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OJ's Killer New Interview
OJ Simpson is back to giving interviews again -- and this time it's live on the Internet. Contain your enthusiasm.
MN1.com's Kate Delaney spent an hour talking with OJ today, about everything from his recent book scandal to the latest celebrity on trial, Michael Vick. An hour of unfiltered Juice on the net? How do you fumigate a browser?
The show was comprised of half scripted questions and half interactive audience participation via phone, IM and chat. Questions from the "audience" included, "Do you think it was a bigger feat to break 2,000 yards in one season or slice two necks in one night?" and "Did you kill Bill Walsh?" He blissfully ignored them both.
When OJ got to talking about his kids, he got emotional, saying, "I raised those kids by myself!" That'll happen when you kill their mother!
OJ will be back as a guest -- three more times this week -- because one hour of inflammatory denial just isn't enough.


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Large parts of Tonga have been left without power after Tropical Cyclone Gita smashed into the Pacific island nation, flattening buildings, downing electrical lines and causing widespread flooding.
The storm, which at its peak brought winds of up to 230 kilometers per hour (kph) with gusts upwards of 280 kph, first made landfall around 8 p.m. Monday, reaching the main island of Tongatapu between 11 p.m and 2 a.m. local time.
Images posted to social media show extensive property damage throughout the capital Nuku'alofa, including to the country's Parliament House.
According to the British Met office, Gita is the worst cyclone to pass close to Tonga's main islands in 60 years. The storm was far stronger than forecasters predicted, despite not reaching reaching category five status.
Reports of injuries remain unclear, due to the difficulty in accessing parts of the archipelago. An estimated 110,000 people live in Tonga, with the majority based on the main island of Tongatapu.
According to Tonga Police spokesperson Sia Adams, as of Tuesday morning, emergency services in Tongatapu were dealing with three confirmed major injuries and 30 minor injuries. One 72-year-old man died of a heart attack, though it was unclear if it related to the storm.
Adams said efforts were now underway to restore power throughout Tongatapu, which remained in darkness, with the city's hospital being the "first priority."
Emergency response teams made up of combined units from the country's police, armed forces and the national emergency management office were dispatched Tuesday morning to help clear roads and rescue those left stranded.
An estimated 5,700 people had sought shelter in evacuation centers overnight, with those numbers expected to increase substantially into the coming days, New Zealand Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters told New Zealand TV station TVNZ.
On Tuesday, the New Zealand government dispatched 12 tonnes of aid supplies and a 10-member team to Tonga to assess the damage wrought by the storm.
In a press statement, Air Commodore Kevin McEvoy, the Acting Commander of Joint Forces New Zealand, said the the military was working with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to get "aid supplies to Tonga as soon as possible and stand ready to provide further assistance as required."
Aid supplies included 500 family hygiene kits, 200 shelter tool kits, 2,300 10-litre collapsible water containers and 1000 tarpaulins.
An Orion aircraft had also been dispatched to conduct an aerial survey of the islands.
"The aerial survey will help assess the scale of the damage wrought by the cyclone and help Tongan authorities determine the next steps in their emergency response," said McEvoy.
He said the survey would focus on Tongatapu and the neighboring island of Eua, and help Tongan authorities "identify worst-hit areas and mobilize resources where they are most needed."
The storm is currently 590 kilometers (367 miles) south east of Suva, Fiji. The storm is moving to the west at 28 kph and is forecast to continue, before turning southwest and diminishing in strength.

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Some Seek Stardom (
AhhhhhH! Check the crippled man, sittin in the church My conscience hurts, flesh like me hits the dirt She's paralyzed from her feet to her thighs And the man who pulled the trigger didn't even lose his necktie Hi/I check Jimmy cuttin hair at the barbershop He plays the bass guitar, like David plays the harp His knowledge name is Greek, cause whenever he speaks He's got the wisdom of King Solomon bags in his eyes from no sleep Sometimes he thought of the fame in Madison Square Garden So some seek stardom, but they forget Harlem But seeking first of all the kingdom of God is what my pops told me So if I fall, could the choir catch me I flew away, on a mountain, got tempted by Satan Got bitten by a cobra, but the Lord took my venom So who's side am I on? I'm on the righteous Always check the lyrics, no time to contradict Some seek stardom, then they forget Harlem (3x) They/brothers/sisters/families/people/we/brothers keep their pockets full, but their souls run empty Well aiyyo family I beseech you, in the hopes that I may reach you My mother taught me one day that this mid-day would come someday Born to talk that jive, with peaky hair grown wild And teachers disliked me, cause I knew where my culture be So now yeah mom I read history, I can't neglect my passion see Rock it's kind of new to me, cause my true love was poetry White was good and bad was black but black was just a massa lackey built for that B. Nimble Jack and I'd like to save you from the wicked D-Dog clear I wouldn't be wet The black to mourn, tomorrow's death The evil things, glad that I, while angels wrote this violence why? Help me make me comprehend my black bezerk and why cast it Time to blaze the angels nappy heads are braided that you make me see what's hard for me that don't make you flee when I enter your vicinity, you see my God ain't never after me So yo I be wised up with Greek To go and be, the last and good and see what's wrong with me and through your insecurity of me and my ability So bredren won't you let me be or has thou asked to much from thy to tell the truth and not to lie? Oh my... Some seek stardom, then they forget Harlem (3x) They/brothers/sisters/families/people/we/brothers keep their pockets full, but their souls run empty (2x) But as I grew, I knew cause the master told me from a baby to a woman from a woman to a baby Life is so short, hardcore becomes hard-corpse Step in a coffin where the money's no longer the source There we go, there we go, there we go I got mine now won't you get yours, we never open doors so we neglect, and don't protect the ones that's not people never really seem to care And then they cry out, "My people! Why aren't we treated equal?" As we flee, we flee our own communities We leave our family in poverty And then we blame it on another, so family please recover Oh c'mon please come now with you can come with me now and blow now if you want to, we're through... Some seek stardom, then they forget Harlem (3x) They/brothers/sisters/families/people/we/brothers keep their pockets full, but their souls run empty (4x)


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We finish up our week-long look at new cookbooks with a look at comfort food – always in season!
The winter holidays bring us back to home, to memories and to traditions. Now, even if you no longer go to grandmother's house for you family dinner, you can bring some of those traditional foods to your own kitchen with the help of Mother's Best by Lisa Schroeder.
Although leaning toward Southern favorites (pulled pork, biscuits and gravy, crab cakes) this book is filled with favorites from many different traditions and is based on a popular Portland, Oregon eatery. Recipes range from hummus to creamed spinach to french toast to tofu scramble. An entire chapter is devoted just to macaroni and cheese, the ultimate comfort food. Don't dismiss these recipes as fuddy-duddy though – they're written for the modern cook with straightforward instructions and lots of tips and hints. It's almost as good as having Mom helping you out in the kitchen!


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Comfy conditioning chamber
May 22, 2012
Diablo 3 is exactly the kind of game I should hate. Blizzard's latest dungeon-crawling loot-fest relies on a checklist of design elements that typically drive me screaming into the night:
- Derivative design
We can't accuse Blizzard of stealing from itself, but Diablo 3 is an essentially conservative game. It iterates on its predecessors in obvious ways - graphics, UI, streamlined path to leveling up, etc. - but in most of the ways that matter, Diablo 3 is a dressed up version of Diablo 2. - Repetitive play
Click-Loot-Upgrade-Repeat. Diablo 3's repetitiveness is woven through its design on both micro and macro levels. Everything you do in this game, you do over and over. Coins spill, and you pick them up. Every time. Stimulus. Operanda. Reinforcement. Skinner is grinning. - Sententious "lore" with no meaningful impact on gameplay.
Diablo 3 throws a few winks at the player, but it doesn't stray far from threadbare fantasy tropes. For the umpteenth time we must locate soulstones, defeat demon lords, assemble shattered swords - all to defeat Eeeviiil. I'm a narrative-loving player, but even I find myself challenged to pay attention to the arch codswallop this game dispenses.
- Choking feedback loops
When designers talk about gluing players to games, they inevitably reference the Diablo series and its effective feedback loops. Such loops occur when a player takes an action and receives information about that action, which in turn encourages the player to alter his choices or behavior the next time that action is performed. I appreciate the gamey-ness of this system, but Diablo 3's feedback loops are so embedded into its design that they're in my face at every turn, and many of them feel only cosmetically significant. I like meaningful choices, but this game taps me on the shoulder with the frequency of a 4-year-old in the toy aisle at Target. - DRM handcuffs
Developers should not constrain where and when I can play my game. Lots of folks have complained about this, so I won't rehash the argument here. If I want to play Diablo 3 solo, I shouldn't be required to login to a developer's server and maintain that connection throughout my play session…unless the game has a crucial reason for doing so that benefits me. So far, I can't discern such a reason. A game that requires twitch reflexes should not suffer from lag that prevents me from playing it properly. In other words, it should not make me die.
So... A funny thing happened on my way to hating Diablo 3. It hooked me. Deep. Here I am, an hour into Act II, and the game is playing me as much as I'm playing it, like all the best games do. I play Diablo 3 when I should be doing other things. Like sleeping. I think about it when I should be paying attention to other things. Like driving. Last night I dreamed about my childhood backyard…in isometric view.
Diablo 3 overrides all my misgivings because it's just so damned much fun. We often decry the game industry's stubborn unwillingness to evolve, dishing out the same old stuff over and over. Sometimes, however, the same old stuff - and Diablo 3 is unmistakably SOS - hits the mark so squarely and elegantly that it quenches a thirst I forgot I had.
It is retro gaming without the stench of lazy design "retro" too often signifies. Diablo has always been retro (remember Wizardry, folks?), but the series has consistently looked forward too, mechanically and aesthetically. Watch Blizzard's Christian Lichtner talk about Diablo 3's art design at this year's GDC to see how Blizzard's artists developed a philosophy for the game's visuals that carefully blended old and new.
The game doles out a skill or special trinket every time you level up. Loot is more varied, the environments are more visually stimulating, and the monsters are more interesting and fun to beat than in Diablo 2. Killing twelve enemies at once with one kick-ass spell never gets old. The music is beautifully evocative, and the character animations make the old Diablo games look, well, very old. If you experience any initial concerns about Diablo 3 being too easy or predictable, hang on until Act II. Trust me, things change.
I drank a bottle of Coca-Cola the other day. Wow. That is some good SOS. I remember now why I used to enjoy it so much. I don't drink soda any more, and I don't plan to fill my refrigerator with Cokes, but I'm glad it's still there when I'm thirsty for it.
Not every successful developer operates so conservatively. In my next post, I'll discuss a game by another AAA studio bent on pushing the design envelope in ways Blizzard can't or won't. If Blizzard is the Ronald Reagan of developers, this studio is the industry's Ted Kennedy. I hope you'll stay tuned.


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Top 10 Hottest Butches of 2012
We updated last year's Top Hot Butches list to look at the women who've stirred our loins this year besides the usual butchy suspects like Rachel Maddow (who, of course, would top this list if you all voted), Wanda Sykes, and Ellen DeGeneres. Since butchy gals of all persuasions still get the short shift even in lesbian media we figured we'd profile 10 butch women you should have gotten to know more of in 2012.
We had such great response to last year's Top Hot Butches list that we decided to make it annual thing and take a look at the women who've stirred our loins this year besides the usual butchy suspects like Rachel Maddow (who, of course, would top this list if you all voted), Wanda Sykes, and Ellen DeGeneres. Since butchy gals of all persuasions still get the short shrift even in lesbian media we figured we'd profile 10 butch women you should have gotten to know more of in 2012. And while the women listed may not self identify as butch they are certainly are in the eye of this beholder.
De'Borah Garner
She rocked The Voice this year and made many a fan with her cute, butchy swagger and killer vocal chords. She said, "Boom! I'm gay" on national television, made button-down shirts popular with girls worldwide – and showed us that wearing bright colors doesn't make you a femme. Boom! We're in love.
More on next page...
Katie Sketch
The 35-year-old powerhouse behind the Canadian indie band The Organ, Sketch's androgynous (read: butch) style has been celebrated by none other than Vogue (which eatured her in a UK edition in 2006). Even though The Organ is kaput, Sketch has stayed in the public eye with her queer feminist cock rock band Vag Halen. Bonus: Her wife, actress Vanessa Dunn, isn't hard on the eyes either.
More on next page...
She's so much more than the lesbian who looked like Justin Bieber. In fact this was the year singer-songwriter Dani Shay came into her own, first as a contestant on season two of The Glee Project and then, especially, when she went public about her relationship with fellow GP-contestant Ali Stroker (yes, the super hot one who uses a wheelchair, who by the way would definitely top our Top Hot Femmes of 2012). First came a hot video and then a Dani-and-Ali "Let it Snow" duet. Could these two get any cuter?
more on next page...
Seimone Augustus
If you've ever seen this WNBA champ (and gold medal-winning Olympian) on the court with her rippled muscles and fierce tats, you'd know why she tops this list. The fact that she came out this year, is a top player going into next season, and has a super hot girlfriend (LaTaya Varner) makes her even hotter.
more on next page...
Julie Goldman
There's a picture of Julie Goldman taken a few years ago, with her in bed with her dog and a bag of potatoes chips. A less sophisticated viewer (i.e. straight men) might see it and say she looks like a dude but in reality she's the essence of yummy butcheness in it — quirky, geeky, self-effacing, Jewish angst in a hot package (like Woody Allen, if he were, you know, attractive and female). She's still hot and she's showing up on TV more and more (this year she was a lesbian mom on The New Normal, a homeless character on Weeds, and one of the writers behind E!'s Fashion Police).
more on next page...
Jiz Lee
Lee's the queen (er, king?) of feminist porn, a gender-queer porn star who is known for a unique androgynous look, using the pronouns "they/them," and an ability to both star in adult pictures and talk at academic institutions such as Stanford and UC Berkeley on queer sexuality and its intersection with pornography.
more on next page...
Megan Rapinoe
Finally, the soccer star is out and we can lust after her not just for her her prowess on the field (she's now one of only three out LGBT Olympians from the US) but for taking up the mantel of what it means to be a top hot butch. Of course, given that her hair has had a Twitter handle of its own for years now, we kind of new she was one of us.
more on next page...
Skyler Cooper
No other lesbian actress can work a masculine role the way Cooper can. She starred in numerous lesbian films (including Cheryl Dunye's The Owls) and this year was busy working on her own pet project, Hero Mars, in which she serves as director, writer, producer, and star. The film is expected out in 2013.
more on next page...
Hannah Hart
She calls herself an "aspiring soubrette, Bay Area native, former NYC habitant, and current Los Angeles coffee shop sip-ster," but we can't help but thinking of her as the foxiest geek girl blogger who gets inebriated while baking on her cooking show, My Drunk Kitchen. Hart stars in, films, and edits all of her own videos and makes for a cute soft butch YouTube star you can't help but adore.
more on next page...
Kiyomi McCloskey
OK, yes, she wears eyeliner and could probably be described best as a femmey-butch, but the Hunter Valentine bandmate, who was featured on The Real L Word last season, is all butch hottie when she's on stage ramming that guitar like she's Led Zepplin offspring. She's hot, she's in band, and she's on TV. Boo-ya!


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Arts & Ideas believes that children are equally deserving of the respect and trust that adults experience in this country. When the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are extended to children, responsible choices arise from the sense of duty that that power naturally entails.
As such, students and staff make the rules and manage day to day activities together. Students and staff have equal democratic access to draft and amend rules, take part in supporting those rules, and share in the administration of conflict resolution and judicial processes. Placed in a community, children are as conscientious and compassionate with their entrusted authorities as we hope adults are.
Charged with the responsibility to make meaningful decisions for themselves and the wider community, children rise to the occasion.


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In areas where adult men are scarce, young people are 36 percent more likely to commit assaults, a research team led by the University of Michigan School of Public Health has shown.
The team found that the proportion of the population lacking a high school degree also is associated with the likelihood of violent behaviors of 10-to-24-year-olds. These two factors explain more than two-thirds of the variation in the rate of adolescent assaults.
The study in the Journal of Community Psychology is the first to show a community-level association between the scarcity of adult men and adolescent violence, said Daniel Kruger, research assistant professor at SPH.
"Father absence is a risk factor for a range of adverse outcomes at the individual level," he said, adding that behaviors from promiscuity to violence often are found in populations where fathers are absent. "In areas where men are scarce in proportion to women, family dynamics and relationships with women are considerably altered."
When women outnumber men — who have become scarce because of factors that include job loss, death or incarceration — there are more single-parent, female-led homes and lower marriage rates, Kruger said.
"Male incentives for long-term commitment in romantic relationships and investment in children are diminished due to the increased availability of female partners," he said.
Kruger and colleagues Sophie Aiyer, Cleo Caldwell and Marc Zimmerman used data from the Flint Police Department to calculate average monthly assault rates and compared it with sociodemographic data from the 2000 U.S. Decennial Census.
Their research adds to other recent work from the Fathers and Sons program, part of the Michigan Youth Violence Prevention Center at the U-M School of Public Health.
This summer, the center released a related study that showed nonresidential fathers who make an effort to be part of their pre-adolescent sons' lives can help young people avoid violent behaviors.


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Sometimes evolution is stupid, and the human body is proof. Here are the most problematic physical and behavioural "scars of evolution" we humans have to deal with.
The human body is, in many respects, a resounding tribute to the adaptive powers of natural selection. We've evolved gloriously large, complex brains capable of abstract thought and foresight. We're bipedal, dextrous, and enjoy relatively long lives (lives that include a fairly generous fertility window), to list a few of the qualities that have allowed us to propagate and thrive across the planet.
But that doesn't mean we're perfect. Far from it, in fact. Not only did evolution create a species that's "good enough," it also produced some distinctly negative traits. Back in 1951, the biologist Wilton Krogman referred to these as the "scars of human evolution."
In some respects, these "scars" can be seen as vestigial traits, but that's not quite accurate. Rather, they're examples of the various trade-offs and side-effects of evolution. They're also not physical or psychological limitations per se (like our poor sense of smell or inability to grasp large numbers — those traits weren't adaptive in our recent evolutionary past). Also, I left out ageing and age-related disorders; those aren't so much "flaws" of evolution as they're an indelible and insurmountable limitation of biological evolution. Lastly, I decided to include some characteristics that evolution designed rather poorly.
Without further ado here are humanity's most unfortunate design flaws; please add any that you think I overlooked to the comments.
Physical Characteristics
The Dual Function of the Pharynx
This is one of the most problematic "features" of the human body — and the cause of innumerable deaths throughout human history. Like many other primates, we're forced to use the same anatomical structure for both ingestion and respiration. But when obstructed, airflow is blocked, which can lead to choking, and in some cases, death.
Our Inability to Biosynthesize Vitamin C
Vitamin C plays a crucial role as an anti-oxidant and in collagen synthesis. But certain animals, such as primates, guinea pigs, and some bats and birds, have completely lost the ability to synthesise this compound. So, when Vitamin C-rich food sources are scarce, such as fruits, we experience a weakened immune response — not to mention scurvy in extreme cases.
Also, because we can't make all the vitamins we need, we carry a host of deadly bacteria in our bowels, which produce them for us. But when this process is disrupted, like a hole in the intestine, it can flare into peritonitis.
The Awkward Wiring of the Male Urinary Tract
The urinary tract in males passes through — rather than being routed around — the prostate gland, which can swell and block urinary function.
The Close Proximity of our Genitals to our Rectum
Not only is this aesthetically displeasing, it's also unhygienic. Combined with our short urethras — especially in women — this leads to frequent urinary tract and bladder infections (UTIs) (remember, front to back, ladies). As the character Darald quipped in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, "Let me just say that if God was a city planner he would not put a playground next to a sewage system."
Our Multi-Function Genitals
Relatedly, our genitals are forced to perform multiple functions. While on the one hand it can be seen as conservation in design, it creates health problems. Again, it's unhygienic. For women, sexual intercourse pushes bacteria further into the urethra, leading to UTIs. Additionally, both men and women can contract UTIs from two sexually transmitted bacteria, chlamydia and mycoplasma. And of course, for women, this is also the part of the body where, in addition to sex and urination, newborn babies come out.
The Extremely Narrow Human Birth Canal
Speaking of which, human females have an unreasonably narrow birth canal, resulting in significantly increased risks to both mother and child during birth (not to mention prolonged labors and extreme levels of discomfort). In fact, death in childbirth used to be the leading cause of death for women during their reproductive years (our big, bulbous heads also has something to do with it). This is a consequence of our quick evolutionary leap from quadrupeds to bipeds, resulting in our narrow pelvis — the passage through which newborn babies pass.
Our Over-Loaded Lower Backs
This is also a consequence of our transition from four-legged to two-legged creatures. According to paleoanthropologist Bruce Latimer of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio,
When humans stood upright, they took a spine that had evolved to be stiff for climbing and moving in trees and rotated it 90 degrees, so it was vertical — a task Latimer compared to stacking 26 cups and saucers on top of each other (vertebrae and discs) and then, balancing a head on top. But so as not to obstruct the birth canal and to get the torso balanced above our feet, the spine has to curve inwards (lordosis), creating the hollow of our backs. That's why our spines are shaped like an "S." All that curving, with the weight of the head and stuff we carry stacked on top, creates pressure that causes back problems — especially if you play football, do gymnastics, or swim the butterfly stroke. In the United States alone, 700,000 people suffer vertebral fractures per year and back problems are the sixth leading human malady in the world. "If you take care of it, your spine will get you through to about 40 or 50," said Latimer. "After that, you're on your own."
Our Achy Knees
Again, an aftereffect of bipedalism. We have to distribute all our weight on just two limbs, which often leads to aches and pains. You can also add achy, or arthritic hips, to this list.
The Overly Complicated Human Foot
Anthropologist Jeremy DeSilva of Boston University put it this way:
Starting with the foot, DeSilva held up a cast with 26 bones and said: "You wouldn't design it out of 26 moving parts." Our feet have so many bones because our ape-like ancestors needed flexible feet to grasp branches. But as they moved out of the trees and began walking upright on the ground in the past 5 million years or so, the foot had to become more stable, and bit by bit, the big toe, which was no longer opposable, aligned itself with the other toes and our ancestors developed an arch to work as a shock absorber. "The foot was modified to remain rigid," said DeSilva. "A lot of BandAids were stuck on these bones." But the bottom line was that our foot still has a lot of room to twist inwards and outwards, and our arches collapse. This results in: ankle sprains, plantar fasciitis, Achilles tendonitis, shin splints, and broken ankles. These are not modern problems, due to stiletto heels; Fossils show broken ankles that have healed as far back as 3 million years ago.
A better design for upright walking and running, DeSilva said, would be a foot and ankle like an ostrich. An ostrich's ankle and lower leg bones are fused into a single structure, which puts a kick into their step — and their foot has only two toes that aid in running. "Why can't I have a foot like that?" asked DeSilva. One reason is that ostriches trace their upright locomotion back 230 million years to the age of dinosaurs, while our ancestors walked upright just 5 million years ago.
Our Inefficient Sinuses
Humans have several sinuses — air-filled cavities that help with drainage of mucus and fluid. But our maxillary sinuses, located on our cheekbone, drain upwards. This often leads to the build-up of fluids and mucus, which can cause an infection.
The "Blind Spot" in Our Eyes
Our so-called "blind spot" is the result of a quirk that happens during embryological development. To deal with this, we've had to evolve elaborate and costly perception-correcting mechanisms. Our very own Esther Inglis-Arkell describes it like this:
Light gets into the eye by passing through the pupil. It hits the retina at the back of the eye. The retina is covered with light-sensing proteins. They relay what they sense to the optic nerve which carries the information back into the brain. The problem is, the optic nerve ends in the field of the retina itself. This is a little like having to plug the power cable for a TV directly into the screen. It creates a dark spot. Most of the time, the other eye will see what's happening in its partner's blind, but if the blind spots overlap while looking at a certain object, or if the person is only looking through one eye, the brain just fills in the spot looking at the surrounding picture.
A Single Set of Adult Teeth
This is where evolution got unreasonably cheap on us, providing humans with just one set of teeth for our entire adult lives. Once we hit 35, our teeth start to go — one of many signs that evolution primed us for reproduction, followed by a brief period of child-rearing, and pretty much nothing else (unless you subscribe to the grandmother hypothesis).
Behavioural Characteristics
Our fondness for sweet, salty, and fatty foods
Our bodies need sugar, salt, and fat — just not in extreme quantities. But in a state of nature, these foods are often scarce or difficult to preserve. That's why we find these food unreasonably delicious and irresistible. It's our body's way of saying, "Yo, eat this stuff while you can, it's good for you." But most of us now live in a world of tremendous abundance, and we consume these foods in ridiculous quantities, leading to all sorts of modern health problems.
Humans have a kind of ingrained fear or distrust of the "out-group." It's a previously adaptive trait that binds small groups of individuals together and prevents them from wandering off or joining other groups. But it also leads to ethnocentrism and divisions between groups. Studies show that oxytocin, while strengthening feelings of trust between individuals, increases fear of "the other." This characteristic was obviously important back when we lived in family clans or tribal arrangements, but today it leads to all sorts of social problems, including racism, prejudice, and our inability to empathise with people we don't immediately know.
Any Number of Cognitive Biases
Many of our cognitive biases — annoying glitches in our thinking that cause us to make questionable decisions and reach erroneous conclusions — are a consequence of our limited intelligence and predisposed tendencies. Examples include the confirmation bias (we love to agree with people who agree with us), the gambler's fallacy (the tremendous weight we tend to put on previous events that aren't causal factors), our tendency to neglect or misjudge probability, and the status-quo bias (we often make choices that guarantee that things remain the same). Some of these are adaptive traits, but others are simply cognitive deficiencies.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
This is an example of how we've potentially pathologized a perfectly "normal" human psychological characteristic. Because ADHD appears to have a genetic component (it affects about 5% of school-aged children), questions have been raised about its prior role as a trait required for survival, namely its adaptive function in hunter, fighter, and wader theories. But today, we see it as something maladaptive — something that needs to be treated. Put another way, and like our penchant for sweet, salty, and fatty foods, it's a trait that's not so much nonoptimal as it's ill suited for present-day society.
Other sources: Better Than Human, WebMD, "Human Evolution: Gain Came With Pain".
Follow me on Twitter: @dvorsky


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About us
The Diabetes UK Shrewsbury & District group is one of over 350 voluntary groups situated throughout the UK.
Our goal is to provide support and educate people living with diabetes, as well as their family, friends and anyone else who is interested in knowing more about diabetes.
We encourage those interested to attend our group meetings which are a welcoming and social environment for people to discuss diabetes and its effects. Support and companionship are some of the simplest yet most important aspects of living with diabetes - this is why our group exists and we want to help in any way that we can.


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Create a Website Account - Manage notification subscriptions, save form progress and more.
Any firework that must be ignited by a heat source is illegal to possess or discharge. Small items such as "poppers" are not prohibited. Individuals are subject to confiscation of all fireworks found in their possession and a fine up to $2,000 plus court costs.
Fireworks also may not be discharged on federal, state, or county roadways. If individuals plan to discharge fireworks on private property not belonging to them, they must have a written letter of permission from the land owner.
The Midland Fire Department also reminds citizens to use caution when discharging fireworks. Eye and burn injuries are common among children, and they should be supervised by an adult. Devices such as sparklers may reach temperatures exceeding 1,000 degrees.
Grass fires are another potential risk during fireworks season. Have at least one of the following extinguishing agents available while discharging fireworks: water, sand or dirt, or a portable fire extinguisher. Never hesitate to call 911 if a fire develops.
Show All Answers
Residential fire deaths have decreased steadily as the number of homes with smoke detectors has increased. Reports from the National Fire Protection Association on residential fire deaths show that people have nearly a 50 percent better chance of surviving a fire if their home has the recommended number of smoke detectors.
Smoke detectors that are 10 years old are near the end of their service life and should be replaced. A smoke detector monitors the air 24 hours a day. At the end of 10 years, it has gone through over 3.5 million monitoring cycles. After this much use, components may become less reliable. This means that as the detector gets older, the potential of failing to detect a fire increases. Replacing them after 10 years reduces this possibility.
For questions about code enforcement, building codes, construction permits and fees/fee schedules for other departments within the City of Midland, please contact City of Midland's Code Division at 432-685-7391.
3 inches inside city limits and 6 inches in the county
24 to 48 hours
10 Stations
Yes since 2004
Order them through the Knox Company
Dale Little 432-688-4161
Over 75 feet to floor of the highest floor


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NATICK, MA, USA juillet 28, 2008
Cognex Receives Multi-Million Dollar Order From China Steel
Largest single order ever received for Cognex SmartView Surface Inspection System
Cognex's surface inspection systems use proprietary, high-performance machine vision hardware and software to automatically detect, visualize, and classify defects on a wide variety of high value-added materials, such as metals, paper, and plastics. China Steel will use the Cognex systems to inspect steel at multiple stages of the manufacturing process, such as during pickling, galvanizing, annealing, and tension leveling, to ensure that the product meets rigorous quality standards.
"Cognex offered a comprehensive solution for each of the very diverse and demanding inspection tasks we evaluated," said Mr. Chih-Chung Wu, Assistant General Manager at China Steel's Kaohsiung plant. "The line scan technology utilized in SmartView offers superior performance, especially in demanding applications, such as in galvanized steel, where we must meet the extremely high quality standards of automotive manufacturers."
"Increasing demand for steel...particularly in Asia...is fueling new capital spending in steel manufacturing plants worldwide," said Dr. Robert J. Shillman, Cognex's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. "Cognex is in an exceptional position to benefit from that demand due to both the excellent reputation of SmartView and to our company's ability to provide products and services worldwide."
Robin Pratt
Sr. Manager, Corporate Communications
Cognex Corporation
phone: (858) 350-5065
email: firstname.lastname@example.com


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Some 300 to 400 Torah scrolls and thousands of vestments, crowns and other articles are being held in museums and storage in Russia, said Slomo Koves, executive rabbi of the Unified Hungarian Jewish Congregation.
Seized by Nazi Germany during the war and then by the Red Army in 1945, many of the items had been stored for safety in the Hungarian National Bank during the Holocaust.
Up to 600,000 Jews died at the hands of the Nazis and their allies, according to Budapest's Holocaust Memorial Center, and Hungary's Jewish community, now numbering around 100,000, still faces anti-Semitism.
Last week, a far-right politician urged the government to draw up list of Jews who posed a "national security risk."
In June, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel repudiated a Hungarian state award he received after an official from the Hungarian government participated in a ceremony honoring a writer who was a member of Hungary's WWII far-right parliament.
Koves said he had sent a letter to Russian authorities about the religious artifacts, which are part of a larger body of art and valuables that Hungarian authorities say the Soviets took from the country when the war ended.
"Our request is that if we're not speaking about looted art, at least we can speak about all the pieces that are important to the Jewish community," Koves said.
He had asked for Moscow to allow a delegation to document the items and then work out a process for their return.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Janosz Martonyi has also written to Moscow to say the issue had been "unfortunately dragging on for a long time now" and saying it was "of great national importance for the whole country".
Russia's Foreign Ministry declined immediate comment.
About one tenth of the six million Jews who were killed during the Holocaust came from Hungary. Most were deported to death camps after Nazi Germany occupied the country in 1944, often after soldiers seized their possessions.
Historians have documented stories of people who risked their lives or died trying to protect Torah scrolls. Some who ran into burning synagogues or hid them on their person when they were deported to death camps.
Scrolls in museums
Torah scrolls are at the heart of Jewish worship, and a community needs to obtain them before it builds a synagogue.
Painstakingly copied by hand on parchment, they contain the five books of Moses and are kept in an arch of a synagogue, usually facing east towards Jerusalem. Koves said the ones in question were hundreds of years old and "priceless".
According to a catalogue compiled by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, 344 Torah scrolls were turned over by Russia's Special Archive, now part of the Russian State Military Archive, to the State Historical Museum.
The Hungarian group said Russia also holds Torahs in the Nizhny Novgorod Museum. Some scholars say these originated in Hungary while others say they came from Russian synagogues.
"When we speak of Torah scrolls, there is no question that they belong to the Jewish community, and we are all heirs of the survivors," Koves said.
"Today, when we don't have to endanger our lives but just have to bring it to people's attention, this is our first duty as Hungarian Jews." Some 8,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors live in Hungary.


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General way to implement tcp servers is "one thread/process per connection". But on high loads this approach can be not so efficient and we need to use another patterns of connection handling. In this article I will describe how to implement tcp-server with synchronous connections handling using epoll() system call of Linux 2.6. kernel.
epoll is a new system call introduced in Linux 2.6. It is designed to replace the deprecated select (and also poll). Unlike these earlier system calls, which are O(n), epoll is an O(1) algorithm – this means that it scales well as the number of watched file descriptors increase. select uses a linear search through the list of watched file descriptors, which causes its O(n) behaviour, whereas epoll uses callbacks in the kernel file structure.
Another fundamental difference of epoll is that it can be used in an edge-triggered, as opposed to level-triggered, fashion. This means that you receive "hints" when the kernel believes the file descriptor has become ready for I/O, as opposed to being told "I/O can be carried out on this file descriptor". This has a couple of minor advantages: kernel space doesn't need to keep track of the state of the file descriptor, although it might just push that problem into user space, and user space programs can be more flexible (e.g. the readiness change notification can just be ignored).
To use epoll method you need to make following steps in your application:
- Create specific file descriptor for epoll calls:
epfd = epoll_create(EPOLL_QUEUE_LEN);
where EPOLL_QUEUE_LEN is the maximum number of connection descriptors you expect to manage at one time. The return value is a file descriptor that will be used in epoll calls later. This descriptor can be closed with close() when you do not longer need it. - After first step you can add your descriptors to epoll with following call:
static struct epoll_event ev; int client_sock; ... ev.events = EPOLLIN | EPOLLPRI | EPOLLERR | EPOLLHUP; ev.data.fd = client_sock; int res = epoll_ctl(epfd, EPOLL_CTL_ADD, client_sock, &ev);
where ev is epoll event configuration sctucture, EPOLL_CTL_ADD – predefined command constant to add sockets to epoll. Detailed description of epoll_ctl flags can be found in epoll_ctl(2) man page. When client_sock descriptor will be closed, it will be automatically deleted from epoll descriptor. - When all your descriptors will be added to epoll, your process can idle and wait to something to do with epoll'ed sockets:
while (1) { // wait for something to do... int nfds = epoll_wait(epfd, events, MAX_EPOLL_EVENTS_PER_RUN, EPOLL_RUN_TIMEOUT); if (nfds
Typical architecture of your application (networking part) is described below. This architecture allow almost unlimited scalability of your application on single and multi-processor systems:
- Listener – thread that performs bind() and listen() calls and waits for incoming conncetions. Then new connection arrives, this thread can do accept() on listening socket an send accepted connection socket to one of the I/O-workers.
- I/O-Worker(s) – one or more threads to receive connections from listener and to add them to epoll. Main loop of the generic I/O-worker looks like last step of epoll using pattern described above.
- Data Processing Worker(s) – one or more threads to receive data from and send data to I/O-workers and to perform data processing.
As you can see, epoll() API is very simple but believe me, it is very powerful. Linear scalability allows you to manage huge amounts of parallel connections with small amout of worker processes comparing to classical one-thread per connection.
If you want to read more about epoll or you want to look at some benchmarks, you can visit epoll Scalability Web Page at Sourceforge. Another interesting resources are:
- The C10K problem: a most known page about handling many connections and various I/O paradigms including epoll().
- libevent: high-level event-handling library ontop of the epoll. This page contains some information about performance tests of epoll.
No related posts.


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Create a Website Account - Manage notification subscriptions, save form progress and more.
Yes, Idaho has a homeowner's exemption for owner-occupied homes, including manufactured homes, which are primary dwellings.
This exempts up to 50% or $100,000, whichever is less, of the value of your home and home site (Section 63-602G IC). Taxes are computed on the remaining value. You may also receive the homeowner's exemption if you are paying occupancy taxes.
Applications are available from the Assessor's Office. When an application is approved, the exemption is permanent as long as you own and occupy the property. If the property is sold, the new owner must file a new application. There are no income or age restrictions, but you can qualify for an exemption on only one home at a time. You must own and occupy your home on January 1 of the tax year and must apply for an exemption by April 15th.
You may also qualify for Property Tax Reduction (Circuit Breaker), if you meet the income requirements and fit one of the following categories:
Applications for the program (PDF) may be obtained from your county assessor and must be filed each year between January 1 and April 15.
View more State of Idaho information and forms about homeowners and property taxes.
Show All Answers
Idaho law requires that all taxable property be assessed at market value each year. To do this, the county assessor develops valuation guidelines based on the sales prices and some of the features of homes that have recently sold. Some of the features that often influence what a buyer would pay for your home and land include size, quality, age, condition and location.
The county assessor uses this information to estimate how much a buyer might reasonably pay for your home if it were to sell on January 1 of the assessment year.
The value of your property may change each year depending on real estate market changes.
An appraiser from the county assessor's office is required to visit your property at least once in each 5 year period. During the other 4 years, the county assessor will use information from property sales or from the inspections of other properties to estimate the current market value for your property.
The term "improvements," as used in property assessment, does not refer just to remodeling, renovating or upgrading. "Improvements" are buildings (your house, garage, manufactured home, etc.), paving, or other structures that add value to land, regardless of when they were completed.
Real property consists of land and the improvements that are attached to it. Personal property normally is not attached to the land; it is generally mobile and does not last as long as real property. A copy machine is an example of personal property.
Personal property that is used by the owner in his private home is not subject to property tax. An example is household furnishings. If the same property is used in a business activity whether in a private home or elsewhere, it is subject to property tax.
Properly registered vehicles, including recreational vehicles, are not subject to property tax.
The value for your property is shown on your assessment notice. The county assessor usually mails this notice to you by the first Monday in June.
If you do not receive this notice, contact the Assessor's Office.
Your county assessor maintains a file of information on your property. If you have questions about your assessment, you should contact your county assessor to review the accuracy of the records. You may appeal the valuation to the Board of Equalization for the county in which the property is located. This board consists of the county commissioners. Most appeals must be filed with your county clerk by the fourth Monday in June. Properties assessed at other times of the year have different appeal dates.
Property values maintained by our county assessor are public records. You may also ask to review the value of other properties in that county.
Be prepared to document your reasons for requesting a change in your property's assessed value. You must prove that the assessor's value is not the current market value of the property.
The amount of tax is determined from the budget needs of the taxing districts. There are many kinds of taxing districts in Idaho. Some, like cities and counties, levy taxes to provide a wide range of services. Others levy taxes for specific purposes like highways, schools, or fire protection.
Officials for each taxing district determine the annual budget needed to provide services for the district. The approved budget is divided by the total taxable value of all properties within the district.
The result is the district's tax rate. This rate, multiplied by the taxable value of your property, determines the amount of taxes you owe to the district.
Every property is located within several independent-taxing districts. This means your property tax bill includes taxes for all the districts in which you live. This combination of taxing districts is known as a "tax code area." Each of these areas is assigned a number which appears on your assessment notice and tax bill. Within each tax code area, the total tax rate is generally the same for all properties.
The taxable value of your property determines how much tax you pay in relation to other properties. Assessments must be accurate for all taxpayers to pay their fair share of the total property taxes.
You should usually receive your tax bill by the end of November. Contact your county treasurer if you have questions about your tax bill.
Tax rates may be affected by a variety of factors.
Rates may increase due to a taxing district's emergency needs or voter-approved bonds and override levies. Total tax rates may increase due to the creation of new taxing district that includes your property.
As an example, business has declined and slowed for local industry or agriculture, a county's economy may suffer and affected property values may go down. However, your taxes may be higher since taxing districts still need to pay for basic services.
Yes, there are limits on property tax increases.
First of all, most taxing districts have limits on the tax rates they may charge.
Second, districts other than schools are limited to annual increases of 3% plus an allowance for growth on a portion of their budgets. The growth allowance is determined on the basis of new construction and annexation that occurred during the previous year.
You may live in a different taxing district than your neighbor. Also, your property may appear similar to your neighbor's at first glance, but there may be enough differences in land size, square footage of homes, quality or condition of land that will result in value differences between properties.
Also, your neighbor may be eligible for some form of property tax reduction for which you either did not qualify or did not apply.
If you purchase and move into a newly constructed home, that no one has ever lived in and move into it after January 1, you will pay the occupancy fee instead of property taxes for the portion of the year you live there.
You must notify the Assessor's Office on or before the date you move into your new home.


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While watching the 94 year old Kirk Douglas mugging at the Academy Awards this past Sunday night, my mind jumped to one of Douglas's most acclaimed films, Vincente Minnelli's "The Bad and the Beautiful." Minnelli's 1952 film is considered one of the great "inside-baseball" movies about Hollywood and it had been on my "to see" list for ages. The following day, I got my hands on a copy and rectified the situation and was not disappointed. "The Bad and the Beautiful" is a real treat for anyone who loves the great Hollywood movies of that golden era (roughly from the advent of sound into the 1950s) and the stories about the men and women who made them.
"The Bad and the Beautiful" is full of smart, strong performances from Dick Powell, Walter Pidgeon, a gorgeous Lana Turner, Barry Sullivan and the great Gloria Grahame, but there's no denying that despite Turner's top billing, this is Douglas' picture. Douglas is Jonathan Shields, a brilliant, ruthless, unscrupulous producer and studio bigwig and he commands the screen in every scene he appears in. He manages the neat trick of being both loathsome and likeable, kind and cutting, often at the same moment. It may well be Douglas' best moment as an actor, though he lost the Academy Award that year to Gary Cooper, for "High Noon." (I'm as big a Gary Cooper fan as the next guy, but "High Noon" is an overrated film and Douglas was robbed.) Oddly, the film was nominated for 6 Oscars and won 5 of them, without being nominated for Best Picture, or Minnelli being nominated for Best Director.
For those of you who only know Minnelli from his great musicals like "An American In Paris" (1951) or "The Band Wagon" (1953), check this film out, as well as the other exceptional melodramas he made, like "Some Came Running" (1958) with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Shirley Maclaine and "Home From The Hill" (1960) with Robert Mitchum. Minnelli's widescreen compositions, use of color, depth and design, elegantly moving camera, and the occasionally overwrought emotion of the films had a big impact on later directors like Martin Scorsese, Peter Bodganovich and Richard Linklater. Minnelli used Cinemascope brilliantly, to express subtle nuances and changes in personal relationships between characters, and those of class and social standing. "The Bad and the Beautiful" is in black and white and in the standard academy 4:3 ratio, but it lead the way to the sorts of stories Minnelli would be telling throughout the decade to come. Don't sleep on this underrated and important American artist.


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The spouse or civil partner of an Irish citizen may apply for Irish citizenship through naturalisation after three years of marriage/civil partnership plus three years residence on the island of Ireland.
If you are of Irish associations, the Minister for Justice and Equality has absolute discretion to waive the conditions for naturalisation. Irish associations means being related by blood, affinity or adoption to an Irish citizen.
If you want to apply for Irish citizenship through naturalisation, you need to download the relevant application form, which includes application guidance (see link below). The completed form should be lodged with the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service (INIS).
What is naturalisation?
Naturalisation is a process whereby a non-Irish national can apply to become an Irish citizen subject to satisfying certain conditions for naturalisation.
Applying for naturalisation:
All applications for Irish citizenship are dealt with by the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service of the Department of Justice and Equality. The majority of applications will have a decision within 6 months. For more information on the application process, please visit www.inis.gov.ie
For useful residency information for non-Irish family members please visit the Crosscare Migrant Project, an organisation funded by the Irish Government under the Emigrant Support Programme.


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Sale on canvas prints! Use code ABCXYZ at checkout for a special discount!
Boundary: Bleed area may not be visible.
by Monroe Payne
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Product Details
Challenge your brain with a jigsaw puzzle designed by an independent artist! Our puzzles are made from premium 0.2" thick paper stock and include a semi-gloss coating on the top surface to make the image pop. Puzzles are available in two different sizes, and each puzzle includes a puzzle box with the artwork printed on the top for safe storage when you're not puzzling. The puzzle pieces are unique shapes.
Design Details
Yet another magnificent alley to explore... #italy #italygram #italytrip #italytravel#italyiloveyou #italya #italytour #italytourism #catania... more
Care Instructions
Store the puzzle in the provided box at room temperature with low humidity.
Ships Within
3 - 4 business days
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Yet another magnificent alley to explore... #italy #italygram #italytrip #italytravel#italyiloveyou #italya #italytour #italytourism #catania #sicilia #renadventures #sicilyphotography, #teatrobellini #Sicilytour #art #artfromphotos #photoart#photoshop #artlovers #digitalart#digitalartists #myart #architecture #architecturephotography
Being an artist is weird. You aren't "normal" in that you don't have a "job" and run the rat race like other people, you don't do the same thing day after day for the money, and you surely aren't understood by the vast majority of people. You live your life allowing your little gray cells out of their cage, so they can do wild, weird and sometimes wonderful things. I spent nearly 30 years being the reliable little drone, making widgets, taking measurements, delivering projectors, selling insurance and fixing electronics; absolutely NONE of which gave me any joy or fulfillment. I was always yearning for that release – the thing that would let those emotions and excitements out of their cubicles to do some really...


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Marxent wants to be businesses' content management system for the VR age
Marxent, a startup in Dayton, Ohio, wants to make the CMS (content management system) for companies' new virtual and augmented reality applications. The company's VisualCommerce product is designed to make it easy for companies with huge product catalogs to use virtual and/or augmented reality to sell what they have.
The startup uses a three-pronged approach: Marxent will help businesses build applications that take advantage of the new technologies, develop a pipeline for getting objects into its CMS using 3D scanning, and then manage the service going forward.
It seems like a solid option for companies that want to show off their wares in VR or AR without building a dedicated tech team just to write that app.
Marxent already has several high-profile clients, including Lowe's Home Improvement, TimberTech, AZEK Building Supplies and Simmons Bedding Company.
It's a business that has the potential to explode over the coming years as more consumers and companies make the jump into VR and AR. Existing products like the Lowe's Holoroom, which lets consumers design a room using products sold at the popular home improvement retailer and then tour the finished product in virtual reality before making a purchase, could drive more spending.
If Lowe's ends up making more money because people are designing everything at home before pulling the trigger on a kitchen remodel worth tens of thousands of dollars, expect its competitors to follow suit.
Overall, the growth of commercial applications like Marxent's will probably help to get VR and AR technology, like headsets and software, out to more consumers. After all, it will be in retailers' interest to bring that technology to users more readily.


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What mom wouldn't love a little quiet time for Mother's Day? Well, JAKKS Pacific is offering you just that in the form of an entertainment basket for all ages filled with these popular JAKKS Pacific toys:
- Timmy Time Small Plush — Features all key characters from the show, including Timmy, Mittens the Kitten, Ruffy the Puppy and Yabba the Duckling. These cuties are huggable and playable – the perfect collectible plush!
- Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides Figures — Realistic-looking 4″ Battle Packs Figure Assortment 'with secret reveal' are perfectly sized for collecting, displaying and recreating scenes from the latest installment in the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise! Each figure includes a unique LED Accessory to shine a light onto the figure to reveal its inner secret and unlock additional features on the Queen Anne's Revenge Deluxe Ship play set (sold separately). Highly detailed 6″ Movie Moments Figures celebrate favorite characters from the Pirates of the Caribbean world.
- Disney·Pixar Cars 2 Piston Cup Patio Set — Now kids can feel like grown-ups with their very own kid-sized Disney·Pixar Cars 2 Piston Cup Patio Set! Featuring washable plastic tabletop with cool in-laid graphics that won't scratch, fade or peel! The patio set comes with a table, umbrella and two folding patio chairs. Perfect for outdoor patios, pool decks, and backyards! Sturdy tubular steel construction and easy adult assembly.
My kids had a blast with these items, and they really did keep them entertained for a significant period of time — especially the patio set. My 3-year-old was excited when the Timmy Time plush showed up, but his eyes really lit up when he saw the patio set box, and he insisted that we put it together right away. It was raining that day, so we set it up in the living room, and my three youngest played restaurant with it all day.
My oldest boys were completely enamored with the Pirates of the Caribbean toys. They're all about playing pirates, and the glowing ring that came with one of the figures was the perfect complement to their pirate garb.
One (1) lucky reader will win a JAKKS Pacific Entertainment Basket for all ages containing the items listed above, valued at over $100!
Entry is simple! You just need to answer the question below by leaving a comment on this site! You can even gain up to 3 bonus entries for doing each additional item listed (just make sure that you leave one entry for each one — up to a total of 4 comments). As a reminder, comments left on Facebook, Twitter or other posts will not be included.
EACH of the 12 participating blogs has their own prizes to give away so make sure to enter on each blog for the best chances to win! Use this spreadsheet to keep track of your entries!
1. What's your favorite tip for keeping your kids entertained so you can score a little break during the day?
1. Follow Deal Seeking Mom on a reader or via e-mail updates and leave a comment on this post.
2. Follow Deal Seeking Mom through Facebook or Twitter and leave a comment on this post.
3. Follow Jakks Pacific on Facebook and leave a comment on this post.
This giveaway will remain open until 11:59 p.m. EST, Friday, April 29th, 2011. Any comments left after this cut-off will not be counted. The winner will be selected randomly and will be notified via email within 48 hours after the close of the contest.
This giveaway is part of the Grateful Giveaways Event being hosted by myself and 11 other bloggers. You can increase your chances of winning this prize (as well as all of the others on this site), by visiting each of them and entering the same way as you did here. You have plenty of time to get to all of them, since the contest will be open for five full days.
As one final reminder, you will want to check out the terms of the giveaway by visiting the Grateful Giveaways: Celebrating a Season of Giving Facebook page. Just click on the TERMS tab at the top of the page. (Note that by entering this contest, you agree that you have read the terms and are eligible to enter this contest).
Disclosure: I received the same gift package that the winner will be receiving to facilitate my review. I did not receive any compensation to write this post. The opinions are all mine!


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Forever Young, The Tragedy Of Vampire: Bloodlines
The formerly forlorn future of RPGs
There's a bittersweet flavour to playing Bloodlines. It's not because of the vampiric moodiness and the twilight tales that it tells, nor the real-world tragedy of its costly development finally undoing brave development studio, Troika. No, the sense of sorrow comes from the realisation that there's nothing like this on the horizon. The idea is begged: why should there be so few games like this? Oh right, because it's so very hard to do.
Bloodlines - a clever, multi-faceted RPG - is a rare animal. Even under the blazing light of Fallout 3's recent release, there's a sense that we've not yet reached our promised land of games that do more, games that do worlds, games that do people. Bloodlines points the way to those games. Indeed, there's a sense that these games might just be becoming a myth. Like the plight of an animal species on the verge of extinction, the lack of games comparable to Bloodlines is one of the great tragedies of our time.
Our plight is this: if your great pleasure is hybrid action-oriented first-person role-playing games, with nuanced, open-plan stories filled with interesting characters, then your fantasy life is necessarily stunted. You have very few options. Games that offer a personal experience of worlds that we could never otherwise access outside of film and literature are rare. Ultra-violent warmonger, battlefield overseer, even sneaky thief man - these are all catered for in some way. But other, wider ideas are harder to come by. What, indeed, would it be like to live life as a 1950s private detective, or an FBI agent, or a nano-tech enhanced super agent of the near future, or a vampire?
Not many games bother with such wide open scope. Bloodlines does. And it does what a select few videogames have articulated: giving us sudden, direct access to something wonderful and alien. But it's drama, and pseudo-social, as much as it is videogame action. It is filled with brilliant artificial people. Bloodlines allows us - like a participant in some larger soap opera - to make decisions about what might happen to those individuals. In this case, it's always something wonderfully dark. Bloodlines manages to be funny, humane (if not human), brutal, horrifying, and thrilling, all at once. Its vampires are larger than life and yet nevertheless alive. Their twisted traits come tumbling out in excellent dialogue and strange quests. It is heavy on heavy themes, ideas that might otherwise pervert the purity of any other action game. Seduction, sedition, schizophrenia, propaganda, pornography, purgatory: these thematic notions are the lifeblood of vampire fiction, and they're essential what's going on in here. The struggle between the vampire castes is at once noble and despicable, and picking your route between its pitfalls is a delight. Ultimately, though, this is about exploration: about seeing something out of the ordinary. Toxic tourism in vampiric clubland.
Bloodlines is something like an action soap-opera. I truly wish I could say that of more games. So few games have attempted to access this most natural of game approaches: analogy of the real world, with conversation and violence intermingled, rather than simply delivering uninterrupted carnage, or endless management. These 'immersive sim' games are tough to make, granted, but when you play something like Bloodlines they also feel like they're the games we deserve. Game developers often talk about the strange sense of entitlement that gamers seem to bring to their hobby, but when you taste games like this, it becomes entirely understandable. To be to be stealthy or stabby, seductive or violent, well, it's almost like the game is spoiling us with options. After ten hours in Bloodlines you're struck by the nagging concern: why aren't other studios reaching for the stars like this? Even Bioshock and Stalker seem vapid in their shooter-obsessions.
Of course, it's a matter of complexity. To make a game like Bloodlines is a task of terrifying scale. It's one thing to make a game about running around putting bullets into people, and quite another to make it the tale of a weak young vampire who can talk to almost anyone in a series of thriving city hubs, travelling back and forth between them amid of a web of quests that range from simple puzzle solving, through the seduction of innocent human victims, to the brawling battles with rival monsters. To make this, you really have to know what you're doing. And therein lies the crux of the matter, the black heart inside the game: the crucial problem with Bloodlines was its complete and utter brokenness on release. Troika had tried to reach the highest peaks of game design, and faltered, and then fallen. My first journey through this glitchy underworld left my character stranded in a sewer pipe. I never did get any further and, savegame deleted, his weird adventure game to a permanent end. Getting past that point months later sent me trudging into endgame of horrifying hack-and-slash tedium, where nothing of the early game intricacy remained to give us respite from the melee. Even if you didn't get that far, a sojourn with Bloodlines exposed you to animation failures, spelling mistakes, and all other kinds of design splatter. This was not a finished game. Bloodlines, despite all its riches, was incomplete.
Ultimately the lamentable collapse of the final act of the game cannot be fixed without money and studio expertise, but many of the other problems have been dealt with. I've played through now with the community patch, and dozens of problems have been fixed. Dialogue trees have been trimmed and punctuated, animations have been been altered and replaced, bugs have been uncovered and squished beneath a fashionable gothic boot heel. Hell, the original boxed version of the game had glitches in the opening cutscene. Those have been mended. Bloodlines is so very far from perfect, but it is perfectly far from almost any other game we could pick up and play today. If you've not sunk teeth into it, then I fear you're truly missing out.
A shorter version of this article first appeared in PC Gamer UK.


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Ashes to ashes
Before Cormac McCarthy's nameless father and son have ventured more than a few yards down The Road, we realize that something is terribly wrong with their world. The only sound, other than the shuffling gait of these two creatures and the father's wracking cough, is the sound of labored breathing – an act made more difficult by the layers of cloth that obscure their faces.
Occasionally, the frail child, who struggles to keep pace with his father, begins to complain about hunger and cold. The bleakness of the landscape suggests that some global apocalypse has scorched the world, leaving nothing but great clouds of ashes that drift aimlessly across a lifeless land, obscuring the sun and coating every available surface with filth. Dying plants, trees and the corpses of people have become "ashen effigies" waiting to be blown away by the wind.
Finally, The Road comes down to a grim equation: a dying man and a child/son whose painful innocence renders him helpless — these two beings pitted against an alien and hostile world.
Acting on some residual instinct, the father is charting a course to the south and the ocean. Although the land's distinguishing features have been virtually erased, McCarthy's survivors may be traveling from the Southern Appalachians towards the coast, "passing long lines of charred and rusting cars," each containing an incinerated corpse. (In this surreal world, they pass a barn emblazoned with a "See Rock City" sign.) There are other survivors, too – bestial, nomadic bands that slaughter and consume each other.
Frequently, there is the distant sound of deranged chanting, as the father and son travel through silent towns and villages, the boy asks questions about the past and the world he never knew, about his mother and the other survivors. This fragmented dialogue reveals both the child's ignorance and the daunting odds against the survival of this tragic pair.
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We learn that the child's mother, in an act reminiscent of Job's wife in the Old Testament, has committed suicide rather than face the horrors of the post-apocalyptic world.
However, despite the spread of mindless violence, the father has managed to instill certain moral precepts in his son. Quite simply, there are the "good guys" and the "bad guys." The "bad guys" slaughter and eat people. The "good guys" search for food, help one another, and "carry the fire." In spite of the bloody carnage that the child has witnessed, he is drawn to the idea of nurturing and protecting a sacred flame.
When the father is forced to kill a man who threatens the boy, he wipes the murdered man's blood from his son's face, telling him, "My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you." When the son asks if they would ever eat anyone, his father assures him that they wouldn't because "Remember, we must carry the fire."
As the father and son learn how to find non-threatening shelters (including hidden caches of food in abandoned bomb shelters), they also develop a talent for perceiving traps. They evade marauders who stake out attractive homes and stalkers armed with bows and arrows.
At length, it becomes evident that the journey to the sea is actually a kind of bequest – a father's final gift to his son – an attempt to kindle in his son's heart what was ashes in his own. In essence, it is a survival strategy that embodies all that is spiritually ennobling ... qualities worthy of the ones "who carry the fire."
Although stated with considerable variations, a number of critics have concluded that all of Cormac McCarthy's previous novels have been a preparation for The Road. In other words, from Child of God and The Outer Dark, through Blood Meridian, the Border trilogy, and No Country for Old Men, McCarthy has been moving through increasingly opaque gradations of darkness and pessimism. Now the sum of all his writing – the decanted essence of McCarthy's final judgment on the spiritual and moral state of this country – resides in The Road.
Oddly enough, although The Road represents McCarthy's darkest and most existential work, it may prove to be his most uplifting. Throughout the novel's grim unfolding, there are occasional echoes of another remarkable literary work: William Faulkner's Nobel Prize Speech. In fact, Faulkner's words sound like an eerie presentiment of McCarthy's novel:
...I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock, hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny, inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not only endure: he will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
Obviously, McCarthy shares Faulkner's conviction that even in a world plunged into a "nuclear winter," man will survive because "he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance." Quite possibly, The Road may be interpreted as a dire prophecy from America's Jeremiah, a worthy successor of a prophet who found man's salvation "not in the church, but in his own heart."


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The Obama administration is offering advice and following the initial peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a news conference Thursday at NATO headquarters in Belgium.
He spoke shortly after a former Afghan president who heads a new peace council said he's convinced the Taliban are ready to negotiate peace.
Gates said the U.S. is a partner with the Afghan government even though U.S. officials aren't sitting at the table.
Any reconciliation between Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government and the Taliban insurgents must be led by Afghans, he added.
The Obama administration's position is sensitive, because taking any role in talks with the Taliban risks criticism within the U.S.
"One of the principles we have established with President Karzai is transparency with one another as this process goes forward so we know what they are doing, they know what we are doing and they understand what our requirements are," Gates said. "And frankly, we share with them what we think will be in their own best interest as the process goes along."
Gates added: "It's basically a partnership as we go forward with this with clearly the Afghans in the lead. I think we're confident that we have access into this process and plenty of opportunities to make our concerns as well as our suggestions known."
His comments came after the revelation Wednesday that NATO was providing safe passage to Taliban officials engaged in settlement talks, the clearest sign yet that the U.S. takes Kabul's discussions with the insurgents seriously.
Previously, the Afghan government has acknowledged that it has been talking with the Taliban, but discussions between the two sides have been described as mostly informal and indirect message exchanges relying on mediators.
Former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani told reporters in Kabul Thursday that the Taliban have not completely rejected the idea of negotiating a nonmilitary resolution of the war.
"They have some conditions to start the negotiations process. It gives us hope that they want to talk and negotiate," Rabbani said.
"We are taking our first steps," he said. "I believe there are people among the Taliban that have a message that they want to talk. They are ready."
The Afghan government has acknowledged that it has been involved in reconciliation talks with the Taliban, but discussions between the two sides have been described as mostly informal and indirect message exchanges relying on mediators.
'Baseless propaganda'
The Afghan Taliban, meanwhile, have denied having discussions.
In a message posted on its website this week, the group said the notion of talks with the enemy was "baseless propaganda" and that negotiations would be a "waste of time."
One expert on Afghan affairs cautioned against expecting peace anytime soon.
"I don't think we can deduce from (Rabbani's) statement that there's some imminent breakthrough likely," said Professor Malcolm Chalmers, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, a British defence and security think tank.
"People have been talking about the possibility of negotiating with elements of the Taliban for some time. There's a big difference between discussions and serious negotiations," he told msnbc.com.
"Everything I have heard would suggest people are putting out feelers and finding out who is interested in what, but on both sides — the different Taliban groups and the government — they are also trying to identify divisions and possible weaknesses," he said.
And the insurgents are not being forced to the negotiating table. While NATO's campaign was hurting the Taliban, especially in the south, insurgents were making gains in other parts of the country, Chalmers said.
Safe passage for TalibanIn Brussels on Wednesday, a senior NATO official confirmed that it has provided safe passage for top Taliban leaders to travel to Kabul for face-to-face negotiations with the Afghan government.
It was the most detailed indication so far of U.S. and NATO support of clandestine talks aimed at bringing an end to the 9-year-old war. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to describe the subject publicly.
Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, a top adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai who also spoke with reporters, confirmed the contacts that were conducted with coalition support.
"There are people who have had contacts between the Afghan government and the Taliban," Stanekzai said, declining to identify the players. "The elders of this country, the clerics of this country — they can mediate to form a bridge."
He said those who want to join to the peace process must be provided safety and security.
"The comings and goings are continuing," he said. "We are now at the beginning steps of our work."
'World's most effective peacekeeper'
Rabbani's comments came as ministers met Thursday to chart NATO's course for the next decade.
On the eve of the meeting, a senior NATO official confirmed NATO forces in Afghanistan were facilitating contacts between senior Taliban officials and the Afghan government.
But officials said discussions were in their very early stages and no quick end to the nine-year-old conflict could be expected.
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen wants input from foreign and defense ministers for a new NATO "Strategic Concept," or vision statement, to be agreed by leaders of the 28-nation alliance at a November 19-20 summit in Lisbon.
"NATO's core mission to protect the 900 million citizens of NATO countries from attack must never change, but it must be modern defense against modern threats," Rasmussen said.
"NATO is the world's most effective peacekeeper. But to stay effective we need to be engaged with our civilian partners and we must reach out to partners around the world that want to make the world safe," he told the meeting in Brussels.
Gates said Wednesday he was concerned that cuts in Europe threatened to put more pressure on an increasingly stretched U.S. military.
Britain is expected to cut 10 percent from its 36.9-billion pound ($58.4 billion) budget, while experts at Germany's defense ministry have listed potential savings of more than 9.3 billion euros ($13 billion).


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Giant online discount brokerage E-Trade has begun offering its retail clients a slice of Facebook's highly-anticipated IPO, making good on Mark Zuckerberg's desire to give casual investors the chance to participate in the red-hot stock offering. E-Trade customers can now place a conditional order for Facebook shares at the company's IPO Center, but the actual amount of stock they stand to receive will depend on the size of E-Trade's overall allocation, and the number of clients who express interest. E-Trade declined to comment on the offering.
Last week, Facebook quietly added E-Trade as the 33rd underwriter for its IPO, which aims to raise as much as $10.6 billion at a valuation of $77 billion to $96 billion. If all goes as planned, the company could be worth over $100 billion by the end of the first day's trading. The inclusion of E-Trade on such a high-profile IPO is unusual, although the discount brokerage has participated in IPOs in the past. The bulge-bracket Wall Street banks that underwrite most IPOs typically dole out shares to preferred clients, such as huge institutional investors like pension funds and endowments, hedge funds, and wealthy individuals. Small, individual investors rarely get a crack at such offerings. Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are the lead bookrunners for the offering.
"The only reason E-Trade is in on this is because Zuckerberg wants broad, retail distribution, which is admirable," says Scott Sweet, senior managing partner at IPO Boutique, which tracks new stock offerings. Sweet said that E-Trade will likely receive a relatively small allocation of shares, which means that depending on its retail client demand, individual investors aren't going to be able to pick up massive quantities of Facebook shares. And the brokerage cautions that even placing a conditional order "will not guarantee an allocation of shares."
Demand for Facebook shares is intense, if the scrum outside the company's roadshow meeting yesterday is any indication. E-Trade serves over 2.5 million retail brokerage account-holders, according to Yahoo Finance. E-Trade declined to comment on the offering, but described its typical IPO process to CNNMoney:
Those who have a brokerage account with E*Trade can participate in a company's IPO, in this case Facebook, through the firm's IPO center. Users can place a so-called conditional offer by indicating how many shares of Facebook they would want to buy, and the maximum price per share they are willing to pay.
Once Facebook's final price for its initial public offering is set, which is likely to be on May 17, E*Trade would then divvy up its portion of the IPO shares to the clients who said they were willing to pay at least that much. An E*Trade customer will need to have sufficient available funds in their accounts to support the offer.
The company also clarified that customers will need to a complete a user profile that aims to gauge whether those who are interested are suitable investors for IPOs by asking questions about annual income, investable assets, and investment goals. However, there are no publicly defined requirements.
Facebook estimates its shares will open at between $28 and $35 per share. The offering will be the largest technology IPO in history and will turn the company's 28-year-old CEO Mark Zuckerberg into one of the world's richest men, worth about $25 billion. Individual investors contemplating participating in Facebook's IPO should read the company's S-1 registration statement and watch the company's IPO roadshow video. They should also speak to their financial adviser if they have one. IPO investing is among the most risky kinds of stock trading, and it's not for everyone, including, it turns out, America's most famous investor, Warren Buffet. Caveat emptor.


text: email@example.com:27:49-07:00 Welcome to the Red Deer Construction Association The Red Deer Construction Association (RDCA) is a non-profit trade association that is the collective voice for the commercial and industrial construction industry serving Central Alberta. The RDCA proudly serves over 300 members across various trade and associate companies. Learn More Member BenefitsBusiness Opportunities Get access to over 4,000 tendering projects on COOLNET Alberta, and COOLNet On Demand. Benefit by networking with other members at Breakfast Seminars and Lunch & Learns. Find out what's going on by subscribing to the Association Newsletter and Central Alberta Builder.Learn More » Advocacy Belonging to RDCA means your automatically become a member of the Alberta Construction Association and the Canadian Construction Association. Together, we provide a strong collective voice to Government.Learn More » Education and Safety Get education and training at a discounted rate right here in Red Deer. We provide courses for safety, CSTS, Gold Seal and other requirements. The RDCA strives to bring leading edge industry education to our local membership.Learn More » Customer Service Gain access to member pricing and free services. Benefits include discounted CCDC documents, free document services from staff authorized by the Province of Alberta as Commissioner of Oaths, discount blueprint copier, and discount classroom and meeting room space.Learn More » Associate Partners


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This blog has spent at least three years just looking for the remote control.
(Thanks to Mollenkamp)
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This blog has spent at least three years just looking for the remote control.
(Thanks to Mollenkamp)
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.
Instead, it revealed we spend four months of our lifetimes playing computer games.
That doesn't make sense. Shouldn't it be "four months per year" instead of "four months per life?"
I knew I should have asked for my 16 hours of orgasms on the installment plan instead of up front!
But, on the other hand I'll never forget April 22, 1983....
Why in the world do they count "playing with children" in the same category as ironing? I do not iron anything, but I certainly spend many hours playing with my kids!
Do we really trust the results of a study performed by someone who made the following statement: computers weren't around a decade or so ago
who needs sex when we have the web...........
insom - ROTFL!! I just spewed Diet Mountain Dew all over my keyboard.
Makes sense. I know I've spent three years of my life hiding the remote control.
Likewise, researchers have a lot of time on their hands.
Wonder how much time I've spent on Dave's blog? If it ends up in the long run being the same amount as spent on orgasms, I don't want you getting any funny ideas, Dave.
Dave(notBarry), Dave's always getting funny ideas. It's his job, even when he's on hiatus.
Guin, it's because a man made the survey. You know, cooking, cleaning, ironing, playing with the kids, it's all woman's work.
Education doesn't seem to take up much time either. Only one year and ten months is spent in the classroom.
It's quite clear I didn't take part in this survey. I just finished degree #3, and I make no guarantees I will be stopping there.
On the other hand, I've spent far less time than most at work...
*zips in*
This is stupid, IMO!
It clearly does NOT take individuality into account. I personally stopped ironing in the 70's, and have never looked back.
*zips out totally disgusted with scientists*
How can it be that the average person spends only a year and ten months of their life getting an education? I've been in school for nine months out of the year for about thirteen years now- surely that's more than two years total.
*tries to woo Elaenor back to the Mad Scientist side*
Come on we aren't all that bad. Maybe this is accurate for Germans, but I don't think it holds up for Americans. And I have spent the last 6.5 years of my life just on one degree so I find their estimate on education insane.
Da Mad Scientist's site mentions "cat boogers", which WBAGNFARB!
Sarah -
You're right. Are they going by credit hours or actual hours?
full schedule in school ~= 40 hours per week
40 hours/week * 9 months ~= 360 hours a year
360 / 24 = 15 days
appx. #of days in a year spent on education.
Now, their model:
1 yr, 10 mo = 665 days
If you divide 665 by 15, that's 44.333 years spent getting an education?
Another case of people with too much time on their hands... this time, environmentalists.
Memo to Mad Scientist:
You're OK, they're not. :)
... um ... how much time is that in metric?
I did a little quick math, and at 6 hrs a day, 180 days a year for 12 years, a person spends just under a year & a half to go from 1st grade thru high school.
Well, OK ... but, did you count recess and gym class?
The comments to this entry are closed.


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After a two-year campaign by 50 organizations in the Power Indy Forward Coalition, Indianapolis Power & Light (IPL) has announced its intention to stop burning coal at its downtown Harding Street power plant in 2016 and close the unlined coal ash lagoons at the plant, located on the city's south side.
"Harding Street is the largest single source of industrial pollution, sulfur dioxide, soot, and carbon in our city," says Megan Anderson, an Indianapolis-based organizer with the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign. (That's Anderson at center, below, delivering petitions to IPL headquarters in 2012.) "This retirement marks the 500th coal boiler to be retired since the launch of the Club's Beyond Coal campaign in 2010, so we're dubbing this victory the Indy 500."
[Note: Coal plants are made up of one or more boilers, or "units" -- Harding Street has three. With the Aug. 21 announcement that TVA's Allen plant in Memphis will be retired, the Beyond Coal campaign has helped retire 178 coal plants and 503 boilers since the campaign launched in 2010.]
A long-standing tradition at the Indianapolis 500 car race is for the victor to drink a bottle of milk immediately after the race. Below, local volunteers toast the Harding Street victory in downtown Indy.
IPL's August 15 announcement came as the Indianapolis City-County Council was preparing to vote on a resolution urging IPL to stop burning coal at Harding Street by 2020. Resolution 241, which also urged IPL to invest in greater amounts of clean, renewable energy, had 11 co-sponsors, and a majority of council members had pledged to vote yes.
Photo by Alicia Tucker, courtesy of A.L.T.ERNATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY
The measure passed the Community Affairs Committee 4-1 last month, with supporters of the resolution vastly outnumbering opponents at the hearing. Hours earlier, the Sierra Club released a poll showing that nearly 7 in 10 Indianapolis voters supported IPL phasing out coal entirely in Marion County, and for the utility to increase its energy efficiency and use of renewable energy like wind and solar.
Among those who testified at the July hearing was Amber Sparks, below in tan jacket, who lives about three miles from the Harding Street plant. She told the City-County Council how asthma-related illnesses have regularly kept her children home from school, led to about 20 emergency room visits and half a dozen intensive care stays, and thousands of dollars in medical bills.
"Asthma has changed our lives," she said. "We continue to adjust and eliminate as many triggers as possible … but there are some triggers I can't control. On bad air days, the children must stay indoors, limit physical activities, and have round-the-clock breathing treatments. Their quality of life is affected, and it breaks my heart each time they look at me and ask why they have asthma."
Below, clean-air activists at the hearing.
According to the EPA, Harding Street was responsible for 88 percent of the toxic industrial pollution released in 2012 in Marion County. It is also the largest source of dangerous soot and sulfur dioxide pollution in the county, contributing to central Indiana's failing grades for air quality announced earlier this year by the American Lung Association.
Photo courtesy of NUVO News
Over 55 churches, neighborhood associations, student groups, and other organizations comprising the Power Indy Forward Coalition passed resolutions urging IPL to power our city with clean energy and put an end to toxic pollution in Indianapolis. Hoosier Chapter volunteers knocked on doors, talked to people at festivals and on the street, made phone calls, and spoke out at rallies and public hearings about the public health impacts of burning coal.
Above and below, clean-energy activists celebrate IPL's August 15 announcement.
"For the past two years, thousands of Indianapolis residents have demanded clean air for our community," says Jodi Perras, Indiana representative for Beyond Coal. "They've signed petitions and postcards, rallied on the steps of Monument Circle (above) and at the Indiana State Museum, and urged their City-County Councilors to call on IPL to stop burning coal at Harding Street. Today, those calls have been answered."
Photo by Alicia Tucker, courtesy of A.L.T.ERNATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY
Perras gives a shout-out to coalition partners Hoosier Interfaith Power & Light, Citizens Action Coalition, Indiana NAACP, Organizing for Action, Concerned Clergy, and students and faculty at Purdue University Indianapolis and Butler University.


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Misunderstood Photoshop: The Gradient Map Tool
- About the Gradient Map
- Colorizing an Image
- Other Gradient Map Options
In this series, Helen Bradley discusses some handy Photoshop tools that are often overlooked or misunderstood, either because they're hidden away or because their use isn't immediately apparent. Yet these tools provide smart and useful ways to perform various tasks in Photoshop, so they're worthy of adding to your Photoshop skill list.
In this sixth part of the series, we consider the Gradient Map tool, which is useful for converting color images to black-and-white and for colorizing grayscale or color images. It's a handy and fun creative tool for photo editing.
About the Gradient Map
Photoshop offers many ways to convert an image from color to black-and-white. Unlike the other tools, however, the Gradient Map gives you a lot of control over how your image is converted. You also can use the Gradient Map to colorize a black-and-white image or to change the colors in a color image. This all-around tool's interesting features can take you to new heights in your photo editing.
Gradient mapping in Photoshop is applied using an adjustment layer. The Gradient Map adjustment layer alters the image by applying a gradient map to the image. Unlike a gradient fill, which fills an area by using a linear or radiant blend of colors, the gradient map applies the gradient by using the lightness and darkness values in the image as a map for how the gradient colors are applied.
The best way to see how the Gradient Map tool works is to try it out. Here's how to use it to turn a color image into a black-and-white image:
- Open a color image in Photoshop. Display the Layers palette if it isn't already visible (Window > Layers).
- Set the foreground color to black and the background color to white.
- Choose Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map to add a new
Gradient Map adjustment layer. Click OK to select the current settings as those
for the layer. When the Gradient Map dialog appears, notice that the gradient
ranges from the foreground color to the background color—by default, it
uses the current foreground and background colors. Notice too that the color
photograph is now converted to black-and-white (see Figure 1).
Figure 1 The Gradient Map tool uses the current foreground and background colors and applies a gradient across the image. Here, because the foreground and background colors are black-and-white, the image is converted to grayscale.
- To change the gradient effect, click the gradient in the dialog to open the Gradient Editor. On the left side of the gradient is the current foreground color; the color is mapped to the darker areas of the image. On the right is the background color, which is mapped to the lighter areas of the image. The middle color in the gradient is mapped to the image midtones. To change how the colors are mapped, drag one of the indicators (called a color stop) under the gradient to change the gradient.
- The small diamond between two color pointers is the color
midpoint; it can be dragged to the left or right to alter the midpoint
between the colors in the adjacent color stops (see Figure 2). When you achieve
a result that looks interesting, click OK and OK again to apply the newly edited
gradient map to the image.
Figure 2 Using the Gradient Editor, you can alter the gradient by dragging the color stops and the color midpoint indicators under the gradient. As you do this, you can preview the effect of the changes on the image.