text:
Trees: Video Short
Trees: On Location
Trees: Full Show
Trees: The Web Show
- Video Short |
- On Location |
- Full Show |
- The Web Show
- Trees [trēs]
- Large perennial woody plants.
The oldest living thing on Earth is a tree. It is also the heaviest and the tallest. Trees keep our air clean, reduce noise pollution, improve water quality, help prevent erosion, create shade, provide food, building materials, homes for wildlife, and make our world beautiful.
Find out more about this topic by clicking on the buttons on this page. You can watch our broadcast show, Science Trek: The Web Show, and our video shorts in our player. Facts will tell you more about the topic. Links will expand your learning beyond our site. Glossary gives you a list of specialized words. Books offer reading suggestions. Games give you a chance to play. Top Ten are answers to ten of our favorite questions asked by students. Teachers provides materials for educators. Archive takes you to video files from past shows not on our current player. Contact us by clicking on the link in the masthead to email us questions or comments. Click for the current season's schedule of programs, learn more about the scientists on this show and be sure to check out my blog.
Explore the site and explore your universe!
Click on a Topic:
- Ages Past
- Animals
- Earth Science
- Environment
- Human Body
- Science Fundamentals
- Space
- Technology
- Other


text:
Anaconda Storage Filtering
This is the main page for information about anaconda's further/continuing storage rewrite. The entire storage subsystem was rewritten from scratch in F11, this page tracks the cleanup and last bits of support.
Anaconda's storage configuration code was rewritten from scratch in F11 to address several design limitations and replace outdated chunks of code. A number of outstanding problem areas remain, and this page tracks progress. It also documents the storage device filtering design and test requirements.
- Name: Dave Lehman
- email: dlehman AT fedoraproject DOT org
Current status
- Targeted release: Fedora 12
- Last updated: 2009-07-07
- Percentage of completion: 25%
Detailed Description
The new storage code still needs numerous bugfixes and the addition of device filtering. This page tracks the broad categories of problem and the progress we're making.
This page does not track the UI cleanup for storage configuration.
Work Items:
- improve handling of parted's partition renumbering
- improve extended partition management
- improve utilization of disk space w/ growable partition requests
- add support for optionally-partitioned devices (disks, md)
- improve UI handling of pre-existing devices and their formatting
- improve handling of unusual/broken pre-existing lvm/md setups
- update swap recommendation algorithm
- create md devices w/ bitmap by default
See Anaconda/StorageRewrite for further details.
Benefit to Fedora
We need to complete the newly redesigned storage management module and improve the stability of installation.
All of anaconda's code for creating and configuring disk partitions, LVM, mdraid, dmraid, multipath, iSCSI, LUKS devices, and filesystems was rewritten. Several known problem areas remain.
How To Test
Testing will need to be extensive.
We will have to verify the following areas of functionality as a starting point:
- creation/configuration of filesystems
- on new partitions
- on existing partitions
- on new LVM logical volumes
- on preexisting LVM logical volumes
- on new software RAID devices
- on existing software RAID devices
- creation of encrypted block devices at various levels in the device stack (partition, PV, LV, mdarray, &c)
- detection of arbitrarily complex device configurations (luks, mdraid, lvm, &c)
- management and configuration of existing encrypted block devices
- automatic partitioning of systems
- clearing of existing devices/partitions
- removal of existing devices
- reconfiguration of existing devices
- detection of existing upgradable installations with widely varied storage configurations
- rescue mounting of existing systems with a wide variety of storage configurations
There is more. Unit tests are being developed, and we will plan a Fedora Test Day. Before this code hits Rawhide it will be smoke-tested in a custom compose.
User Experience
This should improve the user's experience with regard to the storage configuration portion of system installation.
It additionally includes the ability to filter out unwanted storage devices as potential installation targets.
Contingency Plan
Revert to previous codebase and selectively include bugfixes. Which will be difficult to unwedge from the new functionality, which is minor and intertwined with the bugfixes. Basically, this is a lousy option.
See Anaconda/StorageRewrite for further details.
Release Notes
- Install Guide update to reflect ability to filter devices

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Search best CBSE, IGCSE, State Board and International E-learning
Check these Schools that stand out in terms of education services, infrastructure,
methodology and quality
At SchoolWale, we believe in
empowering Teachers, Parents and School Admins to collaborate
and work together to build next generation of education life.
We run promotioanal offers on our e-learning courses and
referral lucky draws from time to time. Participate in our
regular promotions and get rewarded.
Signup for our newsletter and get news in your inbox!


text:
Clinical Documentation Improvement Specialist, RN
| JOB TITLE: Clinical Documentation Improvement Specialist, RN
LOCATION: GCMC – Main Campus
DEPARTMENT: Coding Operations CMC
WORK SCHEDULE: Days
WORK TYPE: Full Time (1.0 FTE)
The Clinical Documentation Improvement Program (CDI) is designed to improve the physician's documentation in the patient's medical record, supporting the appropriate severity of illness, expected risk of mortality and complexity of care of the patient. The role of the Clinical Documentation Improvement Specialist (CDIS) is to assist the providers with accurately identifying and documenting the healthcare services provided to the patient. This is accomplished with the recognition of complete and accurate diagnoses, procedures performed, and the treatment provided. The core of the program uses highly trained staff members to perform a concurrent inpatient review of the record. This allows the record to be coded post discharge in a timely and accurate manner. A highly successful CDI program is based on a highly interactive process between physicians, CDIS staff and other support services. The program does not challenge the provider's medical judgement, but rather provides a methodology in which to clarify existing documentation. Acts as a liaison between the clinical and coding functions.
Demonstrates a level of knowledge about HIM Standards of coding and applies to ongoing evaluation of medical record documentation.
Current PA RN license in good standing required; BS-Nursing preferred. CDIP/CDIS preferred.
Minimum three years of acute care experience required.
Knowledge of coding concepts and guidelines and clinical terminology preferred.
Experience facilitating physician education.
Work is typically performed in a clinical environment.
Walking and standing is 80% of work time
ABOUT GEISINGER: Geisinger is a physician-led health system comprised of approximately 30,000 employees, including nearly 1,600 employed physicians, 13 hospital campuses, two research centers, and a 583,000-member health plan Geisinger is nationally recognized for innovative practices and quality care. Geisinger serves more than 3 million people in central, south-central and northeast Pennsylvania and also in southern New Jersey with the addition of National Malcolm Baldridge Award recipient AtlantiCare, A member of Geisinger. In 2017, the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine became the newest member of the Geisinger Family.
We offer healthcare benefits for full time and part time positions from day one, including vision, dental and domestic partners. * Perhaps just as important, from senior management on down, we encourage an atmosphere of collaboration, cooperation and collegiality. For more information, visit www.geisinger.org, or connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.
** Does not qualify for J-1 waiver. We are an Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity Employer Women and Minorities are Encouraged to Apply. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability or their protected veteran status.
*Domestic partner benefits not applicable at Geisinger Holy Spirit.


text:
Those that have tried thanking posts lately may have been greeted with an error.
I've now sorted that out, and went through edits and edits of upgrades, so all working again now.
Go Thank away
Ad blocker detected: Our website is made possible by displaying online advertisements to our visitors. Please consider supporting us by disabling your ad blocker on our website.
Thanking Posts
Get Announcements on ModphpBB3 in here. Please do not post questions regarding ModphpBB3 in here.
Post Reply
1 post • Page 1 of 1
Post Reply
1 post • Page 1 of 1


text:
All World Athlete Program: What's in it for You?
The list of perks for top-performing athletes goes beyond world championship slots.
The IRONMAN All World Athlete program allows athletes to kick their competitive drive up a notch by pitting their best results against their fellow competitors. In the program's inaugural year, 15,000 athletes at both the IRONMAN and IRONMAN 70.3 distances became All World Athletes by competing in multiple events and earning Age Group Ranking points throughout the race season. Athletes were rewarded for their top three performances throughout the year with the combined points determining the champion for each division.
Check your current age-group placement here.
Becoming an IRONMAN All World Athlete in any of the three categories (IRONMAN, IRONMAN 70.3 and Overall, which includes both their IRONMAN and IRONMAN 70.3 results), requires that an athlete finishes in the top 10 percent of their age group. Athletes are then classified into three levels: Bronze (top 10 percent), Silver (top five percent) and Gold (top one percent). Since the top three race performances are ranked, the more an athlete races, the better their chances at moving up in the age-group rankings.
Beyond the satisfaction of having achieved such status among fellow triathletes, some of you may be wondering, "what's in it for me?" All World Athletes receive a metal luggage tag denoting their status and a bike sticker, and they can also enjoy priority check-in at select events and public acknowledgement at athlete welcome banquets. (See chart below for the full list of benefits.) One of the most notable perks is for Gold All World Athletes, however, who will be notified of the opportunity to register early for the following high-demand races:
- IRONMAN 70.3 Auckland, Asia Pacific IRONMAN 70.3 Championship
- IRONMAN Melbourne, Asia-Pacific IRONMAN Championship
- IRONMAN 70.3 California
- Cairns Airport IRONMAN Cairns
- Flight Centre Active Travel IRONMAN 70.3 Cairns
- IRONMAN Austria
- IRONMAN European Championship Frankfurt
- IRONMAN Lake Placid
- IRONMAN Kalmar Sweden
- KMD IRONMAN Copenhagen
- IRONMAN 70.3 Sunshine Coast
- IRONMAN Wisconsin
- Little Debbie IRONMAN Chattanooga Benefitting Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America
- intermedix IRONMAN 70.3 Augusta
- IRONMAN Florida
So this year, race hard, and work your way to the top. Because there's more than the coveted world championship slots on offer. For more information, contact .
Read more stories about this year's crop of All World Athletes:


text:
Setting Up Your Domain Name
Setting up your domain name is the first step to creating an outstanding presence online. Whether you've just purchased a domain name or are just getting around to setting it up, use the instructions below to get you rocking and rolling:
To Set Up Your Domain Name
- Log in to your GoDaddy account.
- Next to Domains, click Manage.
- Click Use My Domain under the domain name you want to set up.
Note: If your domain is already set up and you want to edit its settings, click Manage Domain under the domain you want to update.
- Click Build a New Website, Connect to an Existing Site, or Set Up Professional Email under the desired option:
Build a New Website
If you have a Website Builder account that isn't set up yet, see Setting up your website.
If you have a Website Builder account that is set up with a different domain name but you want to set it up with this domain instead, see Change my domain name.
If you don't have a Website Builder account but want one, follow the on-screen prompts to purchase and set up a website for your domain name.
Connect to an Existing Site
For information on your forwarding options, see Forward my domain .
Set Up Professional Email
If you have a email account that you want to set up with this domain, use the Let's go! Set up your Office 365 email address instructions to set up your website.
If you don't have a email account but want one, follow the on-screen prompts to purchase and set up email for your domain name.


text:
- Current Topics for Public Discussion
- Emergency Notification System
- Enforcement
- Information for Citizens
- Public Records Requests
- Social Media
- Contact Pullman PD
- Online Services
- News & Statistics
- About Pullman PD
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Department Services
- Background Checks / Criminal History
- Concealed Pistol License
- Copy of Police Report
- Crime Statistics
- Fingerprinting
- Prescription Drug Disposal Program
- Public Record Requests
- Police Clearance Letters
- Personal Record Inspection
- Licenses, Permits, Registrations
- Property & Evidence
- Foundrop Property Recovery Program
- Crime Prevention
- Lost & Found
- Crime Mapping
Personal Record Inspection
Last Updated on Friday, 01 August 2014 13:39
Q. What If I want to inspect my record at the Pullman Police Department?
The first question we will ask is, "Do you have a record with the Pullman Police Department?"
If you have never been arrested by and/or received a criminal citation from the Pullman Police Department, then you don't have an arrest record with our department. The intent of a personal record inspection is to allow individuals access to and the opportunity to review their own criminal history. If you have reason to believe we don't have accurate information on file (for example: charges were amended/dismissed), you can request to review what is on your record with our department free of charge.
However, if you were arrested by and/or received a criminal citation from another law enforcement agency, including the WSU Police Department, you cannot review those records at the Pullman Police Department. To review records with other agencies, you will need to contact the agency that is the custodian of those records.
Q. I have a record with the Pullman Police Department. How do I inspect my record?
To inspect your record with the Pullman Police Department, simply call the Records Department at (509) 334-0802 to set up an appointment with one of our records specialists during normal business hours.
You can inspect your personal record free of charge. However, it is just an inspection. While you will be able to look at and review your record with the Pullman Police Department, you will not be reviewing entire case files, nor will you receive copies of your record. If, after reviewing your record, you would like copies of your record and/or any affiliated case reports, you will need to submit a public records request for a copy of the police report(s).
Additional information from the Revised Code of Washington (RCW):
RCW 10.97.080 Inspection of information by subject — Challenges and corrections.
All criminal justice agencies shall permit an individual who is, or who believes that he or she may be, the subject of a criminal record maintained by that agency, to appear in person during normal business hours of that criminal justice agency and request to see the criminal history record information held by that agency pertaining to the individual.
The individual's right to access and review of criminal history record information shall not extend to data contained in intelligence, investigative, or other related files, and shall not be construed to include any information other than that defined as criminal history record information by this chapter.
Every criminal justice agency shall adopt rules and make available forms to facilitate the inspection and review of criminal history record information by the subjects thereof, which rules may include requirements for identification, the establishment of reasonable periods of time to be allowed an individual to examine the record, and for assistance by an individual's counsel, interpreter, or other appropriate persons.
No person shall be allowed to retain or mechanically reproduce any non-conviction data except for the purpose of challenge or correction when the person who is the subject of the record asserts the belief in writing that the information regarding such person is inaccurate or incomplete. The provisions of chapter 42.56 RCW shall not be construed to require or authorize copying of non-conviction data for any other purpose.
The Washington State Patrol shall establish rules for the challenge of records which an individual declares to be inaccurate or incomplete, and for the resolution of any disputes between individuals and criminal justice agencies pertaining to the accuracy and completeness of criminal history record information. The Washington state patrol shall also adopt rules for the correction of criminal history record information and the dissemination of corrected information to agencies and persons to whom inaccurate or incomplete information was previously disseminated. Such rules may establish time limitations of not less than ninety days upon the requirement for disseminating corrected information.
CLICK HERE to print the necessary form.


text:
From USD $2,800 per Week
From USD $56 per Trip
From USD $179 per Night
From USD $1,675 per Week
From USD $60 per Trip PP
From USD $40 per Trip PP
From USD $225 per Trip PP
From USD $250 per Night
From USD $1,425 per Trip PP
From USD $124 per Night
From USD $915 per Trip
From USD $89 per Night
From USD $145 per Night
From USD $99 per Night
From USD $155 per Night
From USD $25 per Trip
From USD $55 per Night
From USD $106 per Night
From USD $115 per Trip PP
From USD $175 per Night
Planning a summer vacation or a winter excursion? Looking for adventure or relaxation? It doesn't matter what you like to do or where you like to go, a Colorado getaway is right for you! This great western state has much to offer all types of travelers. Plan an urban experience in Denver, filled with shopping, dining and bar hopping, or a rural adventure climbing and camping in the Rocky Mountains.
Head to the state capitol Denver, where you will find a big, modern city, that has managed to keeps its Old Western history alive. Check out the Denver library, art museum, shops and wide variety of world class ethnic dining. Go to a concert at the Red Rocks Venue just west of the city or spend the day at the famous Denver Zoo.
Head to the Colorado and Rio Grande Rivers for kayaking and canoeing; or for all of you more adventurous travelers, try an unforgettable white water rafting experience! During your Colorado getaway, bike the 435 miles of the Colorado Trail or walk through one of the many state parks. Check out the abundant wildlife on an ecotour; or go bird watching on a guided hike and take in breathtaking vistas of the mountain scenery. For those of you feeling adventurous, try zip lining in Buena Vista, riding in a hot air balloon above Denver, rock climbing in the Rockies or skydiving above the Colorado prairies!
In the winter come enjoy a truly luxurious Colorado getaway at some of the world's best ski resorts. Crested Butte, Telluride, Breckenridge, Aspen, Vail, Steamboat and Wolf Creek are all popular resort towns where you can enjoy a fantastic ski vacation. Colorado resorts are popular with international travelers and offer some of the best skiing in the US, great nightlife activities and an incredible vacation experience.
Every traveler will find something wonderful to experience in Colorado; let RealAdventures plan your next vacation today!
Jeanine Kutil


text:
Katy Perry Releases Lyric Video for New Single 'This Is How We Do'by Thomas Chau | PopCrush
Katy Perry has released the lyric video for her newest single, 'This Is How We Do.' The track will be the fifth radio single off her 2013 album 'Prism.' The song was written by Perry and produced by Max Martin and Klas Åhlund.
'This Is How We Do' features electric beats that give it an '80s new wave pop feel. The video showcases lyrics from the pop dance track in various retro fonts, which complements the old-school style of the song itself. Some static effects and motion blurs can be seen, which brings us back to the old days of watching videos on VHS tapes.
Perry sings about hanging out with her friends and having a good time in the song. The playful lyrics such as, "Santa Barbara, chique, at La Super Rica, grabbing tacos, checking out hotties / Now we talking astrology, getting our nails did, all Japanese-y / This is how we do / Day drinking at the Wildcats, sucking real bad at Mariah karaoke" make for a great end of summer tune.
Click on the video above to check out Katy Perry's 'This Is How We Do' lyric video.
See Katy Perry + Other Pop Stars Without Makeup


text:
Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS)
U.S. Department of Labor
Employment Standards Administration
Office of Labor-Management Standards
Newark Resident Office
190 Middlesex/Essex Turnpike
Room 204
Iselin, NJ 08830
(732)750-5661 Fax: (732)750-5963
February 7, 2008
Mr. James Kearney, Business Manager
Iron Workers
Local 45
558 Newark Avenue
Jersey City, NJ 01306
LM File Number 010139
Case Number: ||||||||
Dear Mr. Kearney:
This office has recently completed an audit of Iron Workers Local 45 under the Compliance Audit Program (CAP) to determine your organization's compliance with the provisions of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 (LMRDA). As discussed during the exit interview with you on February 4, 2008, no violations of the LMRDA were disclosed in areas of financial activity included in the CAP. This does not exhaust all possible problem areas, however, since the audit conducted was limited in scope and did not include all areas of your union's operation.
I want to extend my personal appreciation to Iron Workers Local 45 for the cooperation and courtesy extended during this compliance audit. I strongly recommend that you make sure this letter and the compliance assistance materials provided to you are passed on to future officers. If we can provide any additional assistance, please do not hesitate to call.
||||| |||||
cc: Patrick Trombetta, CPA


text:
Ask any of the 11,000 people bustling around the Auburn Hills, Mich., headquarters of Chrysler Group why the automaker the U.S. government thought couldn't possibly survive now can't possibly fail, and the answer is "Because we have Sergio."
Cross the Atlantic to Torino, Italy, and ask a similar question about the future of Fiat, Chrysler's majority owner, and you get this: "Because we have Marchionne."
The difference is purely cultural--Americans use first names to refer to colleagues; Italians prefer last names. But they are talking about the same guy: Sergio Marchionne, the Man Who Saved the Car Business.
The boss of...


text:
History of RAFAEL GONZALEZ
When one examines the Flor de Rafael Gonzalez box, the following statement can still be found: "These cigars have been manufactured from a secret blend of pure Vuelta Abajo tobaccos selected by the Márquez Rafael González, Grande of Spain." The "secret blend" has been pleasing cigar smokers worldwide for over 20 years. To truly appreciate this brand's exquisite fragrance and outstanding smoke, it is recommended that the cigars be smoked within one month of their shipping date, or smoked only after being aged for about a year. Made in the famous Romeo y Julieta factory, these moderately priced cigars are among the best cigars available regardless of the price. The brand is particularly well-known to serious cigar smokers. Be careful not to confuse the Flor band label with the famously full-flavored Montecristo brand; As the Flor de Rafael González Cuban cigars are among the mildest of the Havana cigars, you would be quite surprised if you lit a Montecristo by mistake ! Known for their mellow taste, Fonseca cigars are great for beginners.


text:
I just saw this "trick" where a cup of water is turned over onto a table without spilling (using a piece of cardboard. After removing the cardboard from underneath the cup, the person then removes the cup in a particular way (lifts straight up and twists) and lo and behold, the water stays in it's position as if the cup were still there!? (watch the video to fully understand) Is this really possible? If so, and the real question I'm looking to have answered is, how?
After further research it appears that deionized water is needed as well.


text:
All New BFGoodrich All Terrain T/A KO2 in the Works
Top Secret Tire Spotted in Baja
We normally aren't into spy shots since it's just not our cup of whisky but when our good friend Tony Rojo told us he had some highly classified photos from Baja, we knew we had to take a look. Surprisingly, we didn't find any close ups of the mythical and elusive Chupacabra chasing Class 11 bugs around the race course. What we did see was some cool spy shots of BFGoodrich's latest rendition of the All-Terrain T/A KO at contingency during the 2013 Baja 1000. Naturally we were pretty curious to learn more about this new design that has obviously been kept under wraps for quite some time.
We contacted BFGoodrich to try to get the full scoop on this cool new All-Terrain but they are keeping quiet on this one for the time being. All we can do right now is speculate on how this new All-Terrain will do. You'll notice they've done away with the clean and simple sidewall tread that many have come to love and have gone the way of the thick sidewall tread which seems to be more about looks rather than actual performance on the trail. That being said, we're guessing this tire might have a slightly thicker carcass than the All-Terrain we all know and love. Furthermore, if you look closely, you'll notice that the tire already has a DOT number on them so the odds are it might be coming real soon. The tread face looks really similar to the current All-Terrain T/A KO, mainly the center three diagonal lugs that have proven to be a great design for many years.
We think it's safe to assume that the BFGoodrich All-Terrain T/A KO2 will more than likely hit the market sometime next year since it's currently being tested and proven in the deserts of Baja but since we know you want to know more about this skunk-works tire; we decided to ask the Big Cheese, our Editor-In-Chief John Cappa about his thoughts on this latest tire to roll out of BFG. Here's what he had to say!
John Cappa:
The All-Terrain spotted at the 2013 Baja 1000 looks like a full production tire, meaning all of the numbers are on the sidewall, including what appears to be a DOT number. So what's different? While the tread looks the same, it's not. There are fewer sipes across the lugs and the lugs themselves appear to be shaped slightly different. A big change is the extra rubber and tread protecting the sidewall. We have no idea if the rubber compound or carcass construction is different than the previous generation BFG All Terrain, and the boys and girls at BFG have been pretty tight lipped and not returning our calls.


text:
January/February 2005
Almost every science center has some kind of campus connection, whether it's a formal affiliation (26 ASTC-member museums are run by colleges or universities), partnership in a grant-funded project, or an informal meeting of minds on the departmental level. Researchers find science centers a good match as community partners and dissemination venues. Professors contribute to museum content by lecturing, advising on exhibits, and meeting with visitors on the floor. Undergraduate and graduate students gain real-world experience through internships, technical/design projects, and service-learning. Teachers in training explore museum resources and learn the skills of inquiry-based science. In this issue, we discover some creative opportunities (and challenges) that exist at the interface of academic science and informal education.
• University-Museum Collaboration: The Opportunity and the Need, by Kenneth H. Keller
• A Shared Passion: Leveraging Resources Through Museum-University Projects, by Ronen Mir
• Polymer Power: Partnering to Enrich an Exhibition, by Elizabeth Romanaux
• Where Past and Present Meet: the Change Role of the University Museum, by Marta C. Lourenco
• A Bridge To Science: Israel's University-Sponsored Museums, by Esthy Berzner
• Digital Strategies: Partnering for Personalization, by Clark Dodsworth
• An 'A' for Service: Tapping the Talent at Community Colleges, by Cheryl Kessler and Carolyn Sutterfield
Download the full issue.


text:
The new pope has daunting challenges ahead ranging from the church sex abuse scandal to reinvigorating the flock. And Francis will have to do it all with just one lung.
The Argentinian pontiff lost the greater part of one lung to a teenage infection. "He feels it today," said his authorised biographer, Sergio Rubin. "He's a little bit slowed by it, but he's OK."
Doctors said that losing one lung did not necessarily compromise the pope's health or reduce his lifespan, though it means no strenuous exercise since he no longer has as much air capacity as people with two lungs.
"He probably wouldn't be able to run marathons, but I don't think that would be on his schedule," said Dr Peter Openshaw, director of the Centre for Respiratory Infection at Imperial College London. "Having one lung should be enough as long as there is no other disease in that lung."
Openshaw did not think a papal schedule would be too taxing for Francis's one lung, though he noted the pope's ribcage might look slightly unusual. "His x-ray will probably look rather alarming, but understandable once you know he only has one lung," he said.
Openshaw said Francis's existing lung would probably have expanded to fill the space left by the missing one, and that his ribcage would have shrunk slightly in size. His diaphragm may also have moved up slightly higher than normal. But none of those changes should affect Francis's normal activities, he said.
Experts said it would be rare nowadays to remove a lung. Antibiotics would be used to treat most lung infections including tuberculosis, though part of the organ might be removed to treat advanced lung cancer.
Back when Francis had his lung removed, the available antibiotics were not as powerful. "In the past, doctors used all kinds of strange things to try to treat lung infections," said Dr Jennifer Quint, a respiratory expert at London's School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She said physicians even used to stick ping pong balls into people's lungs in an attempt to starve the lung of oxygen, to kill the bacteria.
Quint said the fact that Francis appears so fit and healthy at 76 bodes well for his future."If he were going to have any major complications from the surgery [to remove the lung], he would have had them by now," she said.
She said Francis's main challenge would be to keep his remaining lung healthy. "I would recommend a yearly flu vaccination and an occasional pneumonia vaccine to avoid infection," she said.
Openshaw agreed the pope's remaining lung should be able to compensate for the missing one, similar to how parts of the brain may pick up functions of other regions damaged by a stroke.
"The other lung can gain capacity but there will be limits," he said, comparing it to a car engine that now runs slightly more slowly. "You may not be able to accelerate as hard but it still works just as well."


text:
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, has its offices on the outskirts of Geneva, in an area once devoted to dairy farms and now given over to sprawl. The offices occupy several dozen buildings, some of them in Switzerland and the remainder, a few hundred yards away, in France. The buildings are reachable by roads with names like Route Bohr, Route Schrödinger, and Route Curie. By the entrance to the complex, there is a museum—nearly empty the day I visited—that attempts to make particle physics comprehensible to the general public. Behind that there is a park where bits of old cyclotrons are displayed, like playground equipment from Mars.
If you think of the sciences as a tower, with one field resting on another until you reach, say, botany or physiology, then particle physics represents the bottommost floor. The first key experiment was conducted in 1909, under the direction of Ernest Rutherford. When Rutherford shot alpha particles at a wafer-thin sheet of gold foil, a small proportion of the particles bounced right back, a phenomenon that he described as "almost as incredible as if you fired a fifteen-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back to hit you." Rutherford's work led to the realization that most of an atom's mass was concentrated in a tiny area, the nucleus. "All science is either physics or stamp-collecting," he is supposed to have said.
Since Rutherford's discovery, particle physics has provided one extraordinary—if increasingly implausible-sounding—revelation after another: first protons and neutrons, then antimatter, gluons, neutrinos, and quarks. In 1967, the existence of particles to mediate the weak force, which is responsible for radioactive decay, was theorized; in 1983, at CERN, these particles—the W and the Z—were observed and their properties measured. In 1977, the existence of what became known as the "top" quark was predicted; in 1995, at Fermilab, in Illinois, it, too, was found.
And yet, for all its triumphs, the field has been haunted by failure. The more physicists have learned about the way matter behaves at its most fundamental level, the more acutely they have become aware that something—a big something—is missing from their accounts. Among the many possibilities proposed for what's often called "new physics" is that the universe actually consists of tiny strands (or strings) of energy; that it contains several dimensions beyond those that we perceive; that it is full of mysterious particles—"sparticles"—that have yet to be detected; that it is not a universe at all but a multiverse; and that it began not with a bang but with a splat.
Sometime in the next few months, physicists at CERN will finish preparations for the most ambitious particle-physics experiment ever, which will be conducted in an apparatus modestly referred to as the Large Hadron Collider, or L.H.C. The L.H.C. fills a circular tunnel seventeen miles in circumference. To get from one side of it to the other, it is necessary to drive through several towns, and then descend three hundred feet in an elevator. Alternatively, it is possible to ride through the tunnel in one of the dozens of bicycles CERN provides for its staff, but in that case a supply of emergency oxygen is required.
The L.H.C. is considered the best—some would say the only—hope for testing the theories of "new physics" against material reality. Once the collider begins operating at full power—in early 2008, if all goes well—nearly half the particle physicists in the world will be involved in analyzing its four-million-megabyte-per-hour stream of data. Few events in the history of science have had a bigger buildup. It's been suggested that the L.H.C. will unlock the secrets of the universe or, barring that, prove this ambition to be hopeless.
The L.H.C. is a kind of Babel built underground. Dozens of countries have manufactured its components, and dozens more have lent manpower and expertise. (Some contracts went to Russian physicists who previously worked for the Soviet military; in this way, the collider has provided a livelihood for scientists whose employment options might otherwise include selling nuclear secrets.) When I ate in CERN's lunchroom, I heard people speaking English, French, German, and Italian, as well as several languages that I couldn't identify. The place was so crowded that it took me five minutes to pay for a cup of coffee, proving the elemental truth that man can build a superconducting collider but not a functional cafeteria.
CERN's chief scientific officer, Jos Engelen, is from the Netherlands. He serves under the director general, who is from France, and alongside the chief financial officer, who is from Germany. I went to speak to Engelen in his office; behind his desk a chart indicated when the various parts of the collider are supposed to be completed. It was a crazy quilt of multicolored blocks, with lines radiating in all directions. Engelen greeted me with a half-ironic cheerfulness that struck me as very Dutch. Among his responsibilities is dealing with the frequent calls and letters CERN receives about the possibility that the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world. When I asked about this, Engelen picked up a Bic pen and placed it in front of me.
"In quantum mechanics, there is a probability that this pen will fall through the table," he said. "All of a sudden, it will be on the floor. Because it can behave as a wave, it can go through; we call that the 'tunnel effect.' If you calculate the probability that this happens, it is not identical to zero. It is a very small probability. But it never happens. I've never seen it happen. You have never seen it happen. But to the general public you make a casual remark, 'It is not identical to zero, it is very small,' and . . . " He shrugged.
Worries about the end of the planet have shadowed nearly every high-energy experiment. Such concerns were given a boost by Scientific American—presumably inadvertently—in 1999. That summer, the magazine ran a letter to the editor about Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, then nearing completion. The letter suggested that the Brookhaven collider might produce a "mini black hole" that would be drawn toward the center of the earth, thus "devouring the entire planet within minutes." Frank Wilczek, a physicist who would later win a Nobel Prize, wrote a response for the magazine. Wilczek dismissed the idea of mini black holes devouring the earth, but went on to raise a new possibility: the collider could produce strangelets, a form of matter that some think might exist at the center of neutron stars. In that case, he observed, "one might be concerned about an 'ice-9'-type transition," wherein all surrounding matter could be converted into strangelets and the world as we know it would vanish. Wilczek labelled his own suggestion "not plausible," but the damage had been done. "BIG BANG MACHINE COULD DESTROY EARTH" ran the headline in the London Times. Brookhaven was forced to appoint a committee to look into this and other disaster scenarios. (The committee concluded that "we are safe from a strangelet initiated catastrophe.")
"I know Frank Wilczek," Engelen told me. "He is an order of magnitude smarter than I am. But he was perhaps a bit naïve." Engelen said that CERN officials are now instructed, with respect to the L.H.C.'s world-destroying potential, "not to say that the probability is very small but that the probability is zero."
I asked Engelen how he would explain the project of particle physics to a non-physicist, or if he thought such an explanation was even advisable. "We simply want to know what the world is made of, and how," he said. "What is in here"—he rapped on his desk with his knuckles—"and how these particles in here constitute a table."
"Let us start with Ernest Rutherford in the beginning of the last century," he went on. "Rutherford understood what an atom looks like. It is a fat, heavy nucleus, with very light electrons orbiting around. The next step is we discovered objects inside the nucleus, one called the proton, the other the neutron. That is the pattern. As a next step, people started to wonder about these protons and neutrons, whether there is structure in there. And they started probing that. And they found that there is structure in there. There are quarks in there. And what we want is to reduce the world to objects that have no structure, that are points, that are as simple as we can imagine. And then build it up from there again."
So far, physicists have succeeded in observing sixteen pointlike, or fundamental, particles, a number that increases if you count antimatter particles, or if you differentiate among, say, the eight types of gluons. Particles in the largest group, called fermions, in honor of Enrico Fermi, are the stuff of matter. Fermions include electrons and quarks, which come in the whimsical-sounding varieties up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. (A hadron is a collection of quarks, or quarks and antiquarks. A proton is a hadron composed of two up quarks and one down; a neutron consists of two downs and one up.) Fermions also include neutrinos, which, somewhat unnervingly, stream through our bodies at the rate of trillions per second. "Neutrinos, they are very small," John Updike's poem "Cosmic Gall" observes. "And do not interact at all."
Hypothetically at least, there is also a seventeenth particle, known as the Higgs. The Higgs particle was first postulated more than forty years ago by the Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, and has been sought—fruitlessly—at every major collider built since then. Its discovery would have many fantastic implications, one of which is that the void of space is not really void but is permeated by an invisible field that acts a bit like cosmic molasses. This Higgs field, if it exists, exerts a drag on matter passing through it, lending mass to particles that otherwise wouldn't have any. Without the Higgs, physicists have no way to explain why fundamental particles weigh anything at all, since, according to theory, they should be massless. The fact that the Higgs is central to modern physics even though it has never been found has prompted one Nobel laureate to label it the rug under which the discipline sweeps its ignorance and a second to dismiss it as the "toilet" into which physics flushes its inconsistencies. A third Nobel winner has labelled it the "God particle."
"We are going to make that particle," Engelen told me. "Or we are going to show that it doesn't exist."
The day that I met with Engelen, I also spoke with the deputy head of CERN's physics department, Michael Doser. Doser is tall and lanky, with fuzzy blondish hair and a narrow stripe of beard that runs down the middle of his chin. His primary interest is antimatter.
"If you think about what matter is, you end up with a very Zen-like answer," he told me. "If you look at what a quark is, or an electron, the primary constituents of matter, they're pointlike particles. They have no spatial extent. They have a number of properties, like mass and charge, and that's it. In a way, they're mathematical figments, and they're separated by vacuum—mathematical figments in nothing. And antimatter is the opposite—mathematical figments with the opposite charge." When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate each other in a burst of energy. It is believed that in the Big Bang equal quantities of matter and antimatter were produced. But this theory makes it difficult to explain certain basic facts, like you and me and countless galaxies. How to account for the abundance of matter in the universe, and the shortage of antimatter, Doser told me, "is one of the most embarrassing questions in particle physics."
Doser began his career at CERN in 1991, at which point most of the physicists at the organization were working on a project known as the Large Electron-Positron Collider, or LEP. Basically, LEP was a high-precision matter/antimatter demolition-derby track. Billions of electrons looping around in one direction were, at discrete intervals, made to cross paths with billions of antielectrons—or positrons—moving the opposite way. Where the beams crossed, huge detectors were set up to record the smashups.
The L.H.C., Doser explained, relies on much the same design, and, in fact, makes use of the tunnel originally dug for LEP. Instead of electrons and positrons, however, the L.H.C. will send two beams of protons circling in opposite directions. Protons are a good deal more massive than electrons—roughly eighteen hundred times more—which means they can carry more energy. For this reason, they are also much harder to manage.
"Basically, what you must have to accelerate any charged particles is a very strong electric field," Doser said. "And the longer you apply it the more energy you can give them. In principle, what you'd want is an infinitely long linear structure, in which particles just keep getting pushed faster and faster. Now, because you can't build an infinitely long accelerator, you build a circular accelerator." Every time a proton makes a circuit around the L.H.C. tunnel, it will receive electromagnetic nudges to make it go faster until, eventually, it is travelling at 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light. "It gets to a hair below the speed of light very rapidly, and the rest of the time is just trying to sliver down this hair." At this pace, a proton completes eleven thousand two hundred and forty-five circuits in a single second.
"The more energetic the particles are, the more force you need to keep them on orbit," Doser went on. "They want to go straight. And so you need very strong magnetic fields." In the L.H.C., such strong fields are required that they cannot be produced by conventional, or so-called "warm," magnets. Instead, the L.H.C. beam pipe has been encased in superconducting magnets, cooled with superfluid helium. These magnets are supposed to operate at minus 271.25 degrees Celsius—minus 456.25 degrees Fahrenheit—a temperature colder than that of deep space. Doser noted that there are many hazards involved in working with such powerful magnets; for example, if a bolt or a screw is left lying around when they are turned on, it can fly through the apparatus like a bullet. He recalled that as a graduate student he had once lost a wrench in a machine this way: "It cost me a year." Meanwhile, if any of the magnets fail, the beams, each of which is supposed to contain something like three hundred trillion protons, could veer off course and, in short order, burn a hole through the collider. "That's why people are so nervous about starting up," Doser said. (In fact, a few weeks after my visit to CERN, during a test of a set of magnets known as an "inner triplet," a support failed, bursting a pipe and spewing helium into the tunnel. The failure of the support, which was produced in the United States, was attributed to a simple engineering error.)
When protons crash into each other at 99.9999991 per cent the speed of light, the resultant mess is usually just that—the subatomic equivalent of shattered glass and twisted metal. But stranger things can happen. Just as it is possible to convert mass into energy—as in a nuclear explosion—the reverse is also true: energy can be transformed into mass according to the Einsteinian equation _E=mc_2 (c being the speed of light). In this way, new particles can be produced that are more massive than those that entered the collision in the first place. The process might be compared to smashing two high-speed Priuses into each other and finding that they have rematerialized as a tank.
By now, the Higgs has been sought for so long that physicists have a pretty clear idea of how much it must weigh. The lower bound is around 120 times more than a proton—or roughly 2 × 10¯²² grams. The upper bound is about 210 times as much as a proton. The most powerful collider currently in operation is Fermilab's Tevatron, outside Chicago. The Tevatron, which smashes protons into antiprotons, can accelerate particles to an energy of just under a trillion electron volts, or one TeV. (An electron volt is the amount of energy acquired by a single electron falling through a potential difference of one volt.) So far, the Tevatron has failed to reveal the Higgs, though physicists there are actively looking for it. The L.H.C. will accelerate particles to seven TeV, which means that it will be seven times as powerful as the Tevatron. This should be more than enough energy to produce the Higgs, if there is a Higgs to produce. It may also be enough to uncover much more than the Higgs. Depending on how the universe is constructed, extra dimensions, mini black holes, and the source of so-called "dark matter" may all be revealed at CERN. Any black holes created, Doser was quick to assure me, would be entirely benign.
On my second day at CERN, I drove out to the detector farthest from Geneva—the Compact Muon Solenoid—which is to operate in, or really underneath, the town of Cessy, France. Robert Cousins, a physicist visiting CERN from the University of California at Los Angeles, had agreed to show me around. When we met in the C.M.S. parking lot, Cousins was wearing a bright-yellow hard hat. He handed me one to put on.
The L.H.C. will have four main detectors, spaced at intervals around the tunnel like beads on a bracelet. Each is being constructed by a different team according to a different design, the theory being that any interesting phenomena missed by one should be captured by the others. The teams share information, but there is a certain amount of cheerful rivalry among them. C.M.S., in particular, has been plagued by difficulties—during excavations, the soil in Cessy proved so soupy that the ground had to be frozen with liquid nitrogen—and before I went to look at it a physicist who is not affiliated with the project told me that C.M.S. was sometimes referred to as "See a Mess."
Cousins led me into a vast, hangarlike building where the detector was being assembled. There was a loud clanging coming from all directions. Iron rings several stories high were sitting on hydraulic lifts. At the far end of the hangar, a huge shaft dropped down several hundred feet. Cousins said that the shaft would be used to lower the detector, piece by piece, to the level of the L.H.C. tunnel. We boarded an elevator, and got out near the bottom. A section of the detector that had already been lowered into place loomed up in front of us. It looked like the underside of a rocket ship.
It is one of the paradoxes of particle physics that fundamental particles, though pointlike and indivisible, are also generally unstable. In fact, the heavier particles are so short-lived that even to speak of their having an existence seems faintly ludicrous; a top quark, for example, is estimated to last no more than 1 × 10¯²⁴ seconds. (For comparison's sake, 1 × 10¯²⁴ centuries comes to three millionths of a billionth of a second.) When unstable particles break down, new, lighter particles are produced. Some of these are likely to be unstable as well, and to break down further. The outcome of this process is a distinctive scattering of "decay products," which physicists refer to as a particle's "signature."
In order to "read" such a signature, a detector has to capture all the decay products that come flying out after a collision and measure their properties. This requires layer after layer of detecting elements; at C.M.S., these are arranged in the shape of an enormous jelly roll. The innermost layer, known as the tracker, consists of some seventy-five million silicon sensors. The next layer, which measures the energies of photons and electrons, contains eighty thousand crystals of lead tungstate. Surrounding this are brass-and-plastic scintillators for tracking hadrons and a tube-shaped magnet—a superconducting solenoid—twenty feet in diameter. Finally, there are several iron rings of increasing circumference. These hold sensors to detect muons, which are essentially heavy electrons. (Neutrinos can't be measured directly, and are therefore factored in as an absence.) All told, the Compact Muon Solenoid will weigh twenty-eight million pounds. It will hold enough iron to reconstruct the Eiffel Tower. Apparently, "compact" is a relative term.
Cousins explained that the information gathered by each layer of C.M.S. would be analyzed virtually instantaneously, and a decision made by the detector's computers whether to ignore the collision or to save the results for further study by recording them on tape. "There are famous high-energy-physics experiments that missed discoveries because they weren't writing them to tape," he told me. We were walking back through the hangar, past the giant iron rings, which were painted fire-truck red. "This is why we try not to be too specific about which theoretical speculations we care about. We add up all the energy, and if it's a huge number we write that event to tape. If on one side of the detector it's a not-so-huge number, but there is nothing on the other side, so it's a huge imbalance, we get excited about that, and we write that to tape, too."
Only a small fraction of the protons zipping through C.M.S. at any given moment will actually crash into one another. Still, this fraction represents an enormous number. When the L.H.C. is operating at full "luminosity," it is expected that the beams will cross forty million times a second and that each crossing will produce twenty collisions. C.M.S. will write fewer than .001 per cent of the crossings to tape; even so, it will be recording six thousand per minute, or three hundred and sixty thousand per hour, or some six million per week. The three other main detectors at CERN will generate similar amounts of data. There are many ways to represent a data stream of this magnitude; one that stuck with me was in terms of CDs. If all the L.H.C. data were burned onto disks, the stack would rise at the rate of a mile a month.
Lodged somewhere in this tower of information should be the signature of the Higgs, or, really, signatures, since the particle is expected to decay in a variety of ways. These signatures will look an awful lot like the signatures of other unstable particles. One physicist I spoke to compared the computational challenge of distinguishing a Higgs to finding a needle not in one haystack but in ten. I thought it sounded more like finding a needle in a needle factory.
Particle physicists come in two distinct varieties, which, rather like matter and antimatter, are very much intertwined and, at the same time, agonistic. Experimentalists build machines. Theorists sit around and think. "I am happy to eat Chinese dinners with theorists," the Nobel Prize-winning experimentalist Samuel C. C. Ting once reportedly said. "But to spend your life doing what they tell you is a waste of time."
"If I occasionally neglect to cite a theorist, it's not because I've forgotten," Leon Lederman, another Nobel-winning experimentalist, writes in his chronicle of the search for the Higgs. "It's probably because I hate him."
A few weeks after I returned from talking to the experimentalists at CERN, I went to speak to Nima Arkani-Hamed, a theorist at Harvard. Arkani-Hamed, who is thirty-five, has an oval face, deep-set eyes, and dark, shoulder-length hair. The day I visited, he was dressed entirely in black. He immediately offered me an espresso, which he made at a little machine that spit out one cupful at a time. "I've been trying to understand something about the fact that the universe is accelerating," he explained, erasing a double-wide blackboard covered with equations.
"Often, this kind of physics is referred to as particle physics, which I don't like," Arkani-Hamed told me. "People get the mistaken impression that what we care about is the particles. The science is characterized like: What are things made of? What are the ultimate building blocks of matter? I hate that. That sounds a lot like chemistry, and it's not like that at all. There are many, many more exciting things in nature than some random elementary particles.
"The reason we go to short distances isn't to probe the building blocks of matter," he went on. "It's because for four hundred years fundamental physics has been on this trajectory of unifying seemingly disparate things. We've found that, as we understand more, apparently incredibly disparate phenomena turn out to be different aspects of a more surprising, more beautiful answer than we could have anticipated—and often even hoped for. This started with Newton, who realized that the force dragging the apple down was the same force holding the moon around the earth. It continued with the realization that electricity and magnetism are different aspects of the same thing. Relativity told us that space and time are different aspects of the same thing. There's more and more unity in our understanding of nature. And we've seen, especially over the last hundred years, that the essential unity and the essential simplicity best reveal themselves at short-distance scales. So it's not that we care about the particles. We care about the laws."
Taped to the wall of Arkani-Hamed's office is a graph labelled "LHC Luminosity Profile." It shows when various phenomena—including the Higgs—should, if they exist, be revealed. Arkani-Hamed is a frequent visitor to CERN, and every time he goes, he told me, "it's like a religious experience." To prepare for the start-up of the collider, he has helped organize a series of dress rehearsals, called the L.H.C. Olympics. In these exercises, one team, playing God, chooses, out of the many models of the universe proposed by theorists, one to be true. The team then generates the sort of data that, according to this model, should be produced at the L.H.C. The other teams have to analyze the data to try to arrive back at the theoretical model the numbers are supposed to reflect. There are no winners or losers, Arkani-Hamed explained. "But afterward some people are high-fiving each other and other people are being consoled." He added, "It's an amazing blast."
One source of tension between experimentalists and theorists is the awkward matter of credit. Who should get the glory when a discovery is made: the theorist who proposed the idea, or the experimentalist who found the evidence for it? In this context, even access to L.H.C. data is a vexed subject; in the United States, the groups that have worked on building the detectors will receive the raw data, but they're not likely to share it. Arkani-Hamed joked that in order to get at the information theorists might have to find a "Deep Throat" who will pass them the data in secret.
"There is a sense among many experimentalists that theorists are a bunch of irresponsible little spoiled brats who get to sit around all day, having all these fun ideas, drinking espresso and goofing off, with next to no accountability," he said. "Meanwhile, they're out there, nose to the grindstone, for ten years; they've built this damn detector, and damn it if they're not going to be the ones to figure it out! And so this stuff that we're doing, there's some Johnny-come-lately feeling like 'Oh, now that it's all done the theorists finally want to think about how they're going to solve this'; it's like there are theorists swooping in to try to take it from them. I'm exaggerating slightly, but not much.
"It's a general fact about physics that the people you tend to remember are the theorists," he went on. "At least in the mythology, experiment plays a less central role. And there's a natural reason for that, because the ultimate goal isn't to observe things about nature; the ultimate goal is to understand and explain things about nature. So, for that reason, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. But definitely you want to be the chicken."
Arkani-Hamed is often called a string theorist, although he is more closely associated with ideas like large extra dimensions—large being on the scale of a tenth of a millimetre—and a hybrid theory known as "split supersymmetry." String theory posits that the universe is composed of tiny strands of energy, which vibrate at different frequencies, creating what appear to be different particles. In its most popular form, string theory demands the existence of seven dimensions beyond the usual four—three in space and one in time—that we're familiar with. Supersymmetry, meanwhile, which is often referred to by the acronym SUSY (pronounced soo-see), holds that every particle has a "superpartner" with a different spin, spin here being understood not as it is in everyday life but as a fixed property of a particle that determines some of its basic characteristics. Under the naming system that's been devised for these hypothetical superpartners, the counterpart of a quark would be a squark, and that of a photon a photino. (The superpartner of the as yet undiscovered Higgs would be a Higgsino.) It has been proposed that these "superparticles" could account for the dark matter that physicists estimate makes up nearly a quarter of the universe.
String theory and supersymmetry are enormously compelling to theorists, so much so that their proponents dominate the theory groups at most élite universities. (As of 2000, at least ten thousand scientific papers on supersymmetry, and several thousand more on string theory, had been written.) Both aim at further unification, and both—to varying degrees—resolve problems that have frustrated physicists for decades. Arkani-Hamed spent nearly two hours trying to take me through the details of just one of these—the so-called "hierarchy problem." In the process, he consumed four or five or six cups of espresso—even this I lost track of. Broadly speaking, the hierarchy problem has to do with mathematical contortions, known to physicists as "fine-tuning," that must be performed in order to account for the fact that gravity is so weak compared to the other forces.
"This is not just a little weird," Arkani-Hamed told me. "It's incredibly weird. The big question that we don't have an answer to, or that we have an answer to but it seems absurd, is: Why do we have a macroscopic universe at all?"
The trouble with string theory and supersymmetry is that, at this point, they remain entirely theoretical. The last confirmed breakthrough in particle physics was a set of equations known as the Standard Model. Developed in the early nineteen-seventies, the equations describe the behavior of all known forms of matter and all known forces, with the notable exception of gravity. Despite the model's limitations as a fundamental theory of nature—the hierarchy problem is just one of its many shortcomings—the predictions it has generated have been borne out, with astonishing precision, at one collider after another. (The Higgs would represent the last element of the model to be confirmed.) String theory, by contrast, has yet to provide a single prediction that could be definitively tested. As for supersymmetry, which is generally considered a precondition for string theory, all efforts to confirm its predictions have so far failed: at the energy levels achieved by colliders to date, not a trace of a squark or a photino has turned up. As Lee Smolin, a physicist at Canada's Perimeter Institute, observed in a recent critique of contemporary theory, eventually "you begin to feel like Sbozo the clown. Or Bozo the clownino. Or swhatever."
To theorists, the tantalizing promise of the L.H.C. is that it will, finally, supply the evidence of "new physics" that they've been waiting for. Certain patterns of missing energy, for example, would suggest the existence of extra dimensions, as would the creation of mini black holes. Different results—also in the form of missing energy—would indicate the existence of squarks or other superparticles. There are good theoretical reasons to expect these phenomena to begin to appear at the energy level of the L.H.C., or so at least Arkani-Hamed tried to explain to me over several more espressos. He told me that he was completely confident the Higgs would be found at the collider: "I would bet many, many months' salary." He also said that if the Higgs was the only result, the L.H.C. would be a disappointment. "We theorists, we're a hard lot to please. We've taken things for granted for so long we say, 'Oh, yeah, for sure you'll discover the Higgs.' But the things we're really interested in are all these major puzzles."
Eventually, some of Arkani-Hamed's graduate students wandered into his office. They had brought with them a Diet Coke, which Arkani-Hamed began to drink out of his espresso cup, and a hundred-page paper that they—and he—were planning to release that day. The opening sentence of the paper declared, "With the upcoming turn-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), high energy physics is on the verge of entering its most exciting period in a generation." (A later sentence noted, "As the reader might find intuitive, we can tremendously improve our scheme over the constant approximation by including the leading order near-threshold behavior of matrix elements.")
In 1969, the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy held a hearing at which the physicist Robert Wilson was called to testify. Wilson, who had served as the chief of experimental nuclear physics for the Manhattan Project, was at that point the head of CERN's main rival, Fermilab, and in charge of $250 million that Congress had recently allocated for the lab to build a new collider. Senator John Pastore, of Rhode Island, wanted to know the rationale behind a government expenditure of that size. Did the collider have anything to do with promoting "the security of the country"?
WILSON: No sir, I don't believe so.
PASTORE: Nothing at all?
WILSON: Nothing at all.
PASTORE: It has no value in that respect?
WILSON: It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. . . . It has to do with are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. . . . It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.
Asked to explain how their work, supported by public funds, contributes to the public good, particle physicists often cite Wilson, or offer some variation on his non-answer answer: the search for knowledge cannot be justified on other grounds; its value, like the particles under study, is irreducible.
The cost of the L.H.C. is expected to run to more than $8 billion, and this doesn't include the price of the tunnel, which was originally dug for LEP. Most of the funding is being provided by European taxpayers; Germany has contributed the most—around twenty per cent of the total—and Britain and France have each contributed slightly less than that. (The United States is contributing a little more than $500 million.) Meanwhile, physicists are already lobbying for the next generation of machines. The plan for the International Linear Collider, which, as its name suggests, would be built in a straight line rather than a ring, calls for smashing electrons and positrons together at the midpoint of a tunnel twenty miles long. According to the Web site that has been set up for the I.L.C., the hypothetical collider's design would allow for "an upgrade" to a thirty-mile-long machine "during the second stage of the project." The even more ambitious Very Large Hadron Collider would occupy a tunnel a hundred and forty miles in circumference.
In principle, colliders could just keep on getting bigger—the Incredibly Large Hadron Collider!—and commensurately more expensive. As a practical matter, of course, there's a limit, and it's quite possible that limit has already been reached. At CERN, nearly every physicist I spoke to recalled the sad—very sad—story of the Superconducting Super Collider. Announced with much fanfare by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, the Superconducting Super Collider was supposed to occupy a tunnel fifty-four miles in circumference under Waxahachie, Texas. It was designed to generate beam energies of 20 TeV, roughly three times as high as those that will be achieved at CERN. Fourteen miles of the tunnel had been excavated—and $2 billion spent—when, in 1993, Congress pulled the plug. "If we find more basic building blocks of the universe, it's not going to change the way people live" is how Representative Martin R. Hoke, of Ohio, shrugged off his vote. As the historian of science Peter Galison pointed out to me, it is probably no coincidence that funding for the supercollider was cancelled almost immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union. The "dignity of men" defense of particle physics worked best at the height of the Cold War, when no one, except maybe the scientists involved, entirely believed it.
Unless funding for another collider materializes, a lot of experimentalists will soon find themselves out of work. "Half of those guys already have résumés in at hedge funds," one theorist joked to me. Arguably, the theorists' situation is not all that much more secure; at a certain point, speculations about the nature of the universe that can't be put to the test cease to be physics. The promise of the Large Hadron Collider is thus also its great burden. A truly astonishing discovery there—proof, say, of extra dimensions, or of something even weirder than that, which theorists have yet to conceive of—would provide a powerful impetus to keep particle physics going for another generation. Barring a breakthrough, it's hard to imagine how the project can continue. Such an outcome would not mean that the fundamental order of the universe is unknowable. But it might well mean that we will never know it. ♦


text:
Internet Governance Forum to tackle issues about online safety, freedom
by Larry Magid
I'm in Baku, Azerbaijan, at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), a United Nations-sponsored "multi-stakeholder" forum to discuss a wide variety of issues regarding Internet governance. Unlike many U.N. forums, IGF is attended not just by government officials but also by corporations, non-governmental organizations, and scholars interested in how to handle global Internet security, stability, growth and content management on the global Internet.
The IGF isn't a legislative body — it's a place to talk about Internet issues that serves as a backdrop to policy makers around the world who are struggling on how to manage the fact that we now live in a world that is virtually without borders.
One job of the IGF is to look at how countries can police the Internet against a wide variety of crimes including child pornography, money laundering, copyright infringement, spam and, of course, scams designed to separate people from their money. Sessions will focus on technological, legal and social solution aas well as how individuals can protect themselves.
I'll be attending sessions on child pornography (otherwise known as child-abuse images) that is illegal in most but not all countries. The goal is to foster international cooperation between law enforcement and child protection organizations such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the United States (whose board I serve on), the Internet Watch Foundation in the UnitedKingdom and representatives of Interpol, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
I'm here to participate in several panels related to child protection online, but my primary role — and that of several other speakers including my ConnectSafely co-director Anne Collier — will be to look at the social milieu of youths using the Internet. Many online issues that children face have nothing to do with crime.
If a child is being harassed online or winds up posting something embarrassing, the police aren't going to help her as much as her online and offline peers and her parents and other caring adults. If a child gets in trouble for something they do wrong online — be it bullying, playful hacking, looking at porn or illegally downloading copyrighted material — the best responses come from peer pressure, parental involvement and firm but loving involvement by educators and other adults. And — most importantly — if a child is denied unfettered access, the solution lies not with law enforcement but with a national and local commitment to ensure access so all children can be citizens of the online global village.
I'll be moderating a panel organized by the European Alliance for Child Safety Online titled, "The UN convention on the Rights of the Child — is it fit for purpose in the digital age?"
Other major issues at IGF include finding ways to extend human rights into the Internet and making sure that everyone has free and unfettered access. They're lofty but challenging goals, especially in countries that censor their own citizens. Russia, for example, just started enforcing a law that gives the government the right to monitor citizens online and ban websites with objectionable content.
This column first appeared in Sillicon Valley Mercury-News.


text:
Why the 'Fiscal Cliff' Is Good for the Dollar
Is the U.S. fiscal cliff a serious downer for the greenback? No, as Vincent Cignarella reports on Markets Hub.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
... I ... oh ... conventional wisdom into this fiscal cliff situation would be terrible for the U S dollar and we are situation ... exactly positives this ... drags on you'd expected on a rally joining us now is DJ FX Trader strategist ... in Cignarella Vince when the fiscal cliff is here ... and the ... U S economy is in dire Straits yet this is dollar positive start positive that so this of Marx Brothers movie basically of the US is of a fiscal cliff ... if we fall off Europe goes into a fiscal abyss basically so ... when you're comparing the that were ... we might stand to lose one and a half percent of GDP if we just postpone ... the court may be a pavements of work on the so-called grand plan ... to take this down to zero and a half percent growth ... that decline would push Europe into a solid recession ... of the ... horrible for other currency so therefore the dollar rallies everyone goes to say it ... is a Jamaican citizen seems to me that ... you look at the safe havens from the Lord his dollar to the Japanese yen ... you need and how it is really the odds in the caricature you believe the IMF ... these are some pretty ugly state agencies of the Britney Spears a bag ... is there really anything definitive knowing what so pillar of the wary of the rest of the Dover there really is not a safe haven when you that the globe ... global economies are are very very highly of life ... and there has ... been an expansion of credit in the last ten years around the world whether it be ... printing money the US ... China real estate market perhaps ... the Australian mining industry ... um does the pick one ... of the Spanish housing market um ... so everyone is ... everyone's borrowers critical ... and that that money needs to be paid back in the question is do you do it slowly and intelligently over maybe a ten year period ... what you do it the way everyone seems to want to do it in in five minutes which is ... the crater economic growth ... so ... safe haven ... and out to me I like out is Khona like the Swiss franc of North America ... um you know there but the dynamics of will better than anyone else but is there a real safe haven not all ... that and then what's the worst Midwest that we do go over the fiscal cliff and ... things are starting to think they are ... in Europe looks like it may break and the Middle East gets even worse and what is the thing that is going to get ... a annihilated in a rush to what that that it may be of monopoly but from the show I think the Australian dollar's a precarious situation um I think if there's a slowdown in global growth in China ... specifically ... so oh well for currency um ... the positive is the RBA has room to lower rates substantially versus what other central banks have ... bought that lowering of rates will remove what ... of positive the currency had which was the carry trade interest differential ... so was the only ... server I was I was dancing around please make sure to read more advances work ... on DJ FX Trader and it is to dot com


text:
Aussie pair takes important first step before FIVB World Tour
Currently, the pair is competing in Thailand on the Asian Beach Volleyball Tour, but once that assignment is completed, they are hoping to use the experience to make their mark on the 2014 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour.
The Melbourne-based men decided to team up at the end of last year, when both their regular partners were unavailable.
Almost immediately they gelled, although more on the court than off it, after Court had moved in with the Schumann's in Melbourne.
But all those excellent home cooked meals soon began paying dividends, as "Damo and Josh" started making their mark on the Renault Australian National Beach Volleyball Tour.
They lost the Glenelg final in Adelaide to Australia's top ranked team, Isaac Kapa and Chris McHugh, but the defeat wasn't a great shame, given the Kapa and McHugh combination went through the previous summer undefeated.
Next was Surfers Paradise in Queensland, where Schumann and Court really announced themselves on the Australian summer.
First, they beat McHugh and Kapa in atrocious conditions in a quarterfinal, and then carried that form through to the final where they beat Sam Boehm and Cole Durant in straight sets.
Unfortunately, that was as good as the summer got for the pair. Schumann was unavailable for Perth and then Court carried an injury into the final two rounds at St Kilda in Melbourne and Sydney's Cronulla Beach.
"We played a state tournament last week and it was all fine," Schumann said on the eve of their departure to Thailand.
"The week before that tournament Josh was back to training 100 percent. It probably took him two weeks after the Oz Champs (Cronulla) to get right again. It was actually just a small thing. It was just his calf and ankle being really tight, which affected his hip which affected his back."
International experience
Court and Schumann are among the first beneficiaries of a new era for Australian Volleyball after a generous sponsorship deal involving Volleyball Australia's patron, mining magnate Gina Rinehart, has enabled a bigger 'Beach Volleyroos' squad to travel overseas to gain valuable international experience.
Along with the Melbourne boys, the Gold Coast's Mowen sisters, Jordan and Justine, went to Thailand; as well as national team pairings Nikki Laird and Mariafe Artacho del Solar and Sam Boehm and Cole Durant.
Schumann, who spent the summer counting his pennies expecting he'd have to fork out his own money to get overseas, is delighted.
"It's amazing," he said. "Something like this has never happened to a team outside the traditional base of Adelaide.
"We can choose which events we play. But it's really important we do well in Thailand so we can qualify for FIVB World Tour events and potentially some Grand Slam events in Europe.
"It's exciting but it's a little bit scary too, because it is out of your control a bit."
The usually unflappable Schumann, one of the most popular players on the Australian tour, admits while he's excited at the opportunity, he's also freaking out a little.
"I stress and worry about it," he said, "and check the injury lists and recheck it, and count people's points and count our points, but at the end of the day you're really at the mercy of the final entry list."


text:
"Electric cars are gay."
Vince Vaughn's character quips this line in the opening of the trailer for the new Ron Howard comedy "The Dilemma." The joke caused a stir among numerous gay-rights activists and CNN's Anderson Cooper Friday, leading Universal to cut the scene from the trailer.
The trailer shows Vaughn's character in a boardroom trying to breathe some "rock and roll" cool into a car he describes as "my-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance-gay."
On "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," Cooper warned about the consequences of throwing around words like "gay" and questioned Universal's decision to lure in audiences by using the word as a punchline.
"It's used just as an insult among kids," Cooper said. "We've got to change the way people use these words because these words to have power and they're used like weapons."
Universal issued a statement Friday saying the trailer "was not intended to cause anyone discomfort."
The events come in the wake of news of anti-gay and bullying behavior across the country, such as the recent tragedy at Rutgers, where Tyler Clementi, a first year student took his life on September 22 after an intimate encounter was broadcast on the Internet.
According to Deadline, Universal screened the original trailer to gay groups like GLADD, as well as gay executives "and no one was offended and everyone had a positive response," said a studio insider.
Selected Readings: Entertainment Weekly, Deadline, GLADD


text:
share:Remind Me
TCMDb Archive MaterialsView all archives (1)
DVDs from TCM Shop
Mister Roberts A naval officer longing for... MORE > $15.79 Regularly $19.98 Buy Now
powered by AFI
Brief Synopsis
A naval officer longing for active duty clashes with his vainglorious captain.
In April 1945, Lt. (j.g.) Douglas A. Roberts is a cargo officer on board the Reluctant , a Navy supply ship called the "Bucket" by its crew. Harbored near a South Pacific island that is far from the fighting, the crew suffers from intense heat, boredom and a tyrannical captain, who takes sadistic pleasure in undermining their morale. Roberts intervenes on the crew's behalf as much as possible. Watching him butt heads with the captain lifts the crew's spirits and provides almost their sole entertainment. However, Roberts, who quit medical school to fight the war, feels completely wasted aboard the "Bucket." Alone on watch one night, Roberts watches a convoy of fighting ships sail by and the next morning confides to Doc, the medical officer and his closest friend aboard ship, how much he aches to join them. Although Doc tries to convince him that standing up for the crew against the bullying captain is a valuable service, Roberts remains discontent. As a weekly ritual, Roberts writes the Navy Department to request a transfer to active combat, but his request is systematically vetoed by the captain, whose signature is required for approval. The captain, an uncouth ex-Merchant Marine, is threatened by Roberts' superior education and intelligence and the admiration given him by the crew. However, he expects that Roberts' hard work will help him get promoted. It has already won the captain an award for "superior cargo transfer," a palm tree that he displays proudly outside his cabin. For over a year, the captain has refused to approve leave and he frequently takes away movie nights and other small privileges. When the sailors discover that binoculars provide them with a clear view of the nurses's shower room in a hospital on the nearby coast, they experience their first release from drudgery in over a year. The ship's morale officer, young ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver, who is also in charge of the ship's laundry, shares Roberts' quarters. Womanizer Pulver is also aware of the nurses, and finagles a trip to the hospital to pick up aspirin for Doc. While there, he convinces head nurse, Lt. Ann Girard, to come to the ship later by promising to share a bottle of scotch with her. Back on board, while preparing his bunk for seduction, Pulver is distressed to learn that Roberts, the owner of the scotch, has used it to bribe an official to send the Reluctant to a liberty port. Amused by Pulver's panic, Roberts and Doc mix up simulated scotch, called "jungle juice," from alcohol, Coca-Cola, iodine and hair tonic. Although Roberts admits that Pulver is "thoroughly likable," he accuses him of being, among other things, disorganized, and challenges him to finish one thing that he starts. As an example, he suggests that he carry out his idea of putting marbles in the captain's overhead. However, Pulver's fear of the captain renders him incapable of defiance. When Ann appears with the other nurses in tow, Pulver despairs of getting her alone. With Roberts' permission, Pulver pretends to be the ship's cargo officer. While he shows them around, the nurses, who are undeceived by his pretensions, discover the sailors' view of their quarters and leave immediately to hang curtains. When the Reluctant sails to the liberty port, the captain, who learns about Roberts' bribe, forbids the men to go ashore. Arguing that the men are "breakable," Roberts begs him to relent, finally winning the crew one night of shore leave at great personal cost: In return, he must cease questioning the captain's orders, especially in front of the men, and give up writing transfer applications. During their night onshore, the men, unaware of Roberts' concessions, unleash all their pent-up energy. They crash an Army dance, fight with soldiers, terrorize women, steal an admiral's goat and mistake the French Colonial governor's mansion for a bordello. Roberts hopes the night will give them strength for the "miserable, endless days ahead of them." The next day, the ship is banished from the port. The captain, livid at the blemish on his record, forces Roberts, in front of the crew, to assist in their punishment. Confused by Roberts' sullen compliance, the men are further mystified when he stops writing transfer requests, and his growing irritability makes them wonder if he is "bucking for a promotion." Later, upon hearing that Germany has surrendered, Roberts puts one of the crewmen, Dolan, on record for a minor infraction, and then, near tears, begs Doc to give him a medical transfer. Guessing that Roberts is suppressing resentment because he made an agreement on the men's behalf, Doc refuses and tells the concerned Pulver afterward that Roberts is panicking because the war is ending before he can join it. Trying to cheer Roberts, Pulver builds an explosive out of a toilet paper roll and some fulminator mercury, which he promises to throw under the captain's bunk. When Roberts laughs hysterically at the idea, he goes to the laundry room to test it. After an explosion, soapsuds flood the ship, and Pulver returns to say that his whole supply of mercury blew up by accident. The rebellion ends after the captain is told that a steam pipe broke. That night, Roberts apologizes to Dolan, but he and the other men respond coldly. Left alone on deck, Roberts listens to the radio broadcast of a speech that urges the free world to stand up to stupidity and arrogance. Inspired, he throws the palm tree overboard, then goes to bed. During the night, the captain, seeing the palm missing, sounds a general alarm. The men, at first believing they are under attack, scurry to find their battle stations and from there watch the ensuing "showdown." The captain, forgetting to turn off the p.a. system, accuses Roberts of breaking his promise and the men then realize that Roberts bought their night of liberty. Roberts remains calm in the face of the captain's spewing anger, and summons Doc when the captain almost passes out. The eavesdropping men thoroughly enjoy the drama of the night and when Roberts emerges from the cabin, their admiration is obvious. Weeks later, Roberts receives orders to transfer to a destroyer stationed in Okinawa, which surprises him, as he has not requested a transfer in months. While packing, he mentions to Doc that, as far as the men are concerned, he is easily replaceable. Doc, however, confides a secret: The men forged a transfer request and then forged the captain's signature of approval, to show their gratitude to Roberts for getting them shore leave. Before he leaves, the men toast Roberts with "jungle juice" dispensed from a fire extinguisher and present him with a handmade medal shaped like a palm tree and inscribed, "Order of the Palm, for action against the enemy above and beyond the call of duty." Deeply moved, Roberts puts on the medal, salutes and leaves. Some time later, the captain orders a 24-hour watch on a palm tree he has dug up to replace his prized one. Pulver, who has been assigned Roberts' position, frets over confronting the captain about showing a movie to the men. At mail call, Pulver receives from Roberts a letter written three weeks earlier. Having gained perspective from his new post, Roberts writes philosophically about the courage the Reluctant men showed while surviving monotony. Although Roberts is now where he needs to be, he is proud to have served with them and treasures their medal more than a Congressional Medal of Honor. A second letter Pulver receives, which was written by a friend serving on Roberts' ship, reports that Roberts was killed by a Japanese suicide bomber while drinking coffee in the ship's wardroom. The men mourn, but Pulver, emboldened by shock, throws the captain's palm tree overboard, pounds on his cabin door and belligerently demands, "Now what's all this crud about no movie tonight?"
Cast & Crew
Additional Details
|MPAA Ratings:
|Premiere Info:
|New York opening: 14 Jul 1955; San Francisco opening: week of 10 Jul 1955
|Release Date:
|Production Date:
AFI Library; EB; AFI*; Paige (see below)
|Color (Warnercolor)
|Distributions Co:
|Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc.
|Stereo (RCA Sound System)
|Production Co:
|Orange Productions, Ltd.
|120-121, 123 or 126
|United States
|not available
|not available
Leonard Maltin Ratings & Review
User Ratings & Review
This title has not been reviewed. Be the FIRST to write a review by CLICKING HERE >
User Ratings & Review
User Reviews:
Cinema History:
Lead Performers:
Supporting Cast:
Screen Play:
Music Score:
Title Sequence:
User Ratings:
Dare I say IT. I don't like this film. James Cagney one of the greatest entertainers of the twentieth century is unfunny possibly due in large part,... MORE>
you cant touch this..jack lemmon character.
a.morris 2018-02-12
jack lemmon is a very flighty officer. the kind you do not take to high command. he will let your morale down. every time you think he will not betray... MORE>
film was made between WWII and Korea
denscul 2017-08-02
My opinion of War Films is they can be used for propaganda. Get the boys out to enlist. I watched this as a Viet Nam vet, a different war and time. The... MORE>


text:
Book 'Em: In Bozeman, Foibles Yield Sentences of Note
A Montana Newspaper Turns Its Police Blotter Into a Local Best Seller
BOZEMAN, Mont.—A man reported that someone got into his unlocked car and turned the lights on, draining the battery; a woman had questions about a man who wanted to trade a gun for a puppy; a caller wanted to know how to get his mother to stop harassing him.
In this mountain town (pop. 39,000), police officers' duties extend beyond the daily rounds and reports. They provide fodder for one of the hottest books in town, "We Don't Make This Stuff Up: The Very Best of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle Police Reports."...


text:
District Office:
2503 Lawrence Street
Ceres CA, 95307
(209) 556-1500
Office Hours:
7:30 am - 5:00 pm
Map and Directions
District Demographics
23 schools
Listing of
CUSD Schools
14,065 students
(16/17 school year)
82.1% Free and
Reduced Meals
Program Participation
29.2% English
Language Learners
Student Ethnicity
Education Code (EC) Section 35186 created a procedure for the filing of complaints concerning
deficiencies related to instructional materials, conditions of facilities that are not maintained in a clean
or safe manner or in good repair, and teacher vacancy or incorrect assignment. The complaint and response
are public documents as provided by statute. Complaints may be filed anonymously. However, if you
wish to receive a response, you must provide the following contact information.
File: Williams Complaint Form - English and Spanish
Rev: 2016
Notice to Parents/Guardians, Pupils, and Teachers: Complaint Rights
Ceres Unified School District does not discriminate on the basis of race,color, national origin, ancestry, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, parental, family, or marital status.
CUSD does not impose, maintain, approve or implement student admission eligibility criteria or employment policies that discriminates on the basis of race,color, national origin, ancestry, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, parental, family, or marital status


text:
I am so sad and furious about the murder of Dr. George Tiller, I don't even know where to begin. This shit is domestic terrorism, pure and simple. Its purpose is to frighten doctors and women into bending to the will of fundamentalist ideologues. And if you think it was just the work of a lone nutcase, as opposed to the logical consequence of a focused and relentless campaign of hatred aimed at Tiller — which led to his being shot once before and his clinic being bombed — please do have a look at all of the sick fucks joking and celebrating on Twitter, or in the comments on pretty much any article about Tiller's assassination. Or at the statement of Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, which begins like so:
George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama Administration will use Tiller's killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions.
Most pro-life organizations, including Operation Rescue, have tried to distance themselves from the assassination, and of course the vast majority of pro-life people would and do condemn murder. Nevertheless, the reality is, words have consequences. Publishing the home address and church of someone you call "America's doctor of death" has consequences. The very rhetoric Randall Terry is so worried about protecting has consequences.
Some tweets just from the last few minutes:
Tiller was a baby killer. Condolences to his victims.
death ratio tiller 1 innocent babies 100000
I am furious that the death of a ghoul like Tiller receives more attention than the deaths of the scores of babies he has killed.
A good way to prevent what happened to Tiller the baby killer is stop killing babies.
for all the libs that are blaming the cons for the murder of Tiller— remember, we are PRO-LIFE.. try to remember that
OK. I'll try. But a whole lot of people who identify as "pro-life" are making that awfully difficult. This is your movement. Words have consequences.
Via that same Twitter stream, I just learned that the suspect in custody is reportedly a man named Scott Roeder, who posted on the Operation Rescue website:
Bleass everyone for attending and praying in May to bring justice to Tiller and the closing of his death camp.
Sometime soon, would it be feasible to organize as many people as possible to attend Tillers church (inside, not just outside) to have much more of a presence and possibly ask questions of the Pastor, Deacons, Elders and members while there? Doesn't seem like it would hurt anything but bring more attention to Tiller.
I really can't think of anything to add. My condolences to Dr. Tiller's family and friends.
Update: Check out this story from someone who, tragically, had to use Tiller's services. This is the reality of late-term abortion. (Via Bitch Ph.D., where you'll also find lots of links to other posts on the subject. Hoyden About Town has a good round-up, too. And Ann has suggestions about what you can do.)


text:
Continuing Medical Education
Joslin Diabetes Center has helped revolutionize the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of diabetes worldwide since its founding more than a century ago. Through its affiliation with Harvard Medical School and its staff of leaders in their field, Joslin has emerged as the global leader in cutting-edge research and pioneering approaches to education and clinical care. Joslin Diabetes Center is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education. Supported largely through unrestricted educational grants, Joslin's programs are noted for their academic rigor and professional production.
Page last updated: November 07, 2019


text:
Sometimes, we ask a question which elicits numerous answers. As you read those answers, you form related questions that don't probably merit entire new questions on their own but little one line answers as a follow-up to the original question.
The mechanisms for doing this today are using comments or posting a new question with a link to the original. Both of these are sub-optimal because they don't really show up in search, as being related. Further, modifying the original question to ask the follow-up query doesn't intimate the people who have already answered the original question and hence, loses its significance.
Should there be a way to post follow-up questions?