Dean’s Diner
For some reason, Susan didn’t seem to like me very much. I have no clue as to why not. I was as agreeable as a kid as I am now as an adult. Whenever we would go into her restaurant, she would smile at my friends and then give me a disapproving glance….
The authorities of the Russian town of Kemerovo arranged a special expedition to find the yeti habitat which was discovered by Google maps.
Recently there have been more than 20 claims from the local hunters who said they had seen strange creatures in the forests. These creatures resembled yeti. After the claims from the local hunters Kemerovo authorities decided to create the team of scientists for yeti searches.
The expedition turned to be successful. Scientists managed to find ‘fresh’ yeti footprints in the Azassky cave.
Scientists found two identical yeti footprints. One of them was left on the rock and it dates back 5,000 years ago, and the other footprint which was left not long ago was found at the bottom of the cave.
“They are absolutely identical. Five thousand years ago yetis settled down in this cave and now their descendants are still living here.
Source: Pravda
Scientists have reported a strange twist in the tale of Europe’s harbinger of spring the Common Cuckoo Cuculus canorus. In a dramatic discovery, returning cuckoos have been heard and filmed calling with a highly distinctive variation of the normal call. The new call is best described as “Ooo-Cuck, Ooo-Cuck”.
The judicial panel that has been off somewhere deciding what to do about the Coleman election challenge has ordered 400 additional ballots opened and counted on April 7th.
If (and we do not know this for a fact) these are THE remaining ballots to count, them Coleman would have to get a statistically unlikely majority to overtake Franken’s lead of 225 votes. I suppose this is possible. So I suppose we’ll be sitting on the edges of our respective seats for the next week.
There does not seem to be any systematic meaningful bias in which candidate is likely to come out ahead in this group. The mix of 400 ballots includes both Coleman-supported and Franken supported absentee ballots.
I understand that there is a news conference being held right now, and I’m checking on that … will report back if anything new developes.
UPDATE: From the Franken Lawyer’s news conference: It turns out that the court intends to look at a subset of the ballots and THEN determine which will be opened. We do now know what percentage of the ballots make up this subset, or what their characteristics might be.
This is important: There are at least two other issues that have not addressed by the court and that the court may still chose to address. So this may be complicated.
Added:
What do these 400 votes have to look like for Coleman to win? If we assume that they represent a random subset of votes, we can guess that 60 are Barkely votes (the third party candidate). This leaves 340 votes.
Then, Coleman has to get 225 votes, which is about 66 percent. Coleman would have to win this tiny mini election by a landslide.
So, if he does win it by a landslide, that would pretty much mean that he cheated.
We’ll see how this goes…
sources: MN progressive, Strib
Are there any concerned liberal-minded faculty or students at St. Cloud State in MN who can help us out with something? Email me. kthxbye
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Note the continued threats of violence by the Right Wing. We continue to await word from the court.
Polycarbonate water bottles have received plenty of bad press for releasing potentially toxic compounds into unsuspecting drinkers, but there may be another culprit: everyday plastic packaging.
A German study of commercially-available bottled water found contamination by chemicals that mimic natural sex hormones. When the researchers raised snails in the water, they bred with extreme rapidity — a warning sign that the chemicals were active. Contamination levels were twice as high in brands packaged in plastic instead of glass, suggesting that plastic was the culprit.
Six bonobos, a species of chimpanzee, have died from a flu epidemic in a month at the Lola Ya Bonobo in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Ten more have contracted the flu.
These are apes in a rehab center, and apparently the flu (we’ll assume for the moment that the diagnosis is accurate, but keep in mind that the term “flu” has different meanings in different parts of the world) hits hard and the animal dies in a few days after showing symptoms.
The caption of this photograph at The Guardian says only, “Nowruz celebrations in Afghanistan.” Nowruz is the name of the Iranian New Year, which is celebrated in a number of countries by people of several faiths. The baskets of dried fruits eaten during the holiday provide the only visual connection to the colorful festivities, and you have to know more than the paper tells you to see that. For many viewers, this will a thoroughly conventional image of the Middle East.
How do you view a photograph when the ethnicity represented is the context? How do you view a photograph when the ethnicity is unexpected? For instance, if you were told that this photograph was taken in Des Moines Iowa, or if you were shown a photo of people putting chicken skewers on the barbie and told it was from Iran?
Read this interesting piece by Robert Hariman on “The Street, A Park, and the Unseen Middle East.”
This was mysteriously sent to me. I think maybe by god.
Check it out.
I saw you working out on that new machine,” the personal trainer, folding towels at the counter by the locker room, was saying to some guy he knew. You see more trainers folding towels these days, what with the economy and all.
“The new machine?” was the reply.
“Yea. The wave.”
“The wave?! Oh, you mean the thing next to the Stair Master. The Hockey Machine.”
“… Ah, right…. the ‘Hockey Machine …”
The wave is a low impact aerobic machine that simulates shushing, like with skate-skiing. Apparently the guys like to call it the “Hockey Machine.” Which it isn’t It’s “The Wave”. It’s got a sign on it that says “The Wave” and everything.
Hockey machine indeed.
OBJECTIVE: To establish if the ‘myth’ about whether the size of a man’s penis can be estimated from his shoe size has any basis, in fact. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: Two urologists measured the stretched penile length of 104 men in a prospective study and related this to their shoe size. RESULTS: The median stretched penile length for the sampled population was 13 cm and the median UK shoe size was 9 (European 43). There was no statistically significant correlation between shoe size and stretched penile length. CONCLUSION: The supposed association of penile length and shoe size has no scientific basis.
Their methodology obviously … oh, never mind. It does not end here. The original cite has “Related Articles” that get even farther from reality.
I suppose we should be fortunate that they are not asking this question the other way ’round. For the benefit of shoe sales departments.
Hanna Rosin paints breast feeding, in a recent item in The Atlantic, as a social requirement for the privileged, a “no-exceptions requirement” and a badge of being a good mother. She also examines the possibility that breast-feeding is ” … an instrument of misery that mostly just keeps women down.”
I dutifully breast-fed each of my first two children for the full year that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends. I have experienced what the Babytalk story calls breast-feeding-induced “maternal nirvana.” This time around, nirvana did not describe my state of mind; I was launching a new Web site and I had two other children to care for, and a husband I would occasionally like to talk to. Being stuck at home breast-feeding as he walked out the door for work just made me unreasonably furious, at him and everyone else.
Blacktating has a counter argument, as does BlogHer.
Rosin externalizes her own ambivalence about breastfeeding her child, to whom she feeds her milk part-time and enjoys the skin-to-skin contact, by blaming public health campaigns, volunteer organizations like La Leche League and a present day frenzy of parenting perfectionism for making her and other women feel guilty. Public health campaigns promoting breastfeeding seem then to have been designed as a means of making privileged, educated, literate, upper class women like Rosin feel bad about themselves for not mothering properly. Rosin makes them sound like an extension of the eugenics movement from the first half of the 20th century which in part sought to encourage reproduction of desirables by tying women to the hearth through pseudoscientific education and the glorification of all-things-motherly.
(See also the Feminist Breeder Blog)
A new study warns that cold-blooded land animals like lizards and insects in the tropics may wither as the world warms. “Cold-blooded” is the layman’s term for ectotherms–animals whose body temperature is contingent on the surrounding environment, rather than internally regulated like that of warm-blooded creatures. They thrive in temperatures ranging from 68 degrees to 104 degrees Fahrenheit (20 to 40 degrees Celsius), above which they overheat. As the globe warms, researchers warn they may be forced to swelter in burrows and under bushes with little time to eat, find mates or rear young.
“Our models suggest that for many reptiles, the room to move may be pretty small,” says Rick Shine, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia
Or did we.