation wants to see the stigma surrounding condom use disappear. The foundation is offering grants to researchers with promising plans to create the "next generation condom," however its biggest issue with the contraceptive is simply that many men won't use them because of decreased sensitivity.
The foundation's proposal notes, "The primary drawback from the male perspective is that condoms decrease pleasure... creating a trade-off that many men find unacceptable. " Today's condoms are cheap, and easy to distribute The foundation's intent is to broadly improve safety against sexually transmitted infections by quelling social stigmas around condom use, but the proposal's guidelines don't take into account the potential for the new condom to be widely distributed. Current condoms are cheap to manufacture and easy to distribute, which is a major factor in making it an effective tool for preventing STIs and unwanted pregnancy around the globe. Frank Zappa - The Talking Asshole (from Naked Lunch)
Supreme Court Gay Marriage Roundup. You may have noticed that all your Facebook friends are now the same person, and that person is a pink equals sign on a red background. That’s because they support same-sex marriage, and the Supreme Court is hearing arguments today and tomorrow regarding the constitutionality of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California.
Here are some links to help you stay informed: SCOTUSblog, whose subject material you can probably surmise from its name, has a couple posts summarizing and analyzing the arguments here and here. Jeffrey Toobin, the New Yorker‘s primary jurisprudence writer, offers his thoughts here. Slate‘s William Saletan enumerates the increasingly desperate conservative arguments against gay marriage, while the Atlantic‘s Garance Franke-Ruta chronicles the history of the movement that led to this case. Mother Jones has both a timeline of gay-marriage legislation and a collection of Justice Antonin Scalia’s homophobic remarks. Girls and women 'hit the hardest' by global recession. 20 January 2013Last updated at 19:24 ET Girls are "the largest marginalised group in the world", says one of the report's authors Women and girls were hit the hardest by the global recession, according to child rights and development organisations.
"The world is failing girls and women," a report by Plan International and the Overseas Development Institute said. A shrinking economy sent girls' infant mortality soaring, and more females were abused or starved, they said. This could erode gains made in recent years towards reaching the Millennium Development Goals, they added. "The improvements made during the last five years are very fragile," Nigel Chapman, chief executive of child rights organisation Plan International, told BBC News. "It is shocking, because I don't think anyone's really noticing it. " Dying babies The problems started when the girls were very young, Mr Chapman explained.
Continue reading the main story Analysis Jorn MadslienBBC News More work, less food Create jobs. The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists—in 7 Charts - Jordan Weissmann. Politicians and businessmen are fond of talking about America's scientist shortage -- the dearth of engineering and lab talent that will inevitably leave us sputtering in the global economy. But perhaps it's time they start talking about our scientist surplus instead. I am by no means the first person to make this point. But I was compelled to try and illustrate it after reading a report from Inside Higher Ed on this weekend's gloomy gathering of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In short, job prospects for young science Ph.D.'s haven't been looking so hot these last few years, not only in the life sciences, which have been weak for some time, but also in fields like engineering. The graphs below, drawn from National Science Foundation data and some of my own calculations, depict Ph.D. employment at graduation. First, the big picture. The pattern reaching back to 2001 is clear -- fewer jobs, more unemployment, and more post-doc work -- especially in the sciences. The Making of The Chronic — blogs.laweekly. Click to enlarge Dr. Dre's seminal 1992 album, The Chronic, turns 20 next month. Though a sensation upon its release, the raw-but-melodic work's legend has only grown in the ensuing decades, and today seemingly every MC-producer duo fancies itself the next Dre and Snoop Dogg.
It has become the most influential rap work ever made, and perhaps even the greatest, as Jeff Weiss argues. See also: *Top 20 Greatest L.A. Rap Albums *The Chronic: The Greatest Album In Rap History But it almost never happened. A 2001 documentary from Santa Monica-based production company Xenon Pictures, Welcome to Death Row: The Rise and Fall of Death Row Records, tells the story of Knight's infamous imprint, as well as the rise of Snoop and Tupac Shakur.
Xenon gathered far more material than it could use for the film, and plans to publish much of the rest in a 2013 book: Welcome to Death Row: An Oral History of Death Row Records. Our story begins with the 1991 inception of Death Row Records. UK ISPs Block Pirate Bay’s Artist Promotions. Several UK Internet providers are blocking Pirate Bay's perfectly legal promotion platform for independent artists. The Promo Bay website is currently being blocked by BT, Virgin Media, BE and possibly several other providers. A plausible explanation is that the Promo Bay domain is listed on the same blocklist that's used to enforce the Pirate Bay blockade. However. the domain itself has never linked to infringing material, nor is it hosted on The Pirate Bay's servers. This week saw the launch of The Promo Bay, an artist promotion initiative supported by The Pirate Bay crew. The website is entirely dedicated to promoting the work of independent musicians, filmmakers and other content creators.
They get to showcase their work to an audience of hundreds and thousands of people at no cost. Initially, the promos were submitted through The Pirate Bay’s website but when the project grew too big it was outsourced to Aussie entrepreneur Will Dayble. Promo Bay locked for copyright infringement. DOJ Mysteriously Quits Monsanto Antitrust Investigation. Just a handful of companies control the US seed market. Stevie Rocco/Flickr There's an age-old tradition in Washington of making unpopular announcements when no one's listening—like, you know, the days leading up to Thanksgiving. That's when the Obama administration sneaked a tasty dish to the genetically modified seed/pesticide industry. This treat involves the unceremonious end of the Department of Justice's antitrust investigation into possible anticompetitive practices in the US seed market, which it had begun in January 2010. It's not hard to see why DOJ would take a look. What's harder to figure out is why the DOJ ended the investigation without taking any action—and did so with a near-complete lack of public information.
A DOJ spokesperson confirmed to me that the agency had "closed its investigation into possible anticompetitive practices in the seed industry," but would divulge no details. Getting market share data for an industry like seeds is a maddening task. Challenges for international law. I Am Transgendered! - Proper Etiquette when dealing with the Transgendered. For Marriage Equality; Against Affirmative Action. NZBMatrix Wasn’t Just a Pirate’s Lair Says One Of Site’s Top Releasers.
Don't witch-hunt the ones we need the most. American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals. Butler: I'm more than happy to pay my share. The Rumblr — Hitch hiked a thousand miles and brought You... Rick's US & World News Update. International Day of the Girl Child 2012. Presidential Proclamation -- National Disability Employment Awareness Month, 2012. Nobel Prize awarded to two scientists responsible for major cloning and stem cell advancements. Happy Birthday, Sartre: Why "Being-in-the-World-Ness" is the Key to the Imagination.