“I’ve become much less goal oriented as I’ve grown older. I spent twelve years dreaming about climbing Mt. Everest. It was all I thought about. During my years of training, I focused all my thoughts on getting to the summit. My self worth, and the meaning of those years, all depended on that one moment of getting to the top. It’s not healthy to be that goal oriented. And Everest is a perfect example why. The weather can change at any moment, and even though you did everything right, and trained the correct amount, you can still fall short. And if you’re thinking of nothing but the final goal—all those years, all that effort, and all the personal growth that you achieved, becomes worthless if you don’t reach the top.” ---A quote from the interesting web site, Humans of New York
The Owl Nebula is a planetary nebula, the glowing gaseous envelope shed by a dying sun-like star as it runs out of nuclear fuel. In fact, the Owl Nebula offers an example of the fate of our Sun as it runs out of fuel in another 5 billion years. As we see it, the nebula spans over 2 light-years.
Our Lady of Fátima is a title for the Virgin Mary due to her reputed apparitions to three shepherd children at Fátima, Portugal on the thirteenth day of six consecutive months in 1917. Three secrets were said to be given to the children, a vision of Hell, a plan for redemption including the conversion of Russia and the third, more mysterious, concerning deaths of religious figures. Pope Benedict XVI explained in a rare conversation with reporters that the interpretation of the third secret did not stop with the interpretation of a prediction of the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in Saint Peter's Square in 1981. The Third Secret of Fátima, said Benedict XVI, "has a permanent and ongoing significance" and that "its significance could even be extended to include the suffering the Church is going through today as a result of the recent reports of sexual abuse involving the clergy".
Lucia Santos and her two cousins, Jacinta and Francisco Marto:
The Pao case raises a difficult scenario: Would an organization hire and develop a talent only to thwart it? Ideally, the market should the best antidote to discrimination. It should reward talent and penalizes prejudice. Competitors should prey upon the prejudice of their opponents. That said, black athletes took a long time to be accepted in areas they now dominate.
Romance fiction accounts for half of the mass-market paperbacks sold in America.
When the Eurozone decided to bail out Greece they were bailing out their own banks. The IMF minutes admit that the bailout was about saving the banks and the rest of Europe, not about Greece. Cyprus was cut loose when it would have been a rounding error for the EU to save it because there were no European banks involved.
Who was...Mehmet Ali Agca?
The Trans-Alaska Pipeline was completed in 1977, stretches 800 miles from Prudhoe Bay in northern Alaska to the Port of Valdez in southern Alaska, and has the capacity to transport over 2 million barrels of oil a day. America consumes almost 19 million barrels of oil a day, so the Trans-Alaska Pipeline has the capacity to deliver a not-insignificant 11% of our country’s oil needs. But Prudho Bay, the source of much of the oil is shrinking as a quality field. Volume of oil that flows through the pipeline has slowed to 500,000 barrels a day. If flows fall below 300,000 barrels a day, the pipeline simply can’t operate because the cold will interfere with the slow flow. They are looking for other sources.
In late January, Obama announced that he will use his executive authority to designate 12 million acres in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as “wilderness,” i.e. no drilling. ANWR is the land east of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline; but Obama has already cut off the area west of the pipeline for drilling. In 2010, the Interior Department closed roughly half of the 23.5-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPRA); the area west of the pipeline.
Northern Alaska is rich with oil. The Arctic Outer Continental Shelf is estimated at 27 billion barrels, ANWR is thought to have at least 28 billion more, and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (designated in 1976 as a strategic petroleum stockpile) has 896 million barrels of oil. Yet not a drop of oil is flowing from these areas.
By congressional law, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline must be dismantled if it ceases to operate.
Copa Holdings is an airline specializing in Central and South America. It has 325 daily flights.
Piketty’s empirical work suffers from several highly problematic characteristics. Empirical demonstrations of the century-long distributional U-shape for three different countries — his main piece of evidence for his inequality thesis — are rendered unreliable by issues including
- suspect and biased adjustment techniques,
- selective cherry-picking to create trends from ambiguous data sets, and
- grossly insufficient annotation to cross-check and replicate his results where they diverge from their claimed sources.
Put another way, he seems to construct most of his data presentations around a specific historical narrative that he has already embraced as correct. This is an inversion of scientific inquiry, placing the cart of an ideological conclusion before the data horse and — in some cases — selectively ignoring or omitting data points that diverge from that conclusion.
In short, Piketty’s empirical demonstrations of his U-shaped historical pattern suffer from distortions, biases, methodological inconsistencies, and other questionable data decisions that render them unsuitable for drawing interpretive conclusions about his theory or making prescriptive policy recommendations. (Philip Magness)
Lincoln is the only president to have a patent. He created a hydraulic system that raised ships over shoals.
Pope John Paul II was shot in St. Peter s Square by a Turkish political extremist, Mehmet Ali Agca. After his release from the hospital, the pope famously visited his would-be assassin in prison, where he had begun serving a life sentence, and personally forgave him for his actions. The next year, another unsuccessful attempt was made on the pope s life, this time by a fanatical priest who opposed the reforms of Vatican II.
There are 1,233 active rigs in North America—a three-year low.
Ad hominem: adj. 1. appealing to one's prejudices, emotions, or special interests rather than to one's intellect or reason.
2. attacking an opponent's character rather than answering his argument. Ad hominem translates literally from Latin as "to the man." It entered English in the late 1500s.
2. attacking an opponent's character rather than answering his argument. Ad hominem translates literally from Latin as "to the man." It entered English in the late 1500s.
Between 1914 and 1945 roughly 100 million Europeans died from political causes: war, genocide, purges, planned starvation, and all the rest. That would be an extraordinary number of deaths anywhere and any time. It was particularly striking in Europe, which had, over the course of the previous four hundred years, collectively conquered most of the world and reshaped the way humanity thought of itself. The conquest of the world was accompanied by the transformation of everyday life. Music was once something that you could hear only if you were there in person. Literacy was useless for most of human history as books were rare and distant. The darkness was now subject to human will. Men lived twice as long as they had previously and women no longer died in childbirth as a matter of course. It is difficult to comprehend the degree to which, by 1914, Europe had transformed the very fabric of life, not only in Europe but in the rest of the world.--George Friedman, Stratfor
Kris Bryant, rising star of the Cubs' organization at third base, was sent to the minors and the baseball union went nuts. Why? In spring training he had more than 40 AB, hit .425 with 9 HR. The Cubs are loaded.
In 1957 Samuel Beckett's Endgame was first performed in London, in French. Waiting for Godot had premiered in 1953 and become an international sensation, but Beckett could find no one in France willing to risk their theater on a new play which featured one character who could not stand, one who could not sit, and two others unable to come out of their garbage cans.
Golden oldie:
Regarding political and economic "diversity" on campus, John Stuart Mill pointed out, back in the 19th century, students must hear opposing views from people who actually believe them, not as presented by people who oppose them. In the 18th century, Edmund Burke warned against those who "teach the humours of the professor, rather than the principles of the science."
A 10th-century "eyesalve" remedy was discovered at the British Library in a leather-bound volume of Bald's Leechbook, widely considered to be one of the earliest known medical textbooks. "Leechbook" and "leechdom" comes from Old English laecedom (medicine, healing), from laece (physician). The word for the bloodsucking beast has a different origin. Earliest documented use: 900.
A doctor from India has built a very modern hospital in The Cayman Islands that is doing open-heart surgery for a flat $22,000 per surgery (25% of US costs), including any complications . That is a total price. Their hospital infection rate, a big problem in the US, is a small fraction of the US number. They do dozens more surgeries per week than similar groups of US doctors do. And they are doing this across multiple disciplines, like orthopedic surgery, cancer treatment, etc.
The Heroes of Beslan struck again, this time a little older group of unarmed children but children none the less. The Islamist militant group al Shabaab stormed a Kenyan university campus on Thursday, killing and wounding dozens of students and staff.
The "Lavon Affair"-- documented in the diaries of the Israeli Prime Minister of the time Moshe Sharett--was a false flag plan to discredit Egypt's government, then headed by Gamal Abdel Nasser, in which Israeli agents bombed theaters, post offices and U.S. and British institutions, to make it seem as though Egypt was behind the bombings. The thinking in Israel at the time was that if the British were to give up control of the Suez Canal, it would be left in Egypt's hands, thereby putting Cairo in a better position to exert pressure on Israel. So Israelis attacked American and British--for a "greater good." The agents were told "to undermine the West's trust in the [Egyptian] government by causing public insecurity" while concealing Israel's role in the sabotage.
According to investor Jared Dillian, if you go back and read Jack Schwager Market Wizards books, and read about all the stud traders, you won’t find one of them who would be buying triple-leveraged oil ETFs for a 10% bounce in oil. No. Those guys would have had the dominant trend right. They don’t care about the countertrend, because that’s not where the money is. Trading with the trend is the only way to make meaningful amounts of money. Or, when investing, do not try to be too smart.
According to investor Jared Dillian, if you go back and read Jack Schwager Market Wizards books, and read about all the stud traders, you won’t find one of them who would be buying triple-leveraged oil ETFs for a 10% bounce in oil. No. Those guys would have had the dominant trend right. They don’t care about the countertrend, because that’s not where the money is. Trading with the trend is the only way to make meaningful amounts of money. Or, when investing, do not try to be too smart.
A lawsuit filed in Los Angeles alleges three independent laboratories found 83 types of wine from 28 wineries with levels of arsenic three to five times higher than the federal standards set for drinking water. The mostly lower-priced wines ranging from about $6 a bottle to the $15 range include popular brands such as Sutter Home, Menage A Trois, Beringer and Almaden.
Pennsylvania LCB spokeswoman Stacy Kriedeman said the board is “monitoring the situation,” but has not seen reason for concern.
A consensus of experts: At the annual convention of the American Institute of Architects, which will take place on May 14-16 in Atlanta, Georgia, (an important, Establisment meeting, whose keynote speaker is former president Bill Clinton), there will be a debate and a vote on a resolution supporting an investigation into the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7 on Sept. 11, 2001. The resolution is the work of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a professional body of over 2,200 architects and engineers who dispute the results of official investigations into the September 11 attacks, including the 9/11 Commission Report. The organisation's members think instead that the World Trade Center was destroyed by controlled demolition using explosives.
AAAAaaaaannnnnddddd......the Owl Nebula:
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