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In the Press
"For most regulars, bars are places we go to relax, without any compulsion to show off. But some go to bars to unleash hidden talents." |
"Stephen can be found in any number of the local pubs, some known, and some unknown, some historical, and some fairly new. He will bring his camera, his sketchbook, and his Pantone color swatch book and settle into the area with the best lighting to drink and draw." |
"There's a rich history to New York bars, something very compelling to me. If you can find something that speaks to you as an artist, then that's half the battle." |


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Looking for an Au Pair in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania?
With over 30 years of experience, EurAupair was one of the first au pair programs to become designated by the U. S. Department of State to legally sponsor au pairs to come to the United States, and has placed tens of thousands of au pairs across the country including Montgomery County.
EurAupair is an affordable child care option, making it a real value for such flexible, loving, in-home care. And, unlike other forms of child care, the fee is for children of all ages, and per family - not per child.
Local Support from EurAupair Community Counselors
Following the receipt of your application form, a local Community Counselor from Montgomery County will be assigned to your family. The Community Counselor is available to answer any questions and provide assistance to both you and your au pair throughout your year together.
"Being a Community Counselor is very rewarding, sharing with young people and their customs, getting to know different countries, bonding with each au pair and staying in touch for years to come." from Community Counselors Ingrid & Don Grill.
Some examples of monthly au pair meetings in the area include: Graeme Park, The Highlands, Lorimer Park, Aldie Mansion, Shady Brook Farm, miniature golf, shopping, meeting for coffee.
Education for your Au Pair
U.S. government regulations require that au pairs be provided with opportunities for cultural and educational enrichment. Au pairs must complete 6 units of academic coursework at an accredited, post-secondary institution.
Here are some institutions in the area your au pair may consider:
Local Activities for your Au Pair and your Child(ren)
Transportation Information
Useful Information for your Au Pair
Looking for an Au Pair in Allentown, Altoona, Bethlehem, Bryn Mawr, Doylestown, Lancaster, Malvern, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, State College or another state ?

subset: commoncrawl


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Fri, 27 Sept
|Ogdon Court
Social Dining - St Anns
Join us for an affordable meal and a chat Menu: Pork chop and vegetables Pudding and custard
Registration is Closed
See other eventsTime & Location
27 Sept 2019, 12:30
Ogdon Court, Beecham Ave, Nottingham NG3, UK
About the event
Sycamore Dining provide social dining at Ogdon Court on the 4th Friday of every month. We only charge £3 for a cooked two course meal. Our meals do need to be booked at least two days in advance, and you need to tell us if you have any dietary needs.
Social Dining
£3.00Sale ended
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Dr Karin von Hippel
Dr Karin von Hippel became Director-General of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) on 30 November 2015.
Karin von Hippel joined RUSI after serving for nearly six years in the US Department of State as a Senior Adviser in the Bureau of Counterterrorism, then as a Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, and finally, as Chief of Staff to General John Allen, Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter-ISIL.
Prior to that, she co-directed the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC and was a senior research fellow at the Centre for Defence Studies, King's College London. She has also worked for the United Nations and the European Union in Somalia and Kosovo, and has direct experience in over two dozen conflict zones.
Dr von Hippel has numerous publications to her name, including Democracy by Force: US Military Intervention in the Post-Cold War World (2000), which was short-listed for the RUSI Westminster Medal in Military History. She holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, an MSt from Oxford University, and a BA from Yale University.


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You can have a healthy, rewarding sex life at any age. The following tips will help you increase intimacy and enjoyment as you're getting older. Let's review them!
Sex can be a powerful emotional experience and a great tool for protecting or improving health, and it's certainly not only for the young. The need for intimacy is ageless. And studies now confirm that no matter what your gender is, you can enjoy sex for as long as you wish. Naturally, sex at 70 or 80 may not be like it is at 20 or 30 — but in some ways, it can be better.
Share Your Hope
As an older adult, you may feel wiser than you were in your earlier years, and know what works best for you when it comes to your sex life. Older people often have a great deal of self-confidence and self-awareness and feel released from the unrealistic ideals of youth and prejudices of society.
And with children grown and work less demanding, couples are better able to relax and enjoy each other without the old distractions.
For a number of reasons, though, many adults worry about sex in their later years and end up turning away from sexual encounters. Some older adults feel embarrassed, either by their aging bodies or by their "performance," while others are affected by illness or the loss of a partner.
Without accurate information and an open mind, a temporary situation can turn into a permanent one. You can avoid letting this happen by being proactive.
Whether you're seeking to restart or improve your sex life, it's important to be ready to try new things, and to ask for professional help if necessary. There is much you can do to compensate for the normal changes that come with aging. With proper information and support, your later years can be an exciting time to explore both the emotional and sensual aspects of your sexuality.
Benefits of Sex as You Age
As an older adult, the two things that may have brought the greatest joy — children and career — may no longer be as prevalent in your everyday life. Personal relationships often take on a greater significance, and sex can be an important way of connecting. Sex has the power to:
Improve mental and physical health. Sex can burn fat, cause the brain to release endorphins, and drastically reduce anxiety.
Increase lifespan. Through its health-improving benefits, good sex life can add years to your life.
Solidify relationships. Sex is a chance to express the closeness of your deepest relationship.
Give refuge. Sex gives you a chance to escape from the sometimes harsh realities of the world.
Accept and Celebrate Who You Are
Sex in later life may not be the same as it was in your youth — but that doesn't have to be a bad thing. In fact, sex can be more enjoyable than ever. As you find yourself embracing your older identity, you can:
Reap the benefits of experience. The independence and self-confidence that come with age can be very attractive to your spouse or potential partners. No matter your gender, you may feel better about your body at 62 or 72 than you did at 22. And it is likely that you now know more about yourself and what makes you excited and happy. Your experience and self-possession can make your sex life exciting for you and your partner.
Look ahead. As you age, try to let go of expectations for your sex life. Do your best to avoid dwelling on how things are different. If you enjoyed an active sex life in your younger years, there's no reason to slow down with age, unless you want to. A positive attitude and open mind can go a long way toward improving your sex life as you age.
Love and appreciate your older self. Naturally, your body is going through changes as you age. You look and feel differently than you did when you were younger. But if you can accept these changes as natural and hold your head up high, you'll not only feel better, you'll also be more attractive to others. Confidence and honesty garner the respect of others — and can be sexy and appealing.
Good Sex as You Age is Safe Sex as You Age
As an older adult, you need to be just as careful as younger people when having sex with a new partner. You may not be able to get pregnant, but you're still susceptible to sexually transmitted diseases. Talk to your partner, and protect yourself.
Communicate With Your Partner
As bodies and feelings change as you grow older, it's more important than ever to communicate your thoughts, fears, and desires with your partner. Encourage your partner to communicate fully with you, too. Speaking openly about sex may not come easily to you, but improving your communication will help both of you feel closer, and can make sex more pleasurable.
Broaching the subject of sex can be difficult for some people, but it should get easier once you begin. And as an added bonus, you may find that just talking about sex can make you feel sexy.
Try the following strategies as you begin the conversation:
Be playful. Being playful can make communication about sex a lot easier. Use humor, gentle teasing, and even tickling to lighten the mood.
Be honest. Honesty fosters trust and relaxes both partners — and can be very attractive. Let your partner know how you are feeling and what you hope for in sex life.
Discuss new ideas. If you want to try something new, discuss it with your partner, and be open to his or her ideas, too. The senior years — with more time and fewer distractions — can be a time of creativity and passion.
Modernize. You may belong to a generation in which sex was a taboo subject. But talking openly about your needs, desires, and concerns with your partner can make you closer—and help you both enjoy sex and intimacy.
Focus on Intimacy and Physical Touch
A good sex life — at any age — involves a lot more than just sex. It's also about intimacy and touch, things anyone can benefit from. Even if you have health problems or physical disabilities, you can engage in intimate acts and benefit from closeness with another person.
Take the pressure off by putting aside your old ideas of what sex "should be." Focus instead on the importance of tenderness and contact.
Taking Your Time
Without pressing workloads or young children to worry about, many older adults have far more time to devote to pleasure and intimacy. Use your time to become more intimate.
Stretch your experience. Start with a romantic dinner — or breakfast — before lovemaking. Share romantic or erotic literature and poetry. Having an experience together, sexual or not, is a powerful way of connecting intimately.
Don't be shy. Hold hands and touch your partner often, and encourage them to touch you. Tell your partner what you love about them, and share your ideas about new sexual experiences you might have together.
Relax. Find something that relaxes both partners, perhaps trying massage or baths together. Relaxation fosters confidence and comfort and can help both erectile and dryness problems.
Expanding Your Definition of Sex
Sexuality necessarily takes on a broader definition as we age. Try to open up to the idea that sex can mean many things, and that closeness with a partner can be expressed in many ways.
It's not just about intercourse. Sex can also be about emotional pleasure, sensory pleasure, and relationship pleasure. Intercourse is only one way to have fulfilling sex. Touching, kissing, and another intimate sexual contact can be just as rewarding for both you and your partner.
Natural changes. As you age, it's normal for you and your partner to have different sexual abilities and needs. Find new ways to enjoy sexual contact and intimacy. You may have intercourse less often than you used to, but the closeness and love you feel will remain the same.
Find What Works for You
You might not be as comfortable with some sexual positions as you once were, but that doesn't mean you need to give up an activity that is pleasurable for you — and miss out on feeling close to your partner.
Keep in mind that it's not all about intercourse or recreating the way things were when you were younger. The key to great sex life is finding out what works for you now. Sex, as you age, may call for some creativity. Use the following ideas as inspiration, but don't be afraid to come up with your own.
Experiment. Try sexual positions that you both find comfortable and pleasurable, taking changes into account. For men, if erectile dysfunction is an issue, try sex with the woman on top, as hardness is less important. For women, using lubrication can help.
Expand what sex means. Holding each other, gentle touching, kissing, and sensual massage are all ways to share passionate feelings. Try oral sex or masturbation as fulfilling substitutes to intercourse.
Change your routine. Simple, creative changes can improve your sex life. Change the time of day when you have sex to a time when you have more energy. For example, try being intimate in the morning rather than at the end of a long day.
Foreplay. Because it might take longer for you or your partner to become aroused, take more time to set the stage for romance, such as a romantic dinner or an evening of dancing. Or try connecting first by extensive touching or kissing.
Playfulness. Being playful with your partner is important for a good sex life at any age, but can be especially helpful as you age. Tease or tickle your partner — whatever it takes to have fun. With the issues you may be facing physically or emotionally, play may be the ticket to help you both relax.
Restarting a Stalled Sex Drive
Some older adults give up having a sex life due to emotional or medical challenges. But the vast majority of these issues do not have to be permanent. You can restart a stalled sex drive—and get your sex life back in motion.
Remember that maintaining a sex life into your senior years is a matter of good health. Try thinking of sex as something that can keep you in shape, both physically and mentally.
Typical Sex Anxiety
The path to satisfying sex as you age is not always smooth. Understanding the problems can be an effective first step to finding solutions. So, what are the typical worries that most middle-aged people usually face?
Emotional obstacles. Stress, anxiety, and depression can affect your interest in sex and your ability to become aroused. Psychological changes may even interfere with your ability to connect emotionally with your partner.
Body image. As you notice more wrinkles or gray hair or become aware of love handles or cellulite, you may feel less attractive to your partner. These feelings can make sex less appealing and can cause you to become less interested in sex.
Low self-esteem. Changes at work, retirement, or other major life changes may leave you feeling temporarily uncertain about your sense of purpose. This can undermine your self-esteem and make you feel less attractive to others.
Worry over "performance." Worrying about how you will perform, or whether you are worthy of sexual attention from your partner, can lead to impotence in men and lack of arousal or orgasm in women. This may be a problem you have never before had to face. Sex drives can be naturally stalled as you face the realities of aging, but it is possible to overcome these bumps in the road.
What should I do?
Communicate. Talk to your partner, or to a friend or counselor, about your issues, whether they're physical or emotional. Explain the anxieties you are feeling, ask for and accept reassurance, and continue the conversation as things come up.
Just "do it." Sex is just as healthy and necessary as exercise and, just like exercise, it may surprise you with pleasure and satisfaction—even if you weren't "in the mood." So get back into practice. Once you're back in the habit, you'll start to feel better and your sex drive should naturally increase.
Increase your activity level. Bumping up your general level of activity will benefit your sex drive by increasing your energy and sense of well-being.
Let it go. As much as you can, use your age and experience to be wise and candid with yourself. Let go of your feelings of inadequacy and let yourself enjoy sex as you age.
Know When to Seek Help
No matter what your age, losing your desire for intimacy and touch altogether isn't normal. In fact, loss of interest or function may be signs of a medical problem — one that may be best addressed by a doctor.
If something is getting in the way of your desire or ability to have a good sex life, don't let embarrassment keep you from asking a doctor for help. Working with a professional, there is much you can do to improve your sex life.
Keep in mind that anything that affects your general health and well-being can also affect your sexual function. Sexual health can be affected by:
Medical conditions. Illnesses that involve the cardiovascular system, high blood pressure, diabetes, hormonal problems, depression, or anxiety can affect sex drive and function. You can talk to your doctor about strategies to combat these issues.
Medications. Certain medications can inhibit your sexual response, including your desire for sex, your ability to become aroused, and your orgasmic function. You can talk to your doctor about switching to a different medication with fewer sexual side effects.
Sex after a heart attack
Many older adults with heart disease — or who've suffered a past heart attack — are less sexually active than they used to be or even stop having sex completely, often fearing that sex may trigger another heart attack. However, for most people, it is still possible to enjoy an active sex life with heart disease.
According to a recent study, for every 10,000 people who have sex once a week, only two or three will experience another heart attack, and their risk of dying during sex is extremely low.
Check with a doctor before resuming sexual activity.
Participate in a cardiac rehabilitation program to improve your fitness.
If you can exercise hard enough to work up a light sweat without triggering symptoms, you should be safe to have sex.
Wait to have sex if you have advanced heart failure, severe valve disease, uncontrolled arrhythmia, unstable angina, unstable or severe heart disease.
Once your condition is under control, ask a doctor when it's safe to resume sexual activity.
You can get in touch with one of our qualified experts to ask any questions that you are probably bothered with.


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The preacher, in his Sunday sermon, used "Forgive Your Enemies" as his subject. After a long sermon, he asked how many were willing to forgive their enemies.
About half held up their hands. Not satisfied he harangued for another twenty minutes and repeated his question. This time he received a response of about 80 percent.
Still unsatisfied, he lectured for another 15 minutes and repeated his question. With all thoughts now on Sunday dinner, all responded except one elderly lady in the rear.
"Mrs. Jones, are you not willing to forgive your enemies?"
"I don't have any."
"Mrs. Jones, that is very unusual. How old are you?"
"Ninety three."
"Mrs. Jones, please come down in front and tell the congregation how a person can live to be ninety-three, and not have an enemy in the world."
The little sweetheart of a lady tottered down the aisle, very slowly turned around and said: "It's easy, I just outlived the bitches."


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A few years before he died in 1992, Henry Stommel sketched a vision of the future of oceanography. It makes poignant reading now. Stommel was the man who had figured out why there is a Gulf Stream. He had helped establish the basic theory for how ocean currents work. In the process he had received every prize and accolade he possibly could. But in his little essay in the magazine Oceanography, Stommel imagined giving up all that. He pictured himself in the twenty-first century, looking back from middle age on a second youth and a second career that was just getting started in 1996. It was a career that had been transformed by a single invention.
Stommel's first career, like that of all oceanographers, had been plagued by one problem above all: a lack of good data. Compared with the means they have to study it, the ocean is too big, and it changes too fast. Meteorologists have it much better: they drown in data every day. Their thermometers and barometers are everywhere on land; satellites tell them when the next hurricane is coming; and twice a day without fail, at around noon and midnight Greenwich time, they let fly more than 800 helium balloons from stations around the planet. Rising through the atmosphere, those balloons radio back the temperatures, pressures, and wind speeds they encounter before they burst about 20 miles up.
Pity the oceanographer, though, who wants to know what the water is like somewhere deep inside the ocean--the better to understand how currents transport heat around the globe; the better, ultimately, to un- derstand how our climate is likely to change over the long haul. He must set sail with a ship and a crew of dozens. The simple act of sticking a thermometer in the middle of the Pacific costs him, or rather his government, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Steaming across the ocean in a straight line, he stops every so often to repeat the same routine measurement at stations no oceanographer is likely to visit again for decades. It is tedious, expensive work--and it isn't done nearly often enough.
So Stommel imagined a machine that could do it. It would be the oceanographic equivalent of those helium balloons, only better. It would be a small, cheap, torpedolike drone that would glide around in the ocean on its own, with an ingenious new engine that would draw power not from batteries but from the ocean itself. Stommel envisioned a thousand of these robots porpoising through the sea at once, staying out for five years and collecting data with a few simple sensors. And several times a day each one of them would broach the surface to report via satellite to Mission Control.
That is where Stommel would sit: on an unspoiled island off Cape Cod, not far from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where he had spent most of his first career. The island was to be a kind of sanctuary. It would have few permanent residents and no automobiles--just a narrow- gauge railway, like the one Stommel had once built in his own yard to amuse his grandchildren and himself. Outside the headquarters building, sheep would graze on the grass bank that sloped down to the sea; inside, virtual- reality displays would immerse oceanographers in the latest data from the scattered robot fleet. In Stommel's vision, twenty-first-century technology coexisted peacefully with the shade of Henry David Thoreau.
The right kind of technology, he thought, could set oceanographers free--free from the quiet desperation of lives spent looking for a ship; free to do the equivalent of designing Central Park, as Stommel once explained it, instead of just mowing the lawn. The robots would handle the lawn mowing: they would conduct on a continuous basis the routine surveys that ships could do only every few decades. Meanwhile, around 200 of them would be reserved to pursue the inspired whims of individual researchers--to track a pod of whales, say. In my heart, Stommel told an audience of oceanographers at around the time he published his essay, I believe that, for a scientist, it is his personal mental wrestling match with some aspect of the universe that is his central activity and reward. All alone, one confronts the unknown and divines some meaning from it. Just so would Stommel's robots confront the ocean alone, without a tether, each of them part amanuensis and part alter ego to the man who had dispatched them. They were to be called Slocums, after Joshua Slocum, who in 1898 had become the first man to circumnavigate the globe single- handedly. Before the robots settled down to science, Stommel planned for them too to race around the world.
He did not live to see the first one dunk its nose in the ocean. But last fall it finally happened anyway--for the Slocum was not Stommel's vision alone, or even primarily. The thing itself was invented in a cottage across the road from Stommel's house in Falmouth, just north of Woods Hole, by an independent engineer named Doug Webb. The device Webb and his colleagues dropped into the Atlantic off Bermuda in October was just a prototype--it only bobs up and down in the water rather than gliding through it--but it was the first sea trial of Webb's innovative engine, and it worked perfectly. Moreover, Webb is not the only engineer at work on an autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV; nor is his project even the furthest along. At MIT, for instance, a researcher named Jim Bellingham has built an AUV called Odyssey, in its own way just as thrifty and ingenious as the Slocum, that is already at sea doing science. Four years after Stommel died, it is beginning to seem possible that mariner-robots really will go down to the sea in large numbers one day--and that they may transform our understanding of this water-covered planet.
Undersea robots were not always thought of as inexpensive tools for oceanographic research. When the first ones were conceived in the 1960s, the impulse behind most of them was military: the Navy wanted robots that could map underwater minefields laid out by the Soviet Union. To carry out so sophisticated a mission, it was thought an AUV would need a lot of computer power and a lot of batteries, and so it would need to be large. Draper Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is still working on such a robotic mine scout; it is around 40 feet long and weighs seven tons, just about the size and weight of a Tyrannosaurus rex. To Jim Bellingham, a buoyant and boyish engineer who works down the street from Draper at the MIT Sea Grant laboratory, it is a dinosaur in other ways as well.
Around the time Stommel was writing his essay, in 1989, Bellingham was getting started at Sea Grant, his first job after graduate school. His Ph.D. was in physics, and his graduate work had involved superconductivity--but that turned out not to be what he wanted to do with his life. Around that time the high-temperature superconductors were discovered, he recalls, and that totally changed the complexion of the field. Conferences and workshops where there had been 50 people suddenly had 2,000 people, you know, from big semiconductor companies and big industrial outfits who were getting into the game.
On the one hand, it looked very lucrative, and on the other hand, it didn't look like there was much prospect for somebody to really make a contribution in a field when suddenly it had become so enormous. What I wanted to do was find a field where there was an enormous amount of promise but there wasn't an enormous amount of activity yet, because it was a little bit too far out. Where people said, 'Yeah, it will work, but maybe sometime in the next century.'
AUVs met that requirement. So when Sea Grant offered him the job of building one, Bellingham grabbed it. His first toe into the water was Sea Squirt, a three-foot-long, 77-pound clunker that made up in ease of use what it lacked in elegance. Sea Squirt was a test bed: Bellingham and his students crammed it with sensors of all types. Above all, they used it to test a new approach to robot intelligence, called layered control, that was just then being pioneered at MIT by an engineer named Rodney Brooks.
The traditional approach to controlling a robot is to try to give it a crude version of human intelligence, along with a map of its environment; as the machine continuously updates the map with information from its sensors, it chooses from many possible actions the one most likely to lead to its goal. All that mapping and intelligent decision making, though, requires a lot of computer power, which makes for big, expensive robots. It also makes for a robot that, in a turbulent ocean, would be in danger of running onto the rocks while updating its map.
Layered control, in contrast, takes insects rather than humans as its models of intelligence. In place of a big central brain and a map of the world it puts a hierarchy of behaviors, each one independent of the others. One of Sea Squirt's priorities, for instance, was obstacle avoidance--not smacking into a rock. Any time the signals from its sonars seemed to demand it, that survival behavior could take control of the robot from the more goal-oriented behaviors, such as searching for a target. Bellingham and his crew found that layered control worked well in Sea Squirt (although deciding which behavior was to be in charge when survival was not at stake proved tricky). The little drone could navigate the Charles River, a few blocks from the Sea Grant lab, without sinking any sailboats and without sinking itself. It could even produce a survey of the water temperature.
After a couple of years of this, though, Bellingham's boss, Sea Grant director Chryssostomos Chryssostomidis, began prodding him to think deeper--a few miles deeper. The point, after all, was to explore the ocean, not the Charles. To dive to the ocean floor, a robot needed to be able to withstand the immense pressures produced by the several miles of water above it. As Bellingham started to ponder this problem, he knew he had to ponder on a budget. Sea Grant was not the Navy, and the Navy, funder of behemoth AUVs, was not impressed with Sea Squirt. The question facing Bellingham was this: Would it be possible to build a robotic submarine that would dive to the ocean floor, do something useful, and come back alive, all for, say, $50,000?
The money constraint forced Bellingham to think new thoughts. His first one concerned the robot's hull. The conventional way to protect an AUV's insides from hundreds of atmospheres of pressure would be to build the hull of titanium, which is strong, corrosion-resistant, and relatively light--but a titanium hull would have blown Bellingham's budget directly. Nosing around some labs in Woods Hole, he came across an alternative: glass. A company called Benthos in Falmouth does a brisk business supplying oceanographers with 17-inch-diameter glass spheres for housing instruments on the ocean floor; when the spheres are sealed, they are strong enough to withstand a full ocean of pressure. And they cost only a few hundred dollars apiece.
Once Bellingham discovered the Benthos spheres, his deep-ocean robot quickly began to take shape. One glass sphere, he decided, could hold the personal computer containing the robot's insectlike brain, along with a compass and pitch-and-roll sensors for navigation. Another sphere could hold batteries to power the electronics and the motor. Mount the two of them in a hard-plastic frame and you have the nucleus of an AUV. The motor and most of the sensors you might need--the sonars, the camera, the temperature and salinity sensors--could be arrayed around the glass spheres; they did not need to be inside. All those things come with their own pressure housings when you purchase them from marine equipment manufacturers--in fact, it is more expensive to buy them without. With Benthos spheres and off-the-shelf gear, Bellingham realized, he could do without a watertight titanium hull. He could just slap a plastic fairing around his gear to give it a nice aerodynamic shape--cost: $2,000--and let the water flood into it. The rudders at the tail were a nice finishing touch: they came from a sailboard manufacturer.
The result was odyssey, an eight-foot-long, 350-pound submarine that soon outgrew the Charles. Its first trip to sea came in 1993, when an oceanographer friend at MIT invited Bellingham and his crew along on a cruise to the Antarctic. Sitting in a rubber boat in the white-capped Drake Passage, running Odyssey from a laptop computer cradled on his lap, Bellingham got a chance to confront the primal fear of any AUV builder-- which is that someday maybe the little bugger won't come back. On the first two dives, everything went fine. Then came the third. It turns out acoustic conditions were such that I lost tracking on the vehicle as it came up, Bellingham recalls. Well, you figure, 'This is not so bad. We'll spot the vehicle again when it comes up to the surface.' We had a radio direction finder too, and we had a strobe--we had three different location devices. By this time, it's our third run, so we're feeling a little more confident.
Well, the problem is, the darn vehicle should have surfaced, and we're not picking it up on the radio direction finder, and we're not picking up the acoustic beacon, and it's daylight out, so the strobe is no good anyhow. So I start to get worried. I start looking around for it. And pretty soon we have everybody up on the ship with binoculars out there looking for it. It wasn't really that long, maybe an hour total, that we couldn't find the vehicle--which to me was a very miserable hour. I thought we'd lost it.
But the captain finally spotted it. He was looking out for birds, actually, and he saw this one giant petrel that was circling the sky for a while, and then it would land on the surface for a bit. And then it would take off again and circle in the sky. He saw this a couple of times and looked under the bird--and sure enough, there was the vehicle. What happened was, as this big bird would land on our vehicle, it would drive it underwater. It's slowly drifting back up to the point where it's breaking the surface again--and the bird lands on it and drives it back down. So the radio beacon is now underwater and you can't pick it up. How do you plan for that?
Of course, the other thing wrong was, in the Charles a white vehicle is easily visible. In the Drake Passage, with breaking waves all over the place, a white vehicle is invisible. Which is why all our new vehicles are yellow.
In Antarctica, Bellingham proved not only that he was willing to put his baby at risk but also that he could make it work in the ocean. After that his phone started ringing. People wanted to work with him. Even the Navy got interested--which is how, a little over a year after the Antarctic trip, Bellingham found himself at the other end of the world, 150 miles off the North Slope of Alaska at a Navy ice camp in the Beaufort Sea, carrying a rifle in case of polar bears. In the Arctic his faith in his own engineering was put to an even sterner test: Odyssey proved that it can be dropped through a hole cut through the six-foot-thick ice, cruise around for a while, and then find the hole again. The Navy now wants to use Odyssey to study how the polar ice tends to break up--a poorly understood process that is of interest for submarines navigating under the ice and that also affects how Earth will respond to global warming. Bellingham didn't get to do too much of that research on his first trip to the Arctic, though: the ice camp itself broke up after two weeks.
Last summer Odyssey made its deepest dives yet, plunging nearly a mile into the Pacific off the coast of Washington, onto the crest of a volcanic mountain chain called a midocean ridge. Once the oceanographers he was working with have an Odyssey of their own, says Bellingham, they won't have to wait their turn, every year or two, to take a research ship out to see the volcanoes; as soon as their seafloor listening devices tell them an eruption has begun, they will simply load the robot onto a fishing boat and be out at sea taking pictures within hours. Bellingham expects a lot of research institutions to have Odysseys of their own eventually. His lab has already built half a dozen of the robots and is in the process of licensing the design to a private company that supplies the oil industry with offshore equipment. Apparently Odyssey has a future in monitoring undersea pipelines for oil leaks.
Getting things off into the commercial world and used on the broader problems of society--I'd view that as a real feather in our cap, says Bellingham. Particularly since it will be the first AUV that has actually gone into commercial production. I mean, that's a big deal. If you look at the history of flight, for a long time lots of people were building airplanes, but none was a commercial success. Then finally the DC-3 came along. If we end up with the DC-3 of AUVs, then we will have made a difference.
Odyssey is certainly as flexible as the DC-3, because its design is so thoroughly modular. Sensors can be added or subtracted to fit the mission; secured inside the yellow fairing, they don't affect the vehicle's performance in the water. Different behaviors can be added to the software without rewriting the whole program; Bellingham did it sitting in his tent one day at the ice camp. And a third glass sphere can be added and filled with batteries to extend the range of the vehicle to 100 miles or so.
On the other hand, that range is still relatively short. It means that Odyssey will generally be operated in a limited region, going off on forays that last a few hours or a few days at most before it returns to the mother ship or goes to an underwater docking station where it can recharge its batteries. Whereas what Doug Webb and Hank Stommel had in mind was a robot that would do without a ship entirely and stay out for five years, longer even than Joshua Slocum himself.
Stommel once wrote a profile of his friend Webb for Oceanus, a magazine put out by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Doug Webb appears to be a cautious and deliberate man, the piece began, but his career shows that he is actually unusually daring. Webb certainly does not fit the movie image of a daredevil. He is 66 now and stocky, with a thinning thatch of hair covering his broad head. He has a taste, in summer, for shirts with epaulets and Bermuda shorts that do not hide his skinny legs. He does not seem like a man who would leave his native Ontario at age 23 to go to Manchester University in England to work in a lab that included Alan Turing, the computer pioneer; nor like a man who would spend part of his time there racing Bugatti sports cars; nor yet like a man who would drop academia and go off to work on computers for Olivetti, the Italian office-equipment manufacturer. Least of all does he look or sound like a man who would ever speak Italian. His manner, though not aloof or unfriendly, is careful and even formal. Stommel once said of himself that he had chosen a career in the physical sciences--he had also considered the ministry--because he was convinced that he was emotionally better adapted to dealing with physical laws than with human affairs. One senses in Webb a similar uncertainty about how best to deal with recalcitrant human materials. I try to be careful not to be threatening, he says.
People are not always what they seem on cursory acquaintance to be, however, and Webb loved Italy. He and his wife, Shirley, whom he met when they were chemistry lab partners in high school, lived there for six years and might have stayed for good had not family ties pulled them back to North America--family ties, and Webb's urgent desire for a career change. By that time, he says, by 1962, believe it or not, it was clear to me that the computer industry was going to become quite large and that I was going to be a specialist in that industry. Computers were initially a place for generalists, and I decided I was more cut out to be a generalist. I made up a list of industries that I didn't think would go through that cycle, and oceanography, I thought, would offer opportunities.
The opportunity Webb found in 1962 was at Woods Hole, working as an engineer with physical oceanographers--the ones who study ocean currents. One of the basic methods such researchers use is to track currents with things that float. Not so long ago those floats were cards or bottles with messages in them, but today they tend to be more sophisticated devices. At Woods Hole, Webb became known as a master float builder. His most famously successful creation was the SOFAR float. SOFAR stands for Sound Fixing and Ranging, and it refers to a layer of the ocean, typically around 3,000 feet below the surface, that tends to trap sound and channel it over long distances. Following up on an idea tossed off by Stommel in 1949, Webb and an oceanographer named Tom Rossby built a device that could drift along on a subsurface current, all the while emitting huge booming sounds that would travel through the SOFAR channel and allow faraway oceanographers to track the float. In the 1970s and 1980s, researchers chucked hundreds of SOFAR floats into the ocean--although chucked is perhaps not the right word: a SOFAR float weighs half a ton and is around 25 feet long, most of it aluminum piping. In the profile Stommel wrote there is an old photo of Webb standing on the dock at Woods Hole next to an upright SOFAR float, looking proud and very small.
He's a giant, says Bellingham. I had heard about him long before I met him. You know, there are people who have great ideas, and then there are people who really have made things work. His floats are almost at the point where they don't seem like a big deal anymore. It's like 'Oh yeah, there's a hundred of those out there.' 'Yeah, and they all work.' He's the guy who made them work and had the vision to create them.
The vision of Slocum came to Webb slowly. In 1974, while he was still in the throes of the SOFAR project, he first started thinking about an AUV that could cross the Atlantic under its own power rather than drifting at the mercy of the currents. But it was not until 1988, while working on a SOFAR spin-off called the Bobber--a float that could bob up and down in the water as it drifted along--that Webb saw where that power might come from. Every time the Bobber wanted to ascend, it inflated an external rubber bladder with oil pumped from an internal reservoir; this increased its volume without changing its mass and so made the float more buoyant. When it was time to descend, the Bobber simply transferred the oil back to the internal reservoir and sank. The work was done by a battery- powered oil pump. Webb realized there was a more natural way to make something expand and contract: you could just heat it and cool it. Maybe, it occurred to him, there was some way you could power a bobbing AUV by drawing heat out of the ocean and then putting it back. That was my first glimpse of thermal propulsion for an underwater vehicle, he says. The Bobber was a very intensive project, though, and I didn't have time to stop. But when it was over, I went back and I picked up those loose threads.
Then he had his second idea. The dream, after all, was not just to build a better Bobber; it was to build a robot that would cross the Atlantic. Once you have it bobbing up and down, though, it is easy-- conceptually, anyway--to make it move horizontally as well: you just put wings on it and let it glide. As the robot fell through the ocean, water flowing over those wings would generate lift, which would carry it down and forward rather than straight down--let a paper glider fall from your hand and you will see it is true. At some nadir in the depth, the glider would then change its buoyancy and start climbing again. All the while its thermal engine would be refueling on the fly: at the warm, sunlit surface it would draw heat from the water; in the cold depths it would put the heat back. Flying for free, without need of batteries for power, the robot could cruise across the Atlantic. In principle it could go around the world.
The whole concept was simple and beautiful and--as Webb would put it--sweet. Webb sensed he was onto an idea that would be a nice way to close out his career. By this time, though, he had long since abandoned the structured security of the oceanographic institution to start his own float-building company, Webb Research, in the cottage behind his house. He was a businessman now, dependent on contracts obtained from oceanographers, who in turn had to get grants from the government. He employed half a dozen people, including his son. His ideas had to pay salaries. He might have 10 or 20 inventions knocking around his head at any one time, but for any one of them to go anywhere, an oceanographer had to get excited about it. Making the rounds in 1988 with his thermally powered ocean-crossing glider scheme, Webb didn't have much luck, in spite of his track record. The idea was too radical to be greeted with anything but skepticism.
So at some point in the proceedings Webb took the obvious step: he walked across the street to Hank Stommel's house. It was a well-trodden path in both directions. The two men had been going to sea together for decades, and they had been neighbors on land since 1966, when Webb bought his house from Stommel and Stommel moved across Palmer Avenue. Their personalities were not at all alike. Stommel was gregarious and open and always bubbling with ideas, which he gave away freely to less gifted colleagues; Webb was and is careful and shy and nervous about collaboration. And yet there was a deeper commonality between the two men. It had its roots, perhaps, in the fact that both were inventors. Webb invented machines, Stommel invented physical theories--but a theory is not so different from a machine. It is designed to solve some problem, and it has parts that have to fit and work together. It can be simple and elegant- -as Stommel's explanation of the Gulf Stream was--or complex and unwieldy. It can be a radical departure from the past--as Stommel's theory of powerful deep ocean currents was in the late 1950s, when most people thought they didn't exist--or a modest elaboration of it. Webb and Stommel both liked the simple and the radical. They shared an aesthetic. They found the same things sweet.
And along with the aesthetic went an ethic. If what you strive for is simplicity, and if your aim is to put something truly new in this world, then it is best not to be an organization man, because large organizations are seldom sympathetic to overly inventive individuals. People feel threatened by inventors, says Webb. They change the world, and all the things that you've done might be made obsolete. Most people would like things to go on just about the way they are, and make incremental changes to keep ahead. If someone comes along and says, 'I'd like to make some big change over here'--God! You know, all that investment is gone, and all of that database is worthless.
I think it's a human thing, not just a scientific thing. In engineering, in commercial enterprises--Ford and General Motors and Chrysler are just kind of incrementally trying to find some advantage with respect to the others. They don't want anything radical to appear. That upsets everybody in a big way.
Well, that never troubled Hank.
Stommel was interested in Webb's thermally powered AUV right away. One of his many passions was steam machinery--in his backyard he kept a Canadian Pacific railroad whistle, with which he would periodically startle the neighbors--and what Webb was proposing was analogous to an underwater steam engine. In a steam engine, as water changes state from a liquid to a vapor--at precisely 212 degrees Fahrenheit--its volume expands by a factor of 1,800, and that expansion drives a piston that turns the engine. The heat to make the steam comes from burning coal.
Webb's AUV wasn't going to be coal fired, of course, and it wasn't actually going to use steam. He had in mind a different working fluid, one that would change from solid to liquid as its temperature rose from around 40 degrees Fahrenheit to around 60 degrees--which is what would happen as the robot climbed from a mile deep in the ocean up to the surface. As the solid expanded to a liquid, it would be made to compress nitrogen in a neighboring tank. That compressed nitrogen would store energy, the way a coiled spring does. When next the robot was a mile deep and wanting to climb, a flip of a valve would allow the nitrogen to uncoil and push oil into an external bladder. The inflated bladder would buoy the robot back to the surface, just as it had done to the Bobber--only now the work would no longer be done by a battery-powered pump. The robot would still need a few batteries to power the crucial valve, as well as its steering mechanism and the radio it used to talk via satellite with its human masters. But it would get its propulsion for free.
Nothing like it had ever been built before, which must have recommended the idea to Stommel. He began to get seriously excited, Webb recalls, when Webb mentioned the possibility of round-the-world robot races. It was then that Stommel suggested naming the robots after Joshua Slocum, and it was then that he wrote his little essay in Oceanography. He was hoping to get his colleagues excited about the idea, too. Meanwhile, to get the project started, Stommel persuaded the Navy to give him a three- year development grant, with a subcontract to Webb.
The money allowed Webb to start work on some of the hurdles Slocum would need to leap on its way from the drawing board to the ocean. To begin with, Webb had to find the right working fluid. The solution he came up with, after long hours of leafing through the pages of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics and experimenting in his shop, was a pure hydrocarbon, one that at low temperatures forms a waxy solid, much like paraffin. But at precisely 50 degrees Fahrenheit the wax melts, and when it does, its volume expands by 10 percent. That expansion, Webb calculated, would be enough to compress the nitrogen and ultimately to pump a slug of liquid glycol into the external bladder, against crushing deep-sea pressures.
The inflated bladder would provide a buoyancy force of around four ounces to the 90-pound Slocum. That is not much in the way of propulsion: it would push the little robot to only half a knot--a speed so slow it raised a whole new set of problems. Could a glider move that slowly and still remain stable? Could it navigate a course and turn when commanded to do so? And could it do all that without the wing flaps and other movable control surfaces an airplane relies on? Such control surfaces, Webb decided, would gobble too much battery power; they would wear out over a five-year mission; and because they would have to be connected to their motors through holes in the fuselage, they would be apt to cause leaks. Slocum would fly with fixed wings and tail.
In a way, it would be much more like a blimp than a heavier-than- air plane. An airplane is kept aloft by the force of air rushing over its wings, whereas a Slocum, like a blimp, is simply less dense than the fluid below it, so it floats. To ascend and descend it adjusts its buoyancy slightly--and it could steer, Webb decided, by making equally minute adjustments of its center of gravity. The sloshing of a few ounces of liquid glycol in and out of the external bladder would be enough to point the probe's nose up for the ascent and down for the descent. To bank to one side, Slocum would rotate the stack of D-cell batteries it carried at its midsection; because of the way the batteries were arranged, that action would move the center of gravity slightly to one side of the robot's central axis, causing its left or right wing to roll. For this system to work, however, the weight of each component of Slocum would have to be known to within a fraction of an ounce, and its position to within a fraction of an inch. It would all have to fit together just so.
Having the great idea, Webb knew, was just the beginning. It's always possible that we will run into some problem that is essentially terminal, he said in the spring of 1991, when he was still in the thick of his personal mental wrestling match with Slocum. And in the first half- year of working on this, I was concerned about one day coming in and spotting that terminal flaw. Now I think it's much less likely, although instead we may find something that's a serious compromise--that makes it heavier, uglier than I first hoped. The great fear is that you start off with a very simple concept, and you run into a problem, and you add some complexity here, then you find another problem and add some complexity over there. And before you're finished, it turns out not to be simple, but really very complex, expensive, and difficult to handle.
It was an intense period, those first two years of the project, with Webb trying to spend as much time as possible on Slocum without neglecting the other floats that were his company's bread and butter. Sunday mornings would often find him over at Stommel's house, talking Slocum while Stommel's wife, Chickie, was playing the organ at church. During the week Stommel would sometimes stop by Webb's cottage when he came home for lunch. Hank enjoyed walking across the street to our shop and seeing what was going on--because something was happening there, Webb recalls. If you've worked, as he did, almost entirely in your head, it's sometimes nice to see some fast results.
In the end the results did not come as fast as either man wished. But by the fall of 1991 Slocum was ready for its first real test, in Lake Seneca in upstate New York--the most readily accessible body of water, aside from the open ocean itself, that was deep enough and cold enough to give Slocum a gallop. The engineer Webb had hired to work on Slocum, Paul Simonetti, had already tested the glider in a shallow, crystal-clear lake in Florida, watching it through a glass-bottom boat. Now he and Webb were going to let Slocum out of their sight for the first time. Before loading it into the van for the trip, Webb brought it across the street to Stommel's house. He carried it into the kitchen to show Chickie Stommel what all the fuss had been about. It was, she remembers, a happy and very exciting day.
At Lake Seneca in November, Simonetti and his colleague Josh Hunt found two feet of snow on the ground and a 29-foot motorboat for rent cheap. The sky was overcast, the water was calm, there was no traffic on the lake, and Simonetti and Hunt were really quite confident when they dropped Slocum over the side for the first time and watched it sink slowly out of sight. In test tanks it had responded vigorously to their commands. But they also had a fail-safe mechanism. We had put a lot of work into this thing, and we didn't want to lose it, says Simonetti. With these things, you never can tell what's going to happen--something totally absurd may happen. So what we did was, we had a little buoy on the surface. On the tail end of the vehicle we had a spool of fishing line that would just pay itself out without any tension, and we attached the other end to the buoy. So in case it did fail, we could get it back just by pulling up the line.
It never came to that. Simonetti and Hunt tested the glider again and again, and Webb joined them after a few days for more tests. They programmed Slocum to go one way, then threw it in the water pointing in the wrong direction and watched as the autopilot software banked the glider and brought it around until it was pulling the surface buoy on the programmed course. Once the robot found that course, it stayed on it; it didn't toss around at random. And it always came back to the surface.
For those tests Webb and his colleagues didn't have the thermal engine in their glider; they had a battery-powered pump. The thermal engine had been tested separately in Lake Seneca, in a device that just bobbed straight up and down, and it had worked well. The engineers had wanted to test each technology separately before taking the risk of marrying them. Driving back to Woods Hole in mid-November, though, they knew they were ready to put the whole thing together. They believed now that they really were going to be able to build a glider that would cross an ocean. Another year or so of development work ought to do the trick. Two months later, in January 1992, Hank Stommel went into the hospital to undergo surgery for liver cancer and never came home. He was 71.
If in the midst of an often crass and strident society, we have learned to love this world, if we have managed to control our avarice and learned to give rather than take, and above all to give ourselves to fellow human beings, then we may discover how, with grace, to give ourselves to death. Stommel had written those words in a column for the local newspaper in 1985, after his first battle with cancer. After his death the column was reprinted in a special issue of Oceanus, along with the reminiscences of scores of people who had known him over the years. In tribute after tribute, people remarked on his generosity, his manic energy, his pyromania (he was a fireworks impresario), and his mechanophilia (to clear brush from his pond, he once bought a coal-fired steam shovel from a shipyard in Boston). Shirley Webb, Doug's wife, recalled Stommel the painter, who showed the influence of Henri Rousseau and was surprisingly proficient in a rambunctious, childlike way. On one canvas from his disaster period, a grand old hotel near Stommel's house is on fire and a fireman is being chased by a rhinoceros while other East African animals look on. Hank would often appear at our kitchen door at unlikely times, with a book, an idea, or a bag of fruit or vegetables. . . , Shirley Webb wrote. He would sit and visit, then disappear abruptly, thinking a new thought, probably.
Doug Webb did not contribute to the Oceanus volume. Hank's death was traumatic both personally and professionally is all he will say. Webb's business, though, has prospered since 1992. He has had great success with a bobbing float called ALACE, hundreds of which are now drifting around the world's oceans. He has been able to move his company out of his cottage and into a new headquarters building. Everyone at Webb Research has an office now, and there is a well-appointed conference room. A plaque on the door identifies it as the Stommel Room.
But Slocum hit the doldrums after Stommel died. In the summer of 1992 the Navy did not renew its funding of the project. Slocum can operate only where it has deep, cold water to dive into, and after the Persian Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Navy's interest shifted to shallow-water oceanography. Had Stommel been around, the Navy might have been inclined to renew his grant anyway; but Stommel was no longer around.
Webb didn't give up, though. He put the development of the glider on hold, but he kept Simonetti working on the thermal engine, paying his salary out of internal funds. His hope was that there might be scientific interest in a profiling device that would simply go straight up and down in the ocean--and for five years, thanks to its thermal engine. He turned out to be right. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration came forward with a small grant, and last October the first prototype profiler went into the ocean off Bermuda. As of early February it was still working, sinking down to 4,500 feet and rising back to the surface every two days, and radioing its temperature measurements back to Webb Research via satellite. Apparently Webb's thermal engine works in the ocean too, not just in Lake Seneca.
Meanwhile the glider has finally emerged from enforced hibernation--at least the battery-powered version that was tested in Lake Seneca. Unlike a thermal Slocum, it can glide in shallow water as well as deep. The Navy, which is already committed to Jim Bellingham's Odyssey, has decided that an electric Slocum glider might be a useful partner to it. Early this year the Office of Naval Research awarded Webb a subcontract to build electric gliders for a large experiment that is scheduled to begin later this year in the Labrador Sea. The Labrador Sea is one of just a few places in the world where deep-ocean currents are born from the sinking of cold, salty water--a sporadic process that has a large influence on Earth's climate. The electric gliders will sweep through the area, measuring the temperature and salinity variations that cause water to sink in narrow chimneys. When they find something interesting, an Odyssey will be dispatched to investigate in more detail.
Webb likes the Labrador Sea experiment; he thinks it is daring. And he admires Odyssey and Bellingham's off-the-shelf approach to robot design. In some narrow sense Bellingham is a younger version of Webb himself--younger, and perhaps a bit more practical. Webb is an engineer who loves to find novel and sexy solutions to problems, says an oceanographer who has worked with him, meaning sexy rather than easy or obvious. Webb would just say he is an inventor.
The Labrador Sea is a stepping-stone for him. A success there, he hopes, along with the success of his thermally powered profiler, will convince skeptical oceanographers that his two ideas should be married at last. Before he retires, he would like to see thermal Slocums porpoising through the ocean--chasing eddies, cruising the meridians, and patrolling their designated stations like faithful sentinels. He would like to start the job of freeing the individual oceanographer, and our knowledge of the ocean, from the constraint of needing a ship. Most of all, he would like to prove that he and his friend were right, and a robot really could be made to cross the ocean and maybe even circle the globe. We had a good team here, and it will be hard to get that back, he says. A lot of people say Slocum's a great idea--and they'd love to use it when we're finished with it. It took someone of Hank's stature to keep it going. But we'll sneak up on it yet.


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A Ph.D. candidate in English literature at Yale University recently wrote a review of the Baz Luhrmann movie adaptation of Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. "The critics who've ravaged the film for not being loyal to the book are hypocrites," he wrote. "These people make their living doing readings and critiques of texts in order to generate theories of varying levels of competency. Luhrmann's film is his reading and adaptation of a text – his critique, if you will."
(READ: Richard Corliss on The Great Gatsby)
That graduate student, James Franco, has also been a film actor of some note. Now he is the star and director of a film based on another famous novel written in the 1920s, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Franco's comments on movie critics nitpicking a Gatsby might have been a preemptive strike against reviews of his new picture, which has received its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section. And the movie, whose script he adapted with his Yale classmate Matt Rager, could be an elaborate summer project: attempting to find a cinematic language for Faulkner's text — Franco's critique, if you will. The effort is honorable, a mixture of mannerism and earned emotion.
(READ: Is James Franco the 21st Century's First Great Public Intellectual?)
"My father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time." The speaker is Addie Bundren (Beth Grant), matriarch of a clan of Mississippi misfortunates that comprises her husband Anse (Tim Blake Nelson), her four sons Cash (Jim Parrack), Jewel (Logan Marshall-Green), Darl (Franco) and Vardaman (Brady Permenter), the youngest, and her teenage daughter Dewey Dell (Ahna Reilly). As Addie lays dying, Cash saws away outside in the rain fashioning her coffin. Jewel tames a beloved horse, Darl goes into town on a fool's errand and Vardaman returns home with a fish about as big as he is.
Death for Addie might be a reprieve from the veil of tears that life in this rural shack has been. The Bundrens lack electricity, a car or any form of refrigeration — which would come in handy, considering that Addie's remains are quickly decaying. "I am a luckless man," observes the toothless Anse, who seems to regret his wife's passing less than his lack of dentures. "God's will be done," he pronounces at the memorial service held in their rude home. "Now I can get them teeth."
(READ: A 1939 cover story on William Faulkner by subscribing to TIME)
The odyssey the Bundrens take after her death could be another fool's errand: transporting her body on a wagon for burial in the town of Jefferson, not far away. Buzzards are circling the coffin, and from the sky they can detect the stink of death. The flying scavengers might also detect the death throes of this family and their hardscrabble, anachronistic way of life. John Steinbeck's Joads are Rockefellers compared to the Bundrens, who on their Cavalry road to Jefferson endure more plagues than Job, with fire and flood among them. By the time they get to Jefferson, Cash has lost his leg, Jewel his precious horse, Darl his freedom and Dewey Dell her sexual dignity. But Pa gets his new teeth, and something else to take home.
Faulkner told this story in a chorus of voices: 15 narrators in the 59 chapters. To locate an equivalent for the novel's polyphonal scheme, Franco often employs split screens. They may give views of two characters, as when Ma is inside the shack beckoning to Cash outside; or additional perspectives of a single calamity, such as when Addie's coffin is lost in a river. Sometimes we get two aspects of the same character from slightly different perspectives, as if showing Take One and Take Two. The device imposes a strange rhythm on the images. It distracts as often as it enlightens, and Franco himself seems to have tired of the tactic. He mostly dispenses with it halfway through the film.
(SEE: Faulkner in the all-TIME Top 100 English-Language Novels list)
Franco sometimes wanders from his naturalistic style into a mixture of dream and nightmare, as when Dewey Dell takes a kitchen knife used to cut fish, walks over to Darl and guts him. (Timothy O'Keefe's music, which takes some of its cues from Bernard Herrmann's scores, nicely increases the tension here, as it does throughout the movie.) But in many respects this is a faithful and intelligent synopsis of the book. Some of the shortest chapters are spoken to the screen by their characters: Varadman's declaration that "My mother is a fish" and Cash's enumeration of his 13 reasons for building his mother's coffin on the bevel.
The cast, which includes Danny McBride (Franco's costar in Pineapple Express) in a small role, shows similar fidelity to the inflections of these backwoods folk; at times the accents were so thick that the English-speaking audience at Cannes had to consult the French subtitles for clarity. It is an impressive ensemble, with the peculiar exception of Franco, who speaks as if he's a distant Northern cousin visiting the Bundgens, and who can't summon the ranting majesty for his climactic speech. He is stronger directing his fellow actors, achieving poignancy in small moments, such as young Vardaman asking of his dead mother, "Where'd she go? Did she go as far as town?" Cash replies, "She went farther than town." In vignettes like this, the film of As I Lay Dying reveals itself as a successful summer project for a multitasking graduate student.
(READ: Richard Corliss's take on James Franco and Danny McBride in Pineapple Express)
But that's just one opinion of the film. For the definitive take, we must await James Franco's review of his own film: his critique of his critique, if you will.


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Wade Michael Page, who officials say opened fire on worshippers at a Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee on Sunday, Aug. 5, was a neo-Nazi and a member of a white-supremacist punk band, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Page allegedly killed six people before being shot to death by police.
The 40-year-old veteran had been the leader of the band End Apathy, according to the watchdog organization's blog Hatewatch. Mark Potok, senior fellow for the SPLC's Intelligence Project, posted that the former Army specialist told the white-supremacist website Label 56 in an interview that he started the band in 2005 because he wanted to "figure out how to end people's apathetic ways."
(MORE: Indians Demand Justice After U.S. Sikh Massacre)
He told the website he became part of the white-power music scene in 2000 when he left his home state of Colorado and attended various hate-inspired concerts throughout the country, joining several other racist bands. According to the SPLC, he also attempted to purchase goods from the neo-Nazi National Alliance, one of the nation's largest white-supremacist organizations. There was no discussion of violence in his interview.
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) special agent Thomas Ahearn told ABC News that Page had tattoos that may link him to hate groups. The ATF also said that the gun used in the shooting was purchased legally.
Police in Oak Creek had no contact with Page prior to Sunday's shooting. But records show that Page served a 60-day jail term in 1994 for criminal mischief in Texas and a 60-day term for DUI in Colorado.
(PHOTOS: Sikh Temple Shooting: Wisconsin Community Reacts to Shocking Attack)
Police say Page went to the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in suburban Oak Creek at about 10:30 a.m. and opened fire on worshippers, killing six. A policeman who had just arrived on the scene caught Page ambushing an officer who was helping a victim and shot Page dead. Three others, including the first officer, were wounded.
FBI officials said at a news conference that weapons had been found at the scene. No motive for the shooting has been released, and little is currently known about the gunman except that he served in the U.S. Army from 1992 to 1998 and was a member of the psychological-operations unit and won several commendations, an Army spokesperson told Yahoo News. However, he was demoted from sergeant to specialist while serving, ABC News reported.


text: The Wahoo KICKR SNAP makes indoor training a "snap!" It's a convenient, easy to set-up wheel-on smart trainer with the realistic ride experience Wahoo smart trainers are known for. The SNAP's legendary flywheel features technology that creates the same resistance experienced when riding outdoors. Plus, no other indoor bike trainer has more software training options, including Zwift and Trainer Road. The KICKR SNAP includes LED lights for connection status and the power measurement is now accurate up to +/-3%.


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French jewelry design studio Marine Mistake was founded by Marine in 2012. She first started to sell her jewelry at small art fairs and markets in Marseille, France, while she was still studying fine art and graphic design. Gradually the jewelry evolved into exquisite and unique pieces that now has become her signature style and her own personality asserts through in all her designs.
She gets inspiration from her favorite animals, ethnic designs, and talisman jewelry. The brass gilded jewelry is delicately cut in many designs - owl, fox, bear and cat - come in silver and gold.


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You've likely heard that LED lighting is a good thing. I'd go so far as to say it has the potential to help make history and change the world.
We've been living and working in artificial light for over 130 years, ever since Thomas Edison's first light bulb. But despite the progress that our well-lit society has made, we've paid a significant price--environmentally and financially--for incandescent, fluorescent and other forms of traditional lighting.
An LED (light-emitting diode) is a solid-state semiconductor device that converts electricity into light. It consumes far less energy and has a substantially longer lifespan than traditional lighting.
As energy efficiency becomes increasingly important for controlling costs, improving energy independence and reducing environmental impacts, LED lighting will become the world's leading source of manufactured light.
One of the most compelling aspects of this lighting leadership story is that LED lighting will grow globally using the existing infrastructure. We don't have to invest billions of dollars in new power grids, new wires, new switches or new networks.
The latest research data indicates that a decade from now, nearly half of the commercial lighting business will be owned by LED lighting.
Right now, 20% of the world's electricity is used for lighting; that can be reduced to 4% with LED lighting. And by 2030 LEDs will drive energy savings equivalent to 334 million barrels of oil per year in the U.S. alone.
Let's examine how LEDs will change the future of the lighting market. Here are five illuminating truths:
1. It's a massive $100 billion market that already exists. LEDs are a proven, effective solution implemented in everything from flashlights to flat-panel screens and car headlights. In Los Angeles, where municipal lighting is becoming LED, the city will reduce their annual energy consumption for public lighting by 40%.
And since LED lighting is a semiconductor technology, it will act as a platform to deliver a wide variety of intelligent applications and improved functionality with a wealth of upgrade options for consumers.
One key to breaking the market wide open is hitting the right price points. And the price of LED lighting is rapidly declining. That's when the large, incumbent manufacturers of traditional lighting technology will fall behind in the market.
Recall the dilemma of the wet film industry when digital photography took hold. It lost a tremendous chunk of the market. The incumbent traditional lighting manufacturers face the same dilemma. Every dollar they invest in LED technology steals from their core business. No incremental revenue is gained by the additional development expense.
Alternatively, for up-and-coming LED companies, every dollar invested in technology grows revenue proportionally.
2. The lighting market will increasingly look, feel and operate like the information technology industry. Light bulbs represent the world's last vacuum technology, so digital lighting is where the semiconductor, software and disk-drive industries were 40 years ago--on the edge of steep and continuous growth.
Solid-state digital lighting platforms will provide a wide range of easy-to-use applications with increased and intelligent functionality, like motion sensors, smoke detectors, dimming capabilities and color adaption for starters. You can already run your stereo system through LED lighting, and will even be able to turn your lights on and off remotely using your iPhone.
3. The traditional lighting business fosters long-accepted rules, particularly around innovation. Traditional manufacturers take 16 months to two years to innovate--far too long to bring today's customers the changes they want and need. So startups are breaking the rules, compressing innovation cycles into as little as three months. Speed to market in the sluggish lighting industry is the essence of true value creation.
4. The lighting industry must start to view the world as a commercial whole, creating a global supply chain. By conducting LED research in the U.S. and diversifying manufacturing across the globe, it's possible to be an asset-light company that doesn't invest a lot of precious capital in fixed production costs, resulting in a significant, positive impact on product cost.
5. LED prices will continue to decline until there's a thriving, global mass market.
Last year LED light bulbs cost between $75 and $100. With vertical integration and an asset-light manufacturing model, it's possible to bring products to market faster at a dramatically reduced cost. LED light modules are already available for about $20, the inflection point for the adoption of LED lighting in a commercial environment, with a payback of about two years. At a $10 price point, the payback will be one year and the residential market will explode.
American author James Thurber said there are two kinds of light: The glow that illuminates and the glare that obscures. But there's only one kind of light for me, and that's LEDs.
Bill Watkins is CEO of Bridgelux, an LED manufacturer. Prior to Bridgelux, Watkins was CEO of disc drive maker
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Blast your way through the autumn forest crushing enemies and stacking combos! Combos of GREAT MAGNITUDE! The dark creatures of the deep forest are gathering in hordes... Don't go down without a FIGHT! Samurai Autumn is a running action/platformer featuring 12 stages, 4 boss battles and upgrades! Stack combos by jumping on multiple enemies in succession. Power your blade with Sun Flowers and unleash a furious storm of energy blasts.
bolt, dash, en, ninja, run, samurai, squish, stomp, Samurai Autumn
2013-01-14, 9:00pm


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As a curious observer of unusual plants and different greenery, the journal presents a monograph on a specific plant; bringing collectively photographers, illustrators, designers, musicians, writers and visible artists, each established and emerging, from everywhere in the world. Once consumed, the animals digest the fruity bits and will typically deposit the seeds elsewhere in their feces. As a result of plants adapt so properly to almost any local weather, scientists needed a approach to organize the a whole bunch of thousands of species. Many of the organisms you most likely consider as plants, similar to bushes, bushes, and flowers, match into this group.
For the majority of plants to develop successfully in addition they require oxygen in the ambiance and around their roots ( soil gas ) for respiration Plants use oxygen and glucose (which can be produced from stored starch ) to offer energy. Gregor Mendel used pea plants and their flowers to give you among the first concepts on how traits are passed from one era to a different.
For instance, farmers plant seeds in the subject. Embryophytes are distinguished from inexperienced algae , which symbolize a mode of photosynthetic life much like the type trendy plants are believed to have advanced from, by having specialised reproductive organs protected by non-reproductive tissues. Parasitic plants , then again, use the sources of their host to offer the supplies needed for metabolism and progress.
By growing uninteresting, brown, skinny leaves whereas it's nonetheless at handy grazing peak, the plant makes itself nearly invisible to the tortoise. When they dry season approaches and water levels begin to drop, these oddball plants go into flowering mode. Place in a window that will get vibrant, oblique sunlight, turning the plant every now and again to avoid extra of development on one aspect.
Inexperienced plants get hold of most of their energy from sunlight through photosynthesis by primary chloroplasts which are derived from endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria Their chloroplasts comprise chlorophylls a and b, which gives them their inexperienced coloration. There are a number of completely different sorts of plants, and not all animals can eat all types of plants. These teams also differ from green plants in that the storage polysaccharide is floridean starch and is stored within the cytoplasm quite than in the plastids.


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George Clooney and Josh Brolin to Star in Joel and Ethan Coen's 'Hail, Caesar!'
Joel and Ethan Coen's upcoming movie 'Hail, Caesar!' has not only landed a distribution deal with Universal, it's also netted Coen vets George Clooney and Josh Brolin to star in a tale of Hollywood and the tabloids of the '50s.
Deadline broke the news and also point out that the comedy will be about Eddie Mannix, a man who fixes celebrity scandals for the studios. It's unknown which of the two performers will play Mannix, but it could be a good role for either (one imagines that the other will play a successful but scandalous performer of the period).
Though Brolin was already on a roll by the time he appeared in 2007's 'No Country for Old Men,' his work in that Best Picture-winning Coen brothers movie definitely elevated his profile as a serious actor, so it will be nice to see him get to play a little lighter in one of their comedies (Brolin was also in their 2011 'True Grit' remake). Clooney first worked with the Coens on 'O Brother Where Art Thou,' and starred in their films 'Intolerable Cruelty' and 'Burn After Reading.'
Though no release date is set (we'd guess late 2015), 'Hail, Caesar!' is already high on our list of most anticipated upcoming releases.


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Those who learn our indicators are able to get in and out of pinpoint trades at a moment's notice.
Let us teach you how to earn the amount that YOU want.
Some trade all day. Some trade just an hour or two. Find your own balance.
No matter where you are located, making trades can be simple and lucrative.


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"Subway Spit Painting #5 (Transient Patrons)"
Regular price
Collected spit from commuters in the NYC subway
9" x 12"
9" x 12"
a and pigment watercolor painting made of video stills from the performance art piece, ¨Transient Patrons" of those who contributed spit. Bonafede, dressed as a degenerate subway beggar, collected spit from commuters in the NYC subway system in an I Love NY mug and used the collective saliva as a medium to paint the "patrons"
The price doesn't include shipping, We do not accept returns.
Transient Patrons, 2008 from John Bonafede on Vimeo.


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609-494-8883 | [email protected] | 1907 Bayview Avenue, Barnegat Light, NJ 08006 |
Joy Luedtke Real Estate, LLC on LBI, Long Beach Island NJ specializing in luxury real estate properties and homes for sale. Search the MLS for waterfront homes and real estate in Loveladies, North Beach, Harvey Cedars, Long Beach Township, Beach Haven, Barnegat Light, High Bar Harbor, or midway along LBI in Surf City and Ship Bottom. A NATIVE resident of LBI, let Joy's 32 years' experience marketing and selling LBI's finest real estate help you with buying or selling on Long Beach Island.
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Squid chasing drove eolution of whale sonar
Squid chasing drove eolution of whale sonar
University of California – Berkeley
September 6, 2007
A University of California at Berkeley study argues that dolphins and other toothed whales developed sonar to chase schools of squid swimming near the ocean surface at night.
Behind the sailor's lore of fearsome battles between sperm whale and giant squid lies a deep question of evolution: How did these leviathans develop the underwater sonar needed to chase and catch squid in the inky depths"
Now, two evolutionary biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, claim that, just as bats developed sonar to chase flying insects through the darkness, dolphins and other toothed whales also developed sonar to chase schools of squid swimming at night at the surface.
Because squid migrate to deeper, darker waters during the day, however, toothed whales eventually perfected an exquisite echolocation system that allows them to follow the squid down to that "refrigerator in the deep, where food is available day or night, 24/7," said evolutionary biologist David Lindberg, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and coauthor of a new paper on the evolution of echolocation in toothed whales published online July 23 in advance of its publication in the European journal Lethaia.
Video capture of the giant squid feeding. Images courtesy of Proceedings of the Royal Society B. RELATED ARTICLES
Jumbo squid and sperm whales tagged Photos of world's largest squid |
"When the early toothed whales began to cross the open ocean, they found this incredibly rich source of food surfacing around them every night, bumping into them," said Lindberg, former director and now a curator in UC Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology. "This set the stage for the evolution of the more sophisticated biosonar system that their descendents use today to hunt squids at depth."
Lindberg and coauthor Nick Pyenson, a graduate student in the UC Berkeley Department of Integrative Biology and at the Museum of Paleontology, reconstructed this scenario after looking at both whale evolution and the evolution of cephalopods like squid and nautiloids – relatives of today's chambered nautilus – and relating this to the biology of living whales and cephalopods.
All toothed whales, or odontocetes, echolocate. The baleen whales, which sieve krill from the ocean and have no teeth, do not. The largest of the toothed whales, the sperm whale, grows up to 60 feet long and dives to 3,000 meters – nearly two miles – in search of squid. Though poorly known because they live entirely in the deep ocean, the many species of the beaked whale dive nearly as deep. Belugas and narwhals descend beyond 1,000 meters, while members of the dolphin family – porpoises, killer whales and pilot whales, for example – all can dive below the 200-meter mark where sunlight is reduced to darkness.
According to Pyenson, who focuses on the evolution of whales, the first whales entered the ocean from land about 45 million years ago, and apparently did not echolocate. Their fossil skeletons do not have the scooped forehead of today's echolocating whales, which cups a fatty melon-shaped ball that is thought to act as a lens to focus clicking noises.
Skulls with the first hints of a concave forehead and potential sound-generating bone structures arose about 32 million years ago, Pyenson said, by which time whales presumably had spread throughout the oceans. Whales had developed underwater hearing by about 40 million years ago.
According to Lindberg, whale biologists had various theories about echolocation, including that whales developed this biosonar soon after entering the water as a way to find food in turbid rivers and estuaries. The evolution of toothed whales, however, indicates otherwise. Whales first occupied the ocean, and only later invaded rivers. Other experts have proposed that development of echolocation coincided with global cooling around 33.5 million years ago, though a mechanism was not specified.
The most convincing explanation, that echolocation allowed whales to more efficiently find food in the darkness of the deep ocean, ignores the question of evolution.
"How did the whales know there was a large supply of food down in the dark"" asked Lindberg, noting that cephalopods are the most abundant and high-energy resource in the ocean, eaten by 90 percent of all toothed whales. "What were the intermediate evolutionary steps that got whales down there""
Lindberg, a specialist in the evolution of marine mollusks, noted that cephalopods have migrated up and down on a daily "diel" cycle for at least 150 million years. At the time whales developed biosonar, nautiloids dominated the oceans. Lindberg and Pyenson propose that whales first found it possible to track these hard-shelled creatures in surface waters at night by bouncing sounds off of them, an advantage over whales that relied only on moonlight or starlight. This would have enabled whales to follow the cephalopods as they migrated downwards into the darkness during the day. Today, the largest number of squid hang out during the day at about 500 meters below the surface, though some go twice as deep. During the night, however, nearly half the squid are within 150 meters of the surface.
Over the millennia, cephalopod species in general – and especially shelled cephalopod species – fell as the number of whale species boomed, possibly because of predation by whales. Then, about 10 million years ago, the whales seem to have driven the nautiloids out of the open ocean into protected reefs. Lindberg said that the decline in nautiloid diversity would have forced whales to perfect their sonar to hunt soft-bodied, migrating squid, such as the Teuthida, which in the open ocean are typically two feet long or bigger and range up to the 40-foot-long giant squid.
"Whales didn't need to have a very sophisticated sonar system to follow the nautiloids, they could just home in on the hard part," Lindberg said. Only later , he added, did they "develop a complex system with finer resolution to detect and capture soft-bodied squid."
"Whales, like bats, developed a sensory system for seeing with sound, and every single toothed whale echolocates in a different way, just like how different bat species echolocate in different ways," Pyenson said. Whales also partition the water column, specializing in harvesting squid at specific depths, just as bats partition the tree canopy and preferentially hunt insects at specific heights.
Lindberg noted that whales and bats are strong examples of convergent evolution to take advantage of unexploited food resources: nocturnal insects, in the case of non-migrating insectivorous bats, and nocturnal cephalopods, in the case of whales. And just as predominately migrating fruit bats do not echolocate, so filter-feeding baleen whales that depend on dense seasonal resources lack biosonar.
Lindberg and Pyenson used existing data on whales and cephalopods to reach their conclusions, drawing upon aspects of tectonics, paleontology, physiology, ecology, anatomy and biophysics. In the same way, "thinking from an evolutionary perspective about existing data from biology, paleontology and ecology could answer questions about the origin of echolocation in bats, shrews and other animals," Lindberg said.


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The support that we have received over these past few months has been more than I would have ever thought possible. A few weeks before my father passed away, he heard about the GoFundMe page (that our dear friend A.J. Ellis took it upon himself to set up) reaching $10,000 in his support. He said, "I didn't know that many people cared."
I think he knew, though. He was unrelentingly humble about his accomplishments -- sometimes to a fault. But that's only one of the countless reasons that I looked up to him and loved him more than even he would have been able to express.
Dum Spiro, Pugno.