Nguyen van Thuan, chairs, Essenes, Antikythera Mechanism, Evo Morales

vassar
Occurred to me today that I'm way old. Most of the people I see dithering about have no idea.
I can personally remember the Assassination of that Roman Catholic President Ngo Dinh Diem, sanctioned by that other RC president JFK who was himself killed 3 weeks later.

Diem's nephew Cardinal (then Bishop) Francois Xavier Nguyen van Thuan, actually came to our house in Wellington.
The Prime Minister Holyoake, was a patient of father's - as was the chief justice, the Archbishop, and much brass in Wgtn. The PM recommended our house as a RC centre of hospitality. It was a rather grand wood paneled double brick house, a stones throw from parliament. As a bolshie teenager, I refused to welcome van Thuan. I already knew whos ring not to kiss.
I guess the PM was glad to have vT taken off his hands. Too Catholic, rather than too Vietnamese. The Vietnam war wasnt yet a political liability. There were 16,000 American military advisers in Vietnam

So few people alive now actually realise the gut feeling that Maliki must be having now as GWB43 leaks offensive memos against him.

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woofer
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total solar eclipse .. on August 1, 2008, outside the Siberian city of Novosibirsk.
least cloudy 2 min totality: Hovd in China ,near Burenhayrhan in Mongolia

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SciAm .. forget resveratrol..
flavonoids called oligomeric procyanidins--essentially condensed tannins, the compounds that impart bitterness to young reds--suppressed production of the peptide responsible for hardening arteries.

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Scientists say 135° is better than 90°
stokke
more chairs: .. anthro
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popsci
periodic table - grind up you antistatic brush, get yourself a dose of Polonium

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Yuck Rating High:
Essenes may have been better off not burying their shit?

Zias believes the lack of longevity puzzle could be explained by the community's latrine practices and its use of still-water pools for ritual cleansing and bathing. "Burying your feces in the outdoors makes a lot of sense until you live in Qumran," Zias explained. "By burying their fecal matter, they actually preserved the microorganisms and parasites. In the sunlight, the bacteria and parasites get zapped within a fairly short amount of time, but buried, the parasites can live in the soil for up to a year. Then people pick up things by walking through fecally contaminated soil -

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Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge by Gerald M. Edelman ISBN 0300120397
Edelman is one of the very few I still read on the subject of consciousness.
All others seem mere handwavers, or political-barrow-pushers.

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chron
The $150 laptop, one for every poor child. A great idea from Negroponte. [The MIT nice brother, n ot the cold-blooded killer Death-Squad runner older brother. Jeesh, what a family]

What happens now: People are desperate for connection. Poor people will find a way to get a cell phone before a fridge, or even a TV. I'm constantly amazed in poor 3rd world neighbourhoods at the video cell-phones. People know that the Internet is on the way, ICafes are used. Mostly for social, not "learning" per se.
The children: I was staggered, helping 15yr old with homework, she was learning "Neutrophils,Eosinophils,Basophils" - 1st yr undergrad stuff for me. 12yr old was learning "Gerund Phrases" in English (her 2nd language) - I recall failing that question as a 12yr old scholarship student (I won a scholarship) Her equipment: pencil and thin paper notebooks. No textbooks. pen and decent paper would be an improvement. InternetConnected NoteBook would be great.
Currently: the cell phone network is absurdly expensive for Internet&data, even for Australians.
Wi-Fi hasnt appeared over the ridge. But when it does, prepare for a big social explosion out of the poor tropics.
Young women & men armed with knowledge & connectivity

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sky calculator awes scientists
Nov. 29, 2006 Cardiff U..
Mike Edmunds and Tony Freeth .. Antikythera Mechanism, ..from the second century B.C.
..30 gears. .the mechanism could track astronomical movements with remarkable precision .. sun’s and moon’s movements through the Zodiac..
The machine could also predict eclipses and recreate the irregular orbit of the moon .. might have predicted the positions of some or all of the planets.
..Nov. 30 Nature. ..
nytimes
People,people, no it could NOT predict eclipses. I will be extremely surprised if it could predict the Moon's position.
Newton had a hard time. It takes solution of 2nd order differential equation.

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Evo Morales, Bolivia's leftist president, told the protesting landless Indians this week that he would issue a presidential decree to redistribute idle land to poor peasants if the boycott continued.
Morales' "land reform", a key campaign promise, aims to redistribute some 48 million acres, or almost a fifth of Bolivia's territory, within five years.

Nguyen van Thuan, chairs, Essenes, Antikythera Mechanism, Evo Morales