work is sacred

Man is forgetting how to play. Yes, we have taught the masses that work is sacred, hard work.

.... told that their work was "sacred" only in the sense that it enabled their masters to play.

Alexander Trocchi,   "Cain's Book"

Disco the parakeet

This bird's phrasebook is immense.  Youtube

Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_Yankee_Nuclear_Power_Plant

This is the Boiling Water Reactor (Fukushima-design, built in 1972) that Vermont voted to shut down but in 2011 the Nuclear Regulator Commission renewed the permit on an additional 20 years.

It's had all kinds of accidents already.   One cause: rotting timer.   Go figure, the thing was built with wood in 1972.

Vermont Yankee.   It just looks like Fukushima.

Followup: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/vermont-yankee-nuke-plant-close-end-2014

 

 Entergy Corp., announced Tuesday, Aug. 27, 2013, it will shut down the nuclear power plant by end of 2014, ending a long legal battle with the state. (AP Photo/Toby Talbot)

Irish navigator coaches rally driver

ye eediot, these arr YORR eenstrokshons.

Global temperature on the cello

A Song of Our Warming Planet from Ensia on Vimeo.

Skip to 1:00 if you don't want the backstory.

Edinburgh Castle builds temporary stadium for beheadings

OK maybe not beheadings, but these Highland Games sure don't look like much room for football.

Maybe the universe is not expanding

Maybe it's just getting lighter.

... When matter is moving away from us, these frequencies appear shifted towards the red, or lower-frequency, part of the spectrum, in the same way that we hear the pitch of an ambulance siren drop as it speeds past. In the 1920s, astronomers including Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble found that most galaxies exhibit such a redshift — and that the redshift was greater for more distant galaxies. From these observations, they deduced that the Universe must be expanding. But, as Wetterich points out, ... If all masses were once lower, and had been constantly increasing, the colours of old galaxies would look redshifted in comparison to current frequencies, and the amount of redshift would be proportionate to their distances from Earth. Thus, the redshift would make galaxies seem to be receding even if they were not.

from Nature

more

The field of cosmology these days is converging on a standard model, centred around inflation and the Big Bang,” says physicist Arjun Berera at the University of Edinburgh, UK. “This is why it’s as important as ever, before we get too comfortable, to see if there are alternative explanations consistent with all known observation.”

There's a freedom in often asking yourself, and others, "What if I'm wrong?"   Give alternate explanations a chance. 

Next big thing in US figure skating, Gracie Gold

Gracie Gold, age 17 from Chicago, at World Championships March 2013



(I kid. She's already huge. But in case you missed it, now you know who to watch for next Olympics.)



UPDATE 1/5/2015
She's nice!  She Favorited my #fanmail tweet:

Mike Dayoub, Your Tweet got favorited!   In reply to U.S. Figure Skating and 3 others Mike Dayoub @MikeDayoub_3rd @USFigureSkating @AshWagner2010 @GraceEGold That was great. Have fun in Boston, ladies, then on to Sochi. YOU ARE BOTH AWESOME. #fanmail 11:50 PM - 04 Jan 14 Favorited by Gracie Gold @GraceEGold 2012 US National Silver Medalist. Team Nike. Team Visa. Covergirl. P&G Family. Smucker's. Pandora Family. See what else @GraceEGold is favoriting. View their profile

Guess the age of the Paris "Metropolitain" entrances

You know these signs?   Guess what year they were designed.

Here's the answer.

Kid totally takes Boston Globe reporter for a ride.

I copied this completely, at risk of copyright prosecution, because I bet the Globe takes this down once they figure out the kid was pulling their leg.

Orchard Gardens graduate excels with determination, support

By Yvonne Abraham

 |  GLOBE COLUMNIST   

  JUNE 30, 2013

THOMPSON ISLAND – Five years ago, Abubakar Suleiman was hunting zebras with spears and trying to avoid antagonizing cheetahs.

There was a school where he lived, in rural northern Nigeria, but he had barely been there in his 10 years. He found the teachers cruel, the pidgin English impossible. There was no running water at home and patchy electricity. His family ate little beyond what they could grow or kill. When he wasn’t hunting, or tending to the chickens and donkeys on the farm where his grandmother was raising him, he was playing soccer.

One foggy day last week, Suleiman was dressed in a slim blue shirt and black pants, on a Boston Harbor island thousands of miles from the beautiful, ruthless place where he was born. The 15-year-old sat with his eighth-grade classmates, all of them beaming: They were graduating from Roxbury’s Orchard Gardens school. They have all come a long way, putting worlds between themselves and the hardships that had threatened to defeat them just a few years ago – impossible neighborhoods and family situations, dismal grades, low expectations, and stunted ambition. Most of them are now headed to excellent public and private high schools.

Even in this remarkable group, it would be hard to find another who has traveled as far as Suleiman. His parents left Nigeria when he was a baby. He thought his grandmother was his mother, refusing to believe otherwise even when his mother, Amina, visited when he was 5. When he was 10, his grandmother died and his parents brought Suleiman and his siblings to Boston.

“At first, I didn’t want to come to America,” he said. “My parents were strangers.” Boston was another planet.

“It was strange to meet light-skinned people,” he said. “I thought, ‘Who are they? Are they human?’” He had never seen a television: “I tapped on the screen: ‘Why are there people in there?’”

He was assigned to Orchard Gardens K-8, a failing school in a state-of-the-art building. He arrived for his first day of fifth grade in traditional clothes – light pants beneath a long, dress-like shirt, and sandals. He was freezing.

In addition to being weather-inappropriate, his outfit was pink. “Everybody kept looking at me, like ‘What is this kid wearing?’” But he was not bullied. For all of its problems, the school had attracted kids who were tolerant and generous, gently nudging the newcomer along as he gathered up a whole language. They gave him the nickname “Bubbles” because Abubakar was too hard to say. Hardly anybody calls him by his real name now, and he’s fine with it.

Learning English has been the biggest challenge of his life. He had to repeat fifth grade. Teachers worked hard to bring him along, but the school was in crisis.

Then, when he was in sixth grade, Principal Andrew Bott arrived. He remade the faculty and welcomed new funding and partnerships with nonprofits like Citizens Schools, which allowed him to extend the school day, and Play Ball!, which brought football and school spirit. The school expanded arts programming, one-on-one tutoring, teacher training, and accountability. A partnership with Thompson Island’s Outward Bound program took the kids to the island for summer school and overnight camp. The school — a place of love and pride — became a national success story.

When he started sixth grade, Suleiman was reading at a first-grade level, Bott said. By the end of seventh grade, he was at a fifth-grade level. He graduates at “a high seventh–grade level,” said Andrew Vega, his English teacher. He scored proficient on this year’s MCAS English Language Arts exam, getting perfect scores on two of his essays. In sixth grade, he struggled with basic arithmetic. Teachers and tutors swooped in to catch him up, and to discover his gift for geometry. They got to know his gaps and his interests, then found ways to fill in the former with the latter. He’s more than ready for high school math now.

How does a kid make up this much ground, this fast? Part of it is Orchard Gardens. But it’s mostly Suleiman — mature beyond his years, mindful of his weaknesses, determined to overcome them.

“He’s a kid who owned it,” Vega said. “I saw moments when he had to stop and collect himself when it got hard. It took him 6½ hours to finish the MCAS exams.”

Along with these giant language leaps, Suleiman learned to play American football, a game he’d once thought stupid and dangerous, and became a track star, helping Orchard Gardens take the citywide athletic championship earlier this month. Suleiman won all but one of his 400-meter races and anchored the 4x200 relay team. He placed first in javelin.

“I have a technique,” he said with a wry smile. The zebras.

He has done all of these things while living in a Roxbury apartment with his giant, blended, loving family – two parents who work in human services, and nine children ranging from 4 months old to their mid-20s.

Because his older siblings and parents are usually working, it falls to Suleiman to help care for his younger brothers and sister, babysitting, supervising homework, taking them to school. Otherwise, he rarely leaves his apartment because his mother worries about his safety. He doesn’t complain.

If you could bottle the things that brought Suleiman this far — what happens inside that school in Roxbury, what lives in this 15-year-old’s heart and home — you could transform a whole city.

At Thursday’s graduation ceremony, Bott called Suleiman “the epitome of the American Dream.” His classmates voted him most improved. He looked delighted by the honor, and appalled by the spotlight.

If his family and friends can find a way to close the gap between his scholarships and the cost of books and transportation, Suleiman is headed to Catholic Memorial, the college prep school in West Roxbury, in September. There he will find track, football, and a clear path to college.

He will likely face some challenges at Catholic Memorial. But nobody who knows this wry, self-possessed teenager is worried.

“I didn’t have the opportunity to do this in Nigeria,” Suleiman said. “Now that I have it, I’m not going to waste it.”

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abraham@globe.com.

Gluten sensitivity might actually be due to an agribiz chemical

http://www.thelocal.de/sci-tech/20130701-50609.html

Their results found a link between gluten sensitivity and the the Adenosine Triphosphate Amylase (ATI) protein, which is found in larger quantities in high-output wheat.

ATIs are natural insect repellents and modern farming techniques grow high ATI-containing crops to increase their yield. This could explain why gluten sensitivity has been on the rise.

and:    
"Wheat amylase trypsin inhibitors drive intestinal inflammation via activation of toll-like receptor 4." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23209313

Sören Kierkegaard - to be an individual

http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=2523&C=2399

the most ruinous evasion of all is to be hidden in the crowd in an attempt to escape God’s supervision of him as an individual, in an attempt to get away from hearing God’s voice as an individual. Long ago, Adam attempted this same thing when his evil conscience led him to imagine that he could hide himself among the trees. 

For in eternity there is no mob pressure, no crowd, no hiding place in the crowd, as little as there are riots or street fights!