text:
Each day, approximately 330,000 people pass through New York City's Times Square intersection. Within this concrete jungle, tourists take selfies with street performers, billboards on towering buildings flash images of celebrities, and taxis honk their horns at slowpokes in crosswalks.
A guided walking safari offers the thrilling opportunity to get closer to some of Africa's most charismatic wildlife. Up until last month, I had completed all my safaris sat within a Land Rover or a rental car.
Arid parks may sound boring to some, but it's incredibly fascinating how much plant life and wildlife is sustained despite such a harsh living environment.
Just outside Upington, South Africa, the slender grey tower shimmered in the distance like a heat mirage. You can be driving down empty highway roads for hours, passing nothing but dust devils and quiver trees, when suddenly, signs of Africa's rapid growth and development appear in front of you.
If there are vultures circling above, there is a good chance you'll find a fresh animal kill nearby.


text:
Scorched by His Fire
Reet Singh
The Blurb
Mita Ramphul can't face another family set-up with a 'nice young man'. What she needs is to divert her family's attention so introducing the devastatingly handsome Tanay Devkumar as her new boyfriend is a stroke of brilliance. Until Tanay's scorching hot kisses threaten to shatter her plans for the perfect pretend date.
He might drive her crazy, yet spending time with Tanay sparks a passion Mita never knew she had. It's only meant to be temporary, but when Tanay looks at her with that smoldering fire in his ebony eyes Mita can't help but surrender to the temptation of her fake boyfriend.
He might drive her crazy, yet spending time with Tanay sparks a passion Mita never knew she had. It's only meant to be temporary, but when Tanay looks at her with that smoldering fire in his ebony eyes Mita can't help but surrender to the temptation of her fake boyfriend.
Buy @
Watch It
Reet Singh has created a beautiful character in Mita. She can be anyone of us. Spicy and Hot. A woman with some faults. Thank God! Mita can be me...or you.
She lives in the beautiful Mauritius and works as a teacher. Her family wants to see her married off and settled. But she is yet to find love and when she does, the man of her dreams does nothing but blame her for being a home wrecker. Ouch! Not a very good start, is it? But Tanay is sure that Mita is out to wreck his sister's home and he will do anything to prevent that. Laxmi, his sister means a lot to him and he would be damned if he lets this vixen destroy her marriage.
If this was only the only story line, it might have become a bit boring but Reet Singh brings a beautiful twist to this tale. A slight adventure which will make the readers keep on turning the pages. I know I did :)
Mita's character is very bubbly and spontaneous while Tanay is the silent-hero kind whose one liners makes a gal jelly-belly. One thing that would have made the story stronger is the Kolkata incident. The character of Mrs. Ramphul of Kolkata could have been a bit deeper, a bit more closer to home - to justify Mita's and Tanay's journey from Mauritius. But what it lacked there is made up in the sizzling romance between the two. Readers, it is HOT and SIZZLING. The love scenes are beautifully written. The thing that most left an impact with me is the fluidity of the story. Its very fluid and there is not stopping once you start this story. Every scene is woven to the next one - without making it look deliberate.
Reet has a romantic soul, partly genetic but certainly attributable to the romantic fiction she devours by the kilo. When she's not watching romcoms, or doing creative things with wool and a crochet hook, or playing Scrabble, she can be found in the kitchen putting together her 'world-famous' one-pot meals. Married for three decades, her prototypical tall, handsome, and sensitive hero-husband still makes her heart skip a beat. Writing about love and happy endings feeds her romantic soul; hearing from her readers thrills her. Having a mother that read to her, she paid it forward, telling bedtime stories to her sons and nieces until they grew too old too fast. As a reaction to them growing up before she knew what was happening, she began writing for older children, and has published children's books on Amazon, for Kindle.
You can stalk her @
Check out The Book Club Tour Schedule
A Giveaway a Rafflecopter giveaway

subset: commoncrawl


text:
In Search of the World Before the Great WareBook - 2013
Related Resources
From the critics
Community Activity
CommentAdd a Comment
We were taught that the 1914-18 World War was about freedom, equality and rule of law. Mr. Charles Emmerson undermines these noble quests by educating us that the main proponents of this war of wars were all hypocrites, imperialists and greedy. The French hyped liberty and equality at home but denied these rights to their Colonial empire including Algiers and Viet Nam. The British could not see fit to offer liberty and equality to any of their aboriginal people. No European country would allow women to vote. One would not to have wanted to be black and living in the United States in 1913 . Chinese intellectual Yan Fu noted that European race's last three hundred years of evolutionary progress had come down to nothing but four words:
Selfishness, slaughter, shamelessness and corruption. Mr. Emmerson provides us an enlightened context for a war which took millions of lives. No one should read a book on WW I until they read 1913. I wish I did.
This is an excellent overview of the geopolitical situation just prior to the First World War. The author has attempted the broadest geographical perspective - which means that it's not just about the US, the UK, France and Germany. The cost, of course, is that the depth of detail cannot be as strong, but it does give some potential hooks for further research if one has any interest.
More a collection of individual essays about selected cities than a linear book with a unifying theme. My problem with sweeping survey books is that the very act of choosing what to put in, and what to leave out, biases the book to support the author's perspective. While the current turmoil in the world has much in common with the intrigue, grievances, subterfuge, and seething ambitions that were at-play in 1913, there are equally as many important differences today. To name just two: more women vote; the internet exists. Each, a revolutionizing event, on its own. To be sure, there are obvious, and deeply troubling, similarities, but 2013 is as different from 1913 as 1913 was from 1813.
Age SuitabilityAdd Age Suitability
There are no age suitabilities for this title yet.
SummaryAdd a Summary
There are no summaries for this title yet.
NoticesAdd Notices
There are no notices for this title yet.
QuotesAdd a Quote
There are no quotes for this title yet.


text:
Setting up a new weblog with WordPress is quite easy and I'm going to presume you have already cheap jerseys registered a brand new domain related to your weblog. Also as getting a web host that uses cPanel. Using Fantastico to upload and set up your new weblog is genuinely a no brainer. It is going to do almost every little thing for you and gives pretty clear cut directions to personalize the look and really feel of your new blog employing available Themes and Plug-Ins. I wish to add that authentic james patrick rangers jersey sale Weblogs are free and you'll be able to set-up as a lot of as you choose. Every must have its own domain or sub domain.
Buying the larger ones will result inside your jeans being too baggy in your case after a while. This is very important because having pants which can be too long or short might be a critical mistake in looking good. At points in your lifetime, you're going to invest some time around photo-fanatics that snap numerous pictures making use of their camera or phone and upload the crooks to their social media marketing account. Few situations are more embarrassing than realizing you've got left the house in the top that's sheer in sunlight. Being a fashion disaster may take its toll on by yourself-esteem. But if your newest style isn't complementary to your physical frame, you will only be doing yourself a fashion disservice. Wear an entire skirt for times when you're going out for a nice dinner.


text:
a weekend in food
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge fan of Joanne Chang and Flour Bakery. J got me the new (fabulous!) cookbook for Christmas, and last week I finally had time to try a recipe! Here's a snap shot of my first attempt at the chocolate chip cookies. All I had on hand for chocolate was toll house chips, but they seemed to work okay. I considered posting the recipe here, but I'm going to encourage you to go pick up the cookbook instead. Or at least drop by Flour and try some of the real deal. If you're a Bostonian and you haven't been yet … well … where have you been?
Friday night we went with a few friends to Red Bones in Davis Square. Let me tell you, it was well worth the 2 hour wait (and they don't take reservations, so plan ahead!) If you haven't been yet, I should warn you that eating at Red Bones is an experience. The tables are packed together, it's loud and very bright. But really, who eats BBQ in leather banquettes and mood lighting? Aside from the heaping mounds of BBQ you're sure to order, you've got to try the fried pickles. Healthy? no. Delicious? yes.
The portions are giant, so I would reccomend splitting an entree. We all did, and we were still stuffed!
Saturday I finally had a chance to stop by the Somerville Winter Farmers market. I had never been to a farmer's market in the winter, so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect … but I loved it! We didn't get to stay for long, but will defintely be back. I picked up some anadama bread and a cider donut (YUM!) from Great Cape Baking Company and a few green peppers from Enterprise Farm. If you're in the Davis Square area it's well worth the trip over to the Armory. If you can leave your car at home, definitely do – parking was a bit of a pain. The market is open 10 to 2pm on Saturdays, and is located at 191 Highland Ave in Somerville.
And then there was the superbowl! Two kinds of chili, corn bread, chips, guacamole, chocolate chip cookies … I wish I had pictures but we ate it all too fast!
How was your weekend? Any food adventures or great new recipes?
blogger inspiration
I am always collecting recipes, and I'm infamous for making something that we both love and then promptly misplacing the recipe. This the little trick I picked up from Fun and Fearless in Beantown, though, is one that I'm sure I'll hang onto:
One of my favorite go-to dinners is ground turkey burgers – they're easy and quick! And while a lean turkey burger is a healthier option than a beef burger, it never hurts to squeeze in an extra vegetable. I think Michelle's suggestion is brilliant – why not dice up some zucchini and fold it into the meat before forming the patties?
The taste didn't change at all, the texture was similar, but you've got an extra vegetable in there before you even start in on your side salad.
And if you play by my rules, committing to an extra vegetable means you've earned little extra dessert, too: )
a word about lasagna
I made a lasagna realization last week:
A great lasagna doesn't have to be smothered in ricotta.
Forgive me Italian chefs everywhere, but for those of us who can't stomach the dairy, this is a life changing realization. I was really missing one of my favorite comfort foods! I hadn't bothered to try it before because I assumed that the end result would be dry crunchy noodles layered in a casserole dish. A little extra sauce and a generous sprinkling of parmesan later though, and I've never been so happy to admit I was wrong. Aged cheeses seem to agree with me just fine, so parmesan was a great solution. If you can't take that, then experiment with your favorite dairy free cheese. You'll be glad you did!
The January Dinner of the Dumbwaiter Supper Club
After a hiatus over the holidays, we were all excited to get back together for another Dumbwaiter Supper Club dinner. Here were this month's clues:
Clue #1: The Green Mile?! What does that mean???
Luke 22:7-23
Clue #2: Hmmm, okay. It's starting to come together ….
Clue #3: GOT IT!
If you didn't guess it yet, the theme was your interpretation of a last supper. Jason and I took it two different ways. I went with "Death by Chocolate" by combing two of my favorite things: bacon and fudge. It sounds crazy, but trust me, the savory and sweet was fantastic:
Jason's interpretation was one of his favorite dishes: buffalo chicken dip with a ton of Frank's Red Hot. It was very spicy … and delicious!
The winning dish this month was Cait's take on tomato soup with a grilled cheese sandwich. She made mini Parmesan cups, and filled them with tomato soup thickened with cream cheese. Each little bite was like a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup all in one – the ultimate mini comfort food!
And here are the rest of the dishes. We started out as pretty good cooks (if I do say so myself) but every month we do this the bar gets set higher! Every dish was amazing, and we all left too full to move.
Jon's Dish: Poutine
Matt's dish: Breakfast Casserole
Julia's dish: Fresh pasta and homemade red sauce with homemade meatballs and sausage
WOW. I can't believe we ate all that … and then ate again today! Since Cait's dish won she'll be hosting our dinner next month. We're already looking forward to her clues!
Restaurant Review: Foundry on Elm
Jason and I were looking to celebrate big moves in both of our careers this month (!) on Friday, but we were too tired to venture all the way into Boston. Lucky for us, Foundry on Elm has moved into the neighborhood! Billed as the "upscale" option in Davis Square, we had been wanting to try it for awhile. The only negative comment I had heard what that the lights were too bright (fair enough, who wants to eat under the glare of harsh lighting?), but when we walked in I could tell that management had gotten the message, too – the lighting was pleasantly dim, but not dark.
We had made a reservation, but somehow ended up being seating just about in the kitchen door. Not ideal, but it was busy and we were starving, so we decided to stay put.
We were starving, so we decided to start with the fried calamari appetizer (our favorite app!). It came out quickly, but was incredibly salty. No complaints from us – we loved the salt (and the sauce that was served on the side – a basil aioli?) but if you don't love salt as much as we do, you might want to try something else.
Our entrees (steak frites and grilled salmon) came out pretty quickly too, though the steak was very undercooked. We mentioned it to the waiter, who went and got the manager! The steak was whisked away and came back in no time, cooked perfectly. We were impressed, and very much appreciated the attentive service! Both entrees were fantastic – I would recommend either!
If you (or your wallet) aren't up for the big entrees, the menu offers burgers and flatbreads, too. Plenty of options! All in all? Great service, great food … we'll definitely be back!
don't "beet" yourself up about it
Beets, like brussel sprouts, are an unloved vegetable. It doesn't have to be that way!
1. Wash the beets
2. Wrap them individually, loosely in tin foil
3. Roast at 350 for 60 minutes
4. Remove from oven, and set aside to cool
5. Slice off one end, and push the skin off.
That's it! Here's what I did with them:
Everyday Food fans, rejoice. We tested out another recipe last night from this month's issue and it was a success! We followed this one exactly, and just loved it. The only note I have for you here is that there is definitely a lot of mise en place required for this recipe, so make sure you leave plenty of time for prep!
Sweet and Sour Chicken with Green Beans
1 c. long grain white rice
1 tbsp cornstarch
1/4 c. sugar
1/4 c. soy sauce
1/4 c. white vinegar
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 1/4 lbs boneless, skinless chicken breast, cut into 1 in pieces
2 bell peppers (we used red and white), seeded and diced large
1/2 lb green beans, trimmed and halved
5 scallions, thinly sliced
2 in piece of ginger, peeled and minced
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 tbsps roasted peanuts (optional – we left these out)
Cook rice according to the package. In a small bowl, mix the cornstarch, sugar, soy sauce, and vinegar. Set aside. Next, prep your vegetables.
In a large skillet, heat oil on high. Add chicken, peppers, and green beans and cook. Stir frequently, until vegetables soften – this should take about 5 minutes. Then add the scallions, ginger, and garlic. Stir frequently, for four more minutes, or until chicken is cooked through.
Whisk the soy sauce mixture again, and add it to the skillet. Stir until the sauce thickens. EDF says about 3 minutes – we kept it shorter for a thinner sauce. Remove from heat, fluff the rice with a fork, and serve the stir fry over rice.


text:
Management & Leadership Scholarships
Scholarship Opportunities
Goodwin College awards more than $2 million annually to students. This assistance helps many students realize their dream of completing college. It is important to note that most Goodwin College students begin their coursework with little or no out-of-pocket expense.
Departmental Scholars Program
Students enrolled in the Management and Leadership program who take 9 or more credits per semester while maintaining a 3.0 GPA are eligible to receive a scholarship worth 30% of their tuition.
For more information regarding this unique scholarship program, please contact:
- Phone800.889.3282
- email@example.com
Other Leadership Scholarship Opportunities:
Workforce Partnerships
See additional financial aid opportunities/scholarships that Goodwin College has available to you.


text:
When it comes to affecting economic cycles, there is very little a President can realistically do. Candidates for President can do even less, so they bloviate like whales spouting on a distant horizon.
The debate between McCain and Obama on this topic has an abstruse, how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin quality about it. We should move on to topics that matter to the American People, like whether Cindy McCain looks like a Stepford Wife, or whether Michelle Obama is too radical and edgy to be a First Lady.


text:
Life Update: Why The Blog Was Out Of Commission, My Health, The GDPR, And Everything Else
I know I have essentially went MIA for the last few weeks. I haven't made a blog post since early in May. My social media accounts have only been posted on sporadically at best. I really try not to skip out like that. I am an introvert, and my natural tendency tends to be to keep a of things to myself.
I know my reactions to major stress aren't the healthiest ways to handle things, but they could be worse. Sometimes I shut people out when things get to be too much for me to deal with. I often feel I need more time than what is usual for me to center my thoughts and calm myself. Maybe some of you can relate.
I try to remind myself to at least update people about what is going on instead of just walking off and not saying anything. And I did make some attempts on social media. But the universe converged to throw a lot of things at me all at once. And my communication even with my closest of friends has been minimalistic lately.
I kind of feel I could have alternatively named this post Why I Came Close To Having A Panic Attack. So here are all the things that have happened:
My Physical And Mental Health
I have talked about my health issues on the blog many times. So you guys know, I struggle hard with fibromyalgia. This year I have been having more problems than normal for me further into the year. I really suspect that it is tied into the fact that where I live that precipitation has doubled in the last three years. And at the beginning of may through the third week I was hit by a major fibro flare. And subsequent issues followed through till the end of May.
It isn't just the pain that I struggle with, it's the brain fog that comes with it. I find it especially hard because it really hinders my brain functions at times. I can't think clearly enough to form sentences let alone comprehend reading legal lingo. And I find the more severe this becomes the more depressed it makes me.
While there are other things that happened over the last month, my feeling is that my physical and mental state contributed the most to having to take down the blog for maintenance. But, there was definitely way more too it.
No AC
Yes, that is correct, I have no AC right now. In fact I haven't had AC in a little over three weeks. As I write this I still don't have AC in my home, but I am hopeful that as you all read this that my AC will be back on.
It took forever to get anyone to come look at our heat pump unit because everyone else in my town had their AC go out at the same time apparently. When I first called there were 50 people ahead of us. So two weeks was waiting for them to get to us.
Once they got here, they found a hose that was leaking. The replacement hose was something they did not have in stock. So another week to get it in. I heard from them today that they are suppose to be here tomorrow to fix it. That is if the person they have scheduled before me doesn't have something go terribly wrong.
So keep your fingers crossed for me. I don't do well in the heat, only slightly better than I do in the cold. One of my meds makes me extremely sensitive to the heat, and I easily overheated because my sweat glands don't work right while on the med.
No Meds And No Doctor
So I have been on the hunt for a new doctor since back in the winter. I didn't really want to switch, but it has become a necessity. My doctor of over 15 years now has slowly been seeing patients less and less. She currently is down to seeing patients one day a week. And between it taking 3 months to get in to see her and me having a hard time keeping appointments due to my actual ailments, I needed to find a new doctor. I need someone who can see me quicker and have more flexibility with my appointment times.
I actually have found a new doctor, or at least one to try. But like typical, the first appointment is always a longer one and the earliest appointment I could get was almost four months away. So it will be later this month before I can get to a doctor for refills in my prescriptions. The one thing I just ran out of, despite trying to spread them out, is my migraine meds. And yes my migraines have become far more regular.
I have to take some responsibility for this one though. I think part of the reason it took me so long to decide on a doctor to see was anxiety. I didn't really expect to have anxiety. Perhaps I should have expected it, but as I said its been over 15 years since the last time I had to look for a new doctor. The last time I had to go through a good 12 different doctors to find one that worked for me. I definitely wasn't looking forward to it, but I thought I was prepared. And then the anxiety just kind of sprung up out of no where.
The GDPR
So if you don't know what the GDPR is, you can read about it here. The very basics of it is that is a European law that governs your privacy rights. Some of you out there might be thinking but I don't live in Europe, so why does this matter. And its complicated, which was part of the problem. There probably are a handful of people out there somewhere that are in no way affected by the new law, but those people probably don't have internet service. Essentially if you live in Europe, have a website that has traffic from Europe, or do business with a company in Europe or a company that does business with people in Europe, then you are at least in some minute way going to be affected by this law.
Please don't take any of what I am saying as though I am complaining about the law itself, I actually think it is a great thing that people's personal information is going to be more protected. The part that I wish were different is all of the legal jargon involved. Everything I have read says its suppose to be put in easy to understand terms, but in reality you need a law degree to understand any of it. That is on top of me having the brain fog problems. This is the point where I almost had a mental breakdown. I really came close a couple of times to having a panic attack about everything that had to be done to make my website compliant. And to be honest, I am still not 100% sure that it is.
I did the best I could. You can read my new Privacy Policy here. But I have to say I am so grateful for the support my husband has given me during me trying to put everything together. I am a true believer that actions speak louder than words, and people show you how they feel about you way before they ever say how they feel. And my husband really stepped up and showed me how much he loves me during a really hard time for me.
Your still probably wondering how this all came to me shutting the blog off for a time. And honestly, it was a solution my husband came up with. I didn't really want to shut the blog down, but it was preferable over the panic attack that was brewing. The deadline for being compliant was May 25. I knew I couldn't be ready in time. So rather than losing my mind over something I couldn't possibly do anyway. So the solution ultimately became putting up the under construction sign and doing it as I could.
I have actually read a lot of comments on the web essentially condemning those of us not ready in time. People are saying that it was put into law two years ago and everyone should have been ready. And maybe if I lived in Europe or was part of a business that had the financial means to pay someone else to do the work that would be an accurate assessment. But honestly the first time I heard anything at all about the GDPR was back in February of this year (2018). It was very obtuse at the time, no real details other than it was a law in Europe. So I honestly didn't think it was something I had to do, because well not in Europe. It wasn't until the beginning of May that I heard any more detail about it, and it was then that I had a oh shit moment. And after reading all of this, if you have made it through all of my ramblings, you realize this is probably the worst time it could have hit for me.
What is coming up
I have a lot coming up over the next few weeks. I had several things planned for the month of May, that now need to be squeezed into June. I have a couple of reviews coming this week. And later this month I have a feature on bathing suites. And there is a new dress challenge on Instagram for July, I am thinking I will be participating some in that.
As always, let me know in the comments if there is something in particular you want to hear about. Much love to all of you have stuck in there with me during my disappearing act.


text:
In June, 2007, a thirty-nine-year-old unemployed physicist named Garrett Lisi arrived at a professional conference in Morelia, Mexico, to give a twenty-minute talk. The conference was attended by all the top researchers in a field called loop quantum gravity, which had emerged as a leading challenger to string theory. Morelia is in a region susceptible to earthquakes, and it occurred to Lisi that if there was an earthquake string theory might predominate for the next twenty years. This thought was not pleasing to him.
Lisi had not been to a professional conference in eight years, and he was anxious about speaking in public. He has since learned that he can conquer this fear if he writes out all his remarks and reads from the script. But he hadn't yet learned that tactic, and so he overcame his nerves by submerging his ideas in a mass of equations.
In the audience was a physicist named Lee Smolin, one of the three founders of the field of loop quantum gravity and a prominent member of the faculty at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Ontario. Smolin had a bad cold that day, and so, through the double fog of his illness and of Lisi's exceedingly technical language, he grasped only the contours of what he was listening to. Lisi believed that he had discovered what physicists call a Theory of Everything—a unifying idea that aims to incorporate all the universe's forces in a single mathematical framework. The Theory of Everything has been the holy grail of theoretical physics for a century; Nobels are won for partial contributions to it. Here was somebody, with no reputation, saying that he might have figured out the key to the whole thing. Within four months, however, and after a second talk, Smolin was telling Lisi that he had "one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in years."
"There's a dream that underlying the physical universe is some beautiful mathematical structure, and that the job of physics is to discover that," Smolin told me later. "The dream is in bad shape," he added. "And it's a dream that most of us are like recovering alcoholics from." Lisi's talk, he said, "was like being offered a drink."
There is a persistent legend in physics of the hermit genius, the scientist who drops out of academia and then returns, many years later, with an insight that moves the discipline forward. The brilliant outsider has become almost a stock character. David Deutsch, a British pioneer of quantum computer theory, had dropped out of paid academia several years before his theories won wide acclaim. Julian Barbour, whose theories helped pioneer a key physics concept known as background independence, left the university and never returned, holding forth in a farmhouse twenty miles outside Oxford and receiving graduate students as pilgrims. The most famous outsider genius was the patent clerk Albert Einstein. "Look, in my experience, the style of a well-trained Ph.D. going away, thinking hard about something for a long time, and coming back with something very original, something that's a well-worked-out and well-thought-through point of view, is an essential, if rare, part of how theoretical physics progresses," Smolin said. "Garrett fit the pattern."
But Lisi, when he arrived in Morelia, was so obscure that he could not think of a single reputable physicist who might recommend him for a job. Einstein at least had a weekly discussion club in Bern, where he muddled through Poincaré and Hume. Lisi had got his Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego, completing his dissertation on the mathematics of the movement of water over a swimming dolphin's skin, and then, at thirty-one, dropped out of academia and nearly out of society.
For almost a decade, Lisi moved on no fixed schedule between Maui, where he likes to surf, and the mountains of the West, where he snowboards. Four years ago, Lisi persuaded his girlfriend, Crystal Baranyk, who is an artist, to move with him into an old Colorado ski-shuttle van; he remodelled it himself, shipped it to Maui, and parked it by the beach. They lived in the van for a year, with no toilet. He worked intermittently, sometimes as a snowboard instructor, once on a short-term consulting contract when a friend's software company needed an algorithm solved, but mostly he tried to think about physics. When Lisi arrived in Morelia, it was as if the Sierra Nevada and the physical sciences had joined to produce their own version of Sidd Finch.
"I am forty years old and most of my net worth is in snowboards and surfboards, and that's kind of weird," Lisi said. He wasn't even particularly careful with these items. At one point, he was living in a yurt on a plantation in Maui with some people from the group World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms when he found himself gripped by the urge to snowboard. He had no place to store his surfboards, so he just left them there. When he returned, a year later, he found that a new group had moved into the yurt, discovered the surfboards, and put them to use.
Five months after Morelia, Lisi finally published his theory online, in a thirty-one-page paper called "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything." The paper is hard for a nontechnical reader to penetrate; it consists mostly of equations and boasts. As physicists began to examine Lisi's paper, they found it alternately sublime and just strange.
For half a century, scientists have tried, unsuccessfully, to unify the two governing theories of the physical world: general relativity, which explains the behavior of very large objects, like stars, and quantum mechanics, which precisely describes the phenomena of very small objects, like particles. The two theories are written in distinct mathematical languages, and scientists have not found a way to unify them—a common syntax. This makes it hard to describe certain crossover phenomena, like the horizons of black holes. Most physicists believe that the problem isn't that the universe is incoherent but that there is something missing in the math.
Scientists have long hoped that new experiments in cosmology or particle physics would break this impasse. But discoveries on this scale haven't been forthcoming, and it's not clear that some of the most compelling modern theories can even be tested by experiment. This is particularly true of string theory. The appeal of the theory lies in its high-end math, but it also twists the real world in unusual ways. String theorists believe that the world has ten or eleven dimensions, depending on the version of the theory, with the extra ones balled up in "compactifications" too tiny to perceive.
Garrett Lisi, willfully cut loose from the world of academic physics, built his theory as an outsider might, relying on a grab bag of component parts: a hand-built mathematical structure, an unconventional way of describing gravity, and a mysterious mathematical entity known as E8. With the publication of his theory, Lisi wandered into a mill of expectations and press attention, in an unusually politicized moment in physics. His supporters include prominent physicists, but some of his antagonists, particularly among string theorists, thought his math was fishy and found the entire episode outrageous. When I asked the Nobel laureate David Gross, a professor of physics and an influential string theorist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, about Lisi, he said that he was "extremely reluctant to add fuel to this silly story."
But Smolin, after meeting Lisi and talking to him, became convinced that it was at least possible that Lisi had made a fundamental breakthrough. "It is of the nature of a high-risk shot on goal from way down the field," Smolin said. He wondered if a position within the academic world might buy Lisi time to develop his theory and asked if he was interested in applying for a university fellowship. Lisi said no.
In the acknowledgments to "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything," Lisi begins by thanking a mathematician from Columbia named Peter Woit. The two men had never met, and their only previous interaction was a slim exchange of e-mails that had ended some months earlier, in which Lisi sent Woit a description of the problems he was working on and Woit responded with some general words of encouragement. But in physics the invocation of Woit's name was a smoke signal, a declaration of partisan affinities. Woit was best known for his zealous one-man campaign to discredit string theory. By thanking him, Lisi had enlisted in the string wars. "It was probably not the most politic thing to do," Woit said.
Lisi had long harbored a deep skepticism about string theory. As a graduate student in theoretical physics at U.C. San Diego in the nineties, he was briefed on a recent string-theory development called the Maldacena conjecture by a young member of the physics department. "It was very interesting mathematics," Lisi said. "But I remember walking out of this office and wondering what it had to do with any physical reality. And, as far as I could tell, it didn't." The influence of string theorists was growing at the time, and Lisi felt the academy closing in on him. "If you share an office next to a guy for twenty years, and you like him and you're friends with him, it's hard to tell him that you think that his whole idea of how the universe works is completely wrong," he said. String theory, Lisi had come to believe, was "a mess."
First during the nineteen-seventies, but with increasing momentum during the eighties, a loose community of physics researchers had begun to postulate that the disparate small particles that we learned about in high-school science class—electrons, for instance—were actually the varied vibrations of tiny open and closed looped strings. String theorists believed that this basic component allowed them to fit all the forces of nature into a single mathematical framework. By 1999, Steven Weinberg, a physicist and Nobel laureate at the University of Texas, could say that string theory was "the only game in town."
One good way to prove string theory would be to look and see whether strings exist. But the vibrations, according to the hypothesis, take place at a frequency too high for existing equipment to detect. String theorists have still not been able to resolve their equations into testable hypotheses. Instead, they have built their case on the compelling quality of their mathematics, which some find almost incomprehensibly beautiful.
Physicists have long looked to higher math for insights into the workings of the universe. "If a figure is so beautiful and intricate and clear, you figure it must not exist for itself alone," John Baez, a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Riverside, said. "It must correspond to something in the physical world." This instinct—the assumption that beauty will stand in for truth—has become a habit. Some physicists now worry that string theory's mathematics have grown permanently unmoored from the real world—an exercise in its own complexity. And so modern theoretical physics has become, in part, an argument about aesthetics.
By 2003, a series of papers had suggested that the ambitions of string theory might never be realized—that its equations had a number of possible solutions that neared infinity and could yield only "landscapes" of possible universes. For some, this was devastating. Physicists are scientists, after all, and, thirty years in, they were getting antsy for proof. But for many physicists these papers are far from decisive, and string theory retains much of its allure. "String theory still has great attractions, and there aren't any alternatives," Weinberg said. "Well, there are alternatives, but they're worse."
In physics, as in politics, the competition is crueller in lean times. "In terms of development of new theories, it has been maybe the slowest period in two centuries," the science historian Spencer Weart said. By 2006, the fight over string theory had begun to leak out of the scientific community. Smolin and Woit published widely reviewed books criticizing string theory, and USA Today published an account of the assault headlined "HANGING ON BY A THREAD?" (There were "lots of bad puns," Jacques Distler, a high-energy physicist at the University of Texas and a proponent of string theory, told me.)
For the critics, what had begun as an academic question had become a debate about what physics meant and what it should hope to uncover. Some physicists, including the leading theorist Leonard Susskind, concluded that our own universe was only a tiny corner of an unimaginably vast "megaverse," which contained an almost endless number of universes, each structured according to different laws. In this context, the traditional search for a single Theory of Everything seemed almost quaint.
This was not Lisi's position. He still had faith in the certainties of science. "The only thing that makes sense," he said, "is if the universe is beautiful and simple and elegant."
Lisi spent this past winter in Incline Village, Nevada, on the less hurried northern lip of Lake Tahoe, in a house he borrowed, rent-free, from a friend. From the deck you can see a sliver of the lake through an opening in the pines. Lisi went snowboarding three or four days a week at nearby Mt. Rose, where a season pass costs three hundred and thirty-three dollars, a comparative bargain. During the afternoons and on the weekends, when the slopes were crowded, he worked on his theory, usually from a beach chair draped with a towel. Crystal Baranyk often painted at an easel a few feet away. Lisi had become accustomed to the curious cadences of the resort—roaring with wealth a few weekends a year, its vast houses empty and silent the rest of the time.
As outdoorsmen go, Lisi is a creature not of adventure but of submissive, mind-clearing habit. He will ski the same slopes and surf the same break, morning after morning, for a whole season. When Lisi encounters a physicist of his own age whose skill he envies, he reminds himself that he is a better surfer. When he comes across a better surfer, he thinks, I'm much better at equations.
Last summer, when Lisi began to meet with physicists, they were struck by his personality, which is self-deprecating and ironic and not particularly hermitlike. "He has this enormous self-confidence, together with an unpretentiousness, which is indicative of someone who knows what he's doing," Smolin said. Lisi is stocky, handsome, and youthful-looking, with a shaved head and the same stubby-faced bulldog Italian look as the celebrity chef Tom Colicchio. He is a great admirer of the Myers-Briggs personality test, and believes that its assessment of him—INTP, or introversion, intuition, thinking, perceiving—is definitive. Lisi has spent most of his adult life as a libertarian but now considers himself somewhat more liberal than that. He is a committed atheist. He likes puns. Lisi doesn't do any drugs or even drink; alcohol feels "like poison" to him. He makes a point of attending the post-hippie festival Burning Man. Although he returns to Maui and Tahoe regularly, his social networks, locally, are slim. The weekend I visited, Lisi and Baranyk were getting ready for a party in Reno, forty minutes away, to which they'd been invited by someone Lisi met on a ski lift, and for which they were dressing up as giant rabbits. But most nights they stayed in and cooked. They sometimes watched videotapes of the British science-fiction show "Doctor Who," but they preferred board games. It is hard to meet Lisi without wondering why someone with so many social gifts, someone who so palpably enjoys the company of others, would choose to isolate himself so thoroughly.
When Lisi finished graduate school, he wanted to work on spinor fields, mathematical representations of particles like electrons, which had conventionally been expressed algebraically but Lisi thought might plausibly be expressed in more geometric terms. He could not find an established postdoctoral program that matched his research interests, however. In part, he believes, this was ideological: he was surrounded by string theorists. He briefly considered going to work outside physics, and interviewed with McKinsey, but the company was considering him for its office in Los Angeles, a city he didn't care for. So he dropped out. His father, a probate attorney and a former Navy fighter pilot, in Escondido, California, and his stepmother were concerned. (His mother died when he was a baby.) His exile was, at first, conditional: if McKinsey had asked him to move to San Francisco, he might have gone. Six months later, he was in Hawaii, paying minimal rent to live in a house on the grounds of the Sudbury Maui school, where the children study independently. He spent some time encouraging a pupil who wanted to study the physics of baseball.
Lisi didn't think that he would ever return to academic physics. "It's publish or perish, and I figured I was perishing," he said. He became accustomed to working in isolation, in air-conditioned public libraries, or in spare rooms at home, when he had a home. There were times when he lived in mansions near Colorado ski slopes, house-sitting. At other times, he pitched a tent in a friend's back yard. He always figured, he told me, "that my brain wouldn't let me starve." But he was hardly thriving.
Lisi's working life was not steady, or easy. "Ninety-five per cent of my time is virtually wasted," he said. "If I were in a university, one of my colleagues would say, 'No, that direction makes no sense—other people have looked into it, and it doesn't go anywhere.' Here no one stops me." He spent weeks searching for a reliable place to work, and months on projects he later discarded. Sometimes he felt like a crazy person, walking down the pier in Santa Monica and muttering equations out loud.
But Lisi felt more and more that his isolated position had its advantages and might improve his chances of achieving something significant. He was convinced that academic physics had a bias against pursuing foundational questions at a young age, both because of the need to publish in order to get tenure and because such questions were seen as pretentious. And there was also, he believed, a bias toward string theory.
In 2002, three years out of graduate school, Lisi published a paper online. He described a way of formulating spinor fields in terms of geometric constructions known as Clifford bundles. Clifford bundles rely on a mathematical language developed by William Kingdon Clifford—a Victorian savant who wrote children's stories about fairies—which is useful for describing rotations. (Today, its formulas are used heavily in computer graphics.) The paper didn't make much of a mark. But Lisi felt that he had caught a glimpse of something bigger.
He wondered if his formulas might be expanded, so that he could use Clifford bundles to express the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces. To others in the field, this would have seemed an odd exercise, like translating the Constitution into Esperanto and then expecting the new text to illuminate the law. But to Lisi it seemed revelatory. He began playing with a thirty-year-old description of gravity, the MacDowell-Mansouri approach, that fit well with Clifford bundles. What seemed to be correspondences appeared: particles and forces that he had previously thought of as wholly distinct blended together neatly when described using Clifford algebra. Lisi was seduced by the coincidences: there seemed to be a deep coherence in it somewhere. But he had also begun to recognize the closing down of possibility that comes with age.
By 2005, when Lisi published his next Clifford-bundle paper online, he was broke, and he and Baranyk talked about whether he should take a job teaching physics at a community college. The paper attracted little notice. But it did help land him a grant, a $38,640 check each year for two years, from a nonprofit group that funded foundational investigations in physics. Lisi was excited, but also frustrated. He hadn't been able to fully describe his theory geometrically, and it wasn't comprehensive. In the standard model, many particles have two related particles, the so-called second and third generations, and he hadn't been able to include those. "I had this algebraic structure worked out, but I didn't know what the hell it was." For a year, Lisi said, "I scratched my head" and tried to figure it out.
One morning in May, 2007, Lisi woke up early and sat down with his laptop. Baranyk was still asleep. He began scrolling through Web sites that described topics in mathematical physics. He found a post, from 1996, in which a University of California professor had described the properties of mathematical structures known as exceptional Lie groups, among them E8.
E8 is famous in physics. The exceptional Lie groups had been classified in the nineteenth century by Wilhelm Killing, a German professor who joined the Franciscan order, as a way of describing higher-level symmetries. A circle has one degree of symmetry; a sphere has three; a space whose symmetries are described by E8 has two hundred and forty-eight. One rough way to imagine it is as a dense and precisely symmetrical cloud of spiderweb, with thousands of threads exploding out from hubs of concentric spheres. The equations that encode its inner structure, if printed in small type, would cover an area the size of Manhattan. During the nineteen-seventies and eighties, physicists had turned to E8 and a family of similar groups with great excitement (a major version of string theory makes use of E8). "It is like a diamond with tens of thousands of facets," Bertram Kostant, an emeritus professor of math at M.I.T., said. "It is easy to arrive at the feeling that a final understanding of the universe must somehow involve E8, or, otherwise put, nature would be foolish not to utilize E8."
Lisi began reading the description of E8's structure and had a flash of recognition: the figure matched his mass of algebra precisely. "I saw that it fit. And saw it and immediately walked around the room, thinking of all the different ways that this thing fit together. And it was going to work." As Lisi went through the numbers, he discovered, with a sudden thrill, that you could plot all the universe's components on E8: each of those particles would correspond with one of its symmetries. It was as if a beachcomber, having spent years collecting driftwood, had suddenly realized that the pieces made up a complete shipbuilding kit.
Lisi was overcome. "I'm literally tingling with excitement," he said. "I had to suppress that in order to think more about the actual algebraic structure. You cannot think when you're ecstatic." He added, "I didn't run through the snow shouting 'Eureka!' or anything like that." By the end of the day, Lisi was convinced that he had stumbled onto a Theory of Everything.
It took Lisi six months to work through the idea. He matched every photon, gluon, weak boson, graviton, Higgs boson, quark, neutrino, and electron, in each of the first, second, and third generations—every particle in the standard model—to symmetries of E8. He found that E8 had twenty more symmetries than the standard model had particles, and concluded that they indicated particles yet to be discovered. This led to a greater symmetry: on the terrain of E8, general relativity and particle physics were no longer out of joint. Lisi had his map for the universe.
Lisi saw the theory as a brief for non-absurdity in physics, and for accessibility. "Just our four dimensions, not ten, not eleven," he said. "No strings. No tiny curled-up dimensions. Just the world that you see."
For the first time since graduate school, Lisi started attending conferences. He went to Mexico, and then, in July, to a conference in Iceland, which drew a documentary film crew. "I'm walking around with this card that says 'I'm Garrett Lisi and I'm working on a T.O.E.,' " he said. It didn't get him much attention. He thought, as he walked past the film crew, "If you guys knew what I was up to, you'd want to talk to me."
In the early nineteen-nineties, a physicist at Los Alamos named Paul Ginsparg had an idea for a better way to spread new findings in the field. Publishing in peer-reviewed journals took months. To compensate, scientists would copy papers they submitted and mail them off to colleagues, a process that was costly, slow, and limiting. Ginsparg created an online database of papers that, by 1999, had become known as arXiv. ArXiv uses moderators to look briefly at posted papers and make sure they're in the correct topical forum, but it is otherwise largely unrefereed. Scientists are proud of arXiv for eliminating barriers in the discipline: relevant contributions come more frequently from scientists in places like Iran, India, and Turkey.
In recent years, as science reporters and interested amateurs have turned to arXiv—and as some physics personalities have started blogs—the audience for physics has both expanded and fragmented. "I know for a fact that many of the leading figures in the field read the blogs, but so do high-school science students," Woit, the Columbia mathematician and string-theory critic, said. "The scary thing is how frequently you can't tell which is which." The leading blogs have readerships that, while including some loud dissenters, tend to align with the perspectives of their authors—Distler, of the University of Texas, has a blog that attracts many string theorists and enthusiasts, while Woit's blog draws more skeptics. It works somewhat in the way the blogosphere operates in politics. Andreas Albrecht, a physics professor at the University of California at Davis, said that the blogs had opened physics to a new sort of populism, one that the academic establishment had to figure out how to manage. "It just pushes those buttons," Albrecht said. "There's some really good stuff, but a lot of really sloppy stuff." What you have, in other words, is the erosion of the referee and the rise of a scientific underclass.
These are Garrett Lisi's people. Last November, he posted his theory on arXiv. At first, it attracted little attention, though it did garner a certain amount of string-theorist scorn. A week later, a reporter at New Scientist (whose editor, as it turned out, had noticed Lisi in Iceland) published an enthusiastic piece on the paper, supported by a quote from Smolin; a science writer at the Telegraph immediately picked up the story, and wondered if Lisi might be the next Einstein. Hundreds of thousands of readers who had never logged on to arXiv before downloaded Lisi's paper. The more attention Lisi received, the more aggressive his opponents on the Internet became. "Every high school senior excited about physics should be able to see that the paper is just a long sequence of childish misunderstandings," Lubos Motl, a Czech physicist, wrote. "I understood these things when I was 14."
Lisi had hoped that physicists would be excited about his ideas. "It's been the best I could have hoped for. When I gave these talks, all the people whom I respected the most really liked it." What he hadn't expected was that other people would be interested, too. Lisi found himself the subject of profiles in science magazines and in Surfer. Discover asked, "Could the Next Einstein Be a Surfer Dude?" and—again with Smolin's endorsement—listed him as one of "six top candidates" for that title. French science reporters seemed particularly taken with his theories, though Lisi found some of his interviews with them unnervingly surreal. There was a segment on a Fox affiliate, for which Lisi insisted that his parents, who are conservatives, be interviewed, and an invitation to appear on "Jimmy Kimmel Live," which he declined. To his disbelief and pleasure, he was invited to speak at TED, an influential, invitation-only four-day technology conference in Monterey. (The TED curator, Chris Anderson, told me, "Not everyone understood him, but it still came over as pretty amazing.") At a TED cocktail gathering, a man near Lisi nudged his wife and said, "That's Garrett Lisi." Glad to be recognized, Lisi introduced himself. The man was Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay.
A few days after the paper appeared on arXiv, Jacques Distler, the Texas string theorist, decided to look into Lisi's theory. Distler had tried to ignore the fuss, but eventually concluded that he couldn't. He told me, "I had the strong impression that the people writing those posts had not read the paper."
First, he thought, Lisi hadn't clearly specified which form of E8 he was using. And there was a second problem, which seemed more serious. Lisi had used a mathematical trick to incorporate the second and third generations of particles into his model. Lisi admitted, in his original paper, that this was a weakness, and that the math was what he calls "handwaving." He saw his work on the second and third generations as provisional—certain calculations were still being worked out. He had already planned to spend the next months refining the fit. But to Distler it was damning.
In private e-mail conversations, Distler prodded Lisi for more detail. Lisi told me that he found the string theorist provocative and polite, and that he welcomed the questions about his theory. "My job should be to try to find problems with it," Lisi said. On his Web site, Distler was less collegial; the more he looked, the more fundamental problems he saw. "Not only can one never hope to get 3 generations out of this 'Theory of Everything,' " he wrote; "it appears that one can't even get one."
Part of the reason Lisi had such a following, Distler thought, was that some well-known physicists who were skeptics of string theory—Smolin and others—had "waxed enthusiastic" about him when reporters had called, and this triggered a cascade. "One can't deny that the particular romance of this surfer dude played a part," Distler said.
Lisi's ideas leaned on several mathematical concepts heavily used in the loop-quantum-gravity community, and his project, if proved right, offered the prospect that their calculations might be expanded to encompass not just gravity but all the forces of nature. As quotes from Smolin and some other leading physicists, testifying to their excitement about Lisi's theory, continued to appear in the press, it began to seem—to some string theorists, at least—that there was mutual opportunism embedded in all the awe: here was a surfer in search of credibility and a movement in search of a poster boy.
At the beginning of March, Lisi drove from Lake Tahoe to U.C.-Davis to give a talk on his theory to a seminar on quantum gravity. Looking around the campus, Lisi said, "It looks nice. If you're visiting, you think, Wow, I could just hang here for a while and soak in some knowledge. A lot of people do play it that way, but those people tend to be students. Researchers tend to be very stressed out." A couple of minutes later, he amended his judgment. "It is a really good life, and there are moments when I miss it."
A full crowd of thirty or so students and professors gathered in the seminar room. Lisi had illustrated the presentation with an animated diagram of E8, its points flexing in correspondence with the particles, which were represented as bright-colored points on a black background, like the children's game Lite-Brite.
"As a physicist, I have a fairly obvious question," a bearded professor said.
"The Coleman-Mandula theorem, right? Wait a second," Lisi said. He'd prepared a slide to deal with this very question. The students and the professors seemed less than satisfied, but the exchange was friendly enough. (Later, when I asked him about another professor's question, Lisi was less patient. "A string theorist," he said, dismissively.)
After the session, as the professors left the room, a small group of students began to cluster around Lisi. He told them how he had lived, on the cheap, in Maui. One of the students, a tall, commanding kid with a bush of curly hair, had relatives on Maui, and they talked about the rates that the shipping companies charged and how to game that system. Lisi, dispensing wisdom, looked a type: the bald, younger-than-his-years California guru. I've never seen him happier.
Yet, even among the early enthusiasts for Lisi's ideas, there have been some defections. "I am now convinced his theory doesn't work," David Ritz Finkelstein, an emeritus professor of physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said. Finkelstein had earlier told New Scientist that "some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of" Lisi's theory. And while others were still confident about the sweeping nature of his theory, some were making the lesser claim that even if Lisi couldn't fix the math, his novel approach to E8 could yield insights into the universe's basic makeup. The thrill was modulated, but it wasn't gone.
Kostant, the M.I.T. professor, is unaffiliated in the string wars. "Columbus made mistakes and thought he was in India. Lisi made a few errors, but this pales in significance to his possibly opening up a whole new world for exploration," Kostant said. "E8 is like North America, South America, and the Pacific Ocean rolled into one. No one in Europe knew anything about it." Lisi's "daring," Kostant said, "possibly creates an agenda for scientists for the next hundred years or more."
Smolin, who had been so instrumental in ushering Lisi's ideas into the public square, expressed regret that they had arrived there before they were fully formed. He found himself pleading for some time and space for Lisi, to allow him to revise and complete his theory—to give it the attention it warranted. "Then we can know: has Garrett made a really great discovery, or was it a miss?"
Part of Lisi's charm is his all-terrain bonhomie. But his fortieth birthday, in January, coincided with some dark thoughts. His body had become slower to recover from injury and stiffer at times, which was a big deal for someone who had arranged his life, more or less, around exactly how good it felt to move. He began to feel a set of responsibilities—to the broader physics community and to those who had supported him, but also to fully extending his ideas. Lisi had long fantasized about opening a "science hostel," a big empty house in a beautiful place, like Tahoe, where scientists would gather to do research. He began to think that, somehow, the attention he'd been getting might help to make the hostel a possibility. Last May, Lisi headed to the Perimeter Institute, for a stint as a visiting researcher. A year ago, he wouldn't have even thought of returning to academia, but he had begun to consider it.
This summer near Geneva, the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful machine of its kind ever built, will be turned on, and begin smashing protons into one another. It will take years for the data to be analyzed, but rumors of the results will leak out and find their way onto the Internet. The L.H.C. contains the aspirations of several camps of particle physicists, who hope that it will offer some confirmation for their theories. Lisi will join them. His theory is still incomplete—missing, for example, a satisfying link to the second and third generations. But it makes predictions about particles that the L.H.C. might discover: new versions of the Higgs boson, for one.
Lisi had recently listened to a talk by an expert on E8, and he now believed that one of its alternate forms might be a better fit for the universe. He showed me a pad on which he was trying to work out the math. I asked him if there would still be twenty missing particles. No, he said. "There will be more." ♦


text:
Sawdust vermicompost extract enhanced plant growth factors.
Sawdust vermicompost extract enhanced plant nutrient uptake.
The sawdust vermicompost extract did not show any fitotoxic effect on Dracaena plants.
Arancon, N.Q., Edwards, C. A., Bierman, P., Melzger, A.D., Lee, S. and Welch, C. 2005. Effect of vermicompost on growth and marketable fruits of field-grown tomato, peppers and strawberries. Bioresource Technology, 47: 731-735.
Atiyeh, R.M., Dominguez, J., Subler, S. and Edwards, C.A. 2000. Changes in biochemical properties of cow manure during processing by earthworms (Eisenia andrei, Bouche) and the effects on seedling growth. Pedobilogia. 44: 709-724.
Atiyeh, R.M., Yardim, Y., Edwards, C.A. and Metzeger, J.D. 2004. Influence of earthworm-processed pig manure on the growth and yields of greenhouse peppers. Bioresource Technology, 93: 139-144.
Azizi, P., Khomami, A.M. and Mirsoheil, M. 2008. Influence of cow manure vermicompost on growth of Dieffenbachia. Ecology Environment and Conservation, 14 (1):1- 4.
Bremner, J.M. and Mulvaney, R.G. 1982. Nitrogen total. In: Page, A.L., Miller, R.H., Keeney, D.R. (Eds.), Method of soil analysis. American Society of Agronomy, Madison, pp. 575-624.
Edwards, C.A. 1998. The use of earthworms in the breakdown and management of organic acid. In: Edwards, C.A. (Ed), Earthworm ecology. CRC Press, the Netherlands, pp. 327-354.
Elvira, C., Goicoechea, M., Sampdro, L., Mato, S. and Nogalas, R. 1996. Bioconversion of solid paper pulp mill sludge by earthworm. Bioresource Technology, 75: 173-177.
Gamaley, A.V., Nadporozhskaya, M.A., Popov, A.I., Cher-tov, O.G., Kovsh, N.V. and Gromova, O.A. 2001. Non root nutrition with vermicompost extracts as the way of ecological optimization. Plant nutrition: food security and sustainability of agro-ecosystems through basic and applied research. Fourteenth International Plant Nutrition Colloquium. Springer Netherlands, Hannover, Germany. pp. 862-863.
Hargreaves, J., Adl, M.S., Warman, P.R. and Rupasinghe, H.P.V. 2008. The effects of organic amendments on mineral element uptake and fruit quality of raspberries. Plant Soil, 308: 213-226.
Horwitz, W. 1980. Official methods of analysis of the association of official analytical chemistry. 13th Ed. Assoc. Off. Anal. Chem., Arlington, Va.
Houba, V.J.G., Lee, V.D., Navozamasky, I. and Walgina, L. 1989. Soil and plant analysis -a series of syllabi. Wageningen Agriculture University.
Ingham, E. 2005.The compost tea brewing manual; latest methods and research. Soil Food Web, Corvallis, OR.
Krishnamoorthy, R.V. and Vajranabhaian, S.N. 1986. Biological activity of earthworm cats. An assessment of plant growth promoter or levels in the casts. Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences Animal Sciences, 95 (3): 341–351.
Lee, Y.S. and Bartlett, R.J. 1976. Stimulation of plant growth by humic substances. Soil Science Society of America Journal, 40: 876-879.
Lemus, G.R. 1998. Evaluation of dairy manure compost maturity. M.S. Thesis, University of Florida.
Mahboub Khomami, A. and Mammadov, G.M. 2014. Growth of Dieffenbachia amoena 'Tropic Snow' in growing media containing sugarcane bagasse and sawdust vermicompost. Journal of Ornamental Plants, 4 (2): 61-67.
Mahboub Khomami, A., Mammadov, G.M., Fatemi Chokami, A. and Sedaghathoor, S. 2015. Growth and reproductive performance of Eisenia foetida in cow manure, cow manure + sugarcane bagasse, and cow manure + sawdust waste. Applied Ecology and Environmental Research, 14 (1): 237-247.
Murphy, J. and Riley, J.P. 1962. A modified single solution method for the determination of phosphate in natural waters. Analytica Chimia Acta, 27: 31–36.
Muscolo, A., Bovalo, F., Gionfriddo, F. and Nardi, S. 1999. Earthworm humic matter produces auxin like effects on Daucus carota cell growth and nitrogen metabolism. Soil Biology and Biochemistry, 31: 1303–1313.
Nelson, D.W. and Sommers, L.E. 1982. Total carbon, organic carbon, and organic matter. In: Methods of soil analysis, Part 2, 2nd ed., A.L. Page et al., Ed. Agronomy. 9: 961-1010.
Page, A.L., Miller, R.H. and Keeney, D.R. 1982. Methods of soil analysis. 2nd Edn, Amercen Society of Agronomy, Madison, WI., USA.
Pant, A., Radovich, T.J.K., Hue, N.V., Talcott, S.T. and Krenek, K.A. 2009. Vermicompost extracts influence growth, mineral nutrients, phytonutrients and antioxidant activity in pak choi (Brassica rapa cv. Bonsai, Chinensis group) grown under vermicompost and chemical fertilizer. Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, 89: 2383 - 2392.
Sanwal, S.K., Laxminarayana, K., Yadav, D.S., Rai, N. and Yadav, R.K. 2006. Growth, yield, and dietary antioxidants of broccoli as affected by fertilizer type. Journal of Vegetable Science,12 (2): 13 – 26.
SAS Institute Inc. 2001. SAS Procedures Guide, Version 8.2, SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, USA.
Schnitzer, M. and Poapst, P.A. 1967. Effect of soil humic compounds on root initiation. Nature (London) 213: 548 - 599.
Simon, E.W., Minchin, A., McMenamin, M.M. and Smith, J.M. 1976. The low temperature limit for seed germination. New Phytologist, 77: 301 - 311.
Taylor, M., Clarke, W.P. and Greenfield, P.F. 2003. The treatment of domestic wastewater using small-scale vermicompost filter beds. Ecological Engineering, 21 (2–3): 197–203.
Tiquia, S. M., Tam, N.F.Y. and Hodgkiss, I. J. 1996. Effects of composting on phytotoxicity of spent pig-manure sawdust litter. Environmental Pollution, 93: 249–56.
Verdonck, O. and Gabriels, R. 1992. Reference method for the determination of physical and chemical properties of plant substrates. Acta Horticulturae, 302: 169–179.
Zucconi, F., Monaco, A. and Forte, M. 1985. Phytotoxins during the stabilization of organic matter. In: Composting of agricultural and other wastes, Grasser, J.K.R. (Ed.). Elsevier, London, UK, pp: 73-86.
Zucconi, F., Pera, A., Forte, M. and de Bertoldi, M. 1981. Evaluating toxicity of immature compost. BioCycle, 22 (2): 54-57.
Journal of Ornamental Plants is licensed under a "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0)"


text:
Decorated Clips4:00 AM Posted In 3D and Fun Folds CD , Cosmetics , Decorated Clips , Kathie McGuire Edit This 0 Comments »
Hello TJ Girlfriends (guys, too if you're out there)~Kathie McGuire here today with a Decorated Clips project from the 3D and Fun Folds CD. Wait, what? Don't I make anything else besides these clips? Truth is, no--not much. Well, not as much as I make these because they are so adorable, so useful, and such a fantastic personal gift.
This small assortment is for a fellow-makeup and fragrance lover, my Avon lady. She loves pink, so I chose a background paper with pink in it along with a few of the other colors which would match the buttons. I found these buttons from an online store called Shelly's Buttons and More.The cosmetic theme was perfect for her, so with very little effort, I had a coordinated, personalized gift for my wonderful friend.
I hope you've enjoyed seeing a few more of these Decorated Clips. Have you tried them? I have to warn you, once you begin making them, it's hard to turn back. LOL
Happy Holidays, Dear Friends!!


text:
Close to highway I-88 and offices, such as Toyota, this all-suite hotel in Aurora, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, offers a fully equipped kitchen and free high speed internet in each suite.
Near the Illinois Technology & Research Corridor, in the Chicago suburb of Aurora, this hotel offers guestrooms with free wireless internet access and an on-site restaurant.
Providing easy access to Interstate 88, this Aurora hotel is located just outside of Chicago and features a variety of modern amenities along with comfortable accommodations, all in a convenient location.
With an indoor pool and jacuzzi available, this Yorkville, Illinois hotel provides guest rooms with free Wi-Fi. Silver Springs State Park is 6.2 miles from the hotel.
The 71 rooms Baymont Inn and Suites of North Aurora IL Chicago is pleased to provide our guests with exceptional service and quality amenities at an affordable price.
Look forward to this hotel in Oswego, Illinois, on completely non-smoking rooms and a variety of convenient amenities including a daily hot breakfast and free. Close to many local attractions await you.
Nestled against 10 acres of woodland, at the crossroads of three counties, Kendall, DeKalb, and LaSalle, this new Best Western property is perfect for your next getaway.
Located in Aurora, Illinois, this comfortable hotel offers guests contemporary amenities only about 8 km from Hollywood Casino and only a short drive from many attractions and exciting area of Chicago.
This St. Charles, Illinois hotel is a 25-minute drive from the Grand Victoria Casino. The hotel offers a daily continental breakfast, free Wi-Fi and an indoor swimming pool. Fairfield Inn and Suites by Marriott Chicago St.
This hotel is situated on the River Fox River in Geneva, Illinois. Guests at the hotel with a spa staff, elegantly designed rooms with Jacuzzi and restaurant Atwater's. The Geneva Golf Course Golf Club can be reached after 1.6 km.
Maplandia.com in partnership with Booking.com offers highly competitive rates for all types of hotels near Chicago/aurora Airport, Canada, from affordable family hotels to the most luxurious ones. Booking.com, being established in 1996, is longtime Europe's leader in online hotel reservations.
At Maplandia.com you won't be charged any booking fees, cancellation fees, or administration fees – the reservation service is free of charge. The reservation system is secure and your personal information and credit card is encrypted.
We have put together also a carefully selected list of recommended hotels near Chicago/aurora Airport, only hotels with the highest level of guest satisfaction are included. Many photos and unbiased hotel reviews written by real guests are provided to help you make your booking decision. Luxury hotels (including 5 star hotels and 4 star hotels) and cheap Chicago/aurora Airport, Canada hotels (with best discount rates and up-to-date airport hotel deals) are both available in separate lists. Always bear in mind that with Maplandia.com and Booking.com the best price is guaranteed!
Accommodation in popular destinations near Chicago/aurora Airport.
Maplandia.com is not sponsored by or affiliated with Google.


text:
Sun-dried tomato
This article needs additional citations for verification. (May 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
Sun-dried tomatoes are ripe tomatoes that lose most of their water content after spending a majority of their drying time in the sun. These tomatoes are usually pre-treated with sulfur dioxide or salt before being placed in the sun in order to improve quality.[1] Typically, tomatoes spend 4–10 days in the sun in order for the sun-drying process to be complete.[2] Cherry tomatoes will lose 88% of their initial (fresh) weight, while larger tomatoes can lose up to 93% during the process; as a result, it takes anywhere from 8 to 14 kilograms of fresh tomatoes to make a single kilogram of sun-dried tomatoes.
After the procedure, the tomato fruits will keep their nutritional value; the tomatoes are high in lycopene, antioxidants, and vitamin C. The final products may contain up to 2–6% of salt and could provide a significant contribution to the day's intake. Sun-dried tomatoes can be used in a wide variety of recipes and come in a variety of shapes, colors, and tomatoes.[3] Traditionally, they were made from dried red plum tomatoes, but they can be purchased in yellow varieties. Sun-dried tomatoes are also available in the form of pastes or purées.
Sun-dried tomatoes may also be preserved in olive oil, along with other ingredients such as rosemary, basil, dried paprika, and garlic.
Tomatoes were originally salted and dried to preserve the fruit.[4][unreliable source?] Salting and evaporating the moisture out of tomatoes (as with most foods) significantly delays the process of decomposition. By drying ripe tomatoes, these foods could be enjoyed and provide valuable nutrition in the winter when it is difficult or impossible to grow fresh produce; the true origin of sun-dried tomatoes is unclear. Italians originally dried their tomatoes on their ceramic roof-tops in the summer sun.[4] Sun-dried tomatoes surged in popularity in the United States in the late 1980s to early 1990s, where they were often found in pasta dishes and salads, becoming a trend before losing popularity from overuse by the end of the 1990s.[5][6][7]
See also[edit]
- ^ "Influence of Pre-drying Treatments on Quality and Safety of Sun-dried Tomatoes. Part I: Use of Steam Blanching, Boiling Brine Blanching, and Dips in Salt or Sodium Metabisulfite" (PDF).
- ^ "Our Sun Drying Process".
- ^ "Sun or Oven Drying Tomatoes for Storage". Retrieved 16 May 2012.
- ^ a b Sun-Dried Tomato History
- ^ Moskowitz, Isa (2013). Isa Does It: Amazingly Easy, Wildly Delicious Vegan Recipes for Every Day of the Week. p. 124.
- ^ "17 Hits From the '90s".
- ^ Shaw, Tucker (2010-11-17). "Sun-dried tomatoes defy hip-shooting". Denver Post. Retrieved 2016-04-05.