tagged w/ remanns recommends
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I was straight-up aiiight ta peep dat gizoogle.com was back online. Put ya muthaf#%!in choppers up if ya feelin dis shiznit!I was straight-up aiiight ta peep dat gizoogle.com was back online. Put ya muthaf#%!in... more
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Had been traveling the world
VICTORIA HARBOUR, Hong Kong — Hong Kong’s favorite new resident, a giant inflatable duck, took a turn for the worse on Wednesday, looking less like an oversized lovable plaything and more like an unappetizing fried egg on the water.
The 16.5-meter (54 feet) inflatable sculpture mysteriously lost its mojo overnight, deflated and bobbed lifelessly in Victoria Harbour.
Organizers called an urgent duck crisis meeting early Wednesday and didn’t respond to questions about the misfortunes of the duck.
The duck has captivated Hong Kong since its arrival earlier this month. News of the duck’s deflation was splashed across Hong Kong media.
Called “Rubber Duck,” it’s the product of Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman. After going on show on May 2, it was to be on display until June 9.
Though it’s unclear what happened to the duck, the artist told CNN earlier that the duck was built locally so it would be easier to fix, referring to would-be attackers as “sculpture stormers.”
Hong Kong is the latest port of call for the duck. It’s previously taken up temporary residence in cities all over the world, including Osaka, Sydney, Sao Paolo and Amsterdam.
The duck hasn’t always enjoyed plain sailing. In 2009 during a port call in Belgium, it was stabbed more than 40 times by a vandal.Had been traveling the world
VICTORIA HARBOUR, Hong Kong — Hong Kong’s... more
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Construction workers bolted a 408-foot spire into place atop One World Trade Center on Friday, symbolically capping New York's comeback after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.
The spire brings the iconic building to a height of 1,776 feet -- an allusion to the year the United States declared its independence. It also makes the building the tallest in the Western Hemisphere and the third-tallest in the world.
The company developing the building in partnership with the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey confirmed the installation.
While the building still has significant construction before its scheduled 2014 opening, the installation brought cheers from New Yorkers, and from people around the country.
The pieces installed Friday morning were hoisted to a temporary platform atop the building last week.
The spire contains 18 steel sections and three communication rings. The first -- and heaviest -- steel section was installed in January. It weighs more than 67 tons, according to a statement from the Port Authority.
It will serve as an antenna for a television broadcast facility housed in the building, which rises from the site near the original World Trade Center towers, which fell in the 2001 attacks.
Last week, construction director Steven Plate told CNN affiliate WABC that the spire will be a "beacon that'll be seen for miles around and give a tremendous indication to people around the entire region, and the world, that we're back and we're better than ever."
Construction on the building began in April 2006.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/10/us/new-york-world-trade-center-spire/index.htmlConstruction workers bolted a 408-foot spire into place atop One World Trade Center on... more
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- - - add your "GROUPS" ,.........HERE.
remanns
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On July 1, student loan interest rates are set to double - from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. On Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., introduced her first piece of legislation on the Senate floor: students paying back federally subsidized loans would have an interest rate of .75 percent. That's the same rate that major banks are charged for borrowing money from the government. Her argument is that students shouldn't have to pay nine times as much interest as banks for their loans.
Her statement, via Americablog:
Big banks pay interest that is one-ninth the rate that students will pay. That is wrong. It doesn’t reflect our values. We shouldn’t be profiting from our students who are drowning in debt while we’re giving great deals to big banks. We should be investing in our young people so they can get good jobs and grow this economy, so let’s give them the same great deal the banks get….
If the Federal Reserve can float trillions of dollars to large financial institutions at low interest rates to grow the economy, surely they can float the Department of Education the money to fund our students, keep us competitive, and grow our middle class.
She continues to explain how her own student debt repayments were equal to her rent back in 1989, which caused her to put off major purchases like buying a home.
What do you think? Should students get the same interest rate as the banks? Or are they apples and oranges when it comes to borrowing money?
Should students get to pay the same interest rate as banks?
On July 1, student loan interest rates are set to double - from 3.4 percent to 6.8... more
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As many of you are aware, Al Jazeera acquired Current TV earlier this year. As we work toward launching the new Al Jazeera America channel, we will no longer support parts of the Current.com website.
In May, the community section of Current.com will shut down. Until then you will still be able to access all of your posts and comments. After that time, this content and your user profiles will cease to exist on Current.com.
If you’re interested in keeping up with what’s new on Al Jazeera America, we encourage you to sign up for its email list at http://www.aljazeera.com/america.As many of you are aware, Al Jazeera acquired Current TV earlier this year. As we work... more
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rluz
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added this
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23 days ago
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Call it a card player’s dream. A complete set of 52 silver playing cards gilded in gold and dating back 400 years has been discovered.
Created in Germany around 1616, the cards were engraved by a man named Michael Frömmer, who created at least one other set of silver cards.
According to a story, backed up by a 19th-century brass plate, the cards were at one point owned by a Portuguese princess who fled the country, cards in hand, after Napoleon’s armies invaded in 1807.
At the time they were created in 1616 no standardized cards existed; different parts of Europe had their own card styles. This particular set uses a suit seen in Italy, with swords, coins, batons and cups in values from ace to 10. Each of these suits has three face cards — king, knight (also known as cavalier) and knave. There are no jokers.
In 2010, the playing cards were first put on auction by an anonymous family at Christie’s auction house in New York. Purchased by entrepreneur Selim Zilkha, the cards were recently described by Timothy Schroder, a historian with expertise in gold and silver decorative arts, in his book "Renaissance and Baroque Silver, Mounted Porcelain and Ruby Glass from the Zilkha Collection"(Paul Holberton Publishing, 2012).
"Silver cards were exceptional," Schroder writes. "They were not made for playing with but as works of art for the collector’s cabinet, or Kunstkammer." Today, few survive. "[O]nly five sets of silver cards are known today and of these only one — the Zilkha set — is complete."
On the cards, two of the kings are depicted wearing ancient Roman clothing while one is depicted as a Holy Roman Emperor and another is dressed up as a sultan, with clothing seen in the Middle East. The knights and knaves are depicted in different poses wearing (then-contemporary) Renaissance military or courtly costumes. Each card is about 3.4 inches by 2 inches (8.6 centimeters by 5 centimeters) in size and blank on the back.
Gilding with mercury
Creating the card set would have been a hazardous job. For the gilding, its designers used mercury, a poisonous substance that can potentially kill.
"You ground up gold into kind of a dust, and you mix it with mercury, and you painted that onto the surface where you wished the gilding to appear," Schroder told LiveScience in an interview. The mercury gets burned off in a kiln, a process "that would leave the gold chemically bonded to the silver."
The process is illegal today, he noted, and even in Renaissance times, it was known to be hazardous. "I don’t think they quite understood why it was dangerous, but they did appreciate the dangers of it," Schroder said.
A gift from a princess?
The owner of the 17th-century card set is not known. However, according to a tradition detailed by the anonymous family who sold it, in the early 19thcentury, the cards were in the possession of Infanta Carlota Joaquina, a daughter of a Spanish king, who was married to a prince in Portugal. She fled to Brazil when Napoleon’s armies marched into Iberia in 1807, apparently taking the silver cards with her....
Continued at:
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/400-year-old-playing-cards-reveal-royal-secretCall it a card player’s dream. A complete set of 52 silver playing cards gilded... more
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Dagum
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1 month ago
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In Tokyo's Harajuku area, they throw a parade to celebrate St. Patrick's Day. It's been going on for sometime and has grown over the years. Marching bands, bagpipers, dancers, Irish settlers, dancing Guinness cans, and samurai(?) all make their appearance. T'is good fun!In Tokyo's Harajuku area, they throw a parade to celebrate St. Patrick's... more
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Two studies of vacuums suggest that the speed of light in a vacuum might fluctuate, pointing the way to a quantum mechanical explanation for why the speed of light and other so-called constants are what they are.
By Eoin O'Carroll, Staff / March 25, 2013
Where did the speed of light in a vacuum come from? Why is it 299,792,458 meters per second and not some other figure?
The simple answer is that, since 1983, science has defined a meter by the speed of light: one meter equals the distance light travels in one 299,792,458th of a second. But that doesn't really answer our question. It's just the physics equivalent of saying, "Because I said so."
Unfortunately, the deeper answer has been equally unsatisfying: The speed of light in a vacuum, according to physics textbooks, just is. It's a constant, one of those numbers that defines the universe. That's the physics equivalent of saying, "Because the cosmos said so."
Or did it? A pair of studies suggest that this universal constant might not be so constant after all. In the first study, Marcel Urban from the University of Paris-Sud and his team found that the speed of light in a vacuum varies ever so slightly.
This happens because what we think of as nothing isn't really nothing. Even if you were to create a perfect vacuum, at the quantum level it would still be populated with pairs of tiny "virtual" particles that flash in and out of existence and whose energy values fluctuate. As a consequence of these fluctuations, the speed of a photon passing through a vacuum varies, about 50 quintillionths of a second per square meter.
That may not sound like much, but it's enough to point the way toward a new underlying physics.
Before 1905, when Albert Einstein formulated his special theory of relativity, scientists regarded space and time as composing the backdrop of the universe, the immovable stage upon which motion takes place. The only problem with this model is that light seems to move at the same speed regardless of the speed of the source, creating an apparent paradox. Einstein's theory resolved this paradox by replacing Newton's absolutes of time and space with a single absolute, the speed of light.
But if even that can vary, what's left for us to hang our hat on? Nothing, it turns out.
But, as we just noted, nothing is something. Urban's paper suggests that the speed of light and other constants "are not fundamental constants but observable parameters of the quantum vacuum." In other words, the speed of light emerges from the properties of particles in the vacuum.
In the other paper, physicists Gerd Leuchs and Luis L. Sánchez-Soto, from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Light in Erlangen, Germany, hypothesize how this emergence occurs. They suggest that the impedance of a vacuum – another electromagnetic 'constant' whose value depends on the speed of light – itself depends only on the electric charge of the particles in the vacuum, and not their masses.
If their hypothesis is correct, it answers our question of where the speed of light comes from: It emerges from the total number of charged particles in the universe.
Time will tell if this hypothesis is correct. And of course, by "time," we mean "space and time," by which we mean "the speed of light," by which we mean "nothing," by which we mean "the properties of the quantum vacuum." But in the meantime – or whatever – you can thank us for informing you that, as the speed of light in a vacuum continues to fluctuate, so too does the length of the meter. Think nothing of it.Two studies of vacuums suggest that the speed of light in a vacuum might fluctuate,... more
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Hope you all enjoy. I paint on poster board paper and use rustoleum glossy paint.
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In comics, the first issue is where the story starts and the legend begins.
For readers, a print copy of issue one can be hard to find and expensive to buy. But those rules don’t apply to tablets, laptops and smartphones both for comics fans and those curious about characters they may have seen in film or on television.
Part of that fascination with superheroes and their growing cachet in popular culture is why Marvel Entertainment, home to the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and the Avengers, among others, is making more than 700 first issues available to digital readers starting Sunday for free through the Marvel app and the company’s website. After Tuesday, they’ll be sold for $1.99 to $3.99 per issue.
The titles go from the 1960s Silver Age to contemporary issues with characters including Wasp, Mr. Fantastic, Power Man and Iron Fist, said David Gabriel, senior vice president of sales.
“This is aimed at attracting fans from all walks of life — those who know our characters from the big screen, those who were readers but fell out of the habit and our long-term fans too,” he said. “We believe that if we get those fans in the door, they’ll stay and help grow this industry, with purchases both in comic stores and via digital comic outlets.”
The publisher went through its catalog of more than 13,000 titles that are already available digitally and plucked out the No. 1 issues with historic ones like “Amazing Spider-Man” by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko or the “Fantastic Four” by Lee and Jack Kirby as well as modern titles like “Civil War,” Joss Whedon’s “Astonishing X-Men” and characters and teams like the Uncanny Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy, too.
“We never want fans to feel like they need to have read it all. Of course we want them to want to check out those stories, but the beauty of these No. 1 issues is that each is an entry point,” he said. “So with a character like Iron Man, you can choose if you want to start with the recent ‘Iron Man’ series from Kieron Gillen or go back a few years to when Matt Fraction launched ‘Invincible Iron Man’ or even before that.”In comics, the first issue is where the story starts and the legend begins.
For... more
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RALEIGH, N.C. — Rep. Rayne Brown, R-Davidson, knows all too well that House Bill 34, her bill defining women’s nipples as indecent, has been the punchline of many a joke this session.
“We’ve had the most fun with this bill for about the past week and a half, and that’s OK. You need to laugh sometimes,” she told the House Judiciary C Committee. “But there are communities across this state, there’s local governments across this state, and also local law enforcement for whom this issue is really not a laughing matter.”
The measure was requested by Asheville officials after participants in a women's rights rally held a second annual topless protest in a downtown park last summer.
Brown, whose district is more than 100 miles from Asheville, said she hadn’t planned to get involved with the issue until she started getting calls about it from her constituents. “I felt that, if this was of concern to my constituents, it was going to be of concern to others as well.”
Brown says topless protests are actually illegal under the current law, but there’s some confusion about it, dating to conflicting court rulings from the 1970s.
“You’ve got local governments passing ordinances to protect themselves from just this thing,” she said. “These folks don’t need to be doing that, but they do it because they’re not sure about the law.
“This bill that I’m presenting in no way shape or form changes North Carolina law,” she said, “but we do need clarification.”
North Carolina law already forbids “indecent exposure,” but it doesn’t specifically define “private parts” as including breasts.
The proposal adds that definition, including “the nipple, or any portion of the areola, of the human female breast,” with an exception made for breastfeeding.
“All we are doing is codifying the Supreme Court definition of ‘private parts,’" added committee Chairwoman Rep. Sarah Stevens, R-Surry. “That’s it. “
Rep. Annie Mobley, D-Ahoskie, voiced concerns that the bill could affect people wearing “questionable fashions.”
Stevens said using pasties or other nipple coverings would protect those women against prosecution. “They’d be good to go.”
Rep. Tim Moore, R-Cleveland, quipped, “You know what they say – duct tape fixes everything.”
The measure passed the committee on a nearly-unanimous voice vote. Its next stop will be the House floor.RALEIGH, N.C. — Rep. Rayne Brown, R-Davidson, knows all too well that House Bill... more
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And yet they won't remove phony High School "Tell-All" Slam Book pages. It would violate their 1st Amendment Rights. As a future cancer survivor and decent human being, their removal of this picture of a very brave lady violates MY common decency principals. FUCK FACE BOOK !And yet they won't remove phony High School "Tell-All" Slam Book... more
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Happy Valentine's Day Current!
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I have been on Current off and on for about 6 years now. In that time period I have made lots of Friendships many of them with people who I am diametrically opposite on lots of Political issues.
Of all my Cyber Buddies on Current I consider JanForGore to be the MOST principled and kind! I was truly saddened when she contacted me yesterday to let me know she was leaving Current.
She said she did not post about it in a thread because she did not want to make a big deal about it, but I do want to make a big deal about it!
I am pretty sure with the departure of ProgressiveHiv and now JanForGore there are no longer any Progressives who “regularly” contribute to Current.
I am SURE there are a couple of Liberals who will come around and tell us all the BS the Republicans are up to, but will turn a blind eye to all the BS Obummer is up to.
The thing I will miss most about Jan is she “ALWAYS” fought for what was right and opposed what was wrong no matter the political party it was coming from.I have been on Current off and on for about 6 years now. In that time period I have... more
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I feel Liberated, No Trolls, No Negative Energy, Just good fun and friends!
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..becasue a Greek deity family tree is a must have...
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r0b0t
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added this
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5 years ago
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I'll leave it up to HH to say something or not, I'm just announcing that one of Current TV's most prodigious contributors has decided to join the long list of great posters leaving Current TV.
If you think that you will have a TROLLING fest posting douche bag comments think again. I will flag them and report them and I encourage everyone else to do the same.
Thanks for your excellent contributions to Current TV Kiwi---you have a permeant home on my site, free from Right-wing trolls.
EDIT: Her account is active but she requested to be removed from Current TV.I'll leave it up to HH to say something or not, I'm just announcing that one... more
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Why is modest swimwear, created for religious women, becoming mainstream? Is it because so many Americans are overweight? Ana Kasparian, Cenk Uygur, and Ben Mankiewicz discuss on The Young Turks.Why is modest swimwear, created for religious women, becoming mainstream? Is it... more
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