It’s a fine line, the difference between passionate fan and scary insane person. When you first meet Greg Cauley, you’re not sure which one you’re getting. Especially when the guy tells you he cares about the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Tar Heels so much he considers the school’s teams his betrothed.
Greg Cauley is 58 years old and he’s been to every Carolina home football game since 1974. He’s been to every home basketball game since 1985.During that football streak, he’s only missed one road game, and that was because the Tar Heels football team played in Maryland at the same time as the basketball team played a home game. He’s traveled to 30 states to see the Tar Heels play. He has the ticket stubs to prove it, stuffed into an overflowing Saucony shoebox. He has a banner signed by every single Tar Heel basketball player and coach since 1975. Dean Smith. Michael Jordan. Tyler Hansbrough. They’re all there. He’s recorded every game on TV since 1982. The Carolina basketball powers-that-be know him so well that in February, for his 500th basketball game in the Smith Center, against Virginia, the ushers delivered a custom-made “500″ cookie cake right to his seat. In his backyard stands a 3/4th-scale replica of the Victory Well on UNC’s campus.
But Cauley’s not who you might expect. A First Citizens Bank branch manager, he doesn’t even live in Chapel Hill, but rather, five miles outside a tiny town called Kinston, down a country highway called Vine Swamp Road. A humble one-story house sits on two acres. What looks like an endless strip of farmland borders his property to the north, and to the east two dozen cattle graze. A neighbor two houses down lives in an actual log cabin. All this, more than two hours from Tobacco Road.
“I just don’t know how he does it,” says Tommy Howard, one of Cauley’s oldest friends. “It’s just so way over the top, over and beyond. I know most of us sports fans are a little crazy, but Greg is just….he’s Greg.”
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Israel Says No to Underweight Models
In an effort to reduce the incidence of eating disorders and promote a healthy body image, the Israeli government has passed a law prohibiting the use of underweight models on runways and in ad campaigns and requiring advertisers to disclose whether an image was altered to make a model appear thinner. The new legislation requires every model to provide medical proof, in the form of a recent doctor’s report, certifying that he or she has a body mass index of at least 18.5. More …
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Zillow.com: Real Estate, Homes for Sale and Real Estate Values “Find homes for sale, rentals, home values, mortgages, and more. Real estate info for practically every home in the U.S.”
Women in the United States increasingly began smoking publicly in the 1920s when the cigarette was adopted by advertisers as a symbol of equality, rebellion, and women’s independence. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
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Napoleonic Code Adopted in France (1804)
One of Napoleon’s first priorities after coming to power was revising the outdated French legal system. The resulting code was a clear framework of laws regarding property, family, and personal rights, replacing an antiquated, confusing patchwork of feudal laws. The code has since been amended but remains in effect in France. In the 200 years since it was enacted, the code has also influenced the laws of many European countries, the US state of Louisiana, and what Middle Eastern country? More…
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A bizarre and violent outburst by a Florida Atlantic University student during a lecture on evolution was caught on camera yesterday and uploaded online.
According to Associate Professor Stephen M. Kajiura, the young woman, Jonatha Carr, became “increasingly belligerent” after he was unable to answer to her question, “how does evolution kill black people.”
He attempted to explain to Carr that evolution doesn’t kill people, but Carr refused to accept his response, and began ranting and raving before threatening to kill the professor and fellow students.
Kajiura was eventually forced to call the police. A follow-up video shows Carr being dragged into a police cruiser and tased.
Back in the classroom, Kajiura attempted to return to the lecture, but only half the students stayed to listen — and even they weren’t paying much attention. “No one could concentrate,” said student Rachel Bustamante. “Everyone gave up and started texting.”
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6 Psychotic Punishments Doled Out by Famous Superheroes.
Hike America’s National Park System from the comfort of your chair.
Today is World Down Syndrome Day.
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Danica Russell, the wife of Invisible Children co-founder Jason Russell, has just released a statement concerning the cause of her husband’s naked nervous breakdown, which occurred last week near SeaWorld San Diego.
According to Ms. Russell, the doctors who have examined Jason diagnosed him with a condition called “brief reactive psychosis,” which she claims is brought on “by extreme exhaustion, stress and dehydration.”
Her statement continues:
Though new to us, the doctors say this is a common experience given the great mental, emotional and physical shock his body has gone through in these last two weeks. Even for us, it’s hard to understand the sudden transition from relative anonymity to worldwide attention -both raves and ridicules, in a matter of days.
The KONY 2012 mastermind will remain under observation for at least the next few weeks. His wife believes he will eventually resume his role with Invisible Children, but says the road to full recovery “could take months.”
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Tim Tebow is headed to New Jersey after being pushed out of Denver by Peyton Manning.
NBC Sports reports that the Jets gave up a fourth-round draft pick for Tebow, who will now be nipping at starting QB Mark Sanchez’s Achilles heel.
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“Why I Left Goldman Sachs” (VERSION TWO)
This is a longer and still far from perfect post in response to the recent OpEd in the Times. Sorry my original one had so many typos but I was rushing to post something before leaving on a few day vacation with my family, which I am still on…
Revised from the post on WEDNESDAY.
I read the OpEd in the New York Times upon waking early, very early, to get some work done before heading off on a short vacation with my family. I don’t know the author Greg Smith, nor do I know anyone who knows him personally. I do know a lot of people who have worked, and do work, at Goldman Sachs. I am a former partner (left in 2002), as is my husband Greg (left in 2000), and I have many close friends who are or have been partners as well. Needless to say, there has been a flurry of emails and phone calls regarding what Mr. Smith has said so very publicly. I also went online and read many of the articles that have been written in response. Talk about a diversity of opinions!
Who am I to challenge what Mr. Smith has said? Based on his background, he certainly seems like a credible guy. He has worked at Goldman for 12 years, has a big title and more. I have known many disgruntled employees and none have ever done something like this. None. For that reason alone I felt I had to pay attention. As a rule, I love people who are really brave and I really dislike people who are passive aggressive. Only Mr. Smith knows which one he is. So although I am not directly challenging Mr. Smith, I did work at the firm for 14 years, was the youngest woman and first woman trader to be made partner in 1996, and served on multiple committees for the firm including the firm’s partnership committee, and thus want to weigh in. That committee was, and I believe still is, responsible for all of Goldman’s people practices, had as members many management committee members and business line heads, and reported to the board of directors in some form. That said, I did leave the firm in 2002, which, my children point out, is a very long time ago.
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First published online by Alex Rayner.It’s Monday night, the kids are in bed, and I am trying to kill Osama bin Laden. I stalk through his Abbottabad compound and I aim my rifle at the first person I see, only to discover he’s my brother in arms, aka “OverdoseRocks”. So I walk downstairs into a prayer room, at which point my gun accidentally goes off. Then the mission is over. We were victorious.Next, I join US servicemen during the 2007 surge in Iraq. For about three minutes I kick about a palm-lined boulevard, strafing apartment buildings. I am ambushed. In my dying moments, I am presented with an advert for a game in which I can embody a cheetah and kill an antelope, but I have had enough bloodshed for one evening.I have been on the Kuma Games site, an online entertainment developer and, according to reports on Iranian television, an international distributor of military propaganda. Kuma produces a range of games, from second world war air-battle shoot-’em-ups for the History Channel, through to the carnivore-themed I Predator, a tie-in for the cable station Animal Planet. Yet it’s the company’s Kuma\War series of topical military games, as well as a more discreet line of Arabic-language first-person shooter games, that have piqued media attention. During a televised confession on Iranian TV, alleged US agent and former marine Amir Mirzai Hekmati said he had worked for Kuma, and it was a CIA front company.
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Kevin Anchukaitis, an assistant research professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, is conducting a tree-ring study to analyze drought patterns in Guatemala.
Tuesday, March 13
After lunch, Edwin Castellanos, Diego Pons and I pack one of the university’s 4-by-4 trucks and head out from Guatemala City for Quetzaltenango (which everyone in Guatemala calls Xela) in the western highlands. On the way, we rendezvous with my collaborator Matthew Taylor and two of his students, Becky Brice and Mike Schutte, who have just arrived in the country.
Matthew is a professor at the University of Denver, and together we’ve been working these last three years on a project financed by the National Science Foundation Geography and Spatial Sciences program to investigate past droughts in the region using tree rings. Matthew has decades of experience working in the field in Guatemala and has been involving his graduate and undergraduate students in our fieldwork from the very beginning.
There are two main goals of our research. First, we’ve been establishing the basis for using various tree species in Guatemala for dendrochronology. This requires first establishing that ring formation in these species is annual, and that patterns of wide and narrow rings are the same among trees at a site. We also need to demonstrate that ring widths vary in a biologically consistent way with the local climate. So far, we’ve determined that two high-elevation conifer species meet these requirements.
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A Christian missionary sets out to convert a remote Amazonian tribe. He lives with them for years in primitive conditions, learns their extremely difficult language, risks his life battling malaria, giant anacondas, and sometimes the tribe itself. In a plot twist, instead of converting them he loses his faith, morphing from an evangelist trying to translate the Bible into an academic determined to understand the people he’s come to respect and love.
Along the way, the former missionary discovers that the language these people speak doesn’t follow one of the fundamental tenets of linguistics, a finding that would seem to turn the field on its head, undermine basic assumptions about how children learn to communicate, and dethrone the discipline’s long-reigning king, who also happens to be among the most well-known and influential intellectuals of the 20th century.
It feels like a movie, and it may in fact turn into one—there’s a script and producers on board. It’s already a documentary that will air in May on the Smithsonian Channel. A play is in the works in London. And the man who lived the story, Daniel Everett, has written two books about it. His 2008 memoir Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, is filled with Joseph Conrad-esque drama. The new book, Language: The Cultural Tool, which is lighter on jungle anecdotes, instead takes square aim at Noam Chomsky, who has remained the pre-eminent figure in linguistics since the 1960s, thanks to the brilliance of his ideas and the force of his personality.
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Study: 96 percent of vertebrates descended from common ancestor with ‘sixth sense’
Jon Weinstein and Lance Grande, Field Museum of Natural History
A juvenile paddlefish filter feeds in a tank at Shedd Aquarium, Chicago.
Although humans experience the world through five senses, sharks, paddlefishes and certain other aquatic vertebrates have another sense: They can detect weak electrical fields in the water and use this information to detect prey, communicate and orient themselves. Now, a study in the Oct. 11 issue of Nature Communications that caps more than 25 years of work finds that the vast majority of vertebrates — some 30,000 species of land animals (including humans) and a roughly equal number of ray-finned fishes — descended from a common ancestor that had a well-developed electroreceptive system.
This ancestor was probably a predatory marine fish with good eyesight, jaws and teeth and a lateral line system for detecting water movements, visible as a stripe along the flank of most fishes. It lived around 500 million years ago.
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Photo Gallery – The Effects of African Dust on Coral Reefs and Human Health
Eugene Shinn took the photographs in this gallery over a period of about fifty years at two locations, Grecian Rocks and Carysfort Reef, in the Key Largo Coral Reef Marine Sanctuary in Florida.
At Grecian Rocks, and at Carysfort Reef about 15 kilometers to the north, clear evidence can be seen of the changes affecting these corals. In some of the earlier photos the aftermath of Hurricane Donna is apparent in the damage that can be seen at some locations. Donna was a Category 4 hurricane when it made landfall in Florida in 1960. In 1978-79, staghorn and elkhorn corals suffered an extensive die-off in Florida. This change can be seen clearly in the first and last star coral photo sets at Grecian Rocks, and in the brain coral photo set from Carysfort Reef. >By the late 1990s, some of the corals that remained at these locations were afflicted with black band disease, algal infestation, or coral bleaching. USGS scientists are investigating whether or not the greater amounts of dust and concentrations of chemicals in that dust coming out of Africa are factors in the large scale changes in Caribbean coral reefs.
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The noise of cars, machines and other forms of human activity could be affecting growth of wild flowers and trees, as well as animals nearby.
Man-made noise may be harmful to some plants because of the long-term impact it has on animals that pollinate flowers and disperse seeds, scientists found in tests near the noisy gas wells of New Mexico, which have compressors running 24 hours a day.
The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, investigated the noise preferences of different animals that feed on the seeds of the pinon pine tree. It found that certain species, such as western scrub jays, tended to avoid noise, while other seed-eaters, such as mice, appeared to prefer foraging in noisy areas.
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Around 1933?
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She threw up in the bathroom after every bite of sushi. We were at Nobu, a relatively expensive sushi place in NYC. Earlier that day she had gone to the doctor and had her stomach stapled. Actually, that’s not quite correct. It was a newer technology. There was a band surgically placed inside of her stomach. When she wanted to prevent herself from eating, she would go to the doctor and he would tighten the band. And then later, she would get him to loosen it.
She was going on a trip through all the great food countries of Europe. All the rich, buttery places: Paris, Rome, etc. She was going with her brand new fiancé, a high-priced patent attorney. So she knew she would be eating a lot and she wanted to avoid eating in the week before going.
So why, then, go to Nobu? Because my new girlfriend had insisted to her that Nobu was the perfect place. She wanted to show off her new boyfriend, me. Or, if not show off, then at least get her girlfrend’s approval of me. And I was nervous. Just thirty minutes earlier I had thrown out my favorite coat. It was filled with holes. I bought a coat that I never wore again. I didn’t want to look cheap. I was insecure. My new girlfriend was a psychiatrist. Her friend’s fiancé was a fancy lawyer. And her friend, the girl with the stomach band was, and still is, the admissions officer at a high-priced private school for the children of actors and hedge fund managers. I was nothing.
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March 20, 2012: In the last few weeks, rebellion related deaths have averaged over 500 a week. It appears that nearly 10,000 have died in a year of protests against the government, and increasingly violent government responses. The security forces have used artillery and tank gun fire against rebellious neighborhoods as well as indiscriminate fire against crowds and snipers (who are supposed to kill “leaders”, but in practice shoot whoever they can.) The government blames Saudi Arabia and Qatar for arming the rebels. Russia and Iran continue to arm the government despite Iraq recently announcing it would not allow Iran to ship weapons (by ground or air) through Iraq. Weapons shipments can still get in via Syrian ports. One Iranian cargo ship (described as a “supply ship”), escorted by an Iranian frigate recently visited Syria briefly, and then returned to Iran. Russian weapons regularly arrive at the Syrian port of Tartus. Syria is a major customer for Russian weapons, with Iran apparently supplying most of the cash to pay for the stuff.
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Originally posted 2012-03-21 14:19:19. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
