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Obama's Top 10 in the Year of the Marxist Socialist Turkey

Ernesto37 — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:41:34 GMT

"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done." Ronald Reagan There were at least ten stand-out flops in Barack Hussein Obama's first catastropic blunderous year as POTUS (President of These United States. Despite an unusually long train-wreck of foreign policy messups, speaking gaffes, and well-planned domestic disasters, there were stand-out goofs that a non-socialist would not have aspired to "accomplish". Who in "the lame-stream media", as announced Michelle Malkin in her book, " NO MORE BUSINESS AS USUAL", who in "the lame-stream media",could have forseen that beating roaring soaring Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democrat primiaries, saying "Present" while in the US Senate, and avoiding major vote stances would be a qualification, albeit a Democrat qualification. After all people say that Barack Obama CAN walk, talk, chew gum and smoke all at the same time! Even Sarah Palin, Fox Political Analyst sadly proclaimed recently: "My fellow citizens, the American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of personal discovery." -- Sarah Palin 1) Initially, there was the so-called "Stimulus Package" that was supposed to act as WPA or "Works Progress Administration", which actually provided a few jobs during FDR's crisis, "The Great Depression". The sicko stimulus package rated no Republican support in the House at all. Not a loony present. The compromise cave-in legislation, which was sullied out thoughtlessly and rapidly by House and Senate alleged leaders and dubious White House staff over several days, passed in the House on a 246-183 vote. Ironically, the U.S. Senate gave final approval on Friday, the Thirteenth, February 13,2009 to a $787 billion stimulus package that President Obama hoped in vain would help boost an economy in freefall because of socialism, cronyism, and waste. Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, attended a wake for his mother until about 8 p.m. Friday, which caused Obama to send a special jet for Brown while everyone waited. Brown also received a special free taxpayer White House flight back to the funeral. Somebody MUST have attempted to convince a Republican to "go along and get Brownie Points but all refused to look foolish and risk voter damnation. Only three allegedly misbegotten Republicans, allegedly of low stature and ill repute namely Susan Collins and Olympia Snow of Maine (Some say Maine-iacs) and later switching to Democrats, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania dared support the unread travesty in the Senate. Their support was needed to give the plan the 60 votes needed to keep it from being shut down by Republican parliamentary procedures.All Democrats in the Senate took a chance and supported the crazy plan. Only seven House Democrats intelligently opposed it so the rest of them SHOULD be in jeopardy as voters are livid and will NEVER forget this. So the Democrats forced through a stimulus bill that added up being more expensive than the Vietnam and Iraq wars combined. Justification? They repeatedly over-emphasized job creation when they said,"jobs, jobs, jobs" like the words from "The Alaskans' TV 1959 song, "Gold. Gold, Gold." As a matter of fact, Obama's Administration promised knowingly that if the unknown nondescript unread stimulus package passed, they foresaw unemployment below 8%. but, unemployment went up to a drastic 26-year peak of 10.2% in November of 2009. With the usual Christmas, Hannacah and EID (Excellence In Death AKA Emerging Infectious Diseases) layoffs, it rose even higher. Another unforseen outcome has been Democrats saying Republican Senator Fay Kay Hutchison voted FOR the Stimulous in order to defame her in the eyes of Texas voters. Senator McCain used the issue to sour voters and LOSE as a surety. He even allowed voters to think he supported the Stimulus travesty and bragged about supporting Ruth Bader Ginsberg in order to lose even more votes, the son of a gun. He even proposed his own stinking stimulus bill in the Senate that was much heavier on tax cuts, but still had an outlandish $421 billion from taxpayers. Macky, after Mack The Knife, McCain's support of TARP would have spiraled debt out of control no matter what. Nevertheless, we dearly want to know whose idea it was to run McCain when just about anyone else would have had a fighting chance and at least not be trying to allegedly THROW the election! ! There is TAR in the TARPITS that formerly entrapped dinosaurs and FEATHERS in every chicken house. epramos01 at hotmail dot com is the site for informers on these wretches, scum and low-life! 2) Despite summer-long tea party protests and outspoken but peaceful townhall rallies against it all over the country, highlighted by the 9/12 Million Patriot Rally in September of 2009, Democrats trudged over the protests to "victory" on health care: Culmonating in an especially aggregious flurry of government "sausage kelbasa making", the Democrats have resorted to above-the-table obvious scullduggery and out-and-out bribery to cram a hotly unpopular health care bill through both the House and the Senate. The Democrats are want to negotiate outlandish tax increases, uneven higher premiums, Medicare butchery-style cuts, government-financed baby-killing, taxpayer-funded care for unlawful aliens, "quality-of-life" death panels, medical procedure rationing, and minimized restricted quality of care for over 2000 pages of legalese legislation they believe will secure them ultimate power in America via foul-smelling, rancid, socialism. To no one with a shred of decency's surprise, this is fast becoming the albatross of political bills and could very possibly set back the Democrats from ruling the House, the Senate, and even the White House over the next couple of election cycles. We now know that Lieberman and Olympia (I Voted For Stimulus Travesty) Snow were politicking and angling for whatever favors they could secure. The Democratic health care proposal as debated in the Senate not only contained large new confiscatory taxes, enormous government enlargement and expansion guaranteeing waste and huge spending, but will allow federal funding for abortion which is baby-killing that 61 percent of Americans do not support, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey. Obnoxiously enough, the only opposition to the abortion provision allowed was by a fellow with an unusual name, perhaps to mar him psychologically, perhaps so they could remember him better for later abuse because of his principles. Gross thinking of new taxes scares the hell out of all Americans whether VAT or whatever. Job killers. but liberals do not care that the poor get health care already, the disadvantaged not working get it free already and unlawful aliens get health care free NOW and later also. They do not care that "Cadillac health plans of unions are spared, union workers, Amish and lawbreakers probably loophole out of paying at all. Burn in hades, democrats! Strangely enough, the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts is expected to help kill the hemongus devious misbegotten travesty graveyard dead in the next couple of months, despite bribes unforseen to other "stray votes". Will 'Crats allow Brown to save them? Or just bribe up another vote for eternal infernal infamy. 3) In a blatant, obvious blunderous payback for votes, labour unions received vested interests and actual ownership in companies. Now the "fox is guarding the henhouse AND the inmates are running the asylum) This may be the "sidewinderest snake-in-the-grass" government deal since the Teapot Dome Scandal in the early twenties and the alleged sale of government reserve oil to Al Gore's oil concern in the 1990s, Barack Obama rose above the law to break legally binding contracts and finance buyouts valued at over 50 billion dollars from taxpayer funds to save union jobs at GM and Chrysler. All things considered, because the unions provided union thugs to be political shock troops for Democrats nationwide, they were given more than 50% of Chrysler and almost 40% of General Motors. It has been said and venturously alleged that the combined efforts of now-jailed Jack Abramoff, now-imprisoned Bernie Madoff, and deceased Charles Ponzi together couldn't have fleeced as many Americans out of their money in a hundred years as Barack Hussain Obama did with this dirty deed. 4) Thanks to Barack (Loose Lips) Obama's comments about Professor Gates' arrest in Cambridge, Massachusettes, Obama has let us all know what he truly thinks about race. Barack Obama previously and continuously has allowed his supporters to play the race card for him while he "works the levers behind the curtain, Wizard of Oz style". Thus, he gives the impression he is a good and regular guy, even while his buddies, selections and allies loudly bellow "racism" at everyone who opposes his machinations of socialism and aforementioned payoffs. Nevertheless, the gamester's poker hand tipped on the Henry Louis Gates arrest case and Americans got to see Obama's cards and what he really and truly thinks about race. It appears he was listening and was influenced by the Black Liberation Theology as preached by his pastor the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Even after freely owning up to the fact that he was unaware of all the facts, Obama accused the Cambridge police of "stupidly" arresting his friend and then went on administer a "tongue-lashing" short lecture to everyone about the racism that most surely had to be sinfully involved. This was Obama's most tell-tale instance on race since he threw his own white grandmother under the proverbial bus while he voiced support of Jeremiah Wright. Recall that video tapes of Wright's sermons sold by Wright's church were excerpted on television with Wright proclaiming "G_d D***n America" and "America's chickens have come home to roost" over the horrific 9/11 NYC Incident at the World Trade Center. Fox News has presented the excerpts many times, whilst The New York Times, NBC, CBS, MSNBC and ABC pretend that Jeremah Wright is Obama's minister for 20 years, then retired somehow with a mansion in a Chicago wealthy person area. Some ministers manage to secure themselves double-wide trailers in the Ozarks as retirement homes. 5) The lawyerly decision to place 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed on trial in New York like an American citizen is profoundly wierd to say the least. Attorney General Eric Holder nor anyone else has found it possible to rationally explan the whys or lawyerly wherefores as to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his alleged accomplices being put on trial in New York City while other terrorists are to be tried in military tribunals. This clearly boosts the likelyhood of a terrorist attack on New York, provides Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and cohorts the opportunity to promote America-hating Al Qaeda and Taliban propaganda in an American court room. It also puts at risk the sensitive intelligence data, and allows a shyster lawyer "dream team" a chance to get KSM off Scott free with a legal loophole and for what? In the face of these facts, Barack Obama and Eric Holder have steadfastly assured Americans that KSM will not be released, whatever transpires in the court room. This constitutes prejudgement AND hints at judicial "manipulation". Does that mean the fair and impartial judge gets a 3 AM telephone call instructing him or her as to what the "punishment phase" will be? That holds true with recent Iraq trial of "Chemical Ali" who allegedly gassed 5600 Kurds to death. Everyone knew the outcome, whether told ahead of time or not. But the Europeans will see America as putting on a big theatrical production of having a terrorist on trial in our criminal justice system for no apparent reason and then proclaiming to all the world that is a mock trial similar to the "kangaroo" court proceedings in Red China, North Korea or Cuba. Perhaps we will pay the Red Chinese to "extradite" KSM and his buddies to a China stadium to be shot in the head? Maybe they would use black hoods and pretend they are Chinese criminals for the crowd excitement and do the "justice" for airfareand possibly "the gate"? 6) Over the Christmas, Hannacah and EID (Excellence In Death AKA Emerging Infectious Diseases) holidays airline passengers have all the privacy intruding, annoying, and time consuming searches we have to endure at the airports, yet terrorists can still get on airplanes with explosives in their panties if they are unlisted? Still, although the US government was given every warning that the Christmas Day Undiebomber was dangerous, not only did they manage to not pick up on the menace, Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano assured us that "the system worked" because passengers managed to thwart the terrorist attack. One known flyer, a Dutchman, is said to have jumped over the seat and physically restrained the would-be homicidal maniac single-handedly. Did they learn from the "shoebomber" that the "devil is in the details" and suppress as many details as possible? The lame-stream media said the pantybomber was stimied or words to that effect, leaving out any word of his being conched on the head with a fire extinguisher or any sort of weapon. Perhaps the mysterious Dutchman is the Manny Pacquiao of Holland or the Nederlands and subdued the Nigerian Muslim youth with a single roundhouse, devastating punch? Then, bothersome, totally ineffective nuevo new rules were put forth because of botching and allowing the incident. Naturally after the Nigerian panty bomber was boneheadedly added to the civilian court system like an errant American, he "clammed up" and went mute since some imbacile had informed him of his Miranda Rights which had materialized from thin air for the benefit of lawyers. It becomes embarsssingly clear that we need some adults like *** Chaney and Ollie North to help us protect our country! 7) After proclaiming in rousing rallies,"Afghanistan is the WAR TO WIN! Not Iraq" in so many words, Obama said this is the most important fight we ever embarked! Then we drag out feet on reinforcements while troops die off and get sent home in BOTH theatres of war making it appear we give up. Noticeably after Obama, the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan has worsened with lately Taliban killing in the Afghan capital. Initially and in good faith, General Stanley McChrystal provided Obama with a plan to help turn things around, waited through months of world travel,golfing, and procrastination, Obama managed a piecemeal approval hamstrung with the very timeline that stuck in John McCain's craw that is saying loudly to the enemy more or less when we intend to pull out of Afghanistan. This just after explaining to Americans how vital Afghanistan was, not just to the USA's security but to the entire infidel world, Obama then announced when we'd be starting to pull out, whether we had a victory or not. Then after it was seen that the timeline announcement had the potential to radically undercut morale and support for the Afghanistan war, the Obama administration did a flip-flop which thoroughly muddied the water and confused the issue. 8) One thing is certain. Cap and Tax (Trade? Trade you a wooden nickel for that ugly fat on your Democrat shoulders) would be more likely to pass IF taxpayers were not so livid about the health care travesty and other Democrat strongarm tactics. Presently the mess of lies about Global Warming and carbon credits is not gaining in the Senate. It could eventually pass like a kidney stone, painfully and with much despair but, the odds are heavily against it. McCain has criticized Obama's Cap and Trade plan, but he had his own crappy naive believe-the-lie-and-be-taxed plan during the give-up-and-lose campaign and it seems likely that he could have worked with the Democrats to stab Americans in the back with his own McCain crud, the son of a gun. Not only that but President John McCain could have talked at least a dozen nitwit Republicans and Republican RINOs in the Senate to vote for the McCain garbage. Such obnoxious, inane, mindless support means Cap and Trade would have been very likely to pass under McCain than Obama and ruin the economy as much. 9) Dare you say "hello" to my little friend, double-barrelled, cocked and pointing-at-your-head amnesty? The Democrats are unnerved and timid of amnesty during an Obaminated recession with Obama's approval numbers in the toilet and the 111th Congress at an estimated 2% approval and dropping. Some Democrats have been "finger-necklaced by the hands of reality" and seek redemption in the eyes of travesty-weary voters with blood in their eyes, The Founding Fathers knew immigration was a loaded gun. Thus an unwanted, unmitigated farce like an amnesty bill most likely will not be considered except by compleat idiots until 2011 after other trash, thanks be to G_d. 10) Lastly but not leastly, the Republicans in Congress and some down-left RINOs, have gone decent remarkably since Obama flushed into office. Sadly, many would be going laft or to the middle, instead of the Right. Republican voters are out for blood in the water which would have put the Republican Party into even MORE dire straits. That's what killed the Republican spirit under Bush and the problem has alieviated because of Obama;s bkatant Unamerican socialism and the Democrat Power GRAB. Thus tea parties, and conservatives are loaded for bear and , the Right is on the Rise. Republicans will fight FOR issues when not so on the defensive AFTER many Democrats are FLUSHED like so many little flecks. Another Obama foreign policy goof besides all the bowing is opposing democracy in Honduras and love for Chavez despite Chavez' constant poor-mouthing and dissing of Obama. Obama has lost face with his "Close Gitmo and Waste Money Bringing Terrorists To Escape On American Soil" nitwittery. And Obama has lost face since it was his idea to buy refuge for Chinese in Bermuda, which set the whole world laughing. To his credit Obama goes for days without blaming tax cuts for deficits. Tax cuts GROW jobs and boost the economy but IDIOTS blame deficits on tax cuts, Crazy Democrat/Republican SPENDING causes deficits. Obama has also threatened to prosecute Bush people for getting results from terrorists and safety in general. More police will be accused of profiling oblivious of the facts, and even more tax cheats will be hired. Obama appears to have a fondness for tax cheats especially in the Treasury Department where a lot of MONEY is located. Many know that allegedly infamous Van Jones was MOVED and kept his same ridiculously high salary like 26 handmaidens who are helping Michelle Obama get dressed, and be about being First Lady or FLOTUS We exited Haiti secretly so it would not collapse. Then it did. Bush took none and received NO credit for bringing the boys home from Haiti. Now they go back. Sadly, being President consists of giving campaign speeches as if still running for election, catering to dictators like Chavez who are kindred socialista brothers-in-arms, and playing lots of golf with or without bets. They let him win to be nice and always will most likely. Why wouldn't he bet if he's any good at all? Gee, I hit in the water again, Mr. president, guess I lose again. And Obama can give a "Thanksgiving Day message" without mentioning G_d at all. IBID: Ronald Reagan quote: http://conservativesofamerica.com/?gclid=CPP_l83CsZ8CFQUMDQodj0HW0w $787 Billion Stimulus Debacle: http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/13/stimulus/ 82 Stories on $787 Billion Stimulus Debacle: http://topics.cnn.com/topics/u_s_senate Health Care Travesty and Baby-Killing Debacle: Fondness for tax cheats: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/tax-quorum/ http://townhall.com/columnists/JohnHawkins/2010/01/19/seven_lowlights_from_obamas_first_disastrous_year_in_office http://rightwingnews.com/2009/12/five-more-amateur-mistakes-by-the-obama-administration/ What If Haiti os Hades and Can't Be Saved? http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-07-17/obamas-crazy-way-to-pay-for-healthcare/ http://www.tmz.com/2009/01/26/blagojevich-oprahs-larger-than-life/ :http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/obamas_team_of_cheats/ IDIOTS blame deficits on tax cuts, Crazy Democrat/Republican SPENDING causes deficits. : http://www.slate.com/id/2185301/pagenum/2 Amnesty: http://www.amconmag.com/article/2004/feb/16/00011/ http://www.conservativeoutpost.com/campaign/stop_amnesty Thanksgiving Without Mentioning G_d, a FIRST in American History? : http://forums.hannity.com/archive/index.php/t-1738811-p-2.html

PS3 to get a price cut

willburns1 — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:56:43 GMT

I have been hearing rumors that the PS3 is going to get a $100 price cut come mid august. According to slashgear "The news comes courtesy of Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia, who tips Sony as reducing the PS3 just prior to the launch of Madden on August 18th."

This makes sence to me because as Slashgear pointed out that it also coninsides with the new school year and back to school shopping. All the little hig school kids that had their summers jobs just might pick one up with all the disposable income they have. I think that the price of the Playstation is what's holding the PS3 back. I know this it is doing well and that it has the best hardware of all the systems but I don't seem them flying off the shelves like they should.

Class Overview: Mage

mike — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 21:42:48 GMT

Mages are a ranged magic based DPS class. They excel in quick and powerful magical damage. Their main function in a group is to do as much damage as possible without getting the enemies to attack and kill them. They can also turn enemies into sheep and take them out of combat so the group can focus on other enemies. Mages can also conjure up water and food to pass out to the group. People love their refreshments and appreciate not having to use up their expensive food and water. Mages are excellent for PVP because they can do huge amounts of damage at once.

Story? Unforgettable. The Audience? Often Not.

cartoon — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 02:19:42 GMT

By BENEDICT CAREY

If a friend is someone who laughs at our stories, then a good friend is one who enjoys them even the second time around. But anyone who gasps with delight on hearing a story for the third time is faking it. Or, it’s a relative: some poor nephew Will or aunt Emily, sitting captive at the holiday table, being polite, perhaps covering a shudder of dread that life is caught in some endless loop where the punch lines never change.

It is not an entirely irrational fear, either, according to new research published in the journal Psychological Science.

“You hear people of all ages, not just elderly people, say, ‘Stop me if I’ve told you this before,’ ” said Nigel Gopie, a postdoctoral fellow at the Rotman Research Institute, in Toronto, who has a paper in the current issue of the journal on these memory lapses.

“We often have a hard time remembering who we told things to, and clearly it starts early.”

In their long study of memory, psychologists have made important distinctions between the short-term and long-term varieties. They have documented crucial differences between explicit memories, like for faces and vocabulary, and the implicit kind, like for driving skills. They have published hundreds of studies on autobiographical memory, false memories and so-called source memory — the ability to recall where a fact was learned, whether from the radio or a book, from a work colleague or the neighborhood gossip.

Yet they have paid little, if any, attention to what Dr. Gopie and his co-author, Colin M. MacLeod of the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, call destination memory: about whose ears information has landed on. While the source of remembered information can be crucially important (Did I read that in The Onion or the daily newspaper?), so is its destination. Our stories, our jokes, our gossip form an important part of our social identity, psychologists say. Repeating oneself is not only embarrassing; it can be damaging, for diplomats, liars or anyone else trying to guard secrets, personal or professional.

“I think people simply get a lot more practice monitoring the sources of information, asking themselves and others, ‘Where is that from?’ ” said Morris Moscovitch, a psychologist at the University of Toronto. “Whereas, it’s rare we get any feedback about” whom we told.

The main finding by Dr. Gopie and Dr. MacLeod — that destination memory is relatively weak — helps explain several embarrassing, and annoying, kinds of social interaction. In one experiment, they had 60 University of Waterloo students associate 50 random facts (a shrimp’s heart is in its head; 8 percent of men are color blind) with the faces of 50 famous people, like Madonna, Wayne Gretzky and Oprah Winfrey. Half of the students “told” each fact to one of the faces, reading it aloud when the celebrity’s picture appeared on a computer screen. The other half read each fact silently and saw a different celebrity moments afterward.

The students then took a memory test. They chose from face-fact pairs: those which they remembered from learning a fact, and those they remembered from reading facts out loud in the first phase of the study. The students who simulated telling the facts did 16 percent worse on the test than the students who were fed the facts while seeing celebrity faces. The study authors concluded that outgoing information “was less integrated with its environmental context — i.e., the person — than was incoming information.”

This makes sense, psychologists say, given what is known about attention: namely, that it is finite. A person who is conveying information, even trivial facts, will devote some mental resources to monitoring what is being said. Self-absorption is also a factor. In another study, Dr. Gopie and Dr. MacLeod repeated the famous-face exercise, with one big difference. This time the facts that the students simulated telling to celebrities were personal (“My zodiac sign is Pisces”). The result was their destination memory worsened significantly.

“Now, the situation may be reversed entirely for highly emotional personal information,” like devastating personal anxieties, Dr. Gopie said. “That is, that people are in those cases very aware of whom they told. We just don’t know that yet.”

The results suggest nonetheless that some of people’s most intricate, richly detailed stories — the most self-distracting to tell — are at high risk for being met with rolled eyes that say, “Been there, heard all that.”

The tendency to blank on who-I-told-what may in fact reflect the workings of a healthy memory. Psychologists have found evidence that when people reset a password or a new phone number for an old friend, their brain actively suppresses the out-of-date digits. The old numbers are a competing memory, and potentially confounding.

Reprised stories aren’t always embarrassing or socially redundant, either. If they are repeated often enough, they become ritual, or, over time, oral history, Dr. Gobie suggests. Still, it is telling that people who have the most invested in who hears what — salesmen, lobbyists — often remind themselves whom they are addressing: “Have I told you, Gail, about the special price we have on laser printers?” That may be sucking up, but it may also be a way of keeping tabs on where the information is going.

That is precisely what the two researchers found in the final experiment reported in their paper. Saying the recipient’s name (“Oprah Winfrey, the United States Postal Service handles 40 percent of the world’s mail volume!”) increased the accuracy of their destination memory.

Researchers say that if destination memory proves significantly weaker in further studies, the next step will be to find out when the risks of such lapses are highest and in whom. An improved understanding of destination memory could help doctors detect age-related memory problems earlier, for instance. It may also be relevant to some models of how memory works.

None of which will bail out the holiday raconteur, caught short in the middle of telling a rerun story. Unless he or she can reshape that tale on the fly, and pass it off as oral history.

40,000 D0LLARS PRIZE Looking for Balloons and Insights to Online Behavior

cartoon — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 02:12:43 GMT

By JOHN MARKOFF

The prize is $40,000, and it goes to the first person or group to determine the locations of 10 red balloons that can be anywhere in the continental United States.

The apparent frivolity of the challenge is only on the surface. This is not a game invented by some eccentric Web Midas. The contest, which takes place on Dec. 5, is being sponsored by Darpa, the Pentagon’s research agency.

The goal is to learn more about social behavior in computer networks and how large computer-connected teams use their resources and connections to compete.

There is also an invention being celebrated. Peter Lee, a computer scientist and one of the Darpa directors organizing the contest, said Dec. 5 would be the 40th anniversary of the day when the first four nodes of the Arpanet — the experimental military-sponsored computer network that was the forerunner of today’s Internet — were connected.

Darpa has previously sponsored three “grand challenges” in an effort to advance the technology for autonomous vehicles. In the second one, in 2005, a Stanford University team won $2 million when its roboticized Volkswagen Touareg was the quickest to navigate a 131-mile course through California desert.

The mission of the agency, created in 1958 after the Sputnik satellite’s launching, is to guard the country against technological surprise. But Darpa prompted concerns about privacy after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks when it created a program to use data-mining technologies to identify potential terrorists.

Dr. Lee said he was not certain what to expect in the tactics that teams might use to track down the balloons, which will be visible from public roadways for a single day. Some groups are developing software applications. Dr. Lee said he also expected large teams of spotters and even the possibility that some groups might use subterfuge like disseminating false information.

Other groups may try to pay for information, he said, noting that even during a brief experiment the agency ran with a balloon near its headquarters, information on the location was offered for sale on Craigslist.

Dr. Lee said the agency would continue to pursue a number of large and small challenge-style contests to foster what he described as new ways to tap into pools of talented individuals and creative groups. Contestants from anywhere in the world may participate in this contest, he said, and registration will stay open until the contest begins.

One Microbe as a Group of 200 Protein Machines

cartoon — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 02:07:55 GMT

By NICHOLAS WADE

Molecular biology for years meant breaking down living cells to their smallest component parts, the genes and proteins that govern what a cell does. But a list of parts tells only so much. To understand how living cells really work, biologists are now trying to visualize how the parts are assembled into operational units.

A team of European scientists has chosen one of the smallest known bacteria, called Mycoplasma pneumoniae, as a test-bed for trying to integrate all the bottom-up knowledge about an organism into a full understanding of how it actually works. The microbe causes a form of bacterial pneumonia and has shed so many functions from its stripped down genome that it can survive only as a parasite on other cells.

The European findings so far, reported in the current Science, are that the bacterium is a collection of some 200 specialized protein machines.

The machines are composed of individual proteins, which recognize each other and assemble into complexes. Some of the machines make copies of the genes embodied in the DNA of the bacterium’s genome. Others, called ribosomes, synthesize proteins according to the genetic instructions they receive. Another class, called chaperones, make sure the new proteins fold up correctly. Then there are processing machines in which each component carries out one step of a multistage chemical process.

Developing a systematic view of a cell’s organization has been possible only since methods for decoding genomes. With the genome in hand, biologists can identify all proteins a cell produces and trace the pattern of interactions among the various kinds.

The European team, lead by Anne-Claude Gavin at the European Molecular biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, chose M. pneumoniae as their subject because it has a mere 689 protein-coding genes, compared with the 2,000 or so of other bacterial species. By tagging each protein in turn and noting which others it had a natural affinity for, the team discovered that the 689 proteins served as component parts for some 200 different machines.

But this is only a slice of the bacterium’s full complexity. The set of 200 machines is referred to as protein repertoire or proteome. The bacterium’s genome can produce many versions of its proteome, each designed to aid survival in a different environment. “There as many proteomes as you have external conditions,” Dr. Gavin said.

Governing the production of these proteomes is a genetic control system that is far more complex than had been expected for a small bacterium, a second European team reports in Science.

The minute examination of this tiny bacterium is intended as a step toward understanding it as a system, which requires cataloging all its components and their interactions.

In a commentary in Science, two biologists at the University of Arizona, Howard Ochman and Rahul Raghavan, say the European work shows that “there is no such thing as a ‘simple’ bacterium,” given how complex even this miniature member of the bacterial world has turned out to be.

Developmental Psychologist Says Teenagers Are Different

cartoon — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 02:04:46 GMT

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

Laurence Steinberg, a developmental psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, is one of the leading experts in the United States on adolescent behavior and adolescent brain biology. Dr. Steinberg, 57, has won the $1 million Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize, which will be awarded to him at a ceremony in early December in Switzerland. Here is an edited version of two conversations with Dr. Steinberg last month:

Q. YOU HEAR PARENTS SOMETIMES SAY, “I’M LIVING WITH AN INSANE PERSON. MY CHILD IS A TEENAGER.” ARE THEY BEING HYPERBOLIC?

A. I’m not one of those people who labels adolescence as some sort of mental illness. Teenagers are not crazy. They’re different.

When it comes to crime, they are less responsible for their behavior than adults. And typically, in the law, we don’t punish people as much who are less responsible. We know from our lab that adolescents are more impulsive, thrill-seeking, drawn to the rewards of a risky decision than adults. They tend to not focus very much on costs. They are more easily coerced to do things they know are wrong. These factors, under the law, make people less responsible for criminal acts. The issue is: as a class, should we treat adolescents differently?

Q. IS THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM BEGINNING TO TAKE THESE DIFFERENCES INTO ACCOUNT DURING SENTENCING?

A. It’s been coming up in cases. I went to Washington in November to watch the oral arguments in two related cases before the Supreme Court that ask: should someone who committed a crime as a teen be subjected to life imprisonment without a chance for parole, ever?

With these cases, and another in 2005 where the high court threw out the death penalty for adolescents, I was scientific consultant to the American Psychological Association on its amicus brief. What we said in the death penalty case — and now — was that we have considerable evidence showing that adolescents are different from adults in ways that mitigate their criminal responsibility. But since 2005, there’s been a lot of new scientific evidence supporting this position.

Q. WHAT IS THE NEW EVIDENCE?

A. In the last five years, as neuroscience has moved forward with functional magnetic resonance imaging and with research on animals, there have been dozens of new studies of adolescent brain development. These show that the brain systems providing for impulse control are still maturing during adolescence. Neuroscientists have shown that the part of the brain that improves most during adolescence is the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in complicated decision-making, thinking ahead, planning, comparing risks and rewards. And the neuroscientific research is showing that over the course of adolescence and into the 20s, there is this continued maturation of this part of the brain. So now, we have brain evidence that supports behavioral studies.

Moreover, we’re seeing that behavior can change once the brain more fully matures. Take thrill-seeking, for instance. What happens is that when people move out of adolescence, they become less interested in it. For example, I can’t stand riding on a roller-coaster now. I liked it as a teenager. I can’t stand driving fast now. I liked driving fast when I was a teenager. What has changed? I’m not as driven today by this thrill-seeking sensation. And in our studies, we’ve shown that there is a kind of normative decline in sensation-seeking after middle adolescence. A lot of adolescent crime is driven by thrill-seeking.

Q. HOW DOES THIS NEW INFORMATION

lead to concluding that the courts shouldn’t sentence some adolescents to life in prison without parole?

A. Given the fact that we know that there will be a developmental change in most people, the science says that we should give them a chance to mature out of it. No one is saying that kids who commit horrific crimes shouldn’t be punished. But most in the scientific community think that we know that since this person is likely to change, why not revisit this when he’s an adult and see what he’s like?

Q. DO YOU HAVE TEENAGERS AT HOME?

A. We have a son, Ben, who is now 25 and who works at Random House. He did something as a teenager that led me to a whole program of research. He and some friends went to the window of a girl they knew and inadvertently set off a burglar alarm. When a police squad car came, they panicked and fled. When I found out, I said: “Do you realize that you were running from armed police officers who thought they were interrupting a break-in. What were you thinking?” He said: “Well, that’s the problem. I wasn’t.” I wondered: “What goes on when kids are in a peer group that pushes them to make bad decisions?”

Since then, we’ve had people of different ages come to the lab and bring two friends with them. We give them computerized risk-taking tests while we image their brains. We compare brain activity when individuals are watched by their friends and when they are alone. For the adults, the presence of friends has no effect. But for adolescents, just having friends nearby doubles the number of risks they take. We’ve found that a certain part of the brain is activated by the presence of peers in adolescents, but not in adults.

Q. YOU ADVISED THE DEFENSE TEAM OF OMAR KHADR, THE YOUNGEST DETAINEE AT GUANTáNAMO BAY. WHY GET INVOLVED IN THAT CASE?

A. Because he was 15 when he was captured in a safe house in Afghanistan, where he’d been sent by his father, who was active in Al Qaeda. There was a battle in 2002 to take this house where American troops died.

He was interrogated for many hours and admitted to having thrown a grenade that killed an American soldier. He later recanted. I was asked by his Defense Department counsel to advise on whether what he said during interrogation was reliable and his degree of culpability, if he did do it.

In my deposition, I said I don’t know whether he did it or not, but there are studies that say that adolescents are more likely than adults to give false confessions. There’s the Central Park jogger case, where it turned out a group of teenagers gave false confessions. Five were convicted. Several years later, an adult murderer and rapist confessed to the crime.

Q. IT HAS JUST BEEN ANNOUNCED THAT YOU’VE WON THIS $1 MILLION KLAUS JACOBS PRIZE. WHAT DO YOU INTEND TO DO WITH THE MONEY?

A. I want to extend our work on adolescent development to teenagers in other cultures so that we can determine whether the patterns are universal. There’s a longstanding debate over how much of adolescent behavior is biological or cultural. Perhaps this award will lead to more answers.

People Hear With Skin as Well as Their Ears

cartoon — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 01:57:50 GMT

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

We hear with our ears, right? Yes, but scientists have known for years that we also hear with our eyes. In a landmark study published in 1976, researchers found that people integrated both auditory cues and visual ones, like mouth and face movements, when they heard speech.

That study, and many that followed, raised this fundamental question about speech perception: If humans can integrate different sensory cues, do they do so through experience (through seeing countless speaking faces over time), or has evolution hard-wired them to do it?

A new study that looks at a different set of sensory cues adds to a growing body of evidence that suggests such integration is innate. In a paper in Nature, Bryan Gick and Donald Derrick of the University of British Columbia report that people can hear with their skin.

The researchers had subjects listen to spoken syllables while hooked up to a device that would simultaneously blow a tiny puff of air onto the skin of their hand or neck. The syllables included “pa” and “ta,” which produce a brief puff from the mouth when spoken, and “da” and “ba,” which do not produce puffs. They found that when listeners heard “da” or “ba” while a puff of air was blown onto their skin, they perceived the sound as “ta” or “pa.”

Dr. Gick said the findings were similar to those from the 1976 study, in which visual cues trumped auditory ones — subjects listened to one syllable but perceived another because they were watching video of mouth movements corresponding to the second syllable. In his study, he said, cues from sensory receptors on the skin trumped the ears as well. “Our skin is doing the hearing for us,” he said.

Dr. Gick noted that it would normally be rare that someone actually sensed a puff of air produced by another, although people might occasionally sense their own puffs. Either way, he said, the stimulus is very subtle, “which suggests it is very powerful.”

“What’s so persuasive about this particular effect,” he added, “is that people are picking up on this information that they don’t know they are using.” That supports the idea that integrating different sensory cues is innate.

Dr. Gick said the finding also suggested that other sensory cues might be at work in speech perception — that, as he put it, “we are these fantastic perception machines that take in all the information available to us and integrate it seamlessly.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated which two of the syllables used in an experiment by researchers produce a brief puff from the mouth when spoken. They are “pa” and “ta,” not “ba” and “pa.”

We May Be Born With an Urge to Help

cartoon — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 01:52:54 GMT

By NICHOLAS WADE

What is the essence of human nature? Flawed, say many theologians. Vicious and addicted to warfare, wrote Hobbes. Selfish and in need of considerable improvement, think many parents.

But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human.

The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help.

When infants 18 months old see an unrelated adult whose hands are full and who needs assistance opening a door or picking up a dropped clothespin, they will immediately help, Michael Tomasello writes in “Why We Cooperate,” a book published in October. Dr. Tomasello, a developmental psychologist, is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The helping behavior seems to be innate because it appears so early and before many parents start teaching children the rules of polite behavior.

“It’s probably safe to assume that they haven’t been explicitly and directly taught to do this,” said Elizabeth Spelke, a developmental psychologist at Harvard. “On the other hand, they’ve had lots of opportunities to experience acts of helping by others. I think the jury is out on the innateness question.”

But Dr. Tomasello finds the helping is not enhanced by rewards, suggesting that it is not influenced by training. It seems to occur across cultures that have different timetables for teaching social rules. And helping behavior can even be seen in infant chimpanzees under the right experimental conditions. For all these reasons, Dr. Tomasello concludes that helping is a natural inclination, not something imposed by parents or culture.

Infants will help with information, as well as in practical ways. From the age of 12 months they will point at objects that an adult pretends to have lost. Chimpanzees, by contrast, never point at things for each other, and when they point for people, it seems to be as a command to go fetch something rather than to share information.

For parents who may think their children somehow skipped the cooperative phase, Dr. Tomasello offers the reassuring advice that children are often more cooperative outside the home, which is why parents may be surprised to hear from a teacher or coach how nice their child is. “In families, the competitive element is in ascendancy,” he said.

As children grow older, they become more selective in their helpfulness. Starting around age 3, they will share more generously with a child who was previously nice to them. Another behavior that emerges at the same age is a sense of social norms. “Most social norms are about being nice to other people,” Dr. Tomasello said in an interview, “so children learn social norms because they want to be part of the group.”

Children not only feel they should obey these rules themselves, but also that they should make others in the group do the same. Even 3-year-olds are willing to enforce social norms. If they are shown how to play a game, and a puppet then joins in with its own idea of the rules, the children will object, some of them vociferously.

Where do they get this idea of group rules, the sense of “we who do it this way”? Dr. Tomasello believes children develop what he calls “shared intentionality,” a notion of what others expect to happen and hence a sense of a group “we.” It is from this shared intentionality that children derive their sense of norms and of expecting others to obey them.

Shared intentionality, in Dr. Tomasello’s view, is close to the essence of what distinguishes people from chimpanzees. A group of human children will use all kinds of words and gestures to form goals and coordinate activities, but young chimps seem to have little interest in what may be their companions’ minds.

If children are naturally helpful and sociable, what system of child-rearing best takes advantage of this surprising propensity? Dr. Tomasello says that the approach known as inductive parenting works best because it reinforces the child’s natural propensity to cooperate with others. Inductive parenting is simply communicating with children about the effect of their actions on others and emphasizing the logic of social cooperation.

“Children are altruistic by nature,” he writes, and though they are also naturally selfish, all parents need do is try to tip the balance toward social behavior.

FROM OBSCURITY A LOST EUROPEAN CULTURE

cartoon — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 01:48:18 GMT

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.

For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.

The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the culture’s visual language. Until recent discoveries, the most intriguing artifacts were the ubiquitous terracotta “goddess” figurines, originally interpreted as evidence of the spiritual and political power of women in society.

New research, archaeologists and historians say, has broadened understanding of this long overlooked culture, which seemed to have approached the threshold of “civilization” status. Writing had yet to be invented, and so no one knows what the people called themselves. To some scholars, the people and the region are simply Old Europe.

The little-known culture is being rescued from obscurity in an exhibition, “The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.,” which opened last month at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. More than 250 artifacts from museums in Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania are on display for the first time in the United States. The show will run through April 25.

At its peak, around 4500 B.C., said David W. Anthony, the exhibition’s guest curator, “Old Europe was among the most sophisticated and technologically advanced places in the world” and was developing “many of the political, technological and ideological signs of civilization.”

Dr. Anthony is a professor of anthropology at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., and author of “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World.” Historians suggest that the arrival in southeastern Europe of people from the steppes may have contributed to the collapse of the Old Europe culture by 3500 B.C.

At the exhibition preview, Roger S. Bagnall, director of the institute, confessed that until now “a great many archaeologists had not heard of these Old Europe cultures.” Admiring the colorful ceramics, Dr. Bagnall, a specialist in Egyptian archaeology, remarked that at the time “Egyptians were certainly not making pottery like this.”

A show catalog, published by Princeton University Press, is the first compendium in English of research on Old Europe discoveries. The book, edited by Dr. Anthony, with Jennifer Y. Chi, the institute’s associate director for exhibitions, includes essays by experts from Britain, France, Germany, the United States and the countries where the culture existed.

Dr. Chi said the exhibition reflected the institute’s interest in studying the relationships of well-known cultures and the “underappreciated ones.”

Although excavations over the last century uncovered traces of ancient settlements and the goddess figurines, it was not until local archaeologists in 1972 discovered a large fifth-millennium B.C. cemetery at Varna, Bulgaria, that they began to suspect these were not poor people living in unstructured egalitarian societies. Even then, confined in cold war isolation behind the Iron Curtain, Bulgarians and Romanians were unable to spread their knowledge to the West.

The story now emerging is of pioneer farmers after about 6200 B.C. moving north into Old Europe from Greece and Macedonia, bringing wheat and barley seeds and domesticated cattle and sheep. They established colonies along the Black Sea and in the river plains and hills, and these evolved into related but somewhat distinct cultures, archaeologists have learned. The settlements maintained close contact through networks of trade in copper and gold and also shared patterns of ceramics.

The Spondylus shell from the Aegean Sea was a special item of trade. Perhaps the shells, used in pendants and bracelets, were symbols of their Aegean ancestors. Other scholars view such long-distance acquisitions as being motivated in part by ideology in which goods are not commodities in the modern sense but rather “valuables,” symbols of status and recognition.

Noting the diffusion of these shells at this time, Michel Louis Seferiades, an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in France, suspects “the objects were part of a halo of mysteries, an ensemble of beliefs and myths.”

In any event, Dr. Seferiades wrote in the exhibition catalog that the prevalence of the shells suggested the culture had links to “a network of access routes and a social framework of elaborate exchange systems — including bartering, gift exchange and reciprocity.”

Over a wide area of what is now Bulgaria and Romania, the people settled into villages of single- and multiroom houses crowded inside palisades. The houses, some with two stories, were framed in wood with clay-plaster walls and beaten-earth floors. For some reason, the people liked making fired clay models of multilevel dwellings, examples of which are exhibited.

A few towns of the Cucuteni people, a later and apparently robust culture in the north of Old Europe, grew to more than 800 acres, which archaeologists consider larger than any other known human settlements at the time. But excavations have yet to turn up definitive evidence of palaces, temples or large civic buildings. Archaeologists concluded that rituals of belief seemed to be practiced in the homes, where cultic artifacts have been found.

The household pottery decorated in diverse, complex styles suggested the practice of elaborate at-home dining rituals. Huge serving bowls on stands were typical of the culture’s “socializing of food presentation,” Dr. Chi said.

At first, the absence of elite architecture led scholars to assume that Old Europe had little or no hierarchical power structure. This was dispelled by the graves in the Varna cemetery. For two decades after 1972, archaeologists found 310 graves dated to about 4500 B.C. Dr. Anthony said this was “the best evidence for the existence of a clearly distinct upper social and political rank.”

Vladimir Slavchev, a curator at the Varna Regional Museum of History, said the “richness and variety of the Varna grave gifts was a surprise,” even to the Bulgarian archaeologist Ivan Ivanov, who directed the discoveries. “Varna is the oldest cemetery yet found where humans were buried with golden ornaments,” Dr. Slavchev said.

More than 3,000 pieces of gold were found in 62 of the graves, along with copper weapons and tools, and ornaments, necklaces and bracelets of the prized Aegean shells. “The concentration of imported prestige objects in a distinct minority of graves suggest that institutionalized higher ranks did exist,” exhibition curators noted in a text panel accompanying the Varna gold.

Yet it is puzzling that the elite seemed not to indulge in private lives of excess. “The people who donned gold costumes for public events while they were alive,” Dr. Anthony wrote, “went home to fairly ordinary houses.”

Copper, not gold, may have been the main source of Old Europe’s economic success, Dr. Anthony said. As copper smelting developed about 5400 B.C., the Old Europe cultures tapped abundant ores in Bulgaria and what is now Serbia and learned the high-heat technique of extracting pure metallic copper.

Smelted copper, cast as axes, hammered into knife blades and coiled in bracelets, became valuable exports. Old Europe copper pieces have been found in graves along the Volga River, 1,200 miles east of Bulgaria. Archaeologists have recovered more than five tons of pieces from Old Europe sites.

An entire gallery is devoted to the figurines, the more familiar and provocative of the culture’s treasures. They have been found in virtually every Old Europe culture and in several contexts: in graves, house shrines and other possibly “religious spaces.”

One of the best known is the fired clay figure of a seated man, his shoulders bent and hands to his face in apparent contemplation. Called the “Thinker,” the piece and a comparable female figurine were found in a cemetery of the Hamangia culture, in Romania. Were they thinking, or mourning?

Many of the figurines represent women in stylized abstraction, with truncated or elongated bodies and heaping breasts and expansive hips. The explicit sexuality of these figurines invites interpretations relating to earthly and human fertility.

An arresting set of 21 small female figurines, seated in a circle, was found at a pre-Cucuteni village site in northeastern Romania. “It is not difficult to imagine,” said Douglass W. Bailey of San Francisco State University, the Old Europe people “arranging sets of seated figurines into one or several groups of miniature activities, perhaps with the smaller figurines at the feet or even on the laps of the larger, seated ones.”

Others imagined the figurines as the “Council of Goddesses.” In her influential books three decades ago, Marija Gimbutas, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, offered these and other so-called Venus figurines as representatives of divinities in cults to a Mother Goddess that reigned in prehistoric Europe.

Although the late Dr. Gimbutas still has an ardent following, many scholars hew to more conservative, nondivine explanations. The power of the objects, Dr. Bailey said, was not in any specific reference to the divine, but in “a shared understanding of group identity.”

As Dr. Bailey wrote in the exhibition catalog, the figurines should perhaps be defined only in terms of their actual appearance: miniature, representational depictions of the human form. He thus “assumed (as is justified by our knowledge of human evolution) that the ability to make, use and understand symbolic objects such as figurines is an ability that is shared by all modern humans and thus is a capability that connects you, me, Neolithic men, women and children, and the Paleolithic painters in caves.”

Or else the “Thinker,” for instance, is the image of you, me, the archaeologists and historians confronted and perplexed by a “lost” culture in southeastern Europe that had quite a go with life back before a single word was written or a wheel turned.

My Shammy

Geishary — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:12:36 GMT

Well, ive had a warrior that went up to 60 but I had to delete her. I also had a high lvl hunter. Ive tried every class but my all time favorite is my shammy. Shamans can do almost everything. Depending on how you spec, you can do all dps or all cc or healing. Also you can mix them up, cc and dps, or cc and healing, or dps and healing. Im elemental spec (ive tried the others). I love it. I dont do alot of dps or alot of healing but im always #2 on the list. Back up dps and back up healing. Which is good because I hate being depended on in instances. Its a fun class and its full of different spells. I suggest every should have a shammy. HeHe

Where do YOU go for Gaming News?

Squeak — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 06:01:11 GMT

I'm curious where people spend their time and where do you get news on the video game industry?

If you don't follow the industry, then where do you learn about new games coming out? Do you subscribe to a magazine or is it just via friends? Or is it internet advertisements?

For the most part I spend my time researching games that interest me. I have a few specific developers that I follow - such as Blizzard or Bioware - so I have signed up for their monthly, e-mailed newsletters and this is often a good source of direct-from-the-producer information. I haven't found a game review site that I'm exactly enthralled with just yet. For general gaming news, some commentary that is often review-like, and a bit of humor I confess that the bulk of my gaming knowledge extends from Penny Arcade and their exposition that I have attended annualy since it's creation in '04.

What about you?

Open Letter To "MY" Senator

Ernesto37 — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:45:12 GMT

I placed MY in quotes because these days, Senators pay little or no attention to what we try to tell them! We get some mealy mouth reply that indicates the Senator is HELL-bent on SUPPORTING the OFFENDING LEGILATION!!! A letter I sent follows You may write your own IGNORED letter... Formerly Honorable XXXXX XXXXXXXX : I say "formerly" because if this bill was so great, why would Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) 3rd term Democrat from Louisiana receive from Sen HARRY REID A PROMISED $300,000 FOR HER YES VOTE payment for her prostitution in backing YOUR bill? This bill, whatever pleasant sounding psudonym you care to christen it, is a TRAVESTY. You may name freedom loss as Beneficial Intent but forcing this is bad legislation that reflects POORLY on YOUR PERSONAL HONOR. DO NOT vote for this bill...it is full of reckless, feckless, spending AND benefits LAWYERS mostly. Expecting YOU of all people to do the intelligent thing and say "NO" on this bill. Furthermore, you can forget about my vote and that of my wife should you back this ... Yours truly, EP Ramos,PhD and wife

The meaning of a2 in an orchestral score.

Beathoven — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:34:41 GMT

I am converting Beethoven's 5th Symphony to MIDI. However, I am stuck on the meaning of "a2" above some of the woodwind parts. As far as I can ascertain, a2 means "with the second flute (or other instrument), but I have no idea whether this applies to one note, one bar or is in force until the notes for both instreuments are shown together or "1." (meaning: first instrument) is encountered. Can anyone give me the true explanation please?

Tucker and Dale vs Evil

Raikus — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:42:04 GMT

Now THIS looks fantastic. It's a typical "hillbillies killing college kids" horror film except it's from the P.O.V. of the hillbillies -- who aren't really killing any of them. It's just a giant case of mistaken identity. It stars Tyler Labine from the grossly underrated CW series Reaper (now canceled) and Alan Tudyk from Firefly and Serenity fame.

See the preview here.

Xbox Live Update Today November 17, 2009 Twitter, Facebook, and Last.fm, Zune Store

willburns1 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:12:18 GMT

Today is the day for the Xbox Live update that will bring Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm, and the Zune Store to the Xbox 360. The update is a pretty good one. I got the chance to see the update before most people because I was part of the live preview. So I have had the chance to play with the Twitter and Facebook applications and I think they are neat but there isn't a lot of use for them on the Xbox. The Facebook application is nice because you can view all your photos on your TV with is a nice feature, but other than that I can't see myself using them that much.Primarily because they don't integrate into the system so it's not like you are going to get Facebook or Twitter notifications while your playing Left 4 Dead, which is probably a good thing.

The Last.fm application is by far my favorite new application. It allows you to play music from Last.fm while a slide show of the band plays on the TV. This is a perfect application for parties, providing a large range of music in a specific genre. Last.fm is of course very much like Pandora radio, allowing you to make a station based on a artist. The website them plays music that is similar to the artist you based the station on. A very handy thing to have on your xbox.

The last application is the Zune Store, which I think is awful. Yes, Yes they allow you to rent movies in 1080p but it costs you are arm and a leg to do it. If it was $1 to rent a movie I think I might do it, but not for $5 - $6, when I get a whole month of Netflix for $8.99 with unlimited HD instant watch. I think they need to get their prices down before something like that will really take off. Of course everything in my opinion is over priced on the Microsoft Market place, but such is life.

Left 4 Dead 2 Finally out!

willburns1 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:44:08 GMT

Left 4 Dead 2 is finally here! I am really excited about the different game play options and the changes they have made to the game. I think the game is awesome with all the new guns and melee weapons. It's sure to make an entire weekend of Zombie killing action. I thought I would just mention some of the things I really like about the changes in the Game.

I think its awesome that they are going to make you switch weapons more often. They are not going to give you enough ammo to play the whole game with the same gun. You are going to have to switch weapons in order to stay locked and loaded. The melee weapons are a new addition to the game that I of course love. They add a whole new dimension to the the game since you can you can only hold melee weapons or a secondary weapon like a pistols. They can do a lot of damage and will help you save ammo. Many of the melee weapons will kill zombies in one hit making for a very useful weapon.

The game features new health items as well. The game will continue to offer med packs and pill containers, but now also features adrenaline shots and defibrillators. The adrenaline shots will allow you to run faster and push though zombies as well as do things faster like heal people. This make having an adrenaline shot at the end of a level very useful.

What about the left 4 dead game do you like. If anyone wants to play some Left 4 Dead hit me up on Live my Gamertag is BigWillyBurns

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 - November 10, 2009 out Now

willburns1 — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:37:19 GMT

So, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 is now out in stores and I don't have it. Sad right? Yes it is but I have my reasons. What is my reason for not get one of the most anticipated games of 09. Well I guess it's because I don't have the money. I played through the COD MW and it was a good game I just have been preoccupied with other games like Borderlands, Halo 3 ODST and the up and coming Left 4 Dead 2 which hits stores November 17, 2009.

I have no doubt that the game is going to be good I just wanted a little more co-op game play. Apparently MW 2 is only a two person co-op, which is a little lame in my opinion. Games like Left 4 Dead and Borderlands have spoiled me with there drop in and drop out 4 player co-op and that is what I wanted to see in COD MW2. It does have split screen however which is good to see. So if you have a buddy over you can play split screen, but like a said it's only 2 player co-op.

So all you people out there let me know what you think of the game. Maybe if it's as good as everyone thinks I'll have to pry my wallet open and get it.

ASTRONOMY AND ASTROLOGY

cartoon — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:55:52 GMT

Few people know that the famous astronomers Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Bruno were also astrologers. In fact, they were astrologers before they became astronomers. In sixteenth century Europe, astrology birthed astronomy during the Renaissance; the telescope replaced the forceps as this birth grew into a science. Over the centuries since, the child grew into the adult who dismissed the astrologer midwives of his birth.

Quantum Astrology: Science, Spirit and Our Place in the Cycles of History celebrates the 400^th anniversary of Galileo’s use of the telescope. .

. This ancient science of the planetary cycles began through the intuitive dictum of “As Above, So Below.” Using great graphics of the planetary cycle’s astrologers clearly demonstrate the impact of cosmic cycles on our personal lives as well as on the collective level of cultural change.

In these times of rapid cultural change astrologers present a twenty-first century vision of the relationship of the ancient science of astrology. This perspective helps give clarity to this time of crisis and cultural change.

GYPSIES POEMS OF LOVE

cartoon — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:47:42 GMT

Walking the ancient paths, building at the same time a new path – where a new day is born with the sun and a pure breath of the fresh dawn in the mountains – they travel from here to beyond. Wandering around in this way across the earth, the gypsies represent histories in the beating pulse of the oldest of worlds, with steps that have reached freedom and that were taken in a state of constant nomadic exploration. Traveling from one place to another in this world and in a constant state of social decadence, their folklore is clearly represented by different groupings of gypsy nature, which join or relate to each other as they find other caravans along the road. With the element of time – which keeps the beat of the elements, the music and the guitar – they go deeper into the spirit of the Flamenco and the dedication to the devotion of the senses, the inspiration and the passion for the art of the gypsy liberty of self-expression in their numerous variations

Sly humor and suspenseful conflict

cartoon — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:10:44 GMT

Mauritius is a small island nation off the African coast in the India Ocean. Mauritius was a British Colony at the time of the stamps’ issue. A local watchmaker won the contract to print two stamps – the Twopence and a One Penny. His mistake was printing the words “post office” instead of “post paid” on the stamps. The mistake was discovered after 200 stamps were printed. It is believed that only 30 of these stamps still exist.

Though the storyline of Mauritius may at first suggest elements of The Piano Lesson, American Buffalo or The Price, Rebeck has other ideas and sensibilities. Like the rare stamps in question from the paradise isle of Mauritius, the fascination is in gazing into what at first may seem slight, obvious and functional.

As a Variety critic noted, “The passionate pastime of generations of obsessive nerds acquire new credibility in Mauritius, in which philately becomes the unlikely terrain for sly humor and suspenseful conflict. Theresa Rebeck’s capably constructed quasi-thriller is an entertaining account of two estranged sisters locking horns over their inheritance of a pair of rare stamps … the play is witty and absorbing.”

A rejuvenating force

cartoon — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:01:49 GMT

It is time to take charge of nourishing ourselves on a deeper level. Nourish your spirit and you will find the rejuvenating force that cannot be bought because it comes from within.

Make the connections and get the insights that empower you as well as make you more beautiful and radiant. Nothing is as rejuvenating as feeling good about oneself.

It is never too late to learn about the prevention of disease or the maintenance of beauty through proper nutrition, exercise to tighten and tone from head to toe and correct mental attitude. You will learn and practice exercise to benefit your face and body. You also will learn how gain control of your thoughts.

We must learn to heal ourselves. It is up to us to choose a rewarding life, so we might as well make the choice that whatever we do, will be done with vitality and enthusiasm

The role of religion in the evolution of society

cartoon — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 04:11:23 GMT

At some point in pre-history, humans started believing in the existence of a god or gods. This was the first religious awakening, and it was vital to human evolution. With it humankind was able to move from a hunter-gatherer society to a complex modern civilization. An important role for the gods after the first awakening was to be a higher power that could and would help humans in their daily challenges. As the first awakening continued over thousands of years, peoples evolved into what we call civilization. Another important role emerged for the god or gods, as religion now helped the secular leader hold the larger group together as a nation and an empire. Typically, the priest class created a myth structure that assisted the political leader with legitimacy and provided a set of rules in which society could better work as a political and social unit. My main goal is not to prove the existence of god or gods, but to establish that religion in the past was functional to human social evolution and that religions hold important social roles in the present and future. At the same time, some of those roles need to be updated, given the realities of globalization and science. Significantly, the functions of religions over thousands of years may not hold true for the twenty-first century.

HELP

cartoon — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:10:20 GMT

I firmly believe that experience is the best teacher, for example, I could spend hours explaining what it is like to drive a car. I could tell how it is different steering a car when it is driven at five miles per hour versus 60 mph. then I could explain how you need to think in reserve when you back up. I could do that, or I could tell you that the only way to learn to drive is through actual experience, supervised of course.

While sitting in front of your computer keyboard, you are not in on danger of driving into a tree or running over pedestrians, so it is safe to plunge right in on your own.

When I tell people this, a frequent response is that they ought to go buy a book. A large number of these people are surprised to learn their computer comes out of the box with the equivalents of an instruction book consisting of many hundreds of pages.

The key to this incredible library is to press the F1 key. “The Help Key” [F1] is the de facto standard method of accessing the help system in most computer programs. Whenever you have a question or you get lost, the quickest and easiest way to get help is to press F1.

Open any program on your computer and press F1 to start the general online help system. If nothing happens, click on File then Help. Sometimes, the Help menu will point you to a help file located on the company website. It is rare to encounter programs that do not include this feature in some form or another. Once the help system is invoked, a table of contents usually pops up with a provision for searching.

Sometimes pressing F1 does not take you to the general help system, because many programs include “context-sensitive help.” When you press F1, the computer will display a help topic most closely related to whatever you were in the process of doing when you pressed the help key. In other words, if you were in the process of trying to print and you press F1, you are most likely to get a help screen with a list of help topics related to how to print. This context-sensitive help is not really intended to be accessible for reading as a whole. Each topic is supposed to describe in detail only one situation, or a single feature of the software.

Context sensitive help is sometimes implemented by using tool tips or a “help-start pointer”. Tool tips are small balloons (information windows) which appear when you hover the mouse over an object without clocking on any mouse buttons. The balloon encloses the briefest description of the help topic. A help start pointer is found on the “Help” pull down window and, when clicked on, changes the mouse pointer shape to a question mark. In most Microsoft applications, clicking on the “Help” menu then clocking on “What is this?” activates this feature. In Microsoft Word, move the question mark shaped mouse pointer over the little icon that resembles a blank sheet of paper and clock there. The help system then answers with: “New blank document… create a new blank file.”

It is often not necessary to buy a book to study, because so many programs come with this type of help system already installed. Some of the help systems do have a [Print] button, but be warned the manual could be hundreds of pages long!

Left 4 Dead 2 Has Avatar Rewards

willburns1 — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:10:48 GMT

Left 4 Dead 2 will be the second game to have avatar rewards for the Xbox 360 console. Avatar rewards is a feature added to the Xbox at the last dashboard update. It allows player so to unlock items to put on or to interact with their avatars. Items like shirts, hat, shoes, and pants. You can also get items like a basketball, or in Left 4 Deads case a frying pan, for your avatar to interact with.

Avatar rewards sounds kind of dumb but is fun if you don't have to pay for it and comes with completing some task. It's kind of nice to get something other than just points for accomplishing something. The Avatar rewards are as follows.

Med Kit: Earned by beating all five campaigns.
Bull Shifters Shirt: earned by winning 10 games of Versus.
A Left 4 Dead 2 shirt: Earned by winning 10 games of Scavenge.
Zombie Hand Shirt: Earned by killing 10,000 Infected.
Depeche Mode Shirt: Earned by rescuing Gnome Chompski from the Dark Carnival.

There is also talk of a commentary mode that can be unlocked featuring audio from Gabe Newell from the game.