My family has always been competitive. My husband, Simon, once beat his head on the carpet in anguish when I took his queen during a friendly chess game. My dad panics if he can’t complete a Fiendish Sudoku in ten minutes; and during TV quiz shows, I am regularly compelled to shout at the paralysed idiot who can’t remember basic facts.
It never occurred to me, however, that one day the blinking rabbit in the studio lights would be me. [...]
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VHeadline commentarist Oscar Heck writes: They’re at it again … as in 2002 and 2003 … anti-Chavez and anti-Venezuela hate-propaganda is being propagated by mainstream corporate media outlets in the USA and by US-based “think-tanks” and “analysts” and “experts.” There have been hundreds of articles in the last few weeks attacking Chavez in any fashion possible … but some of the articles, even if they are opinion articles, sound more like hate articles. Shelley Goldschlager is holding a Chop Chop Chicken, the poultry in question being a miniature version on a platter, all made of wood. With her right hand, she takes a wooden knife and starts cutting off a leg, the utensil separating the two tiny pieces of Velcro that held appendage and body together. “The child gets to carve the turkey, too,” she says. “Cutting is fine motor skills development.” [...] The Inspiraton for the movie Rain Man, Kim Peek just passed on. He was a ‘genuis’ of great porporation. Author Rich Shull explains Mr.Peeks Mind the simple genuis that is not so complicated after all. The Autism Picture thoughts that made him work are explained to the dismay of psychology guru’s- expecting a grand explanation. It takes one to know one as they say. MARGOT J. NOBLET Margot J. Noblet, 58, of Leawood, KS, passed away on Monday, December 14, 2009, at the Kansas City Hospice House. Visitation will be from 6-8 p.m. Wednesday, December 16, at Mt. Moriah and Freeman Funeral Home, 10507 Holmes Road, Kansas City, MO. Funeral services will be held at 11 a.m. on Thursday, December 17, at the funeral home with burial in Mt. Moriah Cemetery. [...] Wired for invention: Don Baker of Mukilteo has held 18 patents during a lifetime thinking of better ways to make things work. Dan Baker was sitting in the doctor’s office. He recently had knee surgery, and now it was time to take out the sutures. The doctor pulled out a surgical staple remover, what looks like a cross between tweezers and scissors. Baker did a double-take. “I have a patent on that damn thing,” he remarked. [...] Relearning how to live after a brain injury There had been fires all that summer around South Lake Tahoe, flushing the wild animals from the places they normally grazed into the open. As Aram Attarian and Carol Welsh set out for their Menlo Park home that morning in 1996, the only smudge on a day Welsh remembers as “postcard-perfect” was the layer of smoke that blanketed the horizon. They had ridden to Tahoe on his motorcycle to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. Attarian took pictures of Welsh, stretched out on a rock in her biker chick leathers, and one of himself in which he looked exactly like Jack Nicholson in “Easy Rider.” As they started back, a life filled with such heedless, carefree mornings stretched out before them like the road ahead. [...] A while back, I was asked to speak at a convention of the world’s smartest people – MENSA. My topic was Look At It This Way. My point was that archeologists looking at people years off and anthropologists looking at people miles off make it plain that what we believe to be true is not so much a fact as a simple function of time and space. Remember the naive natives in The Gods Must Be Crazy who thought a coke bottle was truly miraculous? Remember the medical textbooks a century ago that said masturbation diverted blood from the brain to the genitals and caused irreversible dementia? In the here and now, people believe that religion encourages peace and understanding despite its long history of bloody divisiveness. Indeed, is it safe to say that not even half of what is believed by any culture comes even remotely close to reality? Humans are not too intelligent, rather easily fooled, pattern seeking, storytelling animals who weave narratives and create myths. [...] INCLINE VILLAGE, Nev. — On Friday I had the distinct pleasure of taking some Mensans on a tour or Virginia City. Mensa is not an acronym, as I had supposed, but is a Latin word for table. “We sit around a table and talk.” Fact is, to become a Mensan, one’s IQ must fall into the rarified atmosphere of the top 2 percentile. We met at the Silver Legacy and were bused up to the Comstock at the civilized hour of one o’clock. [...] |
Composite of a Series of Images Taken From Space Aboard the Station
 This is a composite of a series of images photographed from a mounted camera on the Earth-orbiting International Space Station, from approximately 240 miles above Earth. Space station hardware in the foreground includes the Mini-Research Module (MRM1, center) and a Russian Progress vehicle docked to the Pirs Docking Compartment (right). Expedition 31 Flight Engineer Don Pettit said of the photographic techniques used to achieve the images: "My star trail images are made by taking a time exposure of about 10 to 15 minutes. However, with modern digital cameras, 30 seconds is about the longest exposure possible, due to electronic detector noise effectively snowing out the image. To achieve the longer exposures I do what many amateur astronomers do. I take multiple 30-second exposures, then 'stack' them using imaging software, thus producing the longer exposure." A total of 47 images photographed by the astronaut-monitored stationary camera were combined to create this composite. Image Credit: NASA Read More |
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