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- The base of this table includes side-by-side doors and a functional storage cabinet.
- Glass for the table top is not included.
- Due to the handmade nature of the product, colors and design may vary slightly.
Rectangular Sunflower Dining Table
Every Carved Collection dining table offered by La Fuente Imports is considered a one-of-a-kind work of art, exquisitely hand-carved and hand-painted by the renowned Perla furniture studio of Michoacan, Mexico. Be sure to view the alternate photos for a closer view of the handmade detail in every table. The creative designs and vibrant colors result in an eye-catching addition to almost any home decor, and will surely be cherished for years. Matching chairs are available below, under 'We Also Suggest'.
Please Choose an Item
The Carved Collection is constructed from forests certified and managed under the guidelines set forth by CERTFOR and endorsed by PEFC. Certification requires the implementation of long-term sustainable forest management and harvesting practices that conserve biodiversity, reduce carbon expenditures and respect indigenous cultures.
Helpful Information
Rectangular Sunflower Dining Table
2010-04-15 Thank you so much for all your help!
"Thank you so much for all your help! The table is perfect. The delivery was very fast. Your help via Email was invaluable. Thank you for the personal service."
A devoted fan, Pamela K.; Tomball, TX
Rectangular Sunflower Dining Table
2010-04-06 I just want to let you know my tables came today and they are beautiful and there is nothing wrong with them.
"I just want to let you know my tables came today and they are beautiful and there is nothing wrong with them. It was a pleasure doing business with you."
Marion B.; Colebrook, CT
Rectangular Sunflower Dining Table
2010-03-23 I received the table and it's beautiful.
"I received the table and it's beautiful. Thank you so much for all of your help and I hope you had a wonderful holiday. I have had wonderful luck with La Fuente and will be purchasing again! Thank you again!"
Candy G.; South Berwick, ME
Rectangular Sunflower Dining Table
2010-02-27 Our table arrived early last week and I have to say it is perfect.
"Our table arrived early last week and I have to say it is perfect. It is a perfect match with the rest of our furniture. It arrived in perfect condition and in less time than anticipated. Thank you very much!"
Charles M.; Vienna, VA
Rectangular Sunflower Dining Table
2009-11-29 Hello, Just wanted to drop you a line in telling you how great our table and chairs we ordered from you are.
"Hello, Just wanted to drop you a line in telling you how great our table and chairs we ordered from you are. My wife and I are very pleased. Not only was the set beautiful, the packaging was excellent. We wanted to thank you for your help and your product, and plan to tell our family and friends where they can find you on the web. Thanks again."
Jack and Diane F.; Staten Island, NY
Rectangular Sunflower Dining Table
2009-11-12 Thanks for the lovely tables.
"Thanks for the lovely tables. Everything arrived in excellent condition! The tables are gorgeous and I've gotten several compliments on the quality and style of the tables. Thanks again!"
Earl A.; Wilmington, DE
Rectangular Sunflower Dining Table
2009-11-01 Our table and bench came today.
"Our table and bench came today. We LOVE the table! It is WONDERFUL and fits PERFECTLY in our home! We are SO glad we went with the larger table. We can now sit 10 comfortably and we will be able to eat our meals together again! It exceeded what we expected. The bench is very nice, too, but we were just really bowled over by the table! Thanks so much! It was packed very well, and I just wanted to let you know that our order arrived and we are very happy with it! Blessings to you!"
Amy S.; Sacramento, CA
Rectangular Sunflower Dining Table
2009-09-21 I wanted to let you know how happy I am with my table and chairs!
"I wanted to let you know how happy I am with my table and chairs! They are really beautiful and complete our new house. The ordering process was smooth and the delivery was easy. I loved the updates via email and the ability to check the delivery company's progress to my house. The delivery company was gracious and careful with the order, and the furniture was packaged very carefully. All around great experience! I will look to La Fuente for future furniture (and other cool stuff) needs. Thanks."
Shelly K.; Chico, CA
Rectangular Sunflower Dining Table
2009-08-10 I received my order as scheduled.
"I received my order as scheduled. The shipping company was very helpful. I LOVE LOVE LOVE my new table, nothing like the junk I've seen in my area. Thank you for offering quality items, quickly and reasonably priced! I look forward to doing business with you again in the future."
Lynda H.; Milford, CT
Rectangular Sunflower Dining Table
2009-07-31 The table arrived this morning and it is beautiful.
"The table arrived this morning and it is beautiful. Exactly what I wanted. It is worth more than I paid for it! Placed the table right next to the large windows that face the lake. Will send some pictures later."
Brian H.; Dawsonville, GA
Rectangular Sunflower Dining Table 10
Why Shop at La Fuente Imports?


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Michael Mitchell Gallery does more than support local artists, the King Street art gallery gives back to our community as a whole through their annual series of events, Art for Charity, which benefit various local non-profits. This year's series of fetes will feature gourmet eats and Lowcountry musical talent, and a portion of all art sales will go toward that evening's respective charity.
This year's Art for Charity kicked off with an intimate evening for Michael Mitchell's featured artists, the respective heads of this year's non-profit recipients, and other various VIPs. The light, airy space was awash with sunlight as guests filtered into the cocktail party, and the room was soon buzzing with conversation.
Partygoers circulated around the gallery, checking out all the beautiful works of art before heading for a second or third trip back to the delicious, health-conscious spread catered by Chef Maya Morrill. Guests snacked on roasted beet salad with black wild rice, quinoa, arugula, pistachios and dried cherries, as well as chilled carrot and pumpkin soup with cashew cream and mint, and roasted sweet potato rounds topped with dollops of sriracha cream and arugula.
Everyone ate their fill and grabbed a glass of wine as conversation began to shift toward the first upcoming Art for Charity event, kicking off this Friday, May 11. The fete is open to the public (with a recommended $10) and will feature hors d'oevures by O-Ku and entertainment by Lee Barbour and Ron Wiltrout, and the party will benefit MUSC Children's Hospital.
Other upcoming Art for Charity parties will take place on May 18, May 31, June 1, June 7, and June 8. The featured charities will be, in order, Crisis Ministries, Susan G. Komen Lowcountry Chapter, Roper St. Francis Ryan White Program, Charleston Waterkeeper, and MUSC Hollings Cancer Center. Michael Mitchell Gallery is located at 438 King Street, and was opened by current executive director and John's Island native Michael Mitchell, after the interior designer held a charity pop-up shop in the space.

subset: commoncrawl


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I arrived at TEDxDirigo on September 10 feeling rather less than confident about the state of world. The tenth anniversary of 9/11 — and the awful decade that unspooled from that sky-blue morning — was on my mind.
I was thinking about the 9.1 percent unemployment rate, too, and about President Obama's stirring but ultimately probably impotent speech on the matter earlier that week. I was thinking about Republican obstructionism and science-denying wingnuts and the suddenly all-too-real chance that Rick Perry could be elected president in barely more than a year.
Still, I was hopeful. Maybe a day full of positive and forward-thinking "ideas worth spreading" would be just the tonic to buoy my mood.
The event, held at Portland Stage Company last Saturday, is an independently organized offshoot of the well-known TED conferences — it stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design — which for more than a quarter-century have curated provocative slates of smart and innovative speakers (Bill Clinton, Ray Kurzweil, John Hodgman, Bono) who deliver tightly edited talks for selectively chosen attendees. The TED website proclaims its commitment to the "power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world."
It was easy to have doubts, however. Could a roomful of well-meaning and more-or-less well-heeled liberals, most of whom had plunked down $100 a pop for the privilege of being there, really make a difference in times such as these?
Invoking the 9/11 anniversary, TEDxDirigo organizer Adam Burk said the day's hopeful and thought-provoking exchanges of ideas were meant to be a "counterbalance to fear." But how, exactly?
The speakers on Saturday did little to disabuse us of the notion that we live in a broken world facing existential challenges. We were shown a documentary in which a Sierra Leone civil war survivor describes being forced at gunpoint to kill his best friend's father. We were told of the looming food crisis, with more nourishment needing to be grown for exploding global populations in the next 50 years than was over the past 10,000 years combined — all with less oil, less water, less arable land, and less climate stability. We were reminded of the countless hives of honeybees, balefully and inexplicably dying off.
But TEDxDirigo doesn't promise to change the world. It bills itself as an event that's "fundamentally about making new connections" — among ideas and fields of study and people. Its promise, really, is simply this: "Let's talk and see where this leads us."
In a world where cable-TV shouting and comment-thread trolling have become the dominant modes of discourse, that's something.
We live in a beautiful state. One that affords distance from and perspective on an often-crazy country, one that values independence and quiet reflection. It's a place, according to TEDxDirigo's introductory video, where jobs are hard to find, but where natives "work very hard to stay" and to which from-awayers work "very hard to come."
For nine hours, a sold-out crowd of 300 people, chosen from a pool of applicants, took part in a free and fermenting exchange of ideas meant to explore, as Burk put it, "what Maine is, and what it could be."
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11-01-2012 #5921Mehdib92 Guest
Long time I didn't came on this post !!
I'm looking for the original files for Dirt Showdown (BLES01578). Does anybody have them ?
Thanks !!
11-01-2012 #5922JOshISPoser Guest
i got a message from someone saying that sdat is a pretty "advanced" file. to paraphrase (cause i don't understand much ) is that we can use the ps3 to decrypt the file but then we (devs) have trouble then encrypting the file.
apparently duplex can do it though
11-01-2012 #5923HAVOK7 Guest
any link for scarygirl?
11-01-2012 #5924jsouza2012 Guest
I had already posted earlier...
11-01-2012 #5925BBoy Chrif Guest
11-01-2012 #5926Administrator
- Join Date
- Apr 2005
- Posts
- 25,064
Cleaned up this thread some again, some notes:
- We can do a Sticky thread where only Mods can update confirmed working games/links from this discussion thread, but we would need volunteers to maintain it as I don't have the time myself at all.
- PropJOE I have put live your post HERE, but once again added your site URL below it because you tried to do some lameass "Google XYZ" crap that we don't allow.
I will link the post to our main page article for the DUPLEX fixes tonight, but from now on my recommendation is to simply post the fixes ONLY here and I will add your URL to each post so that they don't get stuck in the moderation queue until a Staff member has time to sift through it daily.
- Others: This is NOT a news thread, please DON'T post Spoofer updates or other crapola here... we have ongoing threads for that stuff, use your brains, find them and post any updates in them if you wish or simply wait for us to do it.
- Most of the people posting appear to be on EU time, and the management here is on US time meaning we work days, get out of work, eat dinner and then have time for the site so unless we get some dedicated EU people to help with a Sticky odds are the same mess will reoccur each day.
11-01-2012 #5927franroad Guest
goodnight friends would want to help me download the game i am alive the catch cfw 3.55 urgently required please
11-01-2012 #5928jejemon123 Guest
the ratchet trilogy fixed eboot works but black screen freezing after you choosing which trilogy you want to play.
jeez people pls before you post any fixed pls test it first fully before you said its working!!
11-01-2012 #5929JOshISPoser Guest
what would the volunteers need to do? i don't quite get what you mean.
11-01-2012 #5930Administrator
- Join Date
- Apr 2005
- Posts
- 25,064
Simple, it would work like this:
We make a new Sticky thread with a single post containing links to all the confirmed working new game fixes ONLY that are scattered about currently, and the volunteers would be the only ones with editing permission to keep updating the post based on user feedback from our discussion thread here.
For normal users, they would have READ ONLY access to the thread, so they could easily see in A-Z organized fashion which are confirmed working and the corresponding links to them.
So to answer: when a volunteer sees a new "confirmed working" game fix posted here, they would simply EDIT the new Sticky we make and add it to the list- that's it.


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Web Stories
Blind survivor of World Trade Center to speak, April 2
Posted March 31, 2003; 06:06 p.m.
Mike Hingson, a blind survivor of the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, will discuss his experience in a lecture at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 2, in McCosh 50. The lecture is part of a series of events for Disability Awareness Week.
Hingson will recount how he and his guide dog walked to safety down 78 flights of the north tower. He also will discuss coping with his disability in his career as a salesman.
Prior to Hingson's lecture, disability rights attorney Lois Krieger will speak at 4:45 p.m. in 205 Frist. Krieger is a senior attorney with the Community Health Law Project, a New Jersey nonprofit legal services and advocacy organization.
In addition, two documentary films will be shown as part of Disability Awareness Week. "Sound and Fury," about a family coping with two deaf children, will be shown at 7 p.m. Friday, April 4, in McCosh 50. "When Billy Broke His Head," a film by journalist Billy Golfus about people with disabilities, will be shown at 7 p.m. Sunday, April 6, in McCosh 50.
The events were organized by the Association for Disability Awareness and Advocacy. They are sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students , the Venture Fund, the Projects Board , the Frist Campus Center, the Department of Sociology and the Department of Near Eastern Studies.
Contact: Eric Quinones (609) 258-3601


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CZECH SCHLEVOGT MALACHITE color GLASS VASE
Click thumbnails for expanded view.
Beautiful Art Deco malachite color glass vase with females and grapes in relief are near the perfection. Made by Riedel Glass for Schlevogt's 1930's INGRID line. Henry Schlevogt took over Hoffman (his father in law" company and worked for several years to develop type of glass that had depth and richness of semi-precious stone like Jade, Malachite and Lapis. In 1934 INGRID line glass was unveiled. It was very successful to compete with Lalique glass in international markets. Signed "INGRID" on black/silver foil label. Although this vase is listed in the book "MOSER - Artistry in glass (pg.90, plate 154 / $350-500), Moser was most likely the exporter of this article after the WWII, but never a manufacturer. Mint condition, no chips, cracks or repairs. Dimension : 5"H, Czechoslovakia c. 1950's. Original (un-retouched) pictures without the bar over the chest available on request, if interested, please email us.
Racine Antique Mall
- Racine, Wisconsin
- View Storefront
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- View Store Policies
Payments Accepted:
Item Details:
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- 1
- Category
- Glass
- Department
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- Art Deco
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- Schlevogt
- Year
- c. 1950's
- Dimensions
- Width: 0 inch
- Height: 5 inches
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- Condition
- As described
- Style
- Art Deco
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- Malachite glass


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what can you do when everybody else over by the water cooler is talking about Lost? You do what you have
to do. First you use the wrench. Then the blowtorch. Then the knife. And, of
course, that doesn't work because . . . because torture
. . . doesn't
work! But how else to get the information? His cell phone - the chip,
the thing, the whatever you call it with all the information
- the SIM card! Of course of course! A horse is a horse, you piece of shit! The
SIM card's not in the phone so it's either up his ass or he swallowed it.
If you're a fan of
24 (Mondays at 9 pm on FOX), you don't have to be told what needs to be
done to save America from a terrorist attack. So in this season's hour 4, when
FBI agent Renee Walker (Annie Wersching) needed information from a former
undercover contact in the Russian mob, she did what any red-blooded American
would do: she put the guy's hand in a vise and cut his thumb off.


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Skip to main content
You may have read about the recent changes with our chapter restructuring. All future events will be managed by the central development team out of our office in Silver Spring MD. We will provide more specific information soon about our upcoming events and how we will be serving you, our events and our communities moving forward.
In the meantime, please contact Denise Borsuk at firstname.lastname@example.com or 301-565-3004 x756. She will serve as the chapter's current point of contact for immediate needs.
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We value your support and look forward to continuing to work with you.
For optimal viewing of PHAssociation.org, please use a standards-compliant browser such as Google Chrome or Firefox.
The information provided on the PHA website is provided for general information only. It is not intended as legal, medical or other professional advice, and should not be relied upon as a substitute for consultations with qualified professionals who are familiar with your individual needs. PHA does not endorse or recommend any commercial products or services.
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The National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD) awarded PHA the Abbey S. Meyers Leadership Award in 2012 for outstanding service to PHA members in advocacy, education and other key areas.


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Of the five big-screen treatments given to Charles Dickens' penultimate novel (including a silent-era one and Alfonso Cuaron's ill-judged MTV-style 1998 update) only David Lean's 1946 version, rightly regarded as a classic, deserves to be remembered.
The newest attempt, plainly a work of good, even great, intentions, won't change that. Newell tips his hat to the master often enough (his opening shot is identical to Lean's) but the adaptation struggles to breathe.
Re-reading the novel a few years ago, I was struck by how extraordinarily funny it often is, but there's no lightness of touch here. The script by David Nicholls, who so brilliantly adapted Blake Morrison's And When Did You Last See Your Father?, is at its best when it reproduces Dickens faithfully - in Mr Hubble's condemnation of children as "naterally wicious", for example, or the rants by Mrs Joe (Hawkins is gone too soon).
But there's a head-spinning period of expository dialogue about three-quarters of the way through, complete with cheesy flashbacks, in which the entire interlocking series of conspiracies is explained, and it quite drains the life from proceedings.
Dickens' novel is "about" so much - class, money, power, betrayal, love, jealousy, loyalty, family - that it's a big ask to shrink it to two hours of screen time. You need to decide which thread you're going to follow and this version tries to have it all. It's an approach better suited to a multi-part TV version; here, it leads to logjams and sudden rushes.
This is not to say it's without merit: it's beautifully shot (though the exteriors are starkly overlit), the production design is fantastic and the matte work, which overlays studio scenes on modern London vistas is mostly effective.
The acting is patchy, though Fiennes is a superb Magwitch, terrifying in the opening, heartbreaking at the end and Robbie Coltrane is suitably inscrutable as Jaggers, the lawyer who knows all and says nothing. But Bonham Carter's Miss Havisham is all camp and mannered eye-rolling, without the sickly tragicomic grandeur she needs to be such a manipulator, and the unforgivably explicit ending betrays one of literature's great mysteries.
It's handsome and steady, but never striking - though it will answer all your questions if you never finished the book.
Great Expectations
Stars: 3/5
Cast: Jeremy Irvine, Ralph Fiennes, Jason Flemyng, Sally Hawkins, Robbie Coltrane Director: Mike Newell
Running time: 126 mins Rating: M (violence and content that may disturb)
Verdict: Patchy acting but handsome look


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Web Stories
Frist hosts summer concert series
Wednesdays, June 16 through July 28, 2010, 4:30 p.m. · Frist Campus Center South Patio
Posted June 9, 2010; 05:57 p.m.
The Frist Campus Center will present seven concerts this summer at 4:30 p.m. on the following Wednesdays on its South Lawn:
- June 16: Prospect Crossing (bluegrass/folk)
- June 23: Alex and Janel (folk/acoustic)
- June 30: Yosi (children's music)
- July 7: Mike Montrey (acoustic rock)
- July 14: Key Wilde and Mr. Clark (children's music)
- July 21: Dave Tucker (acoustic)
- July 28: Joanie Leeds (family pop/rock)
The concerts are free and open to the campus community. Free ice cream will be served. In case of inclement weather, the concerts will take place in the Frist Food Gallery on the A level.


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Read Our FAQs
Call (208) 664-4567 Mon. - Fri. 8 AM - 6 PM PSTSat. 8 AM - 4 PM PST
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Add the 2 pack of Frixion Clicker pens below which combines the convenience of a retractable pen with the incredible, erasable FriXion gel ink! Great for marking embroidery lines. Or add the Micron Pen size 005 (.20mm) in Brown, which is also made for marking embroidery with a narrow, permanent line.
We'll let you know when this collection is available.
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Romulo Yanes
These supremely easy, wonderfully spicy potatoes are delicious with Panfried Pork Chops with Pomegranate and Fennel Salsa.
Leave a Review
Easy, healthy, and tasty. I took this recipe as "inspiration," adding my own flavors to the mix: paprika, cayenne, curry... This is a great, simple side dish that can go with any meal - all you need to do is tweak the flavor profiles and voila! Bound to be a crowd pleaser.
These were good but nothing spectacular. I thought the spice mixture was tasty and unique but the technique and the ingredients did not put this recipe over the top for me. Tried it twice: slicing thin wedges as some reviewers suggested and slicing as stated (1"). Thought the recipe as is with the thicker wedges was the better of the two.
The best sweet potato fries ever! I did use yams personal preference. After cutting the potato in half made about 1/4 inch slices because we like them crispy. Trust me you won't have leftovers
These are yummy! Never got crispy, but that was OK by me. Very easy and tender. I even eat them cold...great flavor! I only did about 1/2 of the pepper flakes because I was feeding these to about 30 adults/kids.
Awesome side dish. These are great with anything and I even ate them cold. I also dipped them in sour cream and yogurt - at different times - tasty. I can see cutting the potatoes thinner and making some sweet and spiced chips. I used olive oil instead and cut down on the hot pepper just a little - flavor explosion. If you like sweet potatoes and some flavor - you will dig it.
Really liked the spice mixture with this recipe. I cut the sweet poatoes a little thinner than recipe suggested - they were done in about 30 minutes. A great way to eat a superfood! I may bake some sweet potatoes soon and sprinkle some of the extra spice mixture in with a little butter to flavor them.
This simple but unique spice mix is perfect for the sweet potatoes!
I made it as described, leaving the skins on, using olive oil and cutting the pieces thinner (maybe 3/4 inch) and they cooked in 30 minutes. I forgot to turn them 1/2 way; I'll try that next time. DELICIOUS, EASY EASY EASY.
The ONLY way to make sweet potatoes, especially for people who don't think they like them. I know; I was one of them. :-) I also double the spices except for the crushed red pepper (same) and the kosher salt (triple). These are just too good to skip, and they go with almost anything. Tonight, it's meat loaf; my husband is delighted.
This sweet potato recipe is a winner! I followed the recipe exactly as written and wouldn't change a thing except move the pan to the top rack in the oven for the last 5 minutes so the potatoes get a little crisp around the edges.


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Oldest Alien Planets Found—Born at Dawn of Universe
|7:22:07 PM, Saturday, March 31, 2012
"(Nat. Geo.) Two huge planets found orbiting a star 375 light-years away are the oldest alien worlds yet discovered, scientists say.
With an estimated age of 12.8 billion years, the host star—and thus the planets—most likely formed at the dawn of the universe, less than a billion years after the big bang.
"The Milky Way itself was not completely formed yet," said study leader Johny Setiawan, who conducted the research while at the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.
During a recent survey, Setiawan and colleagues found the signatures of the two planets orbiting the star, dubbed HIP 11952.
Based on the team's calculations, one world is almost as massive as Jupiter and completes an orbit in roughly seven days. The other planet is nearly three times Jupiter's mass and has an orbital period of nine and a half months.
It's possible the planets are much younger than they seem if the worlds formed long after their star was born—but such a scenario is unlikely, the team says.
"Usually planets form just shortly after the star formation," Setiawan said. "Second-generation planets might also form after a star has died, but this is still under debate."
Ancient Planets Defy Theory
Setiawan and colleagues found the ancient planets using a technique called radial velocity, in which astronomers watch for periodic wobbles in a star's light due to the gravitational tugs of orbiting worlds.
The discovery indicates that planet formation in the early universe was possible despite the fact that stars in existence back then were metal-poor—the astronomy term for stars lacking in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.
In the case of HIP 11952, "its iron abundance is only about one percent that of our sun," Setiawan said.
The idea of planets springing from such a stellar makeup runs counter to a widely accepted theory called the accretion model, which says that heavy elements are needed to form planets.
Even gas giants like Saturn and Jupiter require heavy elements to take shape, the thinking goes, because they are built upon solid cores.
The accretion theory has so far been backed up by observations: Most of the planet-harboring stars discovered to date are relatively young and have moderate to high amounts of metals.
But there may be an observational bias, Setiawan said: Astronomers may think the accretion model is correct because planet hunters have been targeting mostly young, sunlike stars.
"To verify this issue, it is necessary to do a planet-search survey around [older] metal-poor stars," Setiawan said.
Clock Ticking for Oldest Worlds
Despite the newfound planets' longevity, it's unlikely the worlds will survive for another 13 billion years.
The parent star will soon transform into a red giant, Setiawan said, one of the last stages of a sunlike star's life.
During this stage, the star will swell in size and most likely engulf any nearby planets."
Lamborghini Batman is Pulled Over in Maryland
|7:56:09 AM, Saturday, March 31, 2012
"There really should be more Superheroes in the real world, and it seems like this unnamed wealthy philanthropist agrees. He has taken it upon himself to give some sick kids in the hospital a very special visit.
The man was first seen a few days ago, in full Batman regalia, pulled over by Montgomery County Maryland Police. He was standing next to a black convertable Lamborghini Gallardo with yellow detailing, which doubles as this generous caped crusader's Batmobile.
The story that unfolded revealed that he was apparently pulled over because his Batmobile did not have plates on it. He allegedly had the plates in the car, but was unable to make them fit in the Lamboghini's plateholder.
Why he was still in the Batman suit was simply for convenience. The latex outfit is difficult to get in and out of, so he wears it to his appearance and changes out of it at home.
I imagine if I was incredibly wealthy I would have a hot car too. But this guy goes one step beyond, spending his spare time putting a smile on the face of some young unfortunate soul in the hospital. He's a true Batman if there ever was one."
Simulations Unravel Mysteries of 2009 Jupiter Impact
|6:46:34 PM, Friday, March 30, 2012
"(PhysOrg.com) -- During July of 1994, both amateur and professional astronomers were captivated as comet Shoemaker/Levy 9 broke apart and slammed into the atmosphere of Jupiter. While these types of impacts are generally rare, a second impact event occurred fifteen years later in July of 2009. The object responsible for the 2009 impact was not directly observed, so astronomers could only make inferences about the object based on the disturbances in the Jovian atmosphere, as shown in the image above.
New research by Jarrad Pond (University of Central Florida), and a team from the University of Central Florida and University of California, Santa Cruz aims to help determine the object responsible for the 2009 impact on Jupiter. Without a direct observation of the event, the team used numerical simulations in order to better understand the object responsible for the large disturbance of the Jovian atmosphere.
Using three dimensional hydrodynamics code, the team modeled the impacts of eight simulated impactors. The team used impactors of .5 and 1km, with different densities and compositions (basalt or ice). By using the same impact angle (69 degrees) and impact velocity 61.4 km/sec), the team was able to narrow down the potential size and composition of the object responsible for the July 2009 impact…"
-- This is an unusually image heavy article for PhysOrg.com, follow the link for the rest of the article.
Einstein Proved Correct on View of the Universe
|6:35:27 PM, Friday, March 30, 2012
"(telegraph.co.uk) The new test of Einstein's view of the universe has proved him right with ''incredible accuracy'' and is helping scientists to understand the mysterious acceleration of the universe.
A team of cosmologists have announced at the National Astronomy Meeting being held at the University of Manchester, the most accurate measurement ever made from when the expansion of the universe began to accelerate.
It means that the phenomenon can be explained using just Einstein's general theory of relativity and the cosmological constant - the simplest theoretical explanation for the acceleration of the universe.
The results will be used to understand what is causing the acceleration and why, and will shed new light on dark energy - the name adopted for the fundamental agent driving the acceleration about which little is known.
The cosmologists from the University of Portsmouth and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have examined the period between five and six billion years ago when the universe was almost half its present age and made measurements of extraordinary accuracy - within 1.7 per cent.The findings support Einstein's general theory of relativity which predicts how fast galaxies, separated by large distances, should be moving toward one another and at what rate the structure of the universe should be growing.
The conclusions are consistent with the concordance model of a universe that bloomed from the big bang 13.7 million years ago.
Team member Dr Rita Tojeiro said: ''The results are the best measurement of an intergalactic distance ever made, which means cosmologists are closer than ever to understanding why the universe's expansion is accelerating.
''One of the great things about Einstein's general theory of relativity is that it is testable. Our results support the theory and are fully consistent with the notion that constant vacuum energy - empty space creating a repulsive force - is driving the acceleration of the universe.
''These are profound statements that describe the physics of our universe at the most fundamental level.
''Critically, the results find no evidence that dark energy is simply an illusion stemming from our poor understanding of the laws of gravity - Einstein's theory has passed its most stringent test yet at extra-galactic scales.''
The experiment was designed to follow up on an observation made in 1998, when scientists studied the brightness of mighty stellar explosions to deduce that the universe's expansion is, against all odds and against our understanding of fundamental physics, becoming increasingly fast.
The new discoveries are based on work by a collaboration of astronomers from across the globe representing the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), part of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), which is mapping the three-dimensional positions of more than one million galaxies.
Professor Will Percival, head of this team at the university's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, said: ''Dark Energy was only discovered 14 years ago, and there's this feeling that we are still riding the wave of discovery.
''It's a very exciting time to be a cosmologist.''
Meanwhile, Einstein's brain has gone on show as a star attraction at an exhibition of human brains.
Other brains on display at The Wellcome Trust, London, include those of Charles Babbage and William Burke.
The exhibition, Brains: the mind as matter, includes more than 150 objects such as rare images of real brains, artworks, manuscripts, artefacts, videos and photography.
Curator Dr Marius Kwint, art historian and University of Portsmouth lecturer in visual culture, said: ''The exhibition shows how a single, fragile organ has become the object of modern society's most profound hopes, fears and beliefs, and some of its most extreme practices and advanced technologies.
''The different ways in which we have treated and represented real, physical brains open up a lot of questions about our collective minds.
''The brain is the most complex entity in the known universe and the exhibition is a fascinating exploration of how humans have tried to come to terms with this infinitely mysterious organ.''"
World Water Day
|6:08:20 PM, Friday, March 30, 2012
"March 22, is World Water Day, an event established by the United Nations in 1993 to highlight the challenges associated with this precious resource. Each year has a theme, and this year's is "Water and Food Security." The UN estimates that more than one in six people worldwide lack access to 20-50 liters (5-13 gallons) of safe freshwater a day to ensure their basic needs for drinking, cooking, and cleaning. And as the world's population grows beyond 7 billion, clean water is growing scarcer in densely populated areas as well as in remote villages. Collected here are recent images showing water in our lives -- how we use it, abuse it, and depend on it."
-- I know I'm late, but the photos and the message are too good not to share! Follow the link and check them out.
Say Hello to an Extraterrestrial Ocean, the Enceladan Ocean, - and Maybe Extraterrestrial Life
|3:14:09 PM, Friday, March 30, 2012
"(TIME Science) It's hard enough for kids to remember all the known oceans and seas — Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Norwegian, Barents — and now they can add one more to the list: the Enceladan Ocean. The name is lovely, and the place is nifty, but there's not much chance of visiting it soon. It's located on Enceladus, one of Saturn's 66 known moons. While Enceladus has been familiar to us since it was first spotted in 1789, the discovery of its ocean, courtesy of the venerable Cassini spacecraft, is a whole new and possibly game-changing thing.
Enceladus has always been thought of as one of the more remarkable members of Saturn's marble bag of satellites. For one thing, it's dazzlingly bright. The percentage of sunlight that a body in the solar system reflects back is known as its albedo, and it's determined mostly by the color of the body's ground cover. For all the silvery brilliance of a full moon on a cloudless night, the albedo of our own drab satellite is a muddy 12%, owing mostly to the gray dust that covers it. The albedo of Enceladus, on the other hand, approaches a mirror-like 100%.
Such a high percentage likely means the surface is covered with ice crystals — and, what's more, that those crystals get regularly replenished. Consider how grubby and gray a fresh snowfall becomes after just a couple of days of splashing road slush and tromping people. Now imagine how a moon would look after a few billion years of cosmic bombardment by incoming meteors.
When the Voyager probes barnstormed Enceladus in 1982, they found that the moon is indeed covered in ice and being constantly repaved. Vast valleys and basins were filled with fresh, white cosmic snow. Craters were cut clean in half, with one side remaining visible and the other covered over. Most remarkably, Enceladus orbits within Saturn's E ring — the widest of the planet's bands — and just behind the moon is a visible bulge in the ring, the result of the sparkly exhaust from ice volcanoes that trails Enceladus like smoke from a steamship. It's that cryovolcanism that's responsible for the regular repaving.
In 2008, Cassini confirmed that the cryovolcanic exhaust is ordinary water, filled with carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, potassium salts and other organic materials. Tidal pumping — or gravitational squeezing — by Saturn and the nearby sister moons Tethys and Dione keeps the interior of Enceladus warm, its water deposits liquid and the volcanoes erupting. The big question was always, How much water is there? A lake? A sea? A globe-girdling ocean? The more there is and the more it churns and circulates, the likelier it is that it could cook up some life.
The answer to that question finally came this week, thanks to Cassini images of stress cracks known as tiger stripes in the ice on the Enceladan surface. Cassini scientists were particularly interested in a pair of tiger stripes in the moon's warmer polar regions, since they are very deep and comparatively wide and seem to change over time.
The new images revealed that the cracks indeed widen and narrow and do so more than was once thought. The two sides of the cracks also move laterally relative to each other, the same way the two banks of the San Andreas Fault can slide forward and back and in opposite directions. And the greatest shifting, as expected, occurs after Enceladus makes its closest approach to Saturn.
"This new work gives scientists insight into the mechanics of these picturesque jets," says Terry Hurford, a Cassini associate at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "[It] shows that Saturn really stresses Enceladus."
The fact that Enceladus becomes as dramatically distorted as it does is a powerful indicator of just how much water it contains. A watery world, after all, is a flexible world, and for Enceladus to be so elastic, it must contain a very large local ocean or perhaps even a globe-girdling one. Portions of that ocean may be not just bathwater warm but outright hot.
Enceladus is not the only moon in the solar system that is home to such a feature. Jupiter's Europa is even more certain to contain a global ocean of its own. On both worlds, organics plus water plus warmth plus time could be more than enough to get biology going.
"Cassini's seven-plus years ... have shown us how beautifully dynamic and unexpected the Saturn system is," says project scientist Linda Spilker at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The idea that that system might also be a living one has just become a little more plausible."
It Might be 'Snowing Microbes' on One of Saturn's Moons
|9:53:00 PM, Thursday, March 29, 2012
"A NASA scientist says there's a good chance of finding extraterrestrial life inhabiting one of Saturn's tiny orbiting moons.
"More than 90 jets of all sizes near Enceladus's south pole are spraying water vapor, icy particles, and organic compounds all over the place," says Carolyn Porco, an award-winning planetary scientist and leader of the Imaging Science team for NASA's Cassini spacecraft. "Cassini has flown several times now through this spray and has tasted it. And we have found that aside from water and organic material, there is salt in the icy particles. The salinity is the same as that of Earth's oceans."
NASA says the watery jets are erupting through icy cracks in a "vast underground sea" on this moon's surface. And the sea may be home to microbes similar to those found in some of the deepest parts of our own planet's oceans. While there is no direct sunlight reaching beneath the surface, Saturn's own orbit may be creating enough heat beneath the surface of Enceladus to helped create the tiny life-forms.
When filmmaker James Cameron returned from his historic voyage to the bottom of the Mariana Trench this week, he said the virtually unexplored depths reminded him of an isolated lunar landscape.
But since the watery jets of Enceladus are spewing with enough velocity to reach into outer space, astronauts may not even need to make a heralding voyage to Enceladus, or beneath its icy surface.
"It's erupting out into space where we can sample it. It sounds crazy but it could be snowing microbes on the surface of this little world," Porco said. "In the end, it is the most promising place I know of for an astrobiology search. We don't even need to go scratching around on the surface. We can fly through the plume and sample it."
Life's Building Blocks May Have Formed in Dust Around Young Sun
|7:33:28 PM, Thursday, March 29, 2012
"(SPACE.com) The organic molecules that were the building blocks for life on Earth could have formed in the dusty disk that surrounded our sun before the solar system had planets, a new computer model shows. What's more, the study suggests the process would be the same around other stars that acquired planets, which means some of those worlds, too, could be seeded with the pieces necessary for life.
Geophysicist Fred Ciesla and astrobiologist Scott Sandford showed in their computer model how the orbiting dust that provided the raw material for planets, asteroids and comets could have been exposed to the ultraviolet light needed to develop organic molecules.
"The origin of these organics has been a mystery," Ciesla told SPACE.com. "There have been a number of places where they have been thought to have formed, and none are mutually exclusive."
Scientists think Earth and the solar system's other planets were formed around 4.5 billion years ago, in a process that began with tiny grains of dust colliding into each other as they orbited the sun, sticking together, forming chunks of rock and gradually building up more and more mass until gravity took over, pulling the chunks together.
Ciesla, of the University of Chicago, and Sandford, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., built a computer model of this protoplanetary disk of dust grains to test whether organic molecules could have formed there.
Organic compounds include basic molecules such as carbon and nitrogen, as well as more complex forms, such as amino acids and the nucleobases that form DNA and RNA.
Sandford had conducted previous experiments in the lab with sub-millimeter-size dust grains covered in ice. When these are exposed to the photons of ultraviolet light, Sandford found, the photons can break down the molecular bonds in the material, allowing atoms to recombine into more complex molecules.
Scientists were unsure, however, whether enough ultraviolet photons would have penetrated into the early sun's protoplanetary disk to allow organics to form there.
Ciesla and Sandford's model showed this wasn't a problem. In fact, the disk seems to have been dynamic enough that dust grains easily would be lofted onto the outer edges of the disk, where they would be exposed to the ultraviolet light from the sun necessary to form the complex molecules.
"It was exciting for us because it just fell out naturally," Ciesla said. "We didn't have to invoke any special conditions in our model. We just found everything we hoped would work out worked out perfectly."
That means it also should work out well around other stars.
"The dynamics and the processes that we've put in the model here, we don't expect them to be unique to our solar system," Ciesla said. "We expect this to be present in all planet-forming disks."
Still, the fact that organics could have formed in the disk doesn't explain exactly how they got onto Earth. When Earth formed, it would have been a molten mess, with temperatures high enough to destroy any organics present at the time.
However, scientists say organic compounds could have survived on the asteroids and comets left behind in the solar system after the planets formed. As these bodies pummeled the Earth over the eons, they could have deposited the building blocks for life.
The new findings are detailed in the March 30 issue of the journal Science."
Up All Night on NASA's Flying Telescope
|4:30:00 PM, Thursday, March 29, 2012
"The new SOFIA observatory isn't your average NASA project. Engineers took a 30-year old 747 airplane, cut a hole in the side and installed a 17-ton telescope. Most telescopes are either on the ground or somewhere in orbit, but SOFIA falls somewhere in the middle, flying around at about 40,000 feet.
I got the chance to hitch a ride on one of its recent research flights as the plane left Moffett Field at theNASA Ames Research Center. It's definitely not the kind of flight where you get a bag of peanuts and movie.
The researchers take advantage of the nighttime sky, so we left at dusk for 10-hour tour flying zigzags across the Pacific Ocean. Each leg of the journey is carefully calculated so the telescope can pinpoint a far away star. The plane interior is packed with computers and equipment. It also lacks insulation since much of it was removed to install the telescope, so it's both cold and loud inside.
At four in the morning, the astronomers are still hard at work. If they're as tired as I am, they certainly aren't showing it.
"For me, this is very exciting," says Ian McLean, a professor at the University of California-Los Angeles. He usually works on the ground. "All my career has been ground-based astronomy. So, it's only my second flight."
McLean says there's a good reason to do astronomy in the stratosphere. The atmosphere is thinner, which means it's easier for the telescope to see the stars. "It's almost as good as space," says McLean. "Not quite, but almost."
And unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, this telescope lands everyday, which means the scientists can update and fix the equipment. "By the time you get a mission into orbit, the technology you're using is relatively old. Here we can stay state of the art all the time," says McLean. NASA began developing SOFIA in 1997 and almost cancelled the project at one point. It flew its first science mission in November 2010 and now costs about $80 million a year to operate.
Searching for a "Holy Grail"
McLean says the SOFIA telescope could show astronomers something that's considered a Holy Grail in their field: seeing a star being born. It happens in huge, dusty clouds – stellar nurseries, as Mclean calls them. "The cloud is huge, light years across and it's gradually contracting to form a whole nursery of stars."
But there's a problem. Astronomers can't see what's happening inside the clouds because, once again, they're made of dust and it's hard to see through.
"We don't mean dust bunnies, but we mean little, tiny little grains of solid material. Doesn't matter how big a telescope you have, you can't see inside it," McLean says.
That's why SOFIA looks at a special kind of light called infrared light. If you look through a telescope on the ground, you're looking at the visible light from space – the light our eyes can see. Infrared light is invisible to us, but it penetrates space dust, which means the telescope can see through the dust too.
"You get to see what you can't see with your eye. It's like a window has been opened," says McLean. They're looking for exactly how stellar nurseries give birth to young stars. McLean says catching a star as it's forming can reveal clues about how own solar system formed.
But star birth isn't the only thing these researchers want to see. They're also looking at the way stars die.
A Star on the Way Out
As the plane makes as sharp right turn, the telescope focuses on an object called NGC 7027. It's a planetary nebula – also known as a dying star. McLean and his team are capturing an infrared image of the nebula, which is about 3,000 light years away. They can also see what it's made of.
"It has a distinctive shape. It's oval. There's a hole in the middle and that's because it literally is a shell of gas that came off the star," says McLean.
7027 is dying because the star has run out of fuel – the same fate that our sun will face in about five billion years. As it dies, the star casts off its outer layers, shedding huge amounts of material to form a cloud around it. But it's not entirely a sad story.
"It won't be wasted," says McLean. "The material that was thrown off by that star in its dying phase, somewhere, millions, perhaps billions of years from now, will find its way into a new star and the planets that form around it."
From dead stars come new stars – and planets like our own. The oxygen and nitrogen in our bodies were once formed inside a star. "The cosmos is within us," as astronomer Carl Sagan once said. "We're made of star stuff."
As sky begins to lighten, we descend towards the Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in the Mojave Desert, where the plane is based. The SOFIA telescope is now undergoing service upgrades and then will return to the skies three times a week. Astronomers from around the world are lining up to get on board."
Pesticides Hit Queen Bee Numbers
|4:11:37 PM, Thursday, March 29, 2012
"(BBC) Some of the world's most commonly used pesticides are killing bees by damaging their ability to navigate and reducing numbers of queens, research suggests.
Scientific groups in the UK and France studied the effects of neonicotinoids, which are used in more than 100 nations on farm crops and in gardens.
The UK team found the pesticides caused an 85% drop in queen production.
Writing in the journal Science, the groups note that bee declines in many countries are reducing crop yields.
In the UK alone, pollination is calculated to be worth about Ł430m to the national economy.
And the US is among countries where a succession of local populations has crashed, a syndrome known as Colony Collapse Disorder.
Many causes have been suggested, including diseases, parasites, reduction in the range of flowers growing wild in the countryside, pesticides, or a combination of them all.
The neonicotinoids investigated in the two Science papers are used on crops such as cereals, oilseed rape and sunflowers.
Often the chemical is applied to seeds before planting. As the plant grows, the pesticide is contained in every part of it, deterring insect pests such as aphids.
But it also enters the pollen and nectar, which is how it can affect bees.
Dave Goulson from the UK's University of Stirling and colleagues studied the impact of the neonicotinoid imidacloprid on bumblebees.
They let bees from some colonies feed on pollen and sugar water containing levels of imidacloprid typically found in the wild, while others received a natural diet.
Then they placed the colonies out in the field.
'Severely compromised'
After six weeks, colonies exposed to the pesticide were lighter than the others, suggesting that workers had brought back less food to the hive.
But the most dramatic effect was on queen production. The naturally-fed hives produced around 14 queens each - those exposed to the pesticide, just two.
"I wouldn't say this proves neonicotinoids are the sole cause of the problems bees face," said Dr Goulson, "but it does suggest they're likely to be one of the causes, and possibly a significant one.
"The use of these pesticides is so widespread that most bee colonies in areas of arable farming are likely to be exposed to them, so there is potential for them to be playing a significant role in suppression of bee populations on a pretty staggering scale."
The French research group investigated the impact of a different neonicotinoid, thiamethoxam, on the number of bees able to make it back to the colony after release.
Using tiny tags attached to the bees' backs, they showed that significantly fewer insects came back if they had previously been exposed to levels of thiamethoxam that they might encounter on farms.
Calculations showed the impairment was bad enough that the capacity of colonies survive could be severely compromised…"
Fossils Foot Bones Hint at Mystery Walker
|3:56:10 AM, Thursday, March 29, 2012
"(BBC)Scientists have obtained a fascinating new insight into the evolution of humans and our ability to walk. It comes from the fossilised bones of a foot that were discovered in Ethiopia and dated to be 3.4 million years old.
The researchers say they do not have enough remains to identify the species of hominin, or human ancestor, from which the right foot came.
But they tell Nature journal that just the shape of the bones shows the creature could walk upright at times.
The fossil haul consists of eight elements from the forefoot - bones such as metatarsals and phalanges.
The specimens were pulled from clay sediments at Burtele in the central Afar region, about 520km north-east of the capital Addis Ababa.
It is a significant discovery because it demonstrates there was more than one pre-human species living in East Africa between three and four million years ago, each with its own method of moving around.
The other creature was the famous "Lucy" animal (Australopithecus afarensis), whose remains were first identified in the Afar in the 1970s.
Lucy's body was built for walking. Her big toe was aligned with the other four digits of the foot, and she had a human-like arch that allowed for very efficient locomotion.
The owner of the partial foot from Burtele was not afarensis; that can be said definitively.
The fossils indicate it had no arch and the big toe was opposed to the other digits, enabling the animal to grasp branches in a tree.
But the fact this creature could and would walk on the ground is evidenced by the nature of the bone joints. These were arranged such that the foot could push off, or toe-off - something only humans do as they walk, and something flat-footed apes cannot achieve.
"If you look at the lateral metatarsal head along with the proximal toe bone, the phalanx - that particular joint is really unique in hominids," explained team member Dr Bruce Latimer of Case Western Reserve University, US.
"You can see it's a very different kind of a joint, because when you toe-off and push forward in that last phase of walking, your toes are highly flexed. In order to achieve that, you have to change the base of the phalanx and the metatarsal head - you have to change both sides of the joint. And it's a highly characteristic type of change that we can pick out immediately," he told the BBC.
The scientists can only speculate as to identity of the Burtele species. Without skull and teeth elements, a formal classification is impossible.
The team says the animal's morphology is reminiscent in some respects to a 4.4-million-year-old creature known as Ardipithecus ramidus. Although, again, it is not ramidus.
"It may be a relic species that was lingering around until 3.4 or 3.3 million years ago, and which had its origins way back in Ardipithecus ramidus times," suggested team leader Dr Yohannes Haile-Selassie.
"But obviously we cannot put it into the Ardipithecus genus or call it a ramidus species because we do not have any craniodental elements associated with this foot.
"We've kept digging at the Burtele site; we have a few isolated teeth, but that's all," the Cleveland Museum of Natural History curator told BBC News.
It is, though, a remarkable thought that there were these two very distinct species effectively rubbing shoulders with each other 3.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia.
The landmark Lucy specimen unearthed in 1974 was found at Hadar, about 50km from Burtele. Other remains of afarensis have been discovered closer still.
Dr Isabelle De Groote is a palaeoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum.
"I think this is really exciting," she said.
"We have so few foot remains, they so rarely preserve, that we tend to take great leaps through evolution where there are no specimens at all representing long periods of time," she commented.
"This new foot helps elucidate the process of how the bi-pedal foot evolved. We can see something of the sequence in how changes to bones occurred.""
NASA Probe Offers New View of Mercury: an Alien World Right in Our Back Yard
|12:34:22 AM, Wednesday, March 28, 2012
"The overheated, underappreciated runt of the solar system is finally getting some attention.
Mostly ignored since a brief fly-by in the 1970s, Mercury, our solar system's smallest, swiftest planet, received a longer house call last March: NASA's $450 million Messenger probe, which achieved orbit, a tricky feat never before attempted.
Now, after poring over 100,000 images and reams of other Messenger data, space scientists have achieved consensus: Mercury is one weird world.
It is radically unlike the other rocky bodies of our solar system — Venus, Mars, Earth, the moon, and the moons of other planets. Its core is too big; its surface too scrunched. It looks shriveled, like a liposuction patient left with too much skin. It contains too much iron. Its internal structure — how the planet is built — is confounding. Its magnetic field is out of whack, asymmetrical. And its surface is strange, a jagged, ragged landscape of soaring escarpments, snaking faults, half-buried "ghost craters," dead volcanos and mysterious pit-marked "hollows."
"It's been really spectacularly baffling," said MIT's Maria Zuber, of the Messenger data, which scientists reported on in two scientific articles and 57 presentations at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference last week.
Mercury was long viewed as an inert lump, but Zuber and her colleagues now say it is still cooling and still shrinking, pushing up scarps — steep cliffs — that run for hundreds of miles. Not long ago (geologically speaking), volcanoes threw up showers of magma, which hardened into huge plains. There's also evidence of mysterious explosions of interior gases that rocked the surface and left strange, pitted scars.
Massive interior forces have pushed and tilted huge stretches of the surface. Mercury's biggest crater — the Caloris Basin, some 900 miles wide — has been so uplifted that much of its floor is taller than its rim. No other crater in the solar system looks like it.
"Everything is intriguing on the surface of Mercury," said Nancy Chabot of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, which built Messenger. "It has landforms that we've never seen on the rest of the terrestrial planets."
Mercury might even experience Mercury-quakes. "I would bet some of those faults are still active," said Messenger's lead scientist, Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution for Science.
And despite being the closest planet to the sun, it apparently has buried water ice surviving beneath permanent shadows thrown by craters. "We're almost certain of it," Solomon said.
'Back to the drawing board'
Just how Mercury was formed is another baffler. It is heavy with iron and sulfur — much more than Earth contains. But all of the rocky inner planets coalesced from the same disk of material. So why is Mercury so strange? "It's like children in the same family," Zuber said. "Same genes, same environment, yet they turn out so different."
Some theorists say a giant space rock smashed into Mercury early on, ripping off a thick outer layer. But Messenger data throw that theory into chaos. Sulfur and other "volatiles" survive on the surface; a huge collision should have wiped them clear…"
African Women And A Western Woman Compare Breasts
|3:37:52 PM, Monday, March 26, 2012
This is a kind of lovely example of how different cultures are, and yet how similar individuals are no matter where they're from.
-- Follow the link for the rest of the photos. =)
The Sonixx – You Don't Like Me
|3:13:14 PM, Monday, March 26, 2012
You don't like me - The Sonixx (official music video) from Brokenwood Prod on Vimeo.
'Flying Plankton' Escape Predatory Fish
|11:35:35 PM, Thursday, March 22, 2012
"(BBC) Tiny shrimp-like creatures called copepods break through the ocean's surface and leap through the air to escape predators, US scientists say.
They have been investigating how the brightly-coloured Pontellid copepods, which live close to the surface, are so abundant yet so conspicuous to fish.
Writing in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the scientists say copepods travel further in air than in water.
Predators are also left confused about where they will land, they say.
Almost all commercially important fish, including cod, pollock and whiting, feed on copepods.
There are reports from the late-19th Century of copepods breaking through the water surface but observers at the time thought this was to allow them to moult.
A later report proposed jumping was part of an escape from predators but was not confirmed.
Dr Brad Gemmell of the University of Texas in Austin, who is behind the new study, said there had been little research on predator-prey interaction around the few millimetres below the ocean's surface, a "unique and important habitat".
He said he found it "paradoxical" that Pontellid copepods, in particular, were so abundant yet lived where they ought to be an easy target for fish.
Unlike other species of copepods, they do not migrate down to darker waters where they can hide during daylight hours.
Instead, they stay close to the surface and are often bright blue or green to protect them from UV radiation. They are also 3mm (0.1 inches) long, larger than other species.
This, said Dr Gemmell, would suggest they should have a poor survival rate.
However, his research shows they have the ability to jump out of the water, often travelling 10 to 20 times their own body length through the air, to escape hungry fish and get out of their perspective field.
The team's calculations show copepods use up to 39% of their kinetic energy to break through the surface tension of the water. Flying fish, by comparison, use less than 0.07%.
This means copepods have to balance the risk of being eaten with the cost to their fitness by avoiding unnecessary escapes, the paper suggests.
They also have to make sure they travel far enough to avoid being chased or coming under another attack.
It is suggested in the paper that certain species of copepods may have special adaptations to make it easier for them to jump out of the water, although further investigation is needed.
One suggestion is that the body surface of jumping copepods is more resistant to water than species that stay underwater.
Another is that they are able to inject chemicals to reduce the surface tension of the water by three to six times."
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Yah, there should be an apostrophe at the end of "users" in my article reply. Oopsies.
Spent a couple of hours today trying to figure out why apache mysteriously stopped after an upgrade. AFAICT, I needed to have the order of two statements switched in httpd.conf. Very confusing. The worst part was that it was completely silent when dying. Ah well, fixed now.
I have now learned to use apt_preferences to pin packages at certain releases. Now I need to code up a cron job to figure out when those are updated, so I can schedule a mass-upgrade session.
I pinned both apache and exim, since I've had problems with both in the recent past(both config file things!), and I'm trying to run a pseudo-production server here. Hmm, I should pin mailman too. [done]. Nothing else is as critical as those packages.
Update: there were(are?) still some problems with my apache configuration. I got images working again, and allowed IDS to be executed. Bah, I say. Does anybody know exactly WTF happened to make apache so unhappy with me? Did it suddenly start obeying some guidelines that it was ignoring before?


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Resilient Design: Building Green Means Building to Last
January 17th, 2012 | by Chris Keenan
Some people, when they look at how to design a home that is "green," and efficiently uses resources, often look back to the days of old, when houses were built to last as well as with a consciousness of the environment in which one lives. Many terms these "resilient homes." They are built to stand the test of time and be efficient in their use of resources


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the art of memorization
I read a book about human memory and memory techniques. Quite interesting and as an association of that memory I will in this post try to describe a nifty memory trick you can do in stack based prolog like engines.
The task is to make a kind of variable that behaves just like a variable but at a memorization of the current state these are automatically stored. We should try to not store too much information so we will need to have some mechanism that free memory in gc and selectively store stuff according to some intelligent scheme.
So let's start with a basic building block.
(define-syntax with-guarded-states
(lambda (x)
(syntax-case x ()
((_ guard ((s v) ...) code ...)
#'(let ((s v) ... (fr #t) (done #f))
(letrec ((guard (mk-guard *current-stack* fr done guard s ...)))
(lambda ()
(set! fr #t)
(set! done #t)
(lambda ()
(set! done #f))))
(lambda (x) (set! fr #f))
(let () code ...)))))))
with-guarded-states take a name for a guard and associate that with a set of variables
s ... with initial values
v .... The guard is active in the code section and it is a function that is used to set the variable
s ... in the wanted manner. in the code we first initiate the variables with the initial value and initiate to flags fr, and done. we then define a guard function with the helper macro mk-guard which semantic will be described later. Then the function put's a dynwind
dyn on the prolog stack. a dynwind has essentially two functions, one that is executed when the stack is reinstated and one where the stack is unwinded. Here at unwinding the fr flag is set to #f and at rewinding e.g. recalling a state, fr is set to #t and done is set to #t and we push a setup hook that set done to #f. The setup hook is called after the winding have been finished. the code is then executed in a let environment meaning that we are allowed to start the code with a set of defines. Anyway done is used to make sure we will update just ones if there is a sequence of guards evaluated and fr will mark that we are in the frame of the guarded variables and done will mark that we are hitting the first guarded set! in a wind/unwind.
the mk-guard is essentially the following
(lambda (ss ...)
(let ((so s) ...)
(set! s ss) ...
So the generated guard will take the new data
ss ... and then store the old state in
so ..., then set the variables with the new data in
(set! s ss) ... and push a dynwind on the stack that represents the memorization of the setting of the variables.
essentially when passing the dynwind in a unwind we will restore the old value, and when passing in a rewind we will restore the new value.
The rewind code and the unwind will be described next, we use,
(if (and (gp-wind-ref p) (not done))
(set! done #t)
(push-setup p
(let ((ss s) ...)
(lambda ()
(set! done #f)
(if fr
(guard ss ...)
(begin (set! s ss) ...)))))))
(set! s so) ...))
So here we see the done flag in action, if done is false e.g. it hits the variable for the first time then it will try execute the if, also we need gp-wind-ref to be true, e.g. we are saving the variable values, the if just marks done as #t so we will not do this again if we enters a new guarded set for the same variables. Again we push-setup e.g. put a hook to be executed at the finishing of the wind/unwind. so we store the current variables in ss, the lambda then will undo done and put it to #f, ready to be used at the next wind/unwind, it will then check if we are in the frame of the variable, if so we will make a new guard setting the s to the stored ss. If we have left the frame we will set the s, the net effect is that we have kept the initial value of the guarded variables intact but been able to correctly add, if needed, a guarded to do the correct transformations of the variable if we unwind or rewind over the new guard, in case of leaving the frame of the variables we have still kept the variable value, in case the there are no references to the variables all data will be reclaimed at perhaps the next gc. After the if part is done we simple restore to the old value so.
The code for the wind is very similar, again we will make sure to just execute the first encountered guard. The difference is that fr will always be true here. Also gp-wind-ref will flag if we shall keep the value of the special variable, or if we shall restore the old value. There is a problem with the previous code though one need to make sure not to grow the number of guards as one reinstate the new value, this is an optimization not solved yet, but the wanted semantic should be correct. A solution would be to at re-instation overwrite the last guard/wind refering to the variables to the new one or add a new one. Another optimization is to make sure that we do not add a null guard e.g. one that does not change anything. The deficiencies shown at winding back the stack does not look that good, but in practice the rewind is followed by a unwind what essentially keep the number of guard to say 1 or 2.
So this works pretty well it is not perfected but still a quite cool feature if one does not restore data to the same state to often without backtracking over the guard constructs.
Have fun!


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- Taken by
- Thomas Hayden
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- 1
- Size
- 0.10 Gigapixels
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- 1429
- Date added
- Mar 22, 2010
- Date taken
- Mar 17, 2010
- Gear
Canon PowerShot S5IS
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- Description
Shot with a borrowed Canon G10. Thanks, Trappe. Beautiful day for a ride through the Gorge. Practice for Grand Canyon GigaView. Not a bad start.
Grand Canyon GigaView is a new school virtual tour of the Grand Canyon created with a collection of GigaPan images taken on a private rafting trip in April 2010 and geolocated in Google Earth. Explore the journey grandcanyongigaview.tumblr.com /
Search for it here on GigaPan.org or dive into the day by day trip report at the link above. Enjoy & please share with your networks!
Thanks for your interest in my work.
Thomas Hayden
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GigaPan Stitch version 1.0.0805 (Windows)
Panorama size: 96 megapixels (17636 x 5464 pixels)
Input images: 84 (14 columns by 6 rows)
Field of view: 116.4 degrees wide by 36.1 degrees high (top=9.4, bottom=-26.7)
Build panorama at 50% scale (loses detail)
Use larger blending region
Original image properties:
Camera make: Canon
Camera model: Canon PowerShot G10
Image size: 4416x3312 (14.6 megapixels)
Capture time: 2010-03-18 01:00:50 - 2010-03-18 01:06:38
Aperture: f/8
Exposure time: 0.0025
Focal length (35mm equiv.): 142.3 mm
Digital zoom: off
White balance: Fixed
Exposure mode: Manual
Horizontal overlap: 43.9 to 51.2 percent
Vertical overlap: 49.4 to 56.3 percent
Computer stats: 3002.45 MB RAM, 2 CPUs
Total time 21:54 (16 seconds per picture)
Alignment: 4:31, Projection: 1:50, Blending: 15:33
(Preview finished in 12:05)


text: hink you've gotten all of the surprising Star Wars news you can handle this year? Well brace yourself for more! Diamond Select Toys will offer an exclusive variant of their vinyl Jawa bank at C2E2, the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo, this weekend! That's right, only 250 have been made, and they're all in Chicago right now!


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Web Stories
Chapel Choir to perform 'Serenade to Music,' April 5
Posted April 3, 2003; 04:59 p.m.
The University Chapel Choir will perform Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Serenade to Music" at 8 p.m. Saturday, April 5, in the University Chapel.
Admission is free. For more information, contact Penna Rose .
Contact: Eric Quinones (609) 258-3601


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Universal Fit
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Build to provide max bass and max treble the twistjax were intended to replace my battered Sony ex75 in ears. They are the same build with a plug in ear with an acoustic bass chamber for hammering the soft tissue of the outer ear. The bass chamber is made of "acoustic steel" which gives a very solid look. At first the highs and lows are amazing and you hear pumpy basses with sparkling...
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In-ear stereo headset Introducing HiDefDrum +Microphone™ by Atomic Floyd™ HiDefDrum are the headphones for music lovers with something to say. These mini works of art pair World Class acoustics with dual-filter technology, so every note you hear and every word you speak is pitch-perfect. Good looking, great sounding, clear talking. Welcome to the New State of Sound.
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Prop 2 could change the way city council raises taxes
SPOKANE, Wash. - The way Spokane's City Council raises taxes could soon change. If Proposition 2 is approved by voters on February 12th, a super majority would be needed to increase taxes or a 5-2 vote. Right now it takes a simple majority, or 4-3.
"I think their goal is to kill government, and their goal is to grind it into the ground," City Council President Ben Stuckart said of the proposition creators.
Stuckart says Proposition 2 is not an issue Spokane voters brought forward. He says it came from westside politicians trying to push their agenda.Prop 2 could change the way city council raises taxes
"I haven't heard a single citizen in the past two years ask for this proposal, but then they've been bringing this to cities all over," Stuckart said. "They're bringing it to Yakima, they've brought it to Pierce County."
Chris Cargill is with the Washington Policy Center, a Seattle-based think tank with offices in eastern Washington. They support the proposition submitted by council member Nancy McLaughlin.
"This may be a controversial idea to some politicians who want to raise taxes, but it's not a controversial idea to the citizens of Spokane," Cargill said.
Cargill also argues it doesn't kill the tax-raising process.
"It doesn't make tax increases impossible, it says work together to find a way to make sure you're looking at efficiencies first," he said.
Although it's technically non-partisan, the current council is comprised of four right-leaning council members and three left-leaning. Many of the recent votes come down to a 4-3 vote. If Prop 2 passes, at least one member would have to compromise.
Stuckart argues, a super majority has never been a problem while raising taxes. The only recent exemption, he says, is when they tried to raise property tax one-percent to fund Fire Station 9.
"There's not a single example in 20 years of a tax that would've been affected by this charter change," Stuckart said.
Cargill says the state legislature already has a super majority standard when raising taxes, and Spokane should follow.
"That's all this is asking is that you present a better plan, and that you require consensus among council members, before increasing that burden," Cargill added.
Ballots must be postmarked by February 12th.
- 4 Things To Know For Tuesday, April 25
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- City working to fill potholes despite poor road conditions
- Wrongful death lawsuit over case of Brenda Thurman still unresolved
- Post Falls company under fire for racist image


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You could earn up to $2600 a year by working while at Grand Valley, reducing your reliance on loans. Most students find it possible to work 10-15 hours a week and still maintain their academic and social life. Working helps you organize your time, teaches you discipline, and provides you with references to help you in your future career goals.
Both are simply jobs that you find to help pay your expenses while attending college.
Work-study is a federal or state program that reimburses employers part of the cost of paying student employees. You qualify by filing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and demonstrating financial need.
Student employment is considered a Grand Valley student employee. The office that you work for does not receive a reimbursement for your wages.
You must apply for a job, and satisfy the employer's requirements to be hired and retained. You receive a paycheck every other week and are responsible for using the money for educational expenses.
Whether you have student employment or work-study, once you have a job and begin working you will receive a paycheck every other week. Your earnings are NOT applied to your bill as a credit.
Visit the Student Employment website for more information on searching for jobs online.


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You emailed your family and friends a link to Jill's post on reusable wrapping paper alternatives. You wore your "Wrapping Paper Sucks!" pin everywhere you went for weeks before Christmas. Yet here you are, stuck with mounds of clawed, crushed and crumpled paper. Not to worry, below are 5 great ways to turn all that trash into shredded treasure.
1) RECYCLE IT: Before you do anything else, check your local recycling policy because 'used' paper is accepted in most city recycling programs. Shredding before recycling is one option, and if you have a manual shredder, you use no electricity.
2) COMPOST IT: Shredded paper is a great starter component for that vermicompost you always wanted to try, but which gave you the creepy crawlies. As one blog commentator wrote, "I use [shredded paper] in my worm composting bin. They love it and then the castings are great for the garden, house plants, even as a type of fertilizer for your yard." Something to jot on your list of New Year's resolutions.
3) STUFF IT: When shredded, gift-wrapping paper makes a great packaging tool. This of course means you would have to save the stuff for the next time you're snail-mailing a delicate gift cross-country to grandma. You can also use it to return that sagging bean bag chair to its original, more rounded, shape.
4) MUSH IT: Make papier mache masks! What kid wouldn't love his or her very own personalized mask? And it's easier than you think. All that is required is equal parts flour, water and imagination. If the idea of a mask spooks your kid, make a papier mache bowl instead. Painted Fish Studio has a great tutorial.
5) PET IT: When minced into tiny bits, discarded paper makes great bedding for small pets. I've been doing this for over a year now, and our pet bunny couldn't be happier. It does absorb less than store-bought bedding, does not contain deodorizers and so will require more frequent changes.
If all else fails, you can go the route of this resourceful recycler: "I stuff torn pantyhose and knee highs with shredded paper, spray with Febreze [or Mrs. Meyers] and stuff this into my kids' stinky sneakers!" But I'd suggest a quick Google search first.
13 Responses to "The wrap-up on holiday wrapping paper"
Um, how about just reusing it? If you don't tear it to shreds, its actually quite reusable. My family has been doing it for years now.
" "I use [shredded paper] in my worm composting bin. They love it and then the castings are great for the garden, house plants, even as a type of fertilizer for your yard."
Wrapping paper would NOT be good for worms! All those inks, and lacquer gloss varnishes, and the metallics….no no no! They say to use newspaper for worms…but p[lease don't use wrapping paper.
I have a friend who spins used tissue paper and newspaper in yarn!
Um, how about just reusing it? If you don't tear it to shreds, its actually quite reusable. My family has been doing it for years now.
Great idea Adam. I only got to do this with one sheet of paper this year. Kids tend to enjoy that rrr-ripping sound as they reveal each wrapped present. And Mary Ann is correct. Though I have not come across any facts stating that dyes are harmful to worms, it it best to err on the side of caution. The same hold true for pets. If your wrapping paper is of the plasticized, gilded or otherwise 'unnatural' variety, keep it away from animals..
Even if I have not got a use for waist paper I get in the habit of soaking in water squishing into a pulp and tossing in the recycle bin.
Unlike shredders it uses no electricity!
Wow what a great selection of crafts you can do with paper shreds. I have been researching composting and paper shredding and you have given me more ideas on what to do with those shreds of paper. Thanks.
Um, how about just reusing it? If you don't tear it to shreds, its actually quite reusable. My family has been doing it for years now.
I didn't buy wrapping papers or boxes at all this year because we've been reusing wrapping papers for three years now. The ones that really get torn can be shredded but if you carefully unwrap them, they can be reused year after year. I also include a little message on the gift tags to reuse the wrapping paper so the recipients also get the message to recycle.
This year I tried a little furoshiki as an alternative to gift-wrapping with paper. I bought bargain-priced Christmas fabric after Christmas at sales, and saved it with the intent of wrapping gifts this year. I looked online for ways to wrap that would keep the gifts from coming undone.
Only did a few gifts that way, but the people who received those gifts were admiring and appreciative. I still have lots of paper leftover, which I re-use, along with ribbon, whenever I can each year. My family used to reuse paper over the years. There is some that is decades old! Happy memories when wrapping with "old" paper.
if you put your own pictures on it and make personalized wrapping paper then you can re-use it for scrapbooking or even make thank you cards with the scraps


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Jamgön Kongtrul Lodrö Taye (1813–1899) was one of the most influential figures and prolific writers in the Tibetan Buddhist world. He was a founder and the single most important proponent of the nonsectarian movement that flourished in eastern Tibet… Read More
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Galizia was the Maltese Gothic Revivalist of the 1860s onwards. According to one source, his government service began when he was apprenticed at 15 to the Superintendent of Public Works, William Lamb Arrowsmith ("Malta Family History"); according to another, he was "educated at the Malta University" (Obituary 385). Perhaps he managed both. At any rate, he rose to become the Chief Government architect in 1860, and the Superintendent of Public Works in 1880. In the latter position, he was aided by his Clerk of Works, Lincolnshire-born Webster Paulson, who had previously been E. M. Barry's Clerk of Works for the Royal Opera House, Valletta. According to Galizia's obituary, "Many public buildings scattered throughout Malta and Gozo testify to his architectural ability, which was recognised by his election as a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects" (386). — Jacqueline Banerjee.
- The Carmelite Church, Balluta Bay, Malta (1877)
- Our Lady of Lourdes, Mgaar Harbour, Gozo (1888-93)
- Victoria Gate (1884-85)
- Houses in the Moorish Style
- The Addolorata Chapel and Cemetery, Paolo, Malta
- The Turkish Cemetery, Marsa, Malta
"Malta Family History." Viewed 15 March 2010.
Obituary. Proceedings of ICE (Institution of Civil Engineers). Vol. 169: 385-6.
Last modified 5 June 2016


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it should work i thought? also can you not just wait & see if there are any left over tags for the season you applyied for??? & if there is more then plenty tags left just waste your drawn tag & get a late season tag dont feel bad many hunters dont go hunt there drawn season for 1 reason or another you are paying 3-4 times what a resident will pay so you should be able to hunt when you want to???
MN NE KS all must be tied for 2nd but 1 day all


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Cake mix, purchased frosting and candies create an easy-to-do music-lover's cake.
Create an attractive display by covering a piece of sturdy cardboard with wrapping paper, then plastic food wrap. Stretch and secure with tape. Or cover cardboard with foil or cooking parchment paper.
Cut cake to form guitar body. Cut 9x2-inch strip for guitar neck. Arrange guitar and neck piece on tray and decorate.
This cake can be frosted using 1 container of frosting. If you like a generous amount of frosting, you may want to have another container on hand.
Freezing the unfrosted cake pieces keeps crumbs in check so they won't get into the frosting.
© 2017 ®/TM General Mills All Rights Reserved


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Hey guys, welcome back. Wow, what a game in New York last weekend! You hear it all the time, but it really is hard to win on the road in this league and I am so proud of our defense for their performance against the Jets; that was awesome. I feel like our offense is right there, we just have to get over that hump and get on a roll, which I think we will really soon.
I mentioned last week how I wanted to cover the topic of hunting this week in the blog. I know that hunting in all of its variations is immensely popular across the state, and that soon enough Lambeau Field will be filled with blaze orange hunting suits on Sunday afternoons. Whether it's deer, pheasants or turkeys it seems like people across the state love to get out and track game, regardless of the temperatures.
My favorite places to go hunting – or attempt to go hunting – are the Pembine and Crivitz areas in the northern reaches of the state. These areas rank up there for me because they remind me so much of home. As we've discussed previously in the blog, there are plenty of times when you can find the best attractions in the most unexpected places, with Pembine and Crivitz being perfect examples. The Peshtigo River has a great stretch of continuous rapids on which I've thoroughly enjoyed whitewater rafting.
Every year I try and take a day or two in between my busy practice schedule and games to go with teammates and friends on a two-hour journey to the Northwoods. As some of you might know, most hunting stories are always dramatically exaggerated from reality, but one of my favorite stories surrounds more of the composite failure of the hunt than any great triumph.
A few years ago, my buddy Tony Moll, along with a few other of my former Packers teammates, planned a guys-only turkey hunt on a friend's property in Pembine. The camaraderie and company of the trip was awesome, and we actually turned the whole thing into more of a mini vacation than an actual hunting trip. We were able to get in a round of golf, and even some time out on the water to go fishing in a span of 36 hours. I think that speaks to our overall dedication to the hunt.
Sad as it may seem, during our day-and-a-half hunting trip, we didn't see a single turkey, which really isn't surprising when I think back on the amount of noise we made in the woods. On the way home, the ironic part was that we saw a large group of turkeys near my house in Howard and we all looked at each other and thought, "What was the point of driving all the way up there when the turkeys were right here in our backyard?"
I think the best laugh we had on that trip was when Jason Spitz, the self proclaimed best shot on the team, thought he was going to impress all of us as "Mr. Turkey Hunter" and try to get one on his own. He woke up at 5 a.m., hours before the rest of us, and ended up returning to the cabin covered in ticks. It seemed like we spent more time digging ticks out of his hair and clothing than we did in the woods hunting turkeys that day.
As I said, the Pembine and Crivitz areas are great places to not only go hunting, but to spend a weekend vacationing. The people in the northern part of the state are down to earth and are always welcoming to visitors.
I also have to share a story from my younger days that shows my whitetail deer hunting expertise. I went with Craig Brandl and Ray Seefeldt, the father of a high school friend of mine who was a serious hunter. At the end of the day, I was getting tired and bored from not seeing any deer, and decided it would be a good idea to take one shot at a squirrel that had just run by. Sure enough, I missed. Judging by the sound of the gun shot, Ray arrived at the hunting cabin later that day and told all the guys that I had shot at a monster buck. To this day, I haven't had the heart to tell him that I was shooting at a squirrel. When I arrived back at the hunting cabin they all asked me how big the buck was, and because I was embarrassed to tell them the truth, I said, "Oh yeah, it was huge, but it was about 200 yards away, and I just missed him."
Truth be told, the northern parts of Wisconsin are quality hunting grounds for all sorts of game – turkeys, whitetail deer, and bears among other animals. I think the real reason hunters travel hours and hours to Wisconsin's Northwoods is more for the camaraderie with family and friends, and a sense of escape and tranquility rather than taking home a monster prize. Anyone who has been on that sort of trip can relate to what I am talking about.
All right, that is going to do it for this week's entry, hopefully some of you hunters and prospective hunters out there enjoyed the read. Next week, I'll delve into a behind the scenes look at Lambeau Field. Until then, wish us luck against Dallas.