Now that Mythbusters is on Roku and Netflix via various venues, I’ve been watching it. Previously I’ve only seen a few. They’re pretty good. And now, President Obama will be on Mythbusters: “The Discovery Channel has announced that the Commander-in-Chief will be doing a cameo on “Mythbusters” tonight. He’ll be asking hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman to redo one of their projects.” *
It’s a great idea that I found on a new blog called Notes from the Pondonome, (which from the photograph in the blog’s banner must be some kind of remote church and graveyard near a river in South Dakota): It involves bacteria.
This is interesting. Well, the whole conversation is interesting, but it gets especially interesting around 6 minutes …
Question: … there’s this US Intelligence Analyst Bradley Manning arrested and it’s alleged that he confessed in in a chatroom to have leaked …. 280 thousand classified us embassy cables. Did he?
Answer: Well, we have denied receiving those cables. He has been charged, five days ago, with obtaining 150k cables and releasing 50. We have released early in the year a cable from the Reykjavik us embassy but not necessarily connected…
What is really interesting about this has little to do with Assange, Wikileaks or the cables, but rather, Human Nature. Obviously, WikiLeaks has the cables if not in hand at least in the bush at that moment, and Assange is essentially lying, or perhaps, telling the kind of white lie that a diplomat might tell on the surface while something somewhat different is going on underneath (and in teh cabalz!!!). And, as a human not trained by MI-5 to have ice in his veins when telling a lie, he spews …. SPEWS!!!! … the “tells.”
So, really, it’s more like:
Answer:glance to the side, swallow hard Well, we have denied receiving those cables. wiggle shoulder He has been charged lilting rise of voice, five days ago, avoid eye contact with obtaining twitch 150k cables and releasing 50 hard swallow. We have released cough cough early in the year um a cable from the grimace Reykjavik us embassy but not necessarily connected…bla bla bla
LOL
In any event, given the current impact that Wikileaks seems to be having, this older Ted talk which I have obtained from a source is worth a look:
“Carbon dioxide is natural, it is not harmful, it is a part of Earth’s lifecycle. And yet we’re being told that we have to reduce this natural substance, reduce the American standard of living, to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occuring in Earth.”
Just a quick note. As the Minnesota Governor’s Race recount proceeds, it became apparent, as many of us predicted, that Emmer’s standing in that context has moved in the wrong direction from his perspective. He will end up losing this race by more votes than had he simply conceded to begin with. It is now expected that Emmer will concede the race any moment now, which has apparently (though this is unofficial) prompted the Electio Canvassing Board to cancel today’s meeting at which the contested votes would have been examined.
This allows the Republicans to say “We lost by fewer than 9,000 votes” instead of “we lost by more than 9000 votes,” I suppose.
Elizabeth Edwards — who catapulted into the public eye in 2004, when her husband, Sen. John Edwards, ran for president and was John Kerry’s running mate on the Democratic ticket, has died, a close family friend tells NPR. She was 61.
Over the past few years, Edwards wrote two best-selling books, fought a well-publicized battle against cancer and saw her marriage crumble after her husband fathered a child with another woman.
My father was a housing authority executive director during much of the 1970s and 1980s. He was fairly well known, having established one or two of the main housing authority directors’ professional associations, and having developed the shared risk pool insurance system which reduced the cost of running public housing projects buy tens of percent. Jimmy Carter offered him the HUD directorship, but he asked to be relieved of that request but reconsidered when Carter was re-elected. Which he wasn’t, else we may have spent a few years in Washington.
Anyway, it was not terribly unlikely for Joe (that was his name) to be asked to give the keynote address at a major housing authority meeting in Chicago one year. And, since dad was also a good Democrat (until later in his life) and well connected to the Albany Machine, the mayor of Chicago knew him well and was warm in his welcome to the Windy City. In fact, the Mayor personally drove (well, was driven, in his limo) over to the hotel my father was staying in, before the noon-time keynote, to surprise him, get a drink or something, and drive him personally to the meeting.
Lamont Ekker experienced what some people might consider a Thanksgiving miracle when he cut through a 15-pound chunk of sandstone at his Torrey rock shop last week.
Ekker cuts and polishes rocks at his shop, Jurassic Rocks, to expose interesting internal patterns and striations. Three days before Thanksgiving, he was “baking” in his oven some rocks he picked up that day in a quarry near Teasdale in southern Utah. The heat causes the iron in the yellow sandstone to oxidize, turning it a brilliant orangish red.
“When I took those pieces out of the oven, I saw this one had turned into what it is,”
The recount in the Minnesota Governor’s race is almost done. As of yesterday evening, only five counties had counting to do. The state “canvassing board” (in charge of the recount, headed by the Secretary of State), is scheduled to meet on December 8th to resolve the recount. That may get done in one day, but is more likely to take about three days. Because there will be lawyers for both sides there and a state supreme court judge on the board who seems bent on dragging out the process (in my humble opinion).
