The General Blogger

Spring-pendulum seismometers were used before electronics were able to measure the size of earthquakes. A medium-sized spring-pendulum seismometer, about three stories tall, is located in Mexico City, Mexico and is still in use. But history of earthquakes is older; exists since from the beginning of mankind. Almost every year we hear together how this planet moves, shaking up, shifting and killed thousand of lives on top of it. An earthquake is unpredictable. It comes often with no warning. Some earthquake collaborate with Tsunami and that makes his killing score rise up to hundreds of thousands lives. There are approximately a half million detectable earthquakes each year. Of the 500,000 earthquakes, only about 100,000 can be felt. But, only about 100 of them can cause damage. In order to become more familiar with this deadly act of nature I have put together a list of interesting facts many people wouldn’t know about.

READ HERE

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Garrison Keillor’s Stroke: MY ABOVE AVERAGE STROKE

After a blood clot infiltrated his gray matter, the Prairie Home Companion host started thinking seriously about sex (and other important stuff)

People keep asking about my stroke.

I am okay, really–not staggering around with one arm hanging limp, or glassy-eyed or slurring my speech, flecks of spittle on my lips. And yet people still say, “How are you doing?” in that special way that means, “Tell us the painful truth and feel free to cry.” Really, it was only a minor stroke, but I will tell about it one last time and then let’s move on to something interesting–such as sex or sweet corn or the Rapture–and I will never discuss this again.

Thank you for your patience.

It happened on Labor Day, 2009, in Minneapolis, at a massage studio (the kind with the Japanese prints and the Peruvian flute music and the careful placement of the towel of modesty). I lay on my belly under the hands of the powerful Jamaican masseuse, Angelica, who was working on my neck and shoulders and telling me how good her life had been since she turned it over to the Lord Jesus Christ and let Him make all the decisions.

“Including what to eat?” I asked.

Yes, she said.

I started to say something witty about honey and locusts and whoa my mouth was numb, my speech slurred. My brain was melting. I heisted up on my elbows. I took a deep breath.

She said, “Are you okay?”

I said (as I was brought up to say), “I am just fine.”

READ MORE HERE

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North American Indian Timeline (1492-1999)

1492

From their nakedness, Columbus inferred the native people to be an inferior race. Columbus wrote of the Indians he encountered, “They all go around as naked as their mothers bore them; and also the women.” However, he noted that “they could easily be commanded and made to work, to sow and to do whatever might be needed, to build towns and be taught to wear clothes and adopt our ways.” Although Columbus also wrote that “they are the best people in the world and above all the gentlest,” his record of the first encounter between Europeans and New World Indians was filled with accounts of enslavement, murder, and rape.

North American Indian Timeline (1492-1999).

LATEST NEWS JAPANESE EARTHQUAKE / NUCLEAR DISASTER:

AP | BBC News | CNN Breaking News | Google News | Google Crisis Response | Kyodo News | Reuters News

Earthquake and Tsunami Relief: How to Help >>

Don’t donate money to Japan

Individuals are doing it, banks are doing it — faced with the horrific news and pictures from Japan, everybody wants to do something, and the obvious thing to do is to donate money to some relief fund or other.

Please don’t.

We went through this after the Haiti earthquake, and all of the arguments which applied there apply to Japan as well. Earmarking funds is a really good way of hobbling relief organizations and ensuring that they have to leave large piles of money unspent in one place while facing urgent needs in other places. And as Matthew Bishop and Michael Green said last year, we are all better at responding to human suffering caused by dramatic, telegenic emergencies than to the much greater loss of life from ongoing hunger, disease and conflict. That often results in a mess of uncoordinated NGOs parachuting in to emergency areas with lots of good intentions, where a strategic official sector response would be much more effective. Meanwhile, the smaller and less visible emergencies where NGOs can do the most good are left unfunded.

In the specific case of Japan, there’s all the more reason not to donate money. Japan is a wealthy country which is responding to the disaster, among other things, by printing hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of new money. Money is not the bottleneck here: if money is needed, Japan can raise it. On top of that, it’s still extremely unclear how or where organizations like globalgiving intend on spending the money that they’re currently raising for Japan — so far we’re just told that the money “will help survivors and victims get necessary services,” which is basically code for “we have no idea what we’re going to do with the money, but we’ll probably think of something.”

Read More Here

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TrueCar “Compare national, regional and local car prices to find what others paid for new cars. View comprehensive price reports to find the best new car deal.”

Within 20 minutes of quitting smoking, a person’s blood pressure returns to normal. Within one year, the chance of suffering a heart attack decreases by half. – Provided by RandomHistory.com

Exact time now

100 Time-Saving Search Engines for Serious Scholars

While burying yourself in the stacks at the library is one way to get some serious research done, with today’s technology you can do quite a bit of useful searching before you ever set foot inside a library. Undergraduates and grad students alike will appreciate the usefulness of these search engines that allow them to find books, journal articles and even primary source material for whatever kind of research they’re working on and that return only serious, academic results so time isn’t wasted on unprofessional resources.

Start off your research with one of these more general academic search engines.

READ HERE.

Originally posted 2011-03-16 11:31:18. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Carbon isotope analysis: a scientific way to know just how much soda kids are drinking behind parents’ backs?

One way to know how much soda people drink is to ask them.

The problem? We tend to underestimate, lie or forget what we’ve consumed.

And this is a challenge for researchers who study the .

A new published in the Journal of Nutrition explains a technique that could help researchers get a good measurement of sugary beverage consumption — by analyzing a piece of hair or a blood sample.

Researcher Diane O’Brien of the University of Alaska and her colleagues have used carbon to develop their measuring tool. “We’re isolating the [carbon] isotope ratio in a specific molecule,” explains O’Brien. The molecule is an amino acid called alanine, which captures carbon from sugars.

It turns out that when you consume sweetened soda, slightly more of a particular kind of carbon called C-13 gets trapped in alanine and incorporated into proteins. And proteins hang around in the body much longer than sugar does. So the scientists say they can sample proteins to look for extra amounts of C-13 in alanine. People with a lot of C-13 are likely to be people who have consumed a lot of corn syrup and cane sugar.

Using this technique, O’Brien says, you can capture a longer-term picture of sugar consumption compared with urine samples — which only reveal how much sugar a person has consumed in the past day or so.

Carbon isotope analysis has helped scientists piece together ancient dietary patterns, explains of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in a commentary about the study: “The use of stable isotope signatures has even provided information about the diet of Otzi [aka The Iceman],the 5,000-year-old natural mummy found in the Alps in 1991.”

And he writes that he thinks the technique will be helpful for researchers studying the obesity epidemic.

“This should be a major step toward resolving the controversy over the role of
caloric sweetener intake in the development of obesity,” writes Schoeller.

Not everyone is convinced.

Read all of this at NPR.

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Today we have another splendid photochrom print. The photograph was taken in 1899 and it shows an Indian man and his wife. The man’s name was Pee Viggi. His wife’s name is not recorded.

via.

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45 Great Articles about Computers and the Internet.

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First Australians

Aboriginals had the continent to themselves for 50,000 years. Today they make up less than 3 percent of the population, and their traditional lifestyle is disappearing. Almost. In the homelands the ancient ways live on.

A finger across the throat and a glance seaward. That’s the signal. The two men grip their spears, hand-carved from stringybark trees, and walk barefoot over the red soil to the water’s edge. Then into the aluminum dinghy, engine revved, and across a warm shallow bay of the Arafura Sea, at the wild edge of Australia’s Northern Territory.

Terrence Gaypalwani stands at the bow, feet spread for balance, staring intently at the water and indicating with the tip of his spear which direction to travel. He’s 29 years old, mid-career as a hunter. Peter Yiliyarr, over 40, a senior citizen, works the motor. The shoreline’s a lattice of mangrove roots; the sun’s a heat lamp. No sign of another human. Gaypalwani stares, points. Thirty minutes. The men haven’t spoken, though even when they’re not hunting, the Yolngu sometimes communicate solely in sign language.

Then Gaypalwani raises his spear, cocks his shoulder, and I look over the side of the dinghy and see a great shadow in the water. Yiliyarr guns the motor, and the spear is heaved, a violent throw. The shadow rises, the spear falls, and the two intersect at the water’s surface.

The turtle, struck, dives deep. It’s as big around as a card table and probably older than either of the men. The metal tip of the spear, buried in the turtle’s shell, dislodges from the shaft, as designed. The shaft floats off—they’ll retrieve it later—but a rope has been tied to the notched base of the spearhead, and the line whizzes out, fed from a coil by Yiliyarr. Both men have thin, elongated scars across their palms and chests. The line runs completely free, though attached to the other end is a white, basketball-size buoy. It flies from the boat and disappears beneath the water. The men stand, scanning.

Read more HERE.

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Jobless Youth: Europe’s Hollow Efforts to Save a Lost Generation

Europe is failing in the fight against youth unemployment. While the German government’s efforts remain largely symbolic, Southern European leaders pander to older voters by defending the status quo.

Stylia Kampani did everything right, and she still doesn’t know what the future holds for her. The 23-year-old studied international relations in her native Greece and spent a year at the University of Bremen in northern Germany. She completed an internship at the foreign ministry in Athens and worked for the Greek Embassy in Berlin. Now she is doing an unpaid internship with the prestigious Athens daily newspaper Kathimerini. And what happens after that? “Good question,” says Kampani. “I don’t know.”

“None of my friends believes that we have a future or will be able to live a normal life,” says Kampani. “That wasn’t quite the case four years ago.”

Four years ago — that was before the euro crisis began. Since then, the Greek government has approved a series of austerity programs, which have been especially hard on young people. The unemployment rate among Greeks under 25 has been above 50 percent for months. The situation is similarly dramatic in Spain, Portugal and Italy. According to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics office, the rate of unemployment among young adults in the EU has climbed to 23.5 percent. A lost generation is taking shape in Europe. And European governments seem clueless when they hear the things people like Athenian university graduate Alexandros are saying: “We don’t want to leave Greece, but the constant uncertainty makes us tired and depressed.”

Read it all HERE.

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