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World Aids Day

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Thanksgiving Table

Samuel Ullman Quotes

Samuel Ullman once said

Youth is not entirely a time of life – it is a state of mind. It is not wholly a matter of ripe cheeks, red lips, or supple knees. It is temper of will, a quality of imagination, vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only by deserting their ideals. You are as young as your confidence, as old as your fears; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.


Maturity is the ability to think, speak and act your feelings within the bounds of dignity. The measure of your maturity is how spiritual you become during the midst of your frustrations.


Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.


Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the Infinite, so long are you young.


Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of the appetite, for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of sixty more than a body of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.


When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.

Film...photography

One of my digital color photos done as greyscale.

Fade to Black

The twilight of film photography.

BY DOUGLAS GANTENBEIN
Tuesday, March 14, 2006 12:01 a.m.

Weston Naef sounds almost misty-eyed when discussing Kodak Tri-X, a black-and-white 35mm film first made in the 1950s and a staple of photojournalism for decades. "It was a wonderful 400-speed film," says Mr. Naef, curator of photography for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, referring to Tri-X's ability to capture an image in low light, known as its "speed." "And then it could be 'pushed' [chemically altered during development] to 1200, or even 2400"--meaning it could be used in even lower light.

Tri-X--along with Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Fujicolor and all those other mellifluously named films--and the Nikon, Minolta and Canon cameras long used by amateur and professional photographers alike are becoming anachronisms. According to the Photo Marketing Association, digital cameras are likely to account for 90% of all cameras sold in 2006. In January Nikon, one of the most revered names in photography, announced it was largely abandoning the film camera business. Days later Minolta (now known as Konica Minolta) followed suit. Kodak now earns more from digital photography than film, although so far it hasn't profited from that trend.

Film was magic--the process of pushing a button to open the shutter, forming an invisible image on a strip of coated plastic, then making that image visible by bathing it with chemicals and projecting it onto a sheet of paper that in turn was soaked in more chemicals and sometimes rubbed and massaged to manipulate the image.

Now, I still press a button on the Canon PowerShot I often carry. But it's a digital image that appears instantly on the camera's LCD screen, and in a few seconds I can transfer it to my Dell computer, to crop and change it in seconds with Photoshop, then email it anywhere.

The sentimentalist in me wants this to end, everyone to go back to film, and to hell with Photoshop. The practical person in me asks, where would I set up a darkroom these days? And when would I use it? Besides, notes Mark Federman, who teaches at the University of Toronto's McLuhan Program, there's no point in labeling a change such as film-to-digital as "bad" or "good." It's just a change.

Which isn't to say this particular change is without damaging impacts, despite digital's obvious win in the marketplace. Mr. Federman, who thinks often about how societies "remember," sees digital photography as a disaster for historians. People delete pictures from their cameras' memory cards. Hard drives crash. PCs end up in the dump, photos still on board. And CDs full of pictures will become unreadable when their surfaces deteriorate (you heard that right--CDs are incredibly unstable). With all that, says Mr. Federman, we're on the verge of losing billions of pictures. "We will not have a record of the individual stories that are told by families from one generation to another through pictures," Mr. Federman says. "That is a wealth of human history that will simply be lost."

Look at it another way: When survivors of Hurricane Katrina returned to their devastated homes in New Orleans or Mississippi, almost without fail they sought family photographs--that one tangible link with their past. Today we're ensuring that in the future those photographs won't even exist. True, prints made from digital photos can now last as long as their film equivalent, but that's still only a few decades compared with the hundreds of years a black-and-white negative might last.

Mr. Federman is even-handed, though, and says that while we lose something we gain something else. A decade ago, photography beyond the Instamatic or Polaroid stage was fairly complex, and merely loading film could sometimes flummox a picture-taker. Today digital photography really is point-and-shoot. So we're democratizing picture-taking, and with a digital camera (or even camera phone) and a PC just about anyone can produce a high-quality photo (technically, if not artistically) and publish it however they see fit, via an Internet blog or one of the digital photo services such as Snapfish.

As for the aesthetics, let's for now call it a wash.

Some photographers continue to insist that film yields a better result than digital. "I still think a beautifully exposed [transparency] is more beautiful than a digital image," says Lisa Quinones, a New York-based commercial photographer. "Digital always seems to be missing something--there isn't quite as much depth to it."

Mr. Naef of the Getty notes that film photography has elements of human error and accident that sometimes can result in surprisingly beautiful results not possible in the mechanically precise digital world. "Digital cameras produce a massively predictable result," he says. "And for amateur photographers, we see fewer of the 'delightful mistakes' that could yield such wonderful pictures."

Mr. Naef likes to cite, on behalf of film, a series of photographs taken in 2001 by California photographer Robert Weingarten. Every day that year, at 6:30 a.m. sharp, Mr. Weingarten took a picture from exactly the same spot, aiming in the same direction, with a Hasselblad camera loaded with color transparency film. The results, seen in a gallery show called "6:30 AM" and now in a book of the same name (Hatje Cantz Publishers, $49), are a revelation: the early morning light of Santa Monica shifting from luminous oranges and reds to muted blues and grays, clouds either etched in brilliant sunlight or suffused into formless fog.

Not only are the images beautifully captured on film in a way that digital might not achieve, says Mr. Naef, but they prove the ineffable beauty of nature. No digital manipulation here--the camera (and film) literally did not lie.

"For '6:30 AM' it was important to use film, in part because of the aspect ratio [the shape of the picture as recorded by the camera--the Hasselblad shoots geometrically neutral square images] and because, with digital, there is always a question of authenticity," Mr. Weingarten says. "And in some cases curators would ask to see the originals, just to ensure there was fidelity to the prints that were displayed." But for the photographer, who is 64 years old, "6:30 AM" was perhaps his last all-film project.

Mr. Weingarten has converted completely to digital for his new "Palette Series," which opens March 15 at the Marlborough Chelsea Gallery in New York and consists of close-ups of paint palettes of artists such as Jasper Johns and Chuck Close. For his part, Mr. Weingarten doesn't dispute Mr. Naef's assertion that film can yield results that are surprising and wonderful. He simply believes that digital has too many advantages to pass up. "My cameras were like old friends," he says. "But with digital I find the tones are better, the subtleties are more, the depth of what you can do is much deeper." He has donated his beloved Nikon F5 film camera to the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., to reside forever as a museum piece.

Film isn't dead yet--one billion rolls of the stuff will be used this year--but it's on the way out, save for the odd fine-art photographer, the technophobe, or a sentimentalist like me. But even I have to admit that my Canon PowerShot is always on my desk and ready to go; my Canon film cameras rest in a camera bag in the attic, along with boxes of old slides and negatives. All history. But maybe that, eventually, will be their salvation.

Mr. Gantenbein is a writer and photographer living in Port Townsend, Wash.

Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

New Stamps

The Postal Service will issue Crops of the Americas definitive stamps in five designs, on March 16, 2006, in New York, New York. The stamps, designed by Phil Jordan, Falls Church, Virginia, go on sale nationwide March 17, 2006.

Artist Steve Buchanan, of Winsted, Connecticut, created each of the five stamp designs. As reference, he used slide photographs made by his wife Rita Buchanan's research in the late 1970s on indigenous agricultural methods in the southwestern United States. The crops depicted in the stamps - corn, chili peppers, beans, squashes, and sunflowers - had been cultivated in the Americas for centuries when Europeans first arrived in the New World.

Climate Change?

Handout photograph shows fish swimming above bleached coral near Miall Island in the Keppel island group about 550 kilometres (340 miles) north of Brisbane February 22, 2006. Australia has just experienced its warmest year on record and abnormally high sea temperatures during summer have caused massive coral bleaching in the Keppels. Sea temperatures touched 29 degrees Celsius (84 Fahreheit), the upper limit for coral. Picture taken February 22, 2006. Australian Institute of Marine Science/Damian Thomson/Handout

Ghostly coral bleachings haunt the world's reefs

By Michael PerryMon Mar 13, 8:13 PM ET

When marine scientist Ray Berkelmans went diving at Australia's Great Barrier Reef earlier this year, what he discovered shocked him -- a graveyard of coral stretching as far as he could see.

"It's a white desert out there," Berkelmans told Reuters in early March after returning from a dive to survey bleaching -- signs of a mass death of corals caused by a sudden rise in ocean temperatures -- around the Keppel Islands.

Australia has just experienced its warmest year on record and abnormally high sea temperatures during summer have caused massive coral bleaching in the Keppels. Sea temperatures touched 29 degrees Celsius (84 Fahrenheit), the upper limit for coral.

High temperatures are also a condition for the formation of hurricanes, such as Katrina which hit New Orleans in 2005.

"My estimate is in the vicinity of 95 to 98 percent of the coral is bleached in the Keppels," said Berkelmans from the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

Marine scientists say another global bleaching episode cannot be ruled out, citing major bleaching in the Caribbean in the 2005 northern hemisphere summer, which coincided with one of the 20 warmest years on record in the United States.

The rest of the article can be found here.

New Crustacean

This photo released Tuesday March 7, 2006 by the IFREMER (French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea) shows a new crustacean, called 'Kiwi hirsuta'. The eyeless shellfish, about 15cm long was discovered in March 2005 during a diving mission led by American researcher Robert Vrijenhoek, of the MBARI Institut, Cal., in hydrothermal vents of the Pacific Antartic Ridge, south of Easter Island. (AP Photo/A Fifis; IFREMER)

PARIS - A team of American-led divers has discovered a new crustacean in the South Pacific that resembles a lobster and is covered with what looks like silky, blond fur, French researchers said Tuesday.

Scientists said the animal, which they named Kiwa hirsuta, was so distinct from other species that they created a new family and genus for it.

The divers found the animal in waters 7,540 feet deep at a site 900 miles south of Easter Island last year, according to Michel Segonzac of the French Institute for Sea Exploration.

The new crustacean is described in the journal of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

The animal is white and just shy of 6 inches long — about the size of a salad plate.

In what Segonzac described as a "surprising characteristic," the animal's pincers are covered with sinuous, hair-like strands.

It is also blind. The researchers found it had only "the vestige of a membrane" in place of eyes, Segonzac said.

The researchers said that while legions of new ocean species are discovered each year, it is quite rare to find one that merits a new family.

The family was named Kiwaida, from Kiwa, the goddess of crustaceans in Polynesian mythology.

The diving expedition was organized by Robert Vrijenhoek of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California.

Lost World

This is the first photograph ever taken of what scientists are calling New Guinea's "lost" bird of paradise.The bird—known as Berlepsch’s six-wired bird of paradise—had been collected only once in the wild since its discovery more than a century ago. Its precise home range was unknown until now.

"Lost World" Found in Indonesia Is Trove of New Species

Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News
February 7, 2006

To boldly go where no one has gone before, one group of scientists didn't have to venture into space. They found a lost world right here on Earth.

"It really was like crossing some sort of time warp into a place that people hadn't been to," said Bruce Beehler of the wildlife expedition he co-led in December into the isolated Foja Mountains on the tropical South Pacific island of New Guinea.

During a 15-day stay at a camp they had cut out of the jungle, the conservationists found a trove of animals never before documented, from a new species of the honeyeater bird to more than 20 new species of frogs.

"We were like kids in a candy store," said Beehler, a bird expert with Conservation International in Washington, D.C. "Everywhere we looked we saw amazing things we had never seen before."

The Whole Grain Stamp

Consumers searching the grocery aisles for authentic whole grain foods now have a new "search tool" – the Whole Grain Stamp. Making it easy for shoppers to spot whole grain foods will help close the Whole Grains Gap and promote a goal long sought by nutrition and medical experts.

With the Whole Grain Stamp, consumers won't need to read ingredients or count grams and ounces to meet the whole grain goals in the 2005 Dietary Guidelines. The Stamp makes it easy to get the recommended three servings a day of whole grains: Eating three whole grain food products labeled "Excellent Source" or "100%/Excellent" does the trick – or six products labeled "Good Source.

The 2005 Guidelines advise eating half or more of our grains as whole grains – at least three 16g servings per day. A "Good Source" contains at least 8 grams of whole grains per labeled serving, while an "Excellent" or "100% Excellent Source" contains at least 16 grams of whole grains per labeled serving.

Definition of Whole Grains

Whole grains or foods made from them contain all the essential parts and naturally-occurring nutrients of the entire grain seed. If the grain has been processed (e.g., cracked, crushed, rolled, extruded, lightly pearled and/or cooked), the food product should deliver approximately the same rich balance of nutrients that are found in the original grain seed.

Examples of generally accepted whole grain foods and flours are:
Amaranth, Barley (lightly pearled), Brown and Colored Rice, Buckwheat, Bulgur, Corn and Whole Cornmeal, Emmer, Farro, Grano (lightly pearled wheat), Kamut® grain, Millet, Oatmeal and Whole Oats, Popcorn, Quinoa, Sorghum, Spelt, Teff, Triticale, Whole Rye, Whole or Cracked Wheat, Wheat Berries, and Wild Rice.

Taken from:

The Whole Grains Council

A Consortium of Industry, Scientists, Chefs and
Oldways Preservation Trust committeed to
increasing consumption of Whole Grains for better health

What is that star?

"This is only the second time in my life I've seen Mercury," says sky watcher Jeffrey Beall who snapped this picture looking west from his balcony in Denver, Colorado.Mercury is the bright "star" just above the mountain ridge, rivaling the city lights.

Mercury makes a rare appearance in the evening sky this week.

"Mercury is elusive because it spends most of its time hidden by the glare of the sun. This week is different. From now until about March 1st, Mercury moves out of the glare and into plain view. It's not that Mercury is genuinely farther from the sun. It just looks that way because of the Earth-sun-Mercury geometry in late February. A picture is worth a thousand words: diagram.

Friday, Feb. 24th, is the best day to look; that's the date of greatest elongation or separation from the sun. Other dates of note are Feb 28th and March 1st when the crescent moon glides by Mercury—very pretty."

Other space stories can be read at Science@NASA.

Greek Hiker Finds 6,500-Year-Old Pendant

An undated handout picture showing a 6,500-year-old gold jewel that has been picked up in a northern Greek field by a hiker who handed it over to authorities, an archaeologist said in the northern Greek port city of Thessaloniki on Thursday, Feb. 16, 2006. (AP Photo/Culture Ministry)

By COSTAS KANTOURIS, Associated Press Writer Fri Feb 17, 1:17 AM ET

THESSALONIKI, Greece - A Greek hiker found a 6,500-year-old gold pendant in a field and handed it over to authorities, an archaeologist said Thursday.
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The flat, roughly ring-shaped prehistoric pendant probably had religious significance and would have been worn on a necklace by a prominent member of society.

Only three such gold artifacts have been discovered during organized digs, archaeologist Georgia Karamitrou-Mendesidi, head of the Greek archaeological service in the northern region where the discovery was made, told The Associated Press.

"It belongs to the Neolithic period, about which we know very little regarding the use of metals, particularly gold," she said. "The fact that it is made of gold indicates that these people were highly advanced, producing significant works of art."

She said the pendant, measuring rough 1 1/2 by 1 1/2 inches, was picked up last year near the town of Ptolemaida, about 90 miles southwest of the northern city of Thessaloniki. Karamitrou-Mendesidi is to present the artifact at a three-day archaeological conference that opened Thursday in Thessaloniki.

Opening Ceremonies Turin

TURIN, ITALY - FEBRUARY 10: Italian actress Sophia Loren, Chilean writer Isabel Allende, American actress Susan Sarandon, Nobel Peace-prize winner Wangari Maathai of Kenya, Nawal El Moutawakel of Morocco, Manuela Di Centa of Italy, Maria Mutola of Mozambique and Cambodian human rights activist Somaly Mam carry the Olympic flag during the Opening Ceremony of the Turin 2006 Winter Olympic Games on February 10, 2006 at the Olympic Stadium in Turin, Italy. It was the first time eight women carried the Olympic flag. (Photo by Vladimir Rys/Bongarts/Getty Images) Bongarts/Getty Images



TURIN, ITALY - FEBRUARY 10: The Olympic flag is seen during the Opening Ceremony of the Turin 2006 Winter Olympic Games on February 10, 2006 at the Olympic Stadium in Turin, Italy. (Photo by Clive Rose/Getty Images) Getty Images

Mary Magdalene

Mary and Child with Sts Mary Magdalene and Catherine
by Alvise Vivarini
1504
Oil on canvas, 89 x 129 cm
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg

THE SAINTLY SINNER
by JOAN ACOCELLA
The two-thousand-year obsession with Mary Magdalene.
Issue of 2006-02-13 and 20
Posted 2006-02-06 The New Yorker

The Catholic Church presumably has enough on its hands right now without worrying about popular fiction, but the Holy See cannot have failed to notice that Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code,” a novel claiming that Jesus was married, has been on the Times best-seller list for almost three years. (Its message will soon spread more widely: the paperback is due out next month, and the movie version will be released in May.) Brown is by no means the first to have suggested that Christ had a sex life—Martin Luther said it—but the most notorious recent statement of the theory was a 1982 book, “Holy Blood, Holy Grail,” by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. “Holy Blood,” which was one of the main sources for “The Da Vinci Code,” proposes that after the Crucifixion Jesus’ wife, with at least one of their children, escaped to France, where their descendants married into the Merovingian dynasty and are still around today. Nobody knows this, though, because, according to the authors’ scenario, the truth has been kept under wraps for a thousand years by a secret society called the Priory of Sion. The book offers a fantastically elaborated conspiracy theory—involving Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Jean Cocteau (all “grand masters” of the Priory of Sion), plus Emma Calvé and various others—that cannot be briefly summarized, but the upshot is that the Priory may now be ready to go public with its story. The authors warn that the organization may intend to set up a theocratic United States of Europe, with a descendant of Jesus as its priest-king but with the actual business of government being handled by some other party—the Priory of Sion, for example.

And who is the woman who caused all this trouble? Who married Jesus and bore his offspring and thereby laid the foundation for the overthrow of post-Enlightenment culture? Mary Magdalene.


"Mary Magdalene is one of several women named Mary who appear in the four canonical Christian gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. She is said in the Gospels to have been relieved of seven demons, to have supported Jesus' ministry financially, and to have witnessed the crucifixion and resurrection. Mary Magdalene was also important to the Gnostics, a category that collectively describes several early Christian sects that placed an emphasis on salvation through knowledge. She appears in several texts that are classified as "gnostic" as a favorite disciple, visionary, and leader. "

Intuition...

Author: Malcolm Gladwell

I have gone through my life trusting my intuition and making what others would call snap decisions. It has always seemed that I’ve just “known” what I had to do, where I had to go, or the character of a person within the first few minutes. I’ve gone with decisions that feel right. It’s almost as if I can see the path as a result of the decision. When I read this book I felt like my way of approaching life was validated.

Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking

(ISBN: 0316172324 Format: Hardcover, 288pp Pub. Date: January 2005 Publisher: Little, Brown & Company)

From the Publisher: How do we make decisions--good and bad--and why are some people so much better at it than others? That's the question Malcolm Gladwell asks and answers in the follow-up to his huge bestseller, The Tipping Point. Utilizing case studies as diverse as speed dating, pop music, and the shooting of Amadou Diallo, Gladwell reveals that what we think of as decisions made in the blink of an eye are much more complicated than assumed. Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology, he shows how the difference between good decision-making and bad has nothing to do with how much information we can process quickly, but on the few particular details on which we focus. Leaping boldly from example to example, displaying all of the brilliance that made The Tipping Point a classic, Gladwell reveals how we can become better decision makers--in our homes, our offices, and in everyday life. The result is a book that is surprising and transforming. Never again will you think about thinking the same way.

And this profile just published in the New York Times:

The Gladwell Effect

By RACHEL DONADIO

Published: February 5, 2006 NYT

"PEOPLE are experience rich and theory poor," the writer Malcolm Gladwell said recently. "People who are busy doing things — as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops — don't have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them."

With a writerly verve and strong narrative powers, he leavens serious social science research with zany characters and pithy, easily digestible anecdotes. Gladwell selects his anecdotes from a wide range of sources — the military, business, food, music, romance — and diverse locales, a tactic that broadens his books' appeal.

…In "The Tipping Point," he discusses everything from the drop in crime in New York in the early 1990's to the retro return of Hush Puppies, the rise of the Aeron chair in the dot-com era, and how "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" became a best seller through its popularity in small reading groups. His point is that social epidemics can spread with the right context and the pull of certain influential people: "connectors," in touch with different groups of people; "mavens," experts in one area; and "salesmen," who can win customers over.

Similarly, in "Blink," he introduces a range of case studies and experts, including art historians who can tell within seconds that a statue is a fake and a psychologist who can predict whether a couple will get divorced after observing them for only a few minutes. His message is that we should trust first impressions — except when we shouldn't. Gladwell, who is multiracial, said he became interested in first impressions when he grew his hair into an Afro and then was repeatedly pulled over for speeding, and stopped once by the police looking for a rapist with similar hair. In an era of increased specialization and niche thinking, Gladwell himself is the ultimate "connector," bridging disparate universes: the New York literary world and corporate America; liberal and conservative; men and women; high and low.

Ambergris

Ambergris

"Ambergris is an excretion from the Sperm Whale. It is found floating on the oceans or collected from the shores of many countries around the world. Ambergris is formed in the intestines of the sperm whale in response, it is thought, to irritation caused to the stomach lining of the whale from the sharp,indigestible, parrot-like beaks of squid."

Whale 'vomit' sparks cash bonanza

An Australian couple who picked up an odd-looking fatty lump from a quiet beach are in line for a cash windfall.

Leon Wright and his wife took home a 14.75kg lump of ambergris, found in the innards of sperm whales and used in perfumes after it has been vomited up.

Long lusted-after due to its rarity, ambergris can float upon the oceans for years before washing ashore on beaches.

Worth up to $20 a gram, Mr Wright's find on a South Australian beach could net his family US$295,000 (£165,300).

At first, Mr Wright and his wife Loralee left the strange lump on the beach where it was found.

However, two weeks later the couple returned to Streaky Bay and found it still lying there.

Floating gold

Curious, Mrs Wright persuaded her husband to take it home.

AMBERGRIS FACTS Found in warm water oceans around the world Bile secreted by sperm whales as a digestion aid Solidifies and floats on water, sometimes for years Used in perfumes, medicines, flavourings Banned in US under endangered species legislation

Internet investigations failed to resolve the mysterious matter of the lump's identity, so the couple turned to local marine ecologist Ken Jury for help.

"I immediately decided it was ambergris - it couldn't be anything else," Mr Jury told Australia's ABC radio.

Mythologised for thousands of years, ambergris has been referred to as "floating gold" by scientists and scavengers who long for a windfall amid the surf.

Expelled from the abdomen of the giant sperm whale, often while hundreds of miles away from land, ambergris is a natural excrement thought to be used by the whale as a digestion aid.

The hard beaks of giant squid, a main source of food for the whale, have often been found inside lumps of ambergris.

Initially, ambergris is a soft, foul-smelling waste matter that floats on the ocean.

But years of exposure to the sun and the salt water of the ocean transform the waste into a smooth, exotic lump of compact rock that boasts a waxy feel and a sweet, alluring smell.

"It's quite remarkable when you think about it, because when the whale throws this out, it's discarded material that they can't digest," Mr Jury added.

"[But] after 10 years, it's considered clean and all you're getting then is the wonderful musky, very sweet perfume, which I've got to say is ultra smooth - it's unbelievable."

Weekend Horoscope...

Aries

My horoscope for today......

The gentle winds of change are blowing through your life at the moment, dear Aries. You have a feeling of newness and an open attitude toward the world. Some outside events will be coming up in your life that give you the impression you are advancing in a concrete manner toward a new life. You can expect to have some pleasant surprises.



And the myth behind the constellation:



Zeus' wife, Hera, had a suitor named Ixion who was tricked by Zeus into impregnating a cloud that had the likeness of Hera. The cloud, Nephele, bore a child and Ixion, as punishment for his attempted indiscretion with Zeus' wife, was attached to a flaming wheel and forced to roll around the heavens for eternity. This is an early reference to the line of the ecliptic, the path of the sun as it moves through the sky. The child was the first centaur. Nephele was lonely and eventually fell in love with Athamas, the king of Böeotia and brother of Sisyphus. She had two children, Phrixus and Helle, who Athamus eventually tried to have sacrificed after he fell out of love with their mother. Hera sent a golden ram to their aid. They jumped on its back and were carried out of harm's way, but not necessarily to safety. Helle lost her grip and fell to her death into the part of the sea that became known as the Hellespont. Phrixus landed at Colchis on the Black Sea and sacrificed the ram in honor of Zeus. He took the fleece of the ram and hung it in a sacred wood in his honor as well, leaving as its guard a dragon sometimes represented by the constellation Draco. This fleece became the stuff of which legends were made as it was sought by countless men not unlike the Holy Grail. The golden fleece of the ram was the treasure sought by Jason and his Argonauts.

A column from David Pogue

David Pogue is hilarious:


How to Be a Curmudgeon on the Internet



Last week in my Times column, I referred to the five-note "Intel Inside" jingle often heard in TV ads. At least a dozen readers e-mailed me to inform me that the jingle is actually four notes, not five. As I've come to expect, some of these readers expressed, ahem, somewhat more anger than the circumstances might have seemed to require.



"If you have that much trouble counting on one hand," one wrote, "you shouldn't be reviewing technology. Maybe a four-year-old can help you out next time."



I replied to this reader that I'm including the first "ping" in my tally. In that case, there ARE five notes in the jingle, as you can hear here.



But my correspondent never wrote back. That, of course, would violate the rules for being an Internet pill, reprinted here in their entirety, courtesy of the Pills of the American Internet Neighborhood Society (PAINS):



RULES FOR TROLLS AND PILLS



WHEREAS, 95 percent of all the e-mail received by critics and columnists is civil, friendly or respectfully constructive;



but WHEREAS, this is the Internet age, and we're all anonymous and can avoid making eye contact forever;



and WHEREAS, there's so much information overload, a little heat and drama on your part may be necessary just to be heard above the din;



and WHEREAS, many of those who fire off potshots are missing out on some of the best techniques for effective snippiness;



THEREFORE let us now post the rules for membership in the Pills of the American Internet Neighborhood Society.



1. Use the strongest language possible. Calling names is always effective, and four-letter words show that you mean business.



2. Having a violent opinion of something doesn't require you to actually try it yourself. After all, plenty of people heatedly object to books they haven't read or movies they haven't seen. Heck, you can imagine perfectly well if something is any good.



3. If it's a positive review that you didn't like, call the reviewer a "fanboy." Do not entertain the notion that the product, service, show, movie, book or restaurant might, in fact, be good. Instead, assume that the reviewer has received payment from the reviewee. Work in the word "shill" if possible.



4. If it's a negative review, call the reviewer a "basher" and describe the review as a "hatchet job." Accuse him of being paid off by the reviewee's *rival*.



5. If it's a mixed review, ignore the passages that balance the argument. Pretend that the entire review is all positive or all negative. Refer to it either as a "rave" or a "slam."



6. If you find a sentence early in the article that rubs you the wrong way, you are by no means obligated to finish reading. Stop right where you are--express your anger while it's still good and hot! What are the odds that the writer is going to say anything else relevant to your point later in the piece, anyway?



7. If the writer responds to your e-mail with evidence that you're wrong (for example, by citing a paragraph that you overlooked), disappear without responding. This is the anonymous Internet; slipping away without consequence or civility is your privilege.



8. Trolling is making a deliberately inflammatory remark, one that you know perfectly well is baloney, just to get a rise out of other people. Trolling is an art. Trolling works just fine for an audience of one (say, a journalist), but of course the real fun is trolling on public bulletin boards where you can get dozens of people screaming at you simultaneously. Comments on religion, politics or Mac-vs.-Windows are always good bets. The talented troll sits back to enjoy the fireworks with a smirk, and never, ever responds to the responses.



9. Don't let generalities slip by. Don't tolerate simplifications for the sake of a non-technical audience. Ignore conditional words like "generally," "usually" and "most." If you read a sentence that says, for example, "The VisionPhone is among the first consumer videophones," cite the reviewer's ignorance and laziness for failing to mention the prototype developed by AT&T for the 1964 World's Fair. Send copies of your note to the publication's publisher and, if possible, its advertisers.



And there you have it: the nine habits of highly effective pills. After all: if you're going to be a miserable curmudgeon, you may as well do it up right!

Congratulations!

Changing Chile

Chilean press hails Bachelet win

The woman taking Chile's top job (BBC News)

“Chile's first woman president, Michelle Bachelet, is breaking many political traditions.

Not only is she a woman, but she calls herself a socialist and she is a single parent with a 12-year-old daughter and two other grown children.

Giving a victory speech to cheering supporters in Santiago, Ms Bachelet said: "Who would have thought, just five years ago, that Chile would have a woman president?"

Outgoing President Ricardo Lagos has hailed her election as an "historic triumph".

Chilean society is often portrayed as ultra-conservative, dominated by men and the Roman Catholic Church.

Only 4% of senators are women and divorce was only introduced last year.

But Ms Bachelet believes this is only part of the picture and Chile is changing - as reflected by her election victory.

"We have a mature, democratic society that believes men and women can hold responsibility," she said.”

and perhaps, someday soon, here too!

Make mine a Breve...

The other morning, after no breakfast and a trip to the dentist (complete with drilling and novocaine), I ended up at our local Wild Oats® store looking for both breakfast and coffee. Desperate for the coffee, I looked at the menu and chose cappuccino. Then came the choices – skim, soy, lite: not enough fat or taste in any of those for me. I asked about whole milk or cream and was offered half and half. And then I heard this voice, just to my left – “That’s a Breve” . OK – so, I’m clueless when it comes to “Java” terminology. So I am posting a list found at one of the many coffee sites on the web – and oh, by the way, make mine a triple expresso breve:

Java Terminology

Americano
Espresso coffee blended with hot water and served in an 8 to 20-ounce cup. Served with 2 cups or 1 cup and an insulator sleeve due to temperature of cup. Often served with cream or iced to bring temperature down.

Breve'
Espresso coffee blended with steamed half and half and topped with foam. Breve's are served in an 8 to 16-ounce cup. Can be flavored.

Espresso
Straight shot of coffee. A single shot of espresso should yield 1-¼ fluid ounces and a double shot about 2 fluid ounces. Always served in an 8-ounce cup and always brewed directly into the cup. Espresso is made by forcing hot water (220 degrees) through finely ground coffee. Espresso is very rich, aromatic, flavorful, and is served by itself or as a base to a number of delicious drinks including mochas and lattes.

Espresso Con Panna
Espresso coffee topped with a dollop of whipping cream. Always served in an 8-ounce cup.

Espresso Macchiato
Espresso that is "marked" with just a little milk.

Caffe' Viennese
Shot of espresso sprinkled with a dash of cinnamon. A shot of steamed milk, and topped with whipping cream.

Cappuccino
1/3 espresso coffee blended with 1/3 steamed milk and 1/3 foamed milk. Served in 8 to 20 ounce cups. Served "wet" means more steamed milk than foam and "dry" meaning espresso with only thick foam on top. Often dusted with nutmeg, cinnamon, or chocolate powder.

Espresso Roma
A shot of espresso with a lemon twist. Served in an 8-ounce cup.

Iced Mocha
Pour shot of espresso over chocolate and swirl. Pour 1 inch of milk in cup and swirl, add ice and rest of milk, swirl to mix.

Iced Latte'
Pour shot of espresso and add 1 inch of milk. Next, add ice swirl and balance of milk. Can be served in a 12 or 16-ounce cup.

Latte
Espresso coffee blended with steamed milk and topped with foam. Served in 8 to 20-ounce cups. If liked, a generous sprinkle of chocolate or cinnamon on top.

Lattecino
An espresso based beverage with 2 parts steamed milk and 1 part foamed milk. A cross between a cappuccino and a latte.

Latte Machiatto
Steamed milk topped with a shot of espresso. This drink is the reverse of a latte with the espresso poured in last. Do not stir. Served in an 8 to 20-ounce cup.

Machiatto
A shot of espresso topped with a dollop of steamed milk and foam. One spoon of foam per shot. Served in an 8-ounce cup.

Mezzo
Espresso coffee, ½ cup of hot water, and steamed milk. Pour in espresso then bring mixture to a ½ cup with hot water, add steamed milk and top with foam.

Mocha
Espresso coffee with steamed milk and chocolate syrup. Swirl the espresso and chocolate syrup together first, then add steamed milk to blend. 1 ounce of chocolate per 8 fluid ounces. The finished product topped with whipping cream and should not be stirred. Often sprinkled with ground cocoa.

Ristretto
Means restricted in Italian. Let half of the normal amount of water pass through a straight shot of coffee. The finished product is a half shot of espresso, the best essence of the bean and the most flavorful. Served in an 8-ounce cup.

Footsteps

Did you ever wonder who walked before you (literally) on the sidewalk, on the trail, on the beach...from the newest
Weekly e-Letter from Science News:


Stone Age Footwork: Ancient human prints turn up down under


January 7, 2006

Bruce Bower

"Researchers working near the shore of a dried-up lake basin in southeastern Australia have taken a giant leap backward in time. They've uncovered the largest known collection of Stone Age human footprints.

The 124-or-more human-foot impressions, as well as a few prints left by kangaroos and other animals, originated between 23,000 and 19,000 years ago in a then-muddy layer of silt and clay, say archaeologist Steve Webb of Australia's Bond University in Robina and his colleagues. Their report appears in the January Journal of Human Evolution."

Textile Museum

Museum weaves story of textile manufacturing

LOWELL, Massachusetts (AP) -- The clanking sounds of a loom at the American Textile History Museum take visitors back to a time when clothes were hand-woven, and textiles drove the New England economy in this historic mill town and others.

"Textiles are such a basic part of everybody's life," said Diane L. Fagan Affleck, the museum's senior research associate. "And yet I think partly because of the technology that we have today, we just don't even think about where they came from or how they came to be."

My son’s grandmother was a ”mill girl”. When she was in her nineties you could watch her hands make weaving motions as she dozed in the afternoon. The museum is near the Lowell National Historic Park:

“The history of America's Industrial Revolution is commemorated in Lowell, Massachusetts. The Boott Cotton Mills Museum with its operating weave room of 88 power looms, "mill girl" boardinghouses, the Suffolk Mill Turbine Exhibit and guided tours tell the story of the transition from farm to factory, chronicle immigrant and labor history and trace industrial technology. The park includes textile mills, worker housing, 5.6 miles of canals, and 19th-century commercial buildings.”

Calling Cards

I keep a small calling card case in my purse. From Levenger, it contains my business cards and several different designs of personal calling cards. I have a design that is specific for “accidents” and another for friends who want information about my web blog and my Flickr site. The artwork distinguishes each type of card. My very enhanced lips, for my Flickr icon and associated calling card, came from experimenting with my Corel PaintShopPro program.

Calling cards became popular during the Victorian era with a well defined social etiquette for paying calls and leaving cards.

" Although the calling card usually supplied only the name of the caller, the following messages could be left to a person by using a system of folds:

Calling Cards System of Folds

If the top left corner was bent or torn, it was a social call.

If the top right corner was bent, it was a visit of congratulations, perhaps for a recent engagement, wedding, birth, or other good news.

If the bottom left corner was bent, it was a visit to say goodbye, as if the visitor were getting ready to go on a trip.

If the bottom right corner was bent, it was a visit of condolence, usually for a death in the family."

Spaceweather.com

Jarkko Rosenström,
Saarijarvi FINLAND
Sep. 10
Camera Canon EOS 350D Tv10s Av4.5 ISO400.

Daryl Pederson,
the Twenty Mile River area in south central Alaska.
Sep. 10

Spaceweather.com is one of my favorite web sites. I get alerts from them for all kinds of interesting space phenomenon including auroras. They have done a bit of redesign and now have a new gallery dedicated to auroras. I saw my first auroras in Vermont, during college, traveling in the fall through the mountains to go to EMT training at Johnson State College. Most recently we were treated to spectacular early evening auroras here in Maine in the fall of 2003.

More about the new gallery:

"A note from Dr. Tony Phillips, Spaceweather.com webmaster: I've been making aurora galleries for Spaceweather.com since 2000. It is both a tedious and extremely enjoyable task. To the hundreds of photographers who have contributed their hard-won photos, I thank you sincerely and hope that you will send more in the future.

Browsing the galleries, you may notice a few things: (1) Contrary to popular belief, you can photograph auroras in places like California and Florida about once a year. The trick is knowing when to look. (2) September, October and November are consistently the best months to see auroras. Why? It's a bit of a mystery. (3) And finally, auroras do not vanish during solar minimum. As proof, we offer the spectacular galleries of 2005."

Enjoy!

Runes

Mythic Runes

I have dabbled in tarot cards, runes and numerology. All fun if not taken too seriously. I visit several on-line sites for all but I like the Runes found here. My draw for 2006 was this one:

Wunjo

This Rune announces a state of security and relaxation, a sense of well-being. Light is finally peeking through the clouds, fruits hang heavy on the branches, and bad times are finally staying behind.

You may see yourself surrounded by joy, pleasure and comfort both at home and outside. There is clarity and a new energy that will allow you to understand, to balance, to renew yourself and your personal relations.

Necessary changes have already been carried out, and now you may rejoice and receive Wunjo's blessings freely.

An explanation of runes is as follows:

"Runes are an alphabetic script used by the peoples of Northern Europe from the first century c.e. until well into the Middle Ages. In addition to their use as a written alphabet, the runes also served as a system of symbols used for magic and divination. Runes fell into disuse as the Roman alphabets became the preferred script of most of Europe, but their forms and meanings were preserved in inscriptions and manuscripts.

The primary characteristic which distinguishes a runic alphabet from other alphabets is that each letter, or rune, has a meaning. For example, whereas "ay", "bee", and "cee" are meaningless sounds denoting the first three letters in our alphabet, the names of the first three runes, "fehu", "uruz", and "þurisaz" are actual words in the Germanic language, meaning "cattle", "aurochs", and "giant", respectively. Runes also have magical and religious significance as well, thus transforming the simple process of writing into a magical act. They are also used for divinatory readings and to create magical spells.

Today, runes have been rediscovered as a symbolic system and have gained immense popularity as a means of divination. They are, however, much more than a curious alternative to Tarot cards for telling fortunes. They provide a key to understanding the lives and beliefs of the ancient people who created them, and have much to teach us about a way of life that was perhaps more intimately connected to the natural world, and to the realm of spirit, than our own."

Tea for Women

Coffee is for my morning and tea is for the rest of the day. I like a nice strong black tea after lunch; then lighter green and mint teas for afternoon and evening. It’s good to know that I am protecting my health as I drink!

Tea Tippling Linked to Lower Ovarian Cancer Risk

"STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Dec. 12 - Middle-age women who drink two or more cups of green or black tea every day may reduce their risk for invasive epithelial ovarian cancer by almost half, epidemiologists here reported.

In a prospective population-based study, Karolinska Institute researchers found a dose-response relationship between the amount of tea a woman consumed and her risk for ovarian cancer, after controlling for potential confounders (P for trend, .03).

Susanna C. Larsson, MSc., and colleagues reported in the Dec. 12 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.

Women who consumed two cups or more per day lowered their risk for ovarian cancer by 46%, with each additional cup of tea lowering the risk by another 18% (multivariate hazard ratio, 0.82; 95% confidence interval, 0.68-0.99).

Tea's compounds have been extensively studied as chemopreventive agents, the investigators wrote, yet tea's potential against ovarian cancer specifically had yet to be established.

These antioxidant polyphenols, which include catechins, theaflavins, thearubigins, and flavonols, "are abundantly present in both green and black teas and have been shown to inhibit carcinogenesis," Larsson and colleagues wrote.

However, the study also found the women who drank tea also tended to be in better health."