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When President Obama embarks on his trip to Latin America this week, he will encounter a very different political environment than he found at the Summit of the Americas held in Trinidad and Tobago, where Latin American leaders practically tripped over each other to shake his hand and pose for the proverbial photo op. At the Summit, which took place just months after he took office, Obama promised an "era of equal partnership" and "a new chapter of engagement that will be sustained through my administration." Yet the good will on display in Port-of-Spain has largely dissipated among the grumblings about the lack of any new U.S. policy toward the region and the continued predominance of U.S. unilateralism over multilateralism.
Obama travels to Brazil, Chile and El Salvador from March 19 to 23. Perhaps no country better represents the changing regional dynamics than Brazil, the hemisphere's new regional powerhouse. Brazil's rise in a way parallels the demise of U.S. influence in the region. Numerous factors have contributed to the United States' waning influence, including the emergence of more progressive governments that are less inclined to follow the dictates of Washington, the creation of regional bodies such as UNASUR (the Union of South American Nations), frustration over the U.S. disregard for the impact of its own economic crisis on its neighbors, and rapidly decreasing levels of U.S. economic assistance. As noted by WOLA's Adam Isacson, "President Obama's trip will underscore that the era of unquestioned U.S. leadership has ended."
Despite Obama's declarations in Trinidad and Tobago, U.S. policy toward the region has remained on auto-pilot; indeed, at times it seems as if the previous Bush administration is still calling the shots. Take, for example, the U.S.-Colombia agreement on U.S. access to seven military bases in Colombia. Not only did Obama administration officials fail to live up to promises to engage more constructively with the region by consulting prior to acting, they failed to reconsider the Bush era plans even after hearing a regional outcry about the destabilizing effect of the growing U.S. military presence in the region. (It was the Colombian Constitutional Court that ultimately derailed the base agreement, though with little impact on the already established U.S. military presence on the Colombian bases.) But perhaps no damage to regional relations was greater than that caused by the U.S. shifting position on the overthrow of the Zelaya government in Honduras. While initially vocal in condemning the coup d'état, the Obama Administration failed to follow-up with strong action, save canceling a couple dozen visas. Within months, the administration reversed course from condemning the coup to supporting an electoral path as a the solution to the crisis, sending a clear message to the rest of the hemisphere that even in this day and age, the U.S. government will turn a blind eye to the ouster of a civilian elected government.
One Latin American Ambassador recently complained of "the incomprehensible political atmosphere in Washington," where, on the one hand, the executive branch seems to have no political will to move any new initiatives forward, and on the other, a stalemate in congress precludes any meaningful attention to the region. And what attention there is towards the region is more often than not negative, with Members of Congress ranting against the evils of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and the like.
Nonetheless, Obama's first official visit to the region provides an opportunity to lay out a new course for regional relations for the second half of his presidency – one based on his promises of equal partnership and multilateralism. Although energy and trade issues are likely to dominate the bilateral talks on his first two stops, in Brazil, President Obama should also acknowledge the significant gains made in that country in reducing poverty over the last decade – and he should explore what the United States can learn from that experience for reducing poverty in our own country.
In Chile, Obama should acknowledge the advances made in dealing with the legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship and holding human rights violators accountable. And to help the process move forward, the U.S. government should respond to requests for further declassification of U.S. documents to help shed evidence on the human rights atrocities committed during the overthrow of President Salvador Allende and the dictatorship that followed – often with U.S. complicity.
Finally, in going to El Salvador, the President is acknowledging the formal transition of power to the FMLN, the former guerrilla insurgency. Many would argue that what El Salvador needs most from the United States is comprehensive immigration reform; however, in the absence of that, the issues that will likely dominate the discussions are the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI), intended to mitigate the impact of increased drug trafficking through the isthmus, development and the perennial problems in that country of gang violence and citizen security. The President would be wise to avoid discussion of a Plan Central America (modeled after Plan Colombia), as proposed by Porfirio Lobo of Honduras, and instead listen to what the Salvadoran government has to say about its approach to improving citizen security. After years of a failed "mano duro" approach, the Funes government has adopted a new approach based on improved police and judicial performance and comprehensive violence and gang prevention strategies – and for the first time in years, the homicide rate is falling. Again, there is much the U.S. can learn from this recent experience in El Salvador for confronting gang-related violence in the United States.
In conclusion, on his trip to Latin America, Obama will encounter a region in which countries are no longer afraid to stand up to the U.S. government and in which the United States no longer calls the shots. President Obama should not go to preach, as so many U.S. presidents have done in the past, but to listen.
(This originally appeared in 'Foreign Policy in Focus' on March 15, 2011)


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Please visit our Open House at 1648 RALPH ST in North Vancouver.
OPEN HOUSE: Saturday May 21st, 2-4pm
One house, so much appeal. With 2700 sq ft, 5 bdrms, family-oriented street in a great neighborhood, this is a perfect family home. Master retreat w/ensuite & huge w/i closet. Show-stopping finishing details such as rich hardwood flooring,crown molding, co-ordinating light fixtures - this home has it all. Unbelievable Gourmet Kitchen w/Frigidaire s/s appls, gas range, wine fridge, huge island flowing easily to the spacious fam rm (or can be used as a dining rm) featured gas f/p & French doors to the generous patio & landscaped backyard. LEGAL 1 or 2 bdrm suite, 5 min walk to Upper Lynn Elem, direct bus to Downtown or Lonsdale Quay. Close to Lynn Headwaters & Canyon. You've got the lifestyle, now get the home. Open Sat May 21,2-4.

subset: commoncrawl


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EVERETT — Snohomish County leaders want a few more days to mull over a proposed emergency ban on homebuilding near landslide zones, a move being considered in light of the catastrophic March 22 mudslide near Oso.
The temporary ban would apply to residential construction within a half mile of areas with landslide risks identified in the county's natural hazards plan. An estimated 30,000 people live in such areas of Snohomish County, mainly near coastal bluffs and mountain valleys.
A vote has been rescheduled for Monday at 10:30 a.m.
If imposed, the moratorium would last for six months. It would only apply to slopes of 50 feet or greater. By law, the council must schedule a public hearing within 60 days of passing the emergency measure.
Reconstruction of Highway 530 should not be affected by the moratorium, Council Chairman Dave Somers said.
All five council members supported taking more time for review.
"It's important to understand the implications of this particular proposal," Councilman Brian Sullivan said.
Since the slide, county leaders have been peppered with questions about what they would do to safeguard people from future slides.
The March 22 Oso mudslide wiped out the Steelhead Haven neighborhood and killed 41 people, with two others missing.
Lawmakers also are being asked what they knew about landslide risks, and whether homeowners were properly warned about the potential for catastrophe.
The closest house to the slide at Steelhead Haven, the rural community along the North Fork Stillaguamish River, was about 400 feet away. The county building rules, in effect since 2007, require a special review for construction within 200 feet of a landslide area. Specific restrictions apply within 50 feet of some slopes.
The same hillside that collapsed March 22 also experienced large slides in 2006 and 1967. The earlier events both blocked the North Fork Stillaguamish River. The one in 1967 hit some cabins, but caused no injuries.
Since 2006, the county issued permits for seven homes in the Oso area hit by the deadly slide.
A geological study in 1999 had warned that the slope could suffer another failure similar to the one in 1967, which traveled about 900 feet. Debris from last month's slide, however, extended 5,827 feet from the scarp to the farthest point south. It covered 245 acres in an estimated 10 million cubic yards of debris.
"This landslide obviously was far greater in extent than anybody could have expected. Even the experts I've listened to and talked to are amazed by the distance traveled and just the magnitude of this event," Somers said.
In 2004, the county considered buying up homes in the area, but gave the project a lower priority. Flooding was considered a more immediate threat.
It's unclear how many potential homes the proposed building ban would restrict.
The county on average issues 1,200 residential building permits during a six-month period, Will Hall, a senior council analyst, said during a staff briefing. Conservatively, Hall estimated that 25 to 100 housing units could be put on hold.
The ban would not cover remodeling existing structures, or to rebuilding infrastructure damaged by the Oso mudslide.
By law, the legislation also could not halt projects with valid permits or completed building applications. For instance, it would not stop plans for more than 3,000 condos in Woodway at Point Wells, an industrial property just west of a 200-foot bluff with a history of instability. That's because the developer already has a legally protected building application.
If the moratorium passes, County Executive John Lovick's administration would be asked to come up with policy recommendations, based on input from people and businesses. Planning officials also could notify homebuilders in known slide areas of potential risks.
Part of the upcoming discussion, Somers promised, would focus on balancing property rights with the county's duty to keep people safe from natural hazards. There's also a debate about whether the county's role should be to declare certain areas off limits to development, or to simply inform people of potential risks.
"There's a push and pull of protecting life and property and yet a push on the other side to make sure that people can use and enjoy their property," Somers said. "So we're caught in the middle."
Noah Haglund: 425-339-3465, firstname.lastname@example.com.
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The Surprising Secret to Self-Motivation
By Ella Kaplan / 05.03.2017
How to Stop Procrastinating
Neuroscience has discovered the remarkably simple source for endless self-motivation.
We can do anything we set our minds to. But sometimes it can feel like our brains are working against us when it comes to achieving our goals.
Plans to learn a new skill, get in shape, or to save money and start a business, keep getting pushed back in the hopes that Future You will handle it 'someday'.
It's a crippling behavioral cycle. In fact, in psychology, procrastination is classified as a form of self-sabotage.
But there's good news. While learning how to become self-motivated may feel difficult or nebulous, the potential solution is remarkably simple, according to Psychology Today and cognitive neuroscience.
We can turn impossible into possible and do anything we set our minds to.
In their findings, a psychology professor at Harvard University, Ron Siegel, suggested that the key to following through on motivation boils down to this: bring optimism and fun back into the picture.
This sounds a little hokey, right? After all, completing a term paper or your taxes isn't exactly fun.
While this habit seems anything but scientific, the neurological reasons behind it aren't.
Why We Procrastinate
According to the research, the reason we procrastinate on our ambitions lies in our primal psychology:
Our modern brains are still wired up for the ancient evolutionary purpose of surviving in a dangerous environment. Over a million years or so, we developed specialized neural structures that selectively tuned in to danger signals.
We procrastinate because of the fear of doing something new or failing.
So when the time comes for us to create and be productive, instead of focusing on the pleasurable and rewarding aspects of obtaining our goals, our brains dwell on the anxiety and fear that comes along with doing something new or putting ourselves out there, or daring to fail.
We go into survival mode and push away potentially uncomfortable situations. In fact, optimism and fun are relatively new concepts for our brain, evolutionarily speaking.
However, there are a few extremely easy methods you can do to make creating and achieving your dreams feel effortless and fulfilling:
Tip the Scale in your Favor
Siegel suggests one simple way to snap out of a self-motivation rut is to write out a list and get the joys of doing something to outweigh the initial pangs of getting started.
A simple two-columned pros and cons list will do just the trick. Yep, while doing that Excel spreadsheet at work might not be fun, you'll realize that being able to enjoy your weekend without it hanging over your head is well worth it.
Write a pros and cons list until the joys outweigh your fears.
While this method is effective in itself, the next step is what really drives this technique home:
Visualize a Full-Body Experience
As you write out your list, really try to visualize and conjure up the precise feelings and sensations that meeting your goal will bring you.
If your goal is to follow a healthier diet, for example, try to viscerally picture how you will feel from the results. Think about how you'll have more energy, or better skin, or how you'll protect yourself from heart disease.
Mentally walking yourself through the process of success, and the joys and benefits it brings, can teach your brain to be motivated by something other than fear.
Visualization is scientifically proven to increase your odds of successfully reaching your goals. In another article, Psychology Today reports that:
Research has revealed that mental practices are almost effective as true physical practice, and that doing both is more effective than either alone.
Visualise what it will feel like to meet your goal.
Reward your Progress
For this one you might be thinking, "But I'm not a kid. I don't need to be rewarded every time I do something."
However, going back to Professor Siegel's point, one of the most critical aspects of sustainable self-motivation is pleasure and joy, and a reward system is a fantastic way to help accomplish this.
Not only is rewarding yourself for reaching goals a good self-care technique, it also changes the chemistry of our brains and can make us more motivated.
In a study that compared motivated people's brains to lazy people's brains, dopamine levels in a certain area of the brain played a large role in people's ability to be self-motivated. Turns out dopamine is released in anticipation of a reward, and rewarding yourself for accomplishments can help you stay on track.
Choose the Right Rewards
Just because positive motivation works, don't make the mistake of self-sabotaging your wins with counter-productive prizes, like spending lavishly.
Don't self-sabotage by rewarding yourself with things that undermine your goal.
As LifeHacker put it:
If the rewards you give yourself undermine the goal itself, it only serves to set you back.
Remember, investing in yourself is the greatest gift you can give yourself. The new 'I deserve it' should be something that continues to reward you for years, rather than punishing you after the novelty wears off.
Everything from taking an exciting class to setting money aside for future endeavors can be fun — and productive — ways to stay self-motivated. You're doing something great for yourself by investing in your future. That is something to feel fantastic about!
Celebrate the Tiny Wins
Like most people on the pathway to success, you probably have major — hopefully audacious — long-term goals that you're tackling. But as you probably know, these huge aspirations won't get accomplished overnight.
That's why you should find the time to make a symbolic fist pump every day.
Celebrating tiny wins gives you a daily dose of self-motivation.
As Tech.Co co-founder, Frank Gruber, put it:
This is a journey — a hard one — and the only way to make it sustainable and bearable is if you actually acknowledge your small successes along the way.
By celebrating those tiny wins, you'll find a much-needed daily dose of self-motivation.
As long as you're focusing on the fun, rewarding, sensory experiences of accomplishing your goals, you will get through the hard work eventually.


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The Annual Report Youth Monitor 2020 Summary presents an outline of the living situation of young people in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Based on a number of social themes, attention is paid to developments and regional differences. At local level, a description of youth in the Caribbean Netherlands is included.Read publication
Last year, 617 out of the 170 thousand live-born babies died in their first year. As a result, the infant mortality rate stood at 3.6 per thousand live births, versus 5.1 in 2000. The infant mortality rate was nearly three times the average among mothers under the age of 20. Infant mortality in the Netherlands is in line with the European Union average. Statistics Netherlands (CBS) reports this based on newly released figures.Read publication
In 2019, 16 percent of all children in the Netherlands were living in a single-parent household. This share has continued to expand over the past two decades. Nine percent of all infants were living with only one parent. The highest shares are found in the cities of Heerlen and Rotterdam.Read publication
Last year, 264 thousand minors in the Netherlands were living in low-income families, remaining unchanged from the previous year. The number of minors in families living persistently on a low income for at least four years dropped by nearly 5 thousand, ending at 103 thousand. This is evident from the latest figures on at-risk-of-poverty rates, released by Statistics Netherlands (CBS).Read publication
The majority of 18 to 24-year-olds believe that things are heading in the right direction in the Netherlands. They do not consider social issues such as crime, a multicultural society, population density and mentality in the Netherlands to be a major problem. Environmental pollution, on the other hand, is relatively often seen as a major problem. Statistics Netherlands (CBS) reports this on the basis of the 2019 Annual Report of the National Youth Monitor.Read publication
The Annual Report Youth Monitor 2019 Summary presents an outline of the life situation of Dutch youth at both national and local level. At local level, a description of youth in the Caribbean Netherlands is included.Read publication
In 2017, the average age of young people leaving the parental home was 23.5 years, versus 22.8 years in 2012. The shift was strongest among students, who in 2016 started living independently on average one year later than in 2012. Working young people moved out of home 0.7 years later.Read publication
This summary presents the main results of the Youth Trends Report 2010, which is based on information from the National Youth Monitor website.Read publication
This Quarterly Report of the National Youth Monitor for the third quarter of 2009 describes unemployed young people in times of economic crisis.Read publication
The Annual report 2009 of the National Youth Monitor of the Netherlands presents a broad overview of how children and young people under the age of 25 years in the Netherlands are doing. The situation of this group is described from six points of view: young people and families, health, education, social participation, labour market and security.Read publication


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From Coffee Futures To Bulk Buying: A Year Of Adventurous Investing
From Coffee Futures To Bulk Buying: A Year Of Adventurous Investing
A year ago, NPR's Uri Berliner decided to take his money out of a savings account that was losing value to inflation and turn it loose in an investing adventure. A series of stories in 2013 described his newly acquired assets and sought to shed light on how the markets for them worked.
I had up to $5,000 of savings I was willing to risk. I ended up investing around $3,600. (For a breakdown of the investments, click here.) I separated the investments into two distinct categories:
- Plain vanilla, which were the kind of low-cost, diversified funds we ought to have in our retirement accounts.
- More flavorful assets that I chose primarily (OK, exclusively) for their storytelling potential, like buying a painting online, making a bulk haul at Costco as a hedge against inflation, and betting on coffee futures.
A number of my colleagues have said, "Hey, whatever happened to your investments, Mr. Business Editor?"
So here's the scorecard.
Fair warning 1: My idiosyncratic portfolio was assembled for a reporting adventure. It's not meant to be investment advice. Far from it. This in no way, shape or form resembles how I've invested for retirement. Do not copy my investments. It could be an epic mistake. You've been forewarned.
Fair warning 2: All strong returns were entirely the result of luck and/or fortuitous timing. As they say on Wall Street, past performance is no guarantee of future results. All disappointing results were well worth it in pursuit of a good story.


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The Powers of Genius: A Poem, in Three Parts
John Conrad & Company, 1802 - 191 sider
Udvalgte sider
Andre udgaver - Se alle
Almindelige termer og sĉtninger
admiration appears arms bard beam bear beauty behold beneath bids bold breast breath character clouds course criticism dark death deep delight discovers divine earth excellence fall fame feel fields Fingal fire flow follow force Genius give glory hand head hear heard heart heaven hope imagination invention Italy kindled king lead light literature live looks manner mark meet mighty mind morning mountains mournful move muse Nature never night numbers o'er Ossian passage passions peace plains poem poet poetry present rage reason rest rise rock roll Rome round rules says scene shades sleep song sorrow soul sound speak spirit spread storm strains stream strength striking sublimity sword taste tear terror thee thou thoughts thro truth voice wandering waves wild winds wings writers written wrote youth
Populĉre passager
Side 126 - Nor think, though men were none, That Heaven would want spectators, God want praise. Millions of spiritual creatures walk the Earth Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep: All these with ceaseless praise his works behold Both day and night. How often, from the steep Of echoing hill or thicket, have we heard Celestial voices to the midnight air, Sole, or responsive each to other's note, Singing their great Creator!
Side 123 - The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my lust shall be satisfied upon them; I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them.
Side 145 - Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks: methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam...
Side 118 - I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water: and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction, saith the Lord of hosts.
Side 125 - The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark Illimitable ocean, without bound, Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height, And time, and place, are lost ; where eldest Night And Chaos, ancestors of nature, hold Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise Of endless wars, and by confusion stand.
Side 120 - In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, Fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face ; the hair of my flesh stood up : It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof: an image was before mine eyes, there was silence, and I heard a voice, saying, Shall mortal man be more just than God? shall a man be more pure than his Maker?
Side 121 - O God, thou art terrible out of thy holy places: the God of Israel is he that giveth strength and power unto his people. Blessed be God.
Side 119 - Doth the eagle mount up at thy command, and make her nest on high ? She dwelleth and abideth on the rock, upon the crag of the rock, and the strong place. From thence she seeketh the prey, and her eyes behold afar off. Her young ones also suck up blood : and where the slain are, there is she.
Side 128 - The seat of desolation, void of light, Save what the glimmering of these livid flames Casts pale and dreadful ? Thither let us tend From off the tossing of these fiery waves ; There rest, if any rest can harbour there...
Side 144 - ... winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall do, till her master's second coming; he shall bring together every joint and member, and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection.


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|Home ▸ Catalog ▸ |Themes & Provenance| ▸ |Animals| ▸ |Snake||View Options: | | |
Snakes on Ancient Coins
The Greeks and Romans did not view snakes as evil creatures but rather as symbols and tools for healing and fertility. Asclepius, the son of Apollo and Koronis, learned the secrets of keeping death at bay after observing one serpent bringing another healing herbs. Woman seeking fertility, the sick, and the injured slept in his temples in chambers where non-poisonous snakes were left to crawl on the floor and provide healing.


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Miss Pat was talking to the class about-what would you do if…
She began by talking about boys and girls and adults that care about others and their communities. She told the class that children and adults who care are practicing a behavior important to being good citizens.
To help the children understand, she asked each student to think about what he or she would do if …Why not play along with the "Can Dos" and think about what you would do.
- A boy in the cafeteria fell. A) Would you help him up, even if it meant losing your place on line to get food? B) Would you hope someone else would help so you wouldn't lose your place on line?
- One of your classmates has a bloody nose. A) Would you turn away because the sight of blood makes you sick? B) Would you give him or her a tissue and get the teacher's attention?
- You go to the movies with a few friends, one of whom uses a wheelchair. Everyone want to sit up front, but you friend has to sit in the handicapped accessible section. A) Would you sit in the wheelchair section with your friend? B) would you sit up front and tell your friend who uses a wheelchair you'll see him after the movie because you think he is used to sitting by himself and won't mind?
- You borrowed your friend's ruler; you broke it. A) Would you give it back broken and say you're sorry? B) Would you buy a new ruler, give it to your friend and explain that you broke the ruler he gave you?
- While you were at a friend's house, it got cold out. Your friend gave you a jacket to wear home. On the way home, a car splashed muddy water on you and got the jacket dirty. A) Would you wash the jacket before you gave it back? B) Would you give it back dirty and explain to your friend what happened?


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7:45 a.m.
I fuel up at Le Panier in downtown Seattle. I've had breakfast already, but it's going to be 90 degrees in Wenatchee, so I down a flaky croissant, in case the day turns into eight hours of volunteer labor. Andrew, who must be tall enough to harvest cherries without a ladder, picks me up in his Prius wearing a lovely pressed shirt, slacks, and trendy lace-up leather shoes. He has the self-assured smile of a very successful car salesman. Back home, I'd been so sure sturdy sneakers and an old t-shirt were appropriate, but now, I'm not so certain. Thank goodness I remembered my cherry-print bobby socks. Andrew notices them immediately.
In high school soccer, I was a forward. I had neither the speed and endurance required of a midfielder, nor the ball skills required near the goal. I thought it was a pretty good gig, hanging out up past midfield, waiting for someone to pass me the ball so that I could score and dance around like I'd actually accomplished something. That is, until one girl started screaming "cherry picker" every time I scored. That made it less fun.
When Andrew, the Washington State Fruit Commission's resident cherry expert, said he'd take me cherry picking at high season, I jumped. I had no reason to believe I wouldn't be good at the real thing, especially if I didn't actually have to grow the cherries myself. And it would be awfully nice if no one hollered at me.
11:00 a.m.
We pull into the packing plant at Bluebird, one of the state's biggest cherry-packing plants, in Wenatchee, Washington. We meet a man I'll call Bob, a well-respected cherry grower. Andrew's arranged for me to pick fruit on Bob's land. A good-natured old boy who acts a lot more burly than he looks, Bob gives me the once-over and makes a joke about letting me "pick" a box of cherries at the plant and getting me back to Seattle.
Only, it's not a joke. I feel branded: City Girl. Unfit to pick. It burns.
"I can't wait to see your land and get up in the trees," I say, smiling like a champ. Bob steers me into the plant.
A cherry-packing plant is a lot like the inside of a beehive, if modern cartoons are any indication, only there's a lot less Jerry Seinfeld, and a lot more Spanish. There are two packing lines, which run 24 hours a day during high season: One for the easy-bruising, pink tinted Rainiers, the sweet glitterati whose every move toward a pricey grocery store clamshell is coddled by a gentle stream of cold water, and one for cascades of the rough-and-tumble reds, the cherries universally dumped into the category labeled "dark sweet." Today, Bluebird is packing for Costco Korea.
I learn that cherries, like shrimp, are categorized by size—only, instead of by pound, it's by diameter, or how many cherries fit in a row in the bottom of a standard box. A farmer brags about a crop of nine-row cherries, and I wonder out loud whether cherries could be sold by varietal and size, like apples. Andrew and Bob stare at me like I have three heads.
Someone hands me a toolbox-sized container of dark sweets, and we leave the plant.
11:45 a.m.
We blink back the sunlight, and I tell Bob I came to pick the dark sweets, like the ones I'm already munching on. I'd love to taste a few different varieties, and see if I can tell the difference.
"Did you bring your bucket?" asks Bob.
I admit I didn't. But I brought a good hat, and harvested all the Ziploc bags my house could provide. I'm still smiling, because I'm pumped to pick, but it occurs to me that it's possible I won't.
"I tell my pickers they have to bring all their own equipment. No bucket, no picking," says Bob. I wonder whether he skips his kids' birthdays. "But I'll show you my trees."
I smile again. I can't think of anything else to do.
12:00 p.m.
Bob's orchards are beautiful; each tree has a box seat in a gently undulating stadium overlooking the Columbia River. He guides me through a newly planted block, explaining how most growers plant different varieties of dark sweets to extend the picking season. (Bob harvests the burgundy-hued Chelans first, then moves onto the light-fleshed Bentons, then the traditional Bings, then to his Vans, which taste slightly more sour.)
"You see them in the markets," says Andrew, picking some of each varietal for me to take home and taste. "You just don't know you see them."
I spot the ladders. They're shaped like flattened Eiffel Towers, and seem almost as tall, with a big adjustable pole shooting toward the ground (for balance, I presume, but it does look like a great way to get hurt). I watch some of the pickers maneuver them around, plunking the last fruit off a few almost-empty branches into the big metal buckets they've strapped to themselves with old GM seatbelts.
"Can I pick some?" I ask. "Sure," says Bob. He points to four cherries hanging from the lowest branch of a nearly naked tree. I pretend he's kidding. Andrew starts looking nervous. I might be about to ruin his relationship with this guy, one of the finest of Washington's 2,500 growers.
"Are there any other parts of the orchard with ripe cherries that haven't been picked yet?" I ask. On the road to Bob's house, we saw trees roped with ruby fruit, and I know there are 37,000 acres of cherries in the state, all ripening now. One of them must be here.
"Yup," he says, pointing north. He turns south to head back to the car.
Maybe Bob's playing Little Red Hen. Maybe I wasn't here early enough. Or maybe I really don't have the chops to pick.
There must be more to cherry picking than picking cherries, I decide. I mean, I'm not exactly a frail-looking person, and I don't think I look that inept, and it's no secret that I came for a reason. I'm wearing the socks. I try again.
I point to my four cherries, and ask Bob what it takes to be a cherry picker. Is there a special technique? How much training is involved? I ask him to show me how to pick, thinking a roundabout approach might actually get me up a tree. I didn't put sunscreen on to stand in the shade all afternoon.
Bob tells me he hires people by the day, and submits them to a roughly ten-minute safety session each morning. Since the limbs lay the groundwork for the next year's blossoms early in the season, it's important not to actually yank entire branches off the tree, but the difficulty is in the hours his workers spend picking—starting at dawn—rather than in the actual picking technique. They're told to pick cherries from the stems, instead of just yanking on the fruit, because cherries that are ripped at the junction between the fruit and the stem won't pass inspection. Other than that, picking is picking. He picks my four Vans off and tosses them on the ground nonchalantly. I rescue them.
"So, where can we pick?" There is nothing indirect about my question this time.
"Well, a few years ago, there was a U-Pick place down Grant Road," says Bob. Then: "Thanks for coming." He starts loading cherries onto his truck for another trip to the packer.
12:30 p.m.
Back in the Prius, Andrew and I stare at each other. He's obviously sorry.
"So…I guess we're not picking?" I ask.
"I guess not," says Andrew. "I don't understand."
We label the cherries and stuff them into a cooler, like a science experiment, and head out to Grant Road, which proves to be a cherry-picking hotspot, if you're in the cherry-picking industry. There are no U-Pick signs here, or at any of the orchards lining the Wenatchee roads we drive for the next 90 minutes, searching for a place to climb a ladder.
My stomach begins to get raw, either because Andrew and I have downed a pound and a half of the cherries from the packer, or because I can't figure out why Bob was so protective of his crop. Maybe the orchards are cover for a county-wide meth operation, and I've inhaled too much dust. Or maybe I just can't stomach the math Andrew's spewing, trying to calculate the carbon sink potential of the Northwest's massive cherry acreage.
2:00 p.m.
A few people tell us there haven't been U-Pick cherry orchards here in years. Apparently, Washington's cherries are in such high demand that growers hold out for top dollar for every single cherry.
That's nice for Washington, but I've come halfway across the state in cherry-print socks to not pick cherries.
We decide to call it a day, and weave our way back to Seattle, stopping at every fruit stand we see, so I can at least come home with the booty I've promised my neighbors. I want to search for sour cherries for David, who needs them for a recipe, but Andrew tells me we're in the wrong part of the state for sours, which make up a miniscule percentage of the state's crop, anyway.
3:15 p.m.
Andrew buys me a coffee milkshake at Twin Pines Burgers, about halfway back to Seattle. It dulls the pain.
6:00 p.m.
In my kitchen, I arrange six cherries (one of each of the varieties Andrew picked) in a little huddle, stems out, and notice that like people, they're all a little different. The Vans and the Benton are wearing big '80s shoulder pads, the Chinook is apple shaped, and the fat Bing—well, let's just say she's built for comfort, that girl. The Rainier looks entirely out of place, and I remember the time I overheard a woman tell her daughter in a grocery store on Cape Cod that "rainy-er" cherries—pronounced with three syllables—come from the wetter climates near Seattle.
I close my eyes, and pop the first cherry I touch into my mouth. Badda bing—it's that big cherry flavor, underneath a skin that's so fresh and taught I can hear it break between my teeth like the crack of a bat. It's my first taste, but it must be the best one of the six. I cheat instantly, glancing at my guide: It's not a Bing, it's a Vans. The flesh inside is curiously light colored. I bite into a Bing to compare, and indeed, the Bing's ruby meat is significantly darker than the Vans's crimson, but I like the Vans better; its afterbite is more astringent. The Chinook is even darker inside than the Bing, almost blackish, and much more tart. Next, the Chelan's skin is the most crisp of them all. Bob told me his Chelans are super sweet now, since it's already late in that variety's season, and indeed, it tastes like a strawberry.
Just the Rainier and the Benton left. I start light. Compared to the dark sweets, the Rainier is so mild, it hardly tastes like the same fruit. It's like eating a cherry with my nose plugged. I toss it to the dog.
But the Benton—he's got a thick, snappy skin, and is more acidic than the others, even the Vans. I nibble back and forth between the Benton and the Vans and the Bing, and it's no contest. The Benton is a cherry lover's cherry. I know instantly it's male because he makes me want to speak in Jane Austen: Oh, sweet Benton! He's my clear favorite.
I do remember the day I fell in love with cherries, before they had genders. Come to think of it, it was the same day I learned how dangerous they can be. I was driving across Washington with a girlfriend to visit colleges on the West Coast, with a fat bag of Bings from the tree in front of my parents' house. Only, they weren't quite ripe, so by the time we hit Ellensburg, a couple hours from Seattle, my tongue was pickled pink and my stomach churned with the acidic torture of unripe fruit.
Come to think of it, I'd picked them myself. Maybe Bob was onto me.


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Sub-4:00 miler Scott McGowan talks about home
By Rachel ToorAs featured in the April 2006 issue of Running Times Magazine
My local running store used to be on a block with an art gallery, a hair salon and a porn shop. Then it moved around the corner to Higgins Street, the main drag of Missoula, Montana—a more foot-traffic-friendly location. The Runner's Edge has a good selection of shoes, all the right accessories (water bottle holders, gels, race entries), and a friendly and knowledgeable staff. Recently when I went in to get a new pair of shoes, a tall, leggy guy with dark hair, big ears and a ready smile waited on me. An hour later, I left with the shoes I'd come for and a book recommendation. Counting Coup, by Larry Colter, describes the intense interest in basketball—in this case, high school women's basketball—on Montana's Crow Indian Reservation. "It'll give you a sense of what it's like on the rez," the young man said, writing down the name of the author and title on a Post-It for me.
When I first came into the store I noticed that he was reading a book of serious nonfiction. I asked him about it, and from there our conversation galloped and gamboled along. I had no idea that Scott McGowan was such a bookworm. It surprised and delighted me. Because, like many people who live in Montana, I knew Scott for his achievements only in one area: on the track.
He'd hit the magic number, and we all knew about it. McGowan had done the one thing that everyone—even and perhaps especially non-runners—can relate to and admire. He entered the pantheon of those people who have captured our communal imagination by doing the special things, like breaking the sound barrier, batting .400, and winning a Nobel Prize. Last spring, at the Reebok Boston Indoor Games, Scott McGowan became the first Montanan ever to go under four minutes in the mile. For his efforts, McGowan received a hero's welcome—lots of news coverage and an invitation to the state capital in Helena, where, as he says, "A proclamation was read, and hands were shook…. It was really nice for my parents," he adds, shrugging off both the applause and the achievement.
As most serious runners know, it's no longer such a big deal to run a sub-four-minute mile. And accomplishing it was no surprise to McGowan, whose 1500 meter times made it clear that this was an obtainable goal. "But," he says, "it's hard to explain to someone that, since I've run 3:37 in the 1500, and the mile is only 100 meters longer, if you extrapolate—you know, they just don't really get it."
Scott McGowan is quick to downplay any success. He has the modesty of a fourth-generation Montanan. There are, I've learned, Montana values. They go something like this: You get a fair day's wage for fair day's work, no more, no less. You have to be able to trust in a person's word. There's the "Popsicle rule"—if you have enough for everyone, you can eat your popsicles in the front yard. Otherwise, do it in private. Montanans hew to the idea of wealth without conspicuous consumption; it's what you've done that's worthy, not what you have. And you don't talk about what you've done. No bragging, no whining.
Scott McGowan is a true and proud Montanan. But he's grown up a little differently from many in the state. "When I tell people that I'm from Poplar, I get everything from sympathy to being called 'Prairie Nigger.'" His town, tucked into the northeast corner of the state, is the tribal headquarters of the Fort Peck Reservation, home to the Sioux and Assinboine tribes and to only a handful of white folks. As reservations go, it is typical. Which means, to many whites, it is a scarred and scary place of boarded up or barred windows, abandoned junk cars, and people looking for drinks or fights. To McGowan, it is a home he loves and is fiercely proud of.
"My dad has said that if I got a nosebleed I wouldn't be Native American anymore," McGowan laughs. His father, a farmer, is the third-generation McGowan to live on the reservation in the town of Poplar; his mother retired recently from her job as the school's librarian. The McGowan family has always had many tribal members as friends. Scott himself is one-eighth Native American, his paternal grandmother was half Chippewa.
On the Fort Peck rez, as on others throughout the state, basketball is a big deal. At 6'4″ ("I say that I¹m 6'3", he says, because now that I'm a runner I really want to be smaller"), Scott regularly scored twenty points a game. "I just did the dirty work," he says, "getting the ball to my friend Richard, who scored thirty points a game. I could rebound, but wasn't a good shooter. I wasn't that good in general. I just worked really, really hard."
He'd been hoping for a basketball scholarship and got some offers from smaller schools, but decided, instead, to focus on running. Since basketball was his main thing, he never trained for track. Running, on the rez, is almost as big as round ball. The Poplar cross country team—McGowan's graduating class was 45 students—won the state championships in their division three years in a row. Scott was good, but not great. But in June of his senior year, he ran 4:12 in the mile. That got him all the way west across the state to the University of Montana.
"I lived college life a little too much," he says of his first couple of years in Missoula. "I didn't really train as hard as I should have." He was good enough, however, to be a four-time All-American and to break the school record in the 1500 (3:41) and the mile (4:02). Then he woke up. On the edge of the Olympic A standard, McGowan went to a little meet in Occidental California, "a last-chance qualifier," he says, and ripped off a 3:37.7, a PR by more than four seconds, making him the fifth fastest American that year.
"It was a big surprise to everyone," McGowan says. It netted him an agent and a contract from New Balance. The Trials were two weeks later, and while McGowan made it to the final, he ran, as he says, "horrible," coming in twelfth place, dead last. "I was embarrassed," he said. "Disappointed in myself. I was afraid that people were saying, 'Oh that guy from Montana—he rides horses and tips cows, and he got lucky one time'."
But McGowan doesn't ride horses (any more), and he doesn't tip cows, and his time was not a fluke. Last winter he won the USATF Indoor Nationals in the 1500, though, typically modest and with a historian's devotion to the truth, he's quick to point out that neither Alan Webb nor Bernard Lagat showed up.
With his Montana reserve, you have to really press McGowan to give you his bona fides. "It's hard for me to think that I've done anything. Until I run a mile under 3:50—then I'll talk about running. Guys like Alan and Bernard are going to make guys like me train harder and work harder." He thinks that his best events might be those he hasn't yet tried—the steeplechase and the 5,000m.
Now he's taking a little break and continuing to work at Runner's Edge, which, he says, is the perfect job for a runner. His boss, owner Anders Brooker, a triathlete, is supportively understanding of his schedule. And, when the things at the store are slow, Scott can read. He graduated from the University of Montana in 2004 with a degree in history, and the field continues to have a firm grip on his interest. He reads widely and closely, everything from books on World War II to the fight for women's suffrage. "If I ever make a lot of money," he says, "If I ever win the lottery, I'm going to give a whole bunch to the history program. I loved my teachers there." He thinks for a minute, catching himself. "And track too. Track too. I'd split it up."
People have suggested that he move for his running, that there might be other places that are more conducive to training than western Montana. "Yeah," he says, "I tell people that we have about three months of decent weather. Then it's snowy and cold, and then it's fire season and the whole valley is blanketed with smoke and you can't even go outside."
I look at him. We both know that what he has just said is not true. Not even close. But Montanans are a funny people. An outward, superficial courtesy—which is often misinterpreted as friendliness by outsiders—is but a thin layer covering deep wells of wariness and reserve. "We don't want people to come here," McGowan says, echoing something I've heard from many other natives. "We like to keep the rural, small town, rugged individualist myth alive so that we're not overrun with outsiders."
"I like being the guy from Montana," McGowan says, "I have a sense of pride not only in my state, but in my hometown. My father told me: Never be embarrassed about where you're from. There are a lot of misconceptions about Indians and about what life on the reservation is like. But I know. I grew up there. The guys are my friends. It's hard," he says, when we start to talk about the intensely strained race relations of a place that, to most visitors, seems overwhelmingly white. "You can't believe how tribal members are treated. When we were on the road, going to cross country meets, we'd go into a Wal-Mart and people said 'there are too many of you to come in here.' Too many Indians. A couple of times I've been called a 'cracker' by a Native American who didn¹t know me, but I've taken a hundred times more from non-natives."
Both the Reebok Indoor Meet, where McGowan did his sub-four, and Indoor Nationals, took place in the Roxbury section of Boston. McGowan warmed up by running around the neighborhood. "They told me it was dangerous, that I shouldn't go out there. I did, and it was fine. A couple of guys said to me, 'Yo, you dropped your wallet,' and I just laughed and said, 'I've got no wallet.' And they laughed. When I got back, people couldn't believe I'd gone out there. I said, "I didn't think it was that bad; you should see my hometown.'" He goes on to explain, "To me the reservation is one simple word, home. I know there are problems in Poplar, just like there are everywhere else, but the people back home are some of the nicest and most supportive folks I know. I am very proud to be a Montanan, but even more proud of the fact that I can call myself a Poplar Indian (school mascot)."
So for now, Scott McGowan will live, train, and do prodigious amounts of reading in Montana. He travels—he spent part of last summer competing in Europe—but is always glad to come back to Missoula, a town where runners, many runners of all shapes and sizes, trot along the river that runs through it, in shoes he's sold them.


text:
Top quality clothing hand-drawn and handmade in Los Angeles in small batches. At Dazey we embrace slow fashion methods to bring our customers high quality, eco-friendly clothing. We are making a conscious effort to eliminate waste by making all of our tees to order rather than in larger quantities that create unneeded product. Every purchase at Dazey is in support of small, female owned business made with the environment in mind, so you can feel good about where your hard-earned dollars go!
Made in United States


text:
One of the few things that bugged me about my favorite text editor, Sublime 2, is that new tabs would open up next to the current tab instead on the far right. Since I usually have about a half-dozen tabs open at once, this made keeping them in a sane order frustrating.
Thankfully Stylishmedia has written a simple little Sublime 2 plugin that makes new tabs open on the right side. Perfect. 🙂


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InnoDB was developed, the memory
allocators supplied with operating systems and run-time libraries
were often lacking in performance and scalability. At that time,
there were no memory allocator libraries tuned for multi-core
CPUs. Therefore,
InnoDB implemented its own
memory allocator in the
mem subsystem. This
allocator is guarded by a single mutex, which may become a
InnoDB also implements a wrapper interface
around the system allocator (
malloc and
free) that is likewise guarded by a single
Today, as multi-core systems have become more widely available,
and as operating systems have matured, significant improvements
have been made in the memory allocators provided with operating
systems. These new memory allocators perform better and are more
scalable than they were in the past. Most workloads, especially
those where memory is frequently allocated and released (such as
multi-table joins), benefit from using a more highly tuned memory
allocator as opposed to the internal,
InnoDB-specific memory allocator.
You can control whether
InnoDB uses its own
memory allocator or an allocator of the operating system, by
setting the value of the system configuration parameter
innodb_use_sys_malloc in the MySQL option file
my.cnf or
my.ini). If set
ON or
1 (the default),
InnoDB uses the
malloc and
free functions of the underlying system rather
than manage memory pools itself. This parameter is not dynamic,
and takes effect only when the system is started. To continue to
use the
InnoDB memory allocator, set
innodb_use_sys_malloc to
When the
InnoDB memory allocator is disabled,
InnoDB ignores the value of the parameter
innodb_additional_mem_pool_size. The
InnoDB memory allocator uses an additional
memory pool for satisfying allocation requests without having to
fall back to the system memory allocator. When the
InnoDB memory allocator is disabled, all such
allocation requests are fulfilled by the system memory allocator.
On Unix-like systems that use dynamic linking, replacing the
memory allocator may be as easy as making the environment variable
LD_PRELOAD or
LD_LIBRARY_PATH point to the dynamic library
that implements the allocator. On other systems, some relinking
may be necessary. Please refer to the documentation of the memory
allocator library of your choice.
InnoDB cannot track all memory use when
the system memory allocator is used
innodb_use_sys_malloc is
ON), the section "BUFFER POOL AND
MEMORY" in the output of the
STATUS command only includes the buffer pool statistics
in the "Total memory allocated". Any memory allocated
using the
mem subsystem or using
ut_malloc is excluded.
innodb_use_sys_malloc and
innodb_additional_mem_pool_size were
deprecated in MySQL 5.6 and removed in MySQL
For more information about the performance implications of
InnoDB memory usage, see
Section 8.10, "Buffering and Caching".


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At last, the Sanzo Party has arrived in India. In this foreign land, where the anomaly's influence runs rampant, their battles only heighten in their violence. And also awaiting them is their tragic fate from 500 years ago— What will they find at the end of their long and treacherous journey?
Doesn't look like anyone has reacted to this yet


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Why Is It Cool To Hate On Dinosaur Discoveries?
Tyrannosaur traditionalists are registering their displeasure at the way paleontologists are altering our understanding of dinosaur lives
When I first heard the news that paleontologists had discovered a giant, fuzzy tyrannosaur, I was giddy with excitement. The dinosaur, dubbed Yutyrannus, was a confirmation of an idea that researchers and artists had been cautiously exploring for years. While most of the feathered dinosaurs discovered so far have been very small and often quite bird-like animals, Yutyrannus was a roughly 30-foot-long bruiser which showed that even huge predators might have sported fluffy plumage. And if an imposing predator like Yutyrannus sported a fuzzy coat, the same might be true for the theropod's notorious cousin, Tyrannosaurus rex. The tyrant king may not have been the wholly scaly monstrosity I grew up knowing, but an apex predator decorated by patches of simple protofeathers.
Not everyone shared my enthusiasm. "Tyrannosaurs were supposed to be scaly," came the cantankerous cry from die-hard fans of more reptilian dinosaurs. Why are paleontologists so committed to destroying the fantastic imagery Jurassic Park embedded in our cultural landscape? Across the web, tyrannosaur traditionalists registered their displeasure. "Oh, how the mighty have fallen!" mourned one WIRED commenter, and elsewhere, Yutyrannus was presented as a "fuzzball" and "chicken from hell." And while the outrage was not as great as when people mistakenly believed that paleontologists were trying to kill Triceratops, at least some dinosaur fans lamented the increasingly avian aspect of tyrannosaurs.
Paleo blogger Mark Wildman recently jumped in with a post titled "In Defence of Scaly Dinosaurs." He was sad to see yet another proud dinosaurian lineage turn fluffy. "Those of us who like our dinosaurs scaly appear to be frowned upon," Wildman wrote, "as if we don't know what we are talking about and that we really ought to 'get with it' and rejoice that the dinosaurs are covered in fuzz and feathers. Well that isn't going to happen—certainly not by me and, I am sure, not for many others." And to dapple Tyrannosaurus with feathers would be the ultimate indignity. Citing the awesomeness of Tyrannosaurus in Dinosaur Revolution, and how silly the feathery Gigantoraptor looked, Wildman challenged readers: "Do you really want the ultimate theropods, the megastars of the dinosaurian world—the tyrannosaurs—displaying colourful yet gaudy feathers and dancing like a demented turkey cock?"
I actually wouldn't mind a strutting tyrannosaur, even though I admit that Dinosaur Revolution's Gigantoraptor sequence was a little over the top. And none of this is to say that Wildman objects to the evidence of feathered dinosaurs. He makes it quite clear that he's entirely on board with the science. All the same, his post and other comments about how Yutyrannus has somehow ruined tyrannosaurs made me wonder about why it is so fashionable to register cranky displeasure with the way dinosaurs have changed. Some people just don't like feathery dinosaurs, many wept and wailed at the false assertion of journalists that Triceratops might disappear, and "Brontosaurus" still stirs up strong feelings among those who grew up with the thunder lizard. It's cool to show contempt for new discoveries in favor of the dinosaurs we grew up with. Before I knew the extent of the evidence, even I felt a little sad that so many of the scabrous, ugly dinosaurs I met as a kid were turned into pretty peacocks.
I can't explain why this is so any more than I can explain why we adore dinosaurs in the first place. I don't think anyone has successfully articulated why we're so enthralled by these creatures. But I think Mike Brown identified one important thread in his book How I Killed Pluto and Why it Had it Coming. When Pluto was officially demoted from planet to dwarf planet, many people objected to the loss of one of our solar system's icons. Brown recalled:
In the days that followed, I would hear from many people who were sad about Pluto. And I understood. Pluto was part of their mental landscape, the one they had constructed to organize their thinking about the solar system and their own place within it. Pluto seemed like the edge of existence. Ripping Pluto out of that landscape caused what felt like an inconceivably empty hole.
Of course, Pluto didn't actually go anywhere. Its title simply changed. But the alteration virtually obliterated the cosmic body in people's minds. Might the same be true for dinosaurs? For those of us who grew up with scaly, swamp-dwelling dinosaurs, the new images of fuzzy dinosaurs are conflicting with the Mesozoic world as we think it should be. A Tyrannosaurus with feathers isn't really a Tyrannosaurus, but a different sort of creature that doesn't quite fit what we had in mind for so long. This tension is inevitable. There is so much that remains unknown that any vision of the past is certainly going to change. I have no doubt that, a few decades from now, children who grew up with feathery dinosaurs will lament how future generations of paleontologists are altering the picture of dinosaur lives.


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NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- As the Superdome's energy provider and stadium management try to determine what caused a 34-minute power outage at Sunday's Super Bowl, local officials are hoping the incident won't leave a black eye on the city or prevent the league's big game from coming back to town.
Larry Roedel, a lawyer for the state board that oversees the Superdome, said Monday that the outage did not appear to be related to work done on the stadium's electrical system in December. The work, approved by the Louisiana Stadium and Exposition District last fall, replaced feeder equipment connecting the stadium to power provider Entergy New Orleans.
Entergy and the company that manages the Superdome, SMG, said Sunday that an "abnormality" occurred where stadium equipment intersects with an Entergy electric feed, causing a breaker to create the outage. It remained unclear Monday exactly what the abnormality was or why it occurred.
But Doug Thornton, manager of the Superdome, said called the outage an equipment error, not a human one. He said that when the power outage hit, meters indicated the stadium was drawing less power than it does during a typical New Orleans Saints game. The air conditioning system was running, he said, but on less power than it does in September.
Thornton said millions of dollars have been spent upgrading electrical equipment in the building since Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, and none of it failed. He said it was working properly when power was restored.
He also said there is no evidence that the halftime show had anything to do with the outage, which struck early in the third quarter. He said the show used its own dedicated generator and wasn't using the Superdome's power supply.
Mayor Mitch Landrieu told WWL-AM (www.wwl.com) on Monday that the city still wants to make a bid to host the NFL's championship game again in 2018 and that the outage won't hurt its chances.
Landrieu said league owners were impressed with the city's performance as host and even joked that the game got better after the blackout. ""People were leaving and the game was getting boring, so we had to do a little something to spice it up," he said.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said New Orleans was a terrific Super Bowl host and that the outage won't affect future bids.
"I fully expect that we will be back here for Super Bowls," NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said. "And I hope we will be back. We want to be back."
Goodell also said the Superdome had a backup power system ready to go, and it was about to be used when the power started coming back on.
The Superdome sits on a 52-acre former railroad yard in the business district. Though only a block from City Hall, the 76,000-seat stadium and the adjacent New Orleans Arena are owned by the state, and the seven-member commission that oversees them is appointed by Gov. Bobby Jindal.
The Superdome was built at a cost of $134 million and opened in 1975. It has been the home to the NFL's New Orleans Saints since then. The first Super Bowl was played there in 1978.
Sunday's game was the seventh Super Bowl at the stadium, and the 10th overall for New Orleans.
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina ripped off the Superdome roof as an estimated 30,000 people huddled inside. They waited, rain-drenched, for days in the severe heat that followed the storm.
On Sunday, officials were eager to show off how the city had been rebuilt since Katrina, and the week of activities leading up to the game was nearly perfect.
New Orleans also is home to one of the largest convention centers in the country. Dr. Bjorn Hanson, dean of New York University's Center for Hospitality and Sports Management, said Monday that the power outage shouldn't hurt the city's reputation as a convention destination.
"I think people view it for what it was: An unusual event with a near-record power draw," he said. "It was the equivalent of a circuit breaker flipping."
The American Association of Neurological Surgeons will hold meetings in New Orleans from April 27 to May 1. Patty Anderson, director of meetings for the group, said she was unconcerned about the outage.
"It doesn't matter," she said. "I never even gave it a second thought. To me, the city is bigger, stronger and more vibrant than it's ever been."
Associated Press writers Beth Harpaz, Brett Martel and Barry Wilner contributed to this report.


text:
The Settings page lets you manage bundle settings, including the variables that are available for use on bundles and content replication settings for ZENworks Primary Servers and Satellite devices.
Settings can be inherited from the following locations:
(System): The bundle is inheriting the setting established for the Management Zone (tab > ).
Folder: The bundle is inheriting the setting established for one of its parent folders.
Device: The bundle is not inheriting the setting, but the setting is configured directly on the bundle. In other words, the setting is not configured at the system level, the folder level, or the bundle level.
To configure a setting for the bundle:
Click the setting name.
If the setting is configured at the system or folder level, clickto enable you to configure the setting at the bundle level.
Fill in the fields.
To get information about the fields, click thebutton or review the following sections:


text:
Customers often approach "the cloud" as if it were some big-box store where IaaS (infrastructure as a service) can be purchased as a commodity. That may be marginally true for simple backup or for dev and test, where the risk of failure is not a big deal. But companies that wish to stand up mission-critical production applications on, say, Amazon Web Services, rapidly discover they need to become experts in the intricacies of the platform.
RightScale, an independent SaaS provider, shoulders much of the burden of building out enterprise-class server deployments for IaaS. It delivers a top layer of management and automation in the form of templates for Amazon, Rackspace, SoftLayer, and other providers, as well as for private cloud infrastructure built on technology from Citrix, Eucalyptus, and OpenStack. Best practices are built right in.
[ In the data center today, the action is in the private cloud. InfoWorld's experts take you through what you need to know to do it right in our "Private Cloud Deep Dive" PDF special report. | Also check out our "Cloud Security Deep Dive," our "Cloud Storage Deep Dive," and our "Cloud Services Deep Dive." ]
InfoWorld executive editor Doug Dineley and I recently spoke with RightScale CEO Michael Crandell, who has a unique perch from which to observe the cloud industry, both on the provider side and the customer side, where he can claim Comcast, PBS, Zynga, and many other big players as part of his customer base. The following is an edited version of that conversation. We were particularly intrigued by Crandell's take on the entry of HP and Microsoft into the IaaS business.
First, we asked him to explain why customers should go to RightScale instead of going directly to an IaaS provider.
Eric Knorr: Say I just want to manage virtual machines on Amazon. What value does RightScale bring to the equation?
Michael Crandell: The first piece is really the automation. There are apps that are amazing in terms of sys admins and servers -- that are able to manage literally thousands of servers through automation, autoscaling, auto-failover, things like that.
RightScale is sort of the big eye in the sky monitoring on these servers. We might detect, for example, that the CPU load had gone up on a bank of app servers. If it went too high for too long across too many machines, let's launch some new app servers. Well, you're now launching new app servers into a particular cluster or deployment that might be running -- if you take Zynga as an example -- Cityville or Farmville.
For the sake of this example, we're just scaling the app servers, not the database layer. So how do the app servers when they launch know how to fold themselves in and configure themselves to be part of the rest of this whole system? That's the dynamic configuration we provide. We use a particular piece of IP that we created for that; we call it a Server Template.
A Server Template in simple terms is still a machine image at the base, reduced down to the plain vanilla OS and a few super common utilities. And then everything that loads to make that server whatever it is in life happens dynamically at launch time.
Doug Dineley: Then the server template is not really a template. It's a set of scripts.
Crandell: It's a set of scripts, the one difference being that you can abstract out variables from the scripts and pass them in at launch time. So in that sense it is a template for, say, an app server -- and you can pass in a launch time, where is the database, what's the host's name, where are the other app servers, where's the load balancer -- and RightScale can dynamically figure that stuff and pass it in. In that way you can make a model of an app server that you can use all over the place.


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Hey Mate, I'm writing in regards to that message I sent through yesterday, we have been nominated as being one of the Top Aussie Blogs on the famous Circle Of Moms website and at the moment are coming #1 but we'll still need our friends and followers help as our challanger has a wider support network than we do and is catching up fast! If you could vote for our blog every day or just once it would make a big difference.
If you do decide you'd like to help out daily, I can pop you on our notification list and have spesh little reminders send to you, just let me know!
Thanks for being our friend on here and have a fabulous weekend!!
Melissa x
Welcome to Mom Blogger's Club! I hope you enjoy your time here and find it helpful! I know it can be overwhelming at first but I promise, you'll be a pro on here in no time! I write a blog called The Adventures of J-Man and MillerBug. It's a blog about my life with my two boys and I do some pretty cool giveaways (OK, I think they're cool! Do you?)
Every weekend I host the Finding New Friends Weekend Blog Hop. It's a great way to find new followers and friends as well as get to know more of your fellow mom bloggers. If you're not familiar with a blog hop, all you have to do is add your blog to the list. Participants then "hop" from blog to blog to find great new blogs! It's a ton of fun! I'd love to have you join us. It's going on now so come on over and link up! You can find it here: http://myadventureinmommyhood.blogspot.com/2011/08/finding-new-friends-weekend-blog-hop_25.html#more. Be sure to leave a messge if you join up so that I can follow you back!
Let me know if you have any questions or if I can help you with anything in your blogging journey! I look forward to being your friend!
Hi Daniyal!I'm fairly new to MBC myself and wanted to welcome you. I am a part-time family doctor and full-time mom of 4 boys. I have a parenting website. On the site I accept questions from parents about their kids' behavior and offer suggestions about difficult situations. I hope you will check it out, perhaps leave a question or recommend it to a friend who has a problem.
Dr. G
On email@example.com/AskDoctorG
I'm doing my part to help raise awareness regarding the issues surrounding cervical cancer and HPV; empowering women to take control of their health. Please feel free to pass it long!
Blog: http://julnet.typepad.com/ibelieveintomorrows/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BelieveinTomorrows
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/BelievnTomorrow
Love and Hugs!
Welcome! I am a Bay Area Blogger also. Hope to meet you and look forward to reading more of your posts.
Hi Daniyal! Welcome to the club and feel free to check out my blog: Swanky Baby - swankybaby.net. I'm looking forward to checking yours out too!


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Blasts From the Past
space science news home
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs for short) are brief flashes of high-energy radiation that appear on average about once a day at an unpredictable time from unpredictable directions in the sky. Since their discovery (by accident) in the late 1960's, several thousand bursts have been detected, most of them with BATSE, the Burst and Transient Source Experiment, on board the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. Their distribution on the sky is completely uniform. In particular, they do not appear to come from the Milky Way. So where do they come from? This is the question that had kept astronomers busy for several decades, with no apparent resolution in sight.
What we thought...
Between the time of the discovery of bursts in the late 1960's, and the launch of the BATSE experiment in 1991, most astronomers were convinced that bursts originated in our own Galaxy, on or near objects called neutron stars. Our Milky Way Galaxy contains many neutron stars, objects as massive as the Sun (about 300,000 times the mass of the Earth) but no bigger than about 10 kilometers in diameter. Their tremendous gravitational field and magnetic field made them an ideal source for the gamma-ray bursts.Why we built BATSE...
See how the Gamma Ray Observatory
was put together
The BATSE experiment on GRO was built with every intention of confirming this theory. It was believed that with BATSE's increased sensitivity, we would be able to see the faint gamma-ray bursts map out the Milky Way on the sky, the same way the stars appear to do so when you get away from the city lights and can see fainter objects.
This concept is demonstrated in the accompanying figure. At the top, we see a schematic of our Galaxy's disk, with the Earth and BATSE located at the star. If we were not able to see very far out into space, symbolized by the first circle, we have the situation shown in the first set of plots. We see bursts in every direction equally. At the same time, we see there is no detectable edge and the brightness distribution of bursts follows a special curve indicating homogeneity. This is because our small inner circle is, to first order, filled uniformly with bursts.
On the other hand, if we can see out of the disk of the Galaxy, such as in the case of the outer circle, the bursts do not appear uniform on the sky, and the distribution shows a deficit of weak bursts, because there are not very many bursts located near the edge of the second circle.
This appealing idea was confronted with reality in 1992, when it became clear from BATSE observations that GRBs are distributed uniformly on the sky, without a concentration to the plane of the Milky Way, or towards its center or in other clumps of or concentrations. In fact, the distribution is almost perfectly random.
By itself, the angular distribution could lead one to argue that perhaps we see the bursts coming from quite nearby, from distances small compared to the thickness of the disk of the Milky Way. However, this would imply, as we saw above, that in no direction do we start to see the edge of the GRB distribution, or in this case, the edge of the Milky Way disk. Such an edge would reveal itself in the distribution of brightnesses of bursts, which would show a deficit of faint bursts.
But this is contradicted by the observed brightness distribution of GRBs, which shows a distinct dearth of very weak GRBs: it is as though in all directions we do see that edge.
What to do??
The combined angular and brightness distributions of bursts eliminates the possibility that GRBs come from the disk of the Milky Way, and left astronomers with a choice between one of two possibilities:
- GRBs originate either in a very large spherical halo (or corona) around the Galaxy, or
- They come from the far depths of the Universe, billions of light years away from us.
The galactic halo would have to be very big, about a million light years across, which is much bigger than the diameter of the known Milky Way system (which is less than a hundred thousand light years), much less the halo that the Milky Way is known to have. The very large halo size is required to avoid an asymmetry in the GRB sky distribution caused by the fact that the Earth is offset from the center of the Galaxy, by about 25,000 light years.
In the case of the other distance scale (referred to by astronomers as "cosmological") it is the smoothness of the GRB sky distribution that tells us that their distances must exceed the length scales over which the distribution of matter appears clumpy, i.e., larger than clusters and superclusters of galaxies, and the voids between them.
This implies distances measured in billions of light years.
At such large distances the effect of the expansion of the Universe becomes noticeable. An important effect of this expansion is the redshift of light (and gamma rays) and the apparent slowing down of clocks, both of which would cause a change in the brightness distribution very similar to what BATSE actually observes. Scientists have looked at the bursts for these cosmological effects, and some have reported seeing time dilation (weak bursts, which are presumably farther away, are, on average, longer than the strong, nearby bursts) and others report energy shifting, where the distribution of gamma-rays in faint bursts appears shifted to lower energies compared to strong bursts. In general the BATSE data seemed to be hinting at a cosmological origin, but it couldn't be proved more directly.
The key to nailing the cosmological hypothesis seemed to hinge on the ability to find a counterpart to a burst in a region of the spectrum outside of the gamma-rays. These counterparts would have the positional accuracies to link the GRB, for instance, to a faint galaxy, or allow the measurement of a redshift from an optical spectrum. Conversely, these would not be seen if GRBs came from a big galactic halo.
At last, a clue!!!
Finding such counterparts has recently become possible with the detection of GRBs with the Wide Field Camera (WFC) on board of the Italian-Dutch X-ray satellite BeppoSAX, which can pinpoint a GRB on the sky to within a circle with a diameter of 6 arcminutes (20 percent of the diameter of the full moon), and not only that, but can provide that position within a matter of hours, much faster than was possible before. This error box, if known sufficiently rapidly, is small enough that optical and radio telescopes can be used to search it for the presence of transient emission that may be connected with the GRB.
This WFC is sensitive to X rays, and can view a 40 by 40 degrees field of view, within which it can locate X-ray sources with several arcminute accuracy.
To know whether or not a GRB occurred in the field of view a Gamma-Ray Burst Monitor (GRBM) on BeppoSAX is employed, whose data are searched for GRBs every satellite orbit of 1.5 hours. When a GRB is found the WFC data are searched, and an accurate position can be determined, which is then quickly dispatched to astronomers around the world.
The first time this worked out successfully was on February 28, 1997, when a GRB was detected coming from the constellation Orion. Within 21 hours after this burst a team of astronomers from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the University of Amsterdam used the 4.2 meter William Herschel Telescope on La Palma (one of the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, West of the North Africa) to make images of the BeppoSAX GRB location. They did the same about a week later. A comparison of these images immediately revealed one star that was present on February 28, which had disappeared a week later.
In the meantime the Beppo SAX astronomers had used a more precise X-ray instrument on their satellite to also observe the GRB location in detail, and they found that it contained a weak decaying X-ray source, with a position (accurate to somewhat less than an arcminute) that coincided with that of the optical star that disappeared. Clearly, the X-ray and optical afterglow of a GRB had been detected for the first time. Further conformation that the decaying X-ray and optical signals came from one and the same source was obtained from X-ray images taken with the ROSAT satellite, which located the X-ray afterglow with an accuracy of some 10 arcseconds: it still coincided with the optical afterglow.
As soon as the disappearing optical afterglow was discovered, very deep optical images were made of it with the ESO New Technology Telescope and the Keck Telescope, which showed that at the location of the optical transient there was a very weak object that looked slightly extended, quite possibly a weak galaxy.
In a matter of weeks two observations were made with the Hubble Space Telescope, which showed that the fading optical transient consists of a point source (its fading between two HST observations shows it is the GRB counterpart) and an extended source ('fuzz') at whose edge it appears to be located. Although they don't constitute solid proof, these observations naturally fit the idea that the GRB of February 28, 1997 went off in a faraway faint galaxy (the fuzz).
And Another!!!
At left, the optical source is identified by the lines in the top image. In the bottom image, the counterpart is nearly invisible. Courtesy Kitt Peak National Observatory.
Finally, for this GRB of May 8, D. Frail of the National Radio Astronomical Observatory discovered the first radio emission associated with any GRB.
And Now The Clincher!!!In the May 7, 1998 edition of Nature, Shrinivas Kulkarni of Caltech and his colleagues used the 10-meter Keck Telescope in Hawaii, and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study the position of a similar burst detected by BATSE and BeppoSAX on the 14th of December 1997. What they have concluded is that this object possesses a redshift of over 3.4 - a colossal distance of more than 12 billion light years away. This is over a million times farther than astronomers had theorized the bursts might lie when the BATSE experiment was built and launched in 1991. See the NASA press release for more information.
This plot shows how the gamma-ray intensity of GRB971214 evolved with time, as observed with the BATSE detectors onboard NASA's Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory. Explanation of the rapid variability in its gamma-ray brightness presents a tough challenge to astrophysicists. The afterglow from this explosion was later observed in other wavelengths, allowing for a measurement of its distance from Earth.
After 30 years, it is clear that gamma-ray bursts represent the most powerful explosions in the universe. On a daily basis, we have the opportunity to sample the most remote reaches of space, simply by detecting and analyzing these bursts. Because of their tremendous luminosity, and their tremendous distance, gamma-ray bursts stand to offer insight into some of the most fundamental questions in astronomy and astrophysics:
- How big is the Universe?
- How old is the Universe?
- How fast is it expanding?
- Is this expansion speeding up or slowing down?
- Will the Universe continue to expand, or will it eventually stop expanding and begin to contract?
Stay tuned, there's more science to come from these prodigious blasts of energy!!!
Recent headlines on Gamma-Ray Bursts
|BATSE Detects 2000th Cosmic Gamma-Ray Burst
|Dec 15, 1997
|Gamma Ray Bursts are 1 in 100: Mystery tops Discover Magazine's "Top 100" Science Stories for 1997
|Dec 10, 1997
|Hubble Confirms Fading Burst Source, and news from the 4th Huntsville Gamma Ray Burst Symposium
|Sept 17, 1997
|Counterpart Discoveries Show Gamma-Ray Bursts ARE Cosmological
|June 11, 1997
|Discovery may be "Smoking Gun" in Gamma Ray Burst Mystery
|Mar 31, 1997
|Gamma-Ray Bursts Thought to be from Edge of Universe
|Jan 15, 1997
return to Space Science Home
Authors: Dr. John M. Horack, Dr. Chryssa Kouveliotou
Curator: Linda Porter
NASA Official: Gregory S. Wilson


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Lady Gaga Crashes at Boyfriend's Beach Shack in Cali
Lady Gaga wasn't kidding when she said she is happy not having her own home (or the mortgage that goes along with it) and instead crashing on the air mattress at her parents' apartment in New York City.
The 'Marry the Night' singer carries that attitude when she stays with her alleged boyfriend and 'You & I' video co-star Taylor Kinney in his San Diego beach shack. Photos of the abode have surfaced and it's certainly a bit rugged!
Kinney has three roommates but Gaga would prefer to crash out with him than make accommodations elsewhere, which she can easily afford! Perhaps the Mother Monster is really in love with Kinney and wants to spend time with him in his own comfortable surroundings!
Brittany Sackett, a real estate agent who dated Kinney for about a year, spoke to In Touch Magazine (as reported by The Daily Mail) about Kinney's digs, saying, "It's really run-down." You can see from the photos that it's certainly laced with a beachy, frat dude, surfer-stoner vibe, with all the bright paintings.
Sackett said she broke up with Kinney when she caught him on a date with Gaga. He accidentally called her while he was out with the Mother Monster in September. What a bad time to pocket dial, huh?! Sackett said she heard Gaga gushing about Kinney and saying he was "sexy and creative."
However, Sackett doesn't share Gaga's positive feelings about Kinney, calling him "dishonest and disloyal." She also said that he's "fame hungry," which intimates that Sackett thinks that is the reason he is dating the most famous woman in the world who has said that her greatest work of art is how she handles her fame. Gaga also has an album called 'The Fame' and a re-release called 'The Fame Monster," so Sackett seems to be saying that Kinney is latching onto Gaga for her fame.
For what it's worth, the fact that Gaga crashes out in a beach shack is cool by us. It's not surprising either, since Gaga's Lower East Side apartment is the East Coast/New York City equivalent of Kinney' beach bungalow. She's been there, done that and has fond memories of that period.


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TextEvans-TCP (Phase 1)An answer to the layman's treatise on baptism: in which the author is pleased to say, that the Quaker doctrine of water baptism is considered, their objections answered, and the doctrine of the Church of England, upon that important point, stated and vindicated. / By Thomas Nicholson. ; [Six lines of Scripture texts]Date of publication:
1757Description:"Errata."--p. [50].This item contains 3 files (263.8 KB).Publicly Available


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RC Willey Local Delivery Magnussen Home Modern Glam Eclectic Furniture Dressers
Local Delivery, Magnussen Home, Modern, Glam, Eclectic, Dressers
RC Willey Local Delivery Magnussen Home Modern Glam Eclectic Furniture Dressers
View our full Instagram gallery to shop these styles and more
Add Stylish, Convenient Storage to Your Bedroom with a Dresser from RC Willey!
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RC Willey offers a wide selection of bedroom dressers in a variety of styles. A modern dresser will add a clean, chic vibe to your space while a traditional dresser will add a time-honored look. A contemporary dresser is a versatile option that will easily mix and match with other styles. We also offer mid-century modern dressers, rustic dressers, farmhouse-inspired dressers, as well as many other bedroom dresser designs so you can find the ideal one that best reflects your personal style!
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A dresser is typically shorter and wider than a chest of drawers. A chest is typically taller and narrower with its drawers being stacked one on top of the other. Most dressers typically have 6 or more drawers and sometimes doors. Chests typically have 5 or 6 drawers.
RC Willey offers a wide range of prices for dressers perfect for any budget. With bedroom dressers at RC Willey starting as low as $249.99, you're sure to find the perfect piece for your budget and space.


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Fundamentals-only models rely on the theory of retrospective voting. That is, these models regard the election as a referendum on the incumbent government's performance, in particular, its economic performance. The idea is that voters reward the incumbent party for good performance and punish it otherwise.
What differentiates fundamentals-only models from fundamentals-plus models is that the former are structural and do not use any public opinion variables (e.g., presidential approval), wheres the latter do.
The PollyVote's fundamentals-only component forecast is calculated as the simple average of the available models in that category.


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Chad Johnson pleads on national TV for one more shot in NFL
Dec 6, 2012, 5:17 AM | Updated: 5:26 am
Chad Johnson use to be known as one of the league's elite wide receivers, catching at least 87 receptions per year between 2003-2007 with the Cincinnati Bengals.
These days, Johnson — who was released by the Miami Dolphins in August after being arrested for domestic battery — has became a caricature of his former self.
Never short on gimmicks — be it the Hall of Fame jacket, the name change or handing an NFL official a dollar bill — the six-time Pro Bowler tried his hand in yet another one on live television Wednesday morning.
When most people are looking for new work, they go around handing out resumes to prospective employers. Johnson took a rather different approach.
Looking for one final shot to prolong his professional career, Johnson took to ESPN's FirstTake desk to plea with any general manager who might be tuning in.
While it was concise and seemed partly genuine, it also reeked of desperation, and oh by way, was entirely inaccurate.
Johnson described himself as humble, quiet and always open.
Good luck with that one, Chad.