CISPA — the most unpopular bill on the Internet, no matter what Facebook says— passed late Thursday with a 248-168 vote in the GOP-controlled House.
What you might have missed, helpfully pointed out by Forbes‘ Andy Greenberg:
Even before it passed, the House voted to amend the bill to actually allow even more types of private sector information to be shared with government agencies, not merely in matters of cybersecurity or national security, but in the investigation of vaguely defined cybersecurity “crimes,” “protection of individuals the danger of death or serious bodily harm,” and cases where that involve the protection of minors from exploitation.
The CISPA fight now heads to the Democrat-controlled Senate. If the bill manages to reach his desk, President Obama has threatened a veto.
From : death+taxes
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Visual Dictionary Online “The Visual Dictionary is designed to help you find the right word at a glance. Filled with stunning illustrations labeled with accurate terminology in up to six languages, it is the ideal language-learning and vocabulary dictionary for use at school, at home or at work.”
Mexico introduced chocolate, corn, and chilies to the world. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
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Bison released by the American Prairie Reserve, near Malta, Mont., are among two groups set free in the state. Some are descended from one of Montana’s last wild herds.
WOLF POINT, Mont. — Sioux and Assiniboine tribe members wailed a welcome song last month as around 60 bison from Yellowstone National Park stormed onto a prairie pasture that had not felt a bison’s hoof for almost 140 years.
That historic homecoming came just 11 days after 71 pureblood bison, descended from one of Montana’s last wild herds, were released nearby onto untilled grassland owned by a charity with a vision of building a haven for prairie wildlife. Some hunters and conservationists are now calling for bison to be reintroduced to a million-acre wildlife refuge spanning this remote region.
“Populations of all native Montana wildlife have been allowed to rebound except bison; it’s time to take care of them like they once took care of us,” said Robert Magnan, 58, director of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation’s Fish and Game Department, who will oversee the transplanted Yellowstone bison program.
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Botox Offers Only Modest Migraine Relief
Botulinum toxin A, the main ingredient in Botox, is best known as an anti-wrinkle treatment, but it has several other uses as well, including treating excessive sweating and headaches. However, a review of 27 studies involving 5,000 headache patients finds that these injections are only moderately helpful for people with chronic migraines, appearing to reduce headache frequency by an average of two a month, and provide little to no relief for those with less frequent headaches. In addition, those injected with the drug report more side effects, such as muscle weakness and stiff necks. More …
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Fair game … Walden Pond, near Massachusetts. The area, made famous by Thoreau, is to feature in a game that draws on his notes. Photograph: Joseph Sohm/Corbis
Its lack of thrills, spills and multiple deaths means it is unlikely to appeal to fans of Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, but a video game based on the years Henry David Thoreau spent living alone in a Massachusetts cabin is in development, following a US government grant.
The University of Southern California has been given $40,000 by the National Endowment for the Arts to develop Walden, in which “the player will inhabit an open, three-dimensional game-world, which will simulate the geography and environment of Walden Woods”. With the game drawing from the detailed notes Thoreau wrote about the area and its landscape, flora and fauna, users will be able not only to walk in the author’s footsteps but also, said the university, “discover in the beauty of a virtual landscape the ideas and writings of this unique philosopher, and cultivate through the gameplay their own thoughts and responses to the concepts discovered there”.
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Valerie Sanders has overcome her fear of water – as long as it’s the indoor, chlorinated variety – to discover a love of swimming that brings out the worst and the best in her
I have a long and cowardly relationship with swimming. Not for me any deep-sea heroics with sharks off the shores of Malaysia, or snorkelling around shipwrecks. To my shame, I confess I have never swum in the sea; I have never dived. I have always waited for at least an hour – more like two – before taking to the water after a meal, and that water has always been the artificially turquoise blue, fragrant with chlorine, of the safely enclosed indoor swimming pool.
Yet I really do love swimming: swimming is the essence of freedom – just so long as I’m not out of my depth, and it’s a quiet Sunday lunchtime, and all the squawking children and burly dads have hauled themselves out of the water for a clubroom lunch in front of the rugby. Then, with no one cluttering the lanes, I power happily up and down, back and forth, 70 times. It has to be 70, even though 64 lengths count as a mile. “Going beyond” is one of our university’s mission slogans, so that’s what I do. I go the extra (bit of a) mile. Why stop at 64 if you have it in you to do 70? But equally, why commit to 72 if you might have to do that every week from then on?
Swimming brings out the worst in me, and not only these habits of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Over the years it has made me tell lies, deceive teachers and push past the dreamy, drifting mums with one eye on the soup of children bubbling beyond the “slow” lane; I who have myself been repeatedly overtaken on the drive to the pool by people impatient with my self-righteous adherence to the speed limit. Driving and swimming are the yin and yang of my weekend life, sharing a common history of early, long-drawn-out avoidance. I learned to do both and then pretended I couldn’t do either; then, when I was ready at last, it had to be on my terms – no diving in pools, no driving on motorways. It was of a piece with not walking until I was two (I had seen my younger brother do it, and knew the risks). Now I love it – walking, that is, and running, and Pilates, but not driving on motorways. I love all exercise, but have never learned how to do any of it properly. I have tight hamstrings, I don’t like putting my head under water, I have never mastered the crawl or the butterfly, and I swim with my head up, like a moorhen, as people of my age do, because that was how we were taught – but at least I don’t walk in the water, which seems to be the latest variant on not swimming when swimming is what you’re purporting to do.
Since when did walking become the new swimming? I long to stop and ask them, those pairs of fat friends who amble up and down the lanes, as out of place as any leisurely couple taking a stroll up the central reservation of the M25. Sometimes they vary it and walk backwards to up the challenge, or else they sneak in a normal length of breaststroke before scuttling past through a backwash, elbows jutting outwards, in an aqua power-walk of unexpected velocity. Perhaps, by keeping their feet on the pool floor, their eyes on the distant horizon, they too are avoiding the horrifying realities of actual swimming.
Like most people, I began swimming as a child. Both my parents thought it was a good idea, although my mother hated it herself and never learned to swim properly. The smell of slippery duckboards mixed with chlorine gas of trench-warfare intensity was enough to put her off, combined with the usual swimming-bath experience of muffled shouting heard through waterlogged ears. The last straw, she tells me, was returning to her changing cubicle to find a wet footprint on her liberty bodice, thrown carelessly on to the floor. Things were only slightly more advanced in my own childhood, my school hiring the local orphanage (of all places) for our weekly shivering attempt at the basic strokes. Knowing that the orphanage was for the children of drowned trawlermen did little for my confidence, and when the caretaker forgot to turn on the water heater (which happened fairly often), it was all too much like the Barents Sea to tempt me into any displays of aqua-bravery.
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US President Abraham Lincoln Suspends Habeas Corpus (This day in 1861)
In law, habeas corpus is a writ ordering that a person be brought before a judge, especially to decide whether a prisoner’s detention is lawful. Its suspension means that prisoners can be held indefinitely without being charged. During the US Civil War, President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus to arrest and silence Southern dissenters. A legal battle ensued, and Lincoln prevailed. Habeas corpus has been suspended numerous times in US history, most recently in what year? More…
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A Rumbling of Things Unknown: Marilyn Monroe
Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control.
Actress must have no mouth.
She was luminous – on that much everyone seems to agree. Hers is not the flawless matt beauty of Dietrich or Garbo. She is, as one might say, more curvy – I am of course referring to her face, on which, unlike Dietrich, Garbo or indeed Elizabeth Taylor (whom she saw as a rival), there isn’t a single straight line. There is no flattening wash over this face. Even Laurence Olivier, who mostly couldn’t stand her, had to concede that every time she appears in The Prince and the Showgirl, she lights up the scene (the cinematographer Jack Cardiff said that she glowed). That is just one of the things about her that makes her inimitable – which is why the recent My Week with Marilyn could not but fail somewhere as a film. But the question of what – in the aura that surrounds her – she was lighting up or revealing, other than herself, is rarely asked. Luminousness can be a cover – in Hollywood, its own most perfect screen. Monroe’s beauty is dazzling, blinding (no other actress is defined in quite these terms). Of what, then, is she the decoy? What does she allow us to see and not to see? Monroe herself knew the difference between seeing and looking. ‘Men do not see me,’ she said, ‘they just lay their eyes on me.’
In Reno in the summer of 1960, the Manchester Guardian journalist Bill Weatherby found himself Monroe’s confidant. He couldn’t quite understand why, but thought it might have been because he began by showing no interest in her; he had gone to interview Arthur Miller just before filming started on The Misfits, which would be Monroe’s last finished film. ‘I’ve seen you talk,’ he reports her saying, ‘to everyone but me.’
Read more HERE.
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In Nothing We Trust
MUNCIE, Ind.—Johnny Whitmire shuts off his lawn mower and takes a long draw from a water bottle. He sloshes the liquid from cheek to cheek and squirts it between his work boots. He is sweating through his white T-shirt. His jeans are dirty. His middle-aged back hurts like hell. But the calf-high grass is cut, and the weeds are tamed at 1900 W. 10th St., a house that Whitmire and his family once called home. “I’ve decided to keep the place up,” he says, “because I hope to buy it back from the bank.”Whitmire tells a familiar story of how public and private institutions derailed an American’s dream: In 2000, he bought the $40,000 house with no money down and a $620 monthly mortgage. He made every payment. Then, in the fall of 2010, his partially disabled wife lost her state job. “Governor [Mitch] Daniels slashed the budget, and they looked for any excuse to squeeze people out,” Whitmire says. “We got lost in that shuffle—cut adrift.” The Whitmires couldn’t make their payments anymore.They applied for a trial loan-modification through an Obama administration program, and when it was granted, their monthly bill fell to $473.87. But, like nearly a million others, the modification was canceled. After charging the lower rate for three months, their mortgage lender reinstated the higher fee and billed the family $1,878.88 in back payments. Whitmire didn’t have that kind of cash and couldn’t get it, so he and his wife filed for bankruptcy. His attorney advised him to live in the house until the bank foreclosed, but “I don’t believe in a free lunch,” Whitmire says. He moved out, leaving the keys on the kitchen table. “I thought the bank should have them.”
Read more HERE.
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THE FRENCH HORN IS THE BEST
The Big Question: one instrument takes us back to the beginning of music. Jasper Rees started learning it when he was ten…
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, May/June 2012
Soon after I began on the French horn as a ten-year-old—the earliest, for dental reasons, that anyone should grapple with that narrow mouthpiece—I read that it is the joint hardest instrument to learn. (Alongside the oboe.) I went through phases of boasting, then moping, about what turned out to be all too true. All horn players who put in the hours and years earn membership of an exclusive society, the musical equivalent of the Alpine Club. Why? Because mistakes in exposed places are easy to make and tend to be costly, and yet there’s a matchless thrill that comes with mastery.
And then of course there is the profound, all but prelapsarian beauty of the sound. More than with any other instrument, those who choose to learn the French horn are making a direct link to music’s very beginnings, when man first blew through a conical horn. Even now its uniquely natural sound is embedded in our collective DNA: it’s the instrument, a wise man once said, of primitive alarm, but also of honeyed repose. The staple tunes a good young learner attempts will include a Mozart concerto which links friskily back to the hunt.
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Violence rages in Sudan-South Sudan conflict – The Big Picture – Boston.com
Fighting continues along the border of Sudan and South Sudan this week. President Salva Kiir of South Sudan said the latest attacks amounted to a declaration of war after more bombs were dropped on his country. The conflict stems from South Sudan temporarily taking control of the oil-rich border town Heglig, which Sudan claims as its own. Tension between the two countries over control of oil resources and where the border lies has been ongoing since South Sudan seceded from Sudan in July of last year as a result of a 2005 peace treaty that ended decades of war. — Lloyd Young(24 photos total)
A Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA) soldier looks at warplanes as he lies on the ground to take cover beside a road during an air strike by the Sudanese air force in Rubkona near Bentiu on April 23. Sudanese warplanes carried out air strikes on South Sudan on Monday, killing three people near the southern oil town of Bentiu, residents and military officials said, three days after South Sudan pulled out of a disputed oil field. (Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)
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Why Pygmies of Africa are so short…
New research suggests unique changes in genome may be the reason
Why the Pygmies of West Africa have such short stature, while neighboring groups don’t, has been somewhat of a mystery. Now new research suggests unique changes in the Pygmy’s genome have both led to adaptations for living in the forest as well as kept them short.
Researchers analyzed the genomes, the “building code” that directs how an organism is put together, of Western African Pygmies in Cameroon, whose men average 4 feet, 11 inches tall, and compared them with their neighboring relatives, the Bantus, who average 5 feet, 6 inches, to see whether these differences were genetic or a factor of their environment.
“There’s been a long-standing debate about why Pygmies are so short and whether it is an adaptation to living in a tropical environment,” study researcher Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania said in a statement. “Our findings are telling us that the genetic basis of complex traits like height may be very different in globally diverse populations.”
Read more HERE.
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What do debutante balls, the Japanese tea ceremony, Ponzi schemes and doubting clergy all have in common?
A single cell, such as a bacterium, is the simplest thing that can be alive. In addition to the materials from which it is constructed, it needs three features: a way of capturing energy (a metabolism), a way of reproducing (genes or something like genes) and a membrane that lets in what needs to come in and keeps out the rest.
Converging lines of research from various schools in biology agree on these three necessities, but there is substantial unresolved controversy about the order in which they must have emerged at the origin of life. If the history of evolutionary biology continues along the paths it has followed so far, it is likely that the solution to this problem will prove to be some ingenious and indirect process of chance combinations and gradual refinements, in which metabolism-like cycles and reproduction-like processes joined forces with non-living membranes that were already floating around, objets trouvés that could be appropriated and exploited.
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Truk Lagoon, known as Chuuk – a group of tropical paradise islands in the Federal States of Micronesia – offers adrenaline-junky scuba divers a cool yet creepy underwater adventure in shark-infested Pacific waters while wreck diving the mysterious Ghost Fleet of Truk Lagoon. More than 50 major shipwrecks from WWII litter the seabed, making the undersea wonder of the world the best shipwreck diving destination on the globe. In 1944, Americans launched Operation Hailstone, which has been called the Japanese Pearl Harbor, and the bombardment lasted for three days. The attack wiped out 60 ships and 275 airplanes, sinking them to the bottom of the lagoon, so that now it is the biggest ship graveyard in the world. Most of the wrecks were left untouched for nearly 25 years since people feared setting off the thousands of sunken bombs. Many of the shipwrecks in the scuba diving paradise have full cargo holds full of fighter aircraft, tanks, bulldozers, railroad cars, motorcycles, torpedoes, mines, bombs, boxes of munitions, radios, thousands of various weapons, human remains, and other artifacts. More than 3,000 people were thought to have been killed and some divers swear that the wrecks in Truk Lagoon are haunted. Destination Truth conducted an underwater ghost hunting expedition in Truk Lagoon. While diving at the Hoki Maru, the divers recorded sounds of running engines in the cargo hold full of trucks. Here’s a virtual adventure with wreck divers who explored and photographed the Ghost Fleet of Truk Lagoon. This is underwater awesomeness! We love these pics! [33 Photos]
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Analytical thinking erodes belief in God
Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein famously did not believe in a supernatural God, and neither do some scientists today. It now appears there may be a good reason for this: thinking analytically dims supernatural beliefs, apparently by opposing the intuitive thought processes that underpin them.
The vast majority of people believe in a supernatural god or gods, says social psychologist Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Yet there are hundreds of thousands of atheists and agnostics who do not. While scientists have begun to study the psychology of belief, we know little about what causes disbelief.
Humans use two separate cognitive systems for processing information: one that is fast, emotional and intuitive, and another that is slower and more analytical.
The first system innately imputes purpose, personality or mental states to objects, leading to supernatural beliefs. People who rely more on intuitive thinking are more likely to be believers, while the more analytical are less likely. This doesn’t necessarily mean analytical thinking causes disbelief, but activating analytical thinking can override the intuitive system – and vice versa. Norenzayan used this to test the causal relationship.
Read more HERE.
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The “Romantic Lighting” was all set when we arrived to our suite.
This is the second part in a series exploring the seedy world of by-the-hour sex hotels. We previously visited the Kew Motor Inn.
When my fellow reporter and I walked up to the Liberty Inn, I was practically in disbelief. I had passed the sordid hotel, set a on veritable island of sorts along 14th street and the West Side Highway, on a near daily basis during my runs along the Hudson River. How could I not have known — for the past several years now — that alongside the Meatpacking District’s row of overpriced shops was an hourly hotel clearly designed for those looking to get laid?
BULLETPROOF GLASS AND VENDING MACHINE LUBE
I stifled a laugh with my fellow reporter Zach when we walked in — it was pretty embarrassing to ask for the Romantic Interlude suite with a colleague. Much like the other hotels we visited, the “front desk” was protected by a sheath of incredibly thick, probably bulletproof glass. As I handed the attendant my credit card to shell out $120 for three hours in a souped up room complete with Jacuzzi, he asked me for the “required” three dollars in cash. Maybe to stick down a stripper’s G-string? Who knows.
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