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POPSWhat Happened to the American Spirit? More importantly, the economic evolution of places such as China and the Gulf states of the Middle East is intimately tied to something so simple and so essential that it is easily overlooked: the belief that they can achieve anything. That used to be the defining feature of this country, one that peoples throughout the world marveled at and envied.
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POPSMedical Quackery Devices Patented Dec. 12, 1905, the Timely Warning was manufactured as a solution to amorous dreaming. OMG! See those spikes? And while not listed at this site, I'm sitting here with a Dr. Pepper. It was originally created as a potion by pharmacist.
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POPSA Few Things Moore Forgot in Sicko Michael Moore forgot to mention what the United States does have that other countries do not: A Declaration of Independence. A Constitution. A Bill of Rights. The concepts of individual rights, personal choice, free markets, private investment that develops most of the world's new medications, and the benefit of a private relationship between physicians and their patients without third-party interference. In his hymn to every other nation's superiority to America—in proportion to their commitment to collectivism—Michael Moore forgot to mention any American values at all.
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POPSHealth Care Is Not a Right Some people can't afford medical care in the U.S. But they are necessarily a small minority in a free or even semi-free country...As to this small minority, in a free country they have to rely solely on private, voluntary charity. Yes, charity, the kindness of the doctors or of the better off—charity, not right, i.e. not their right to the lives or work of others. And such charity, I may say, was always forthcoming in the past in America. The advocates of Medicaid and Medicare under LBJ did not claim that the poor or old in the '60's got bad care; they claimed that it was an affront for anyone to have to depend on charity.
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POPSAssumptions in Polar Bear Populations What we do know about polar bears is that, contrary to media portrayals, they are not fragile "canary in the coal mine" animals, but are robust creatures that have survived past periods of extensive deglaciation. Polar bear fossils have been dated to over one hundred thousand years, which means that polar bears have already survived an interglacial period when temperatures were considerably warmer than they are at present and when, quite probably, levels of summertime Arctic sea ice were correspondingly low.
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POPSPolar Bear Populations Given these uncertainties, the best estimate--guesstimate might be a better term--published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Species Survival Commission's (SSC) Polar Bear Specialist Group, is that there are about twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand polar bears worldwide.
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POPSBackdoor Kyoto Protection under the Endangered Species Act will provide concrete help to polar bears and could revolutionize American climate policy. Since U.S. resistance to curbing greenhouse gases has allowed other countries to shirk their responsibilities as well, major changes in American policy are likely to have a powerful domino effect, catalyzing change in climate policy worldwide. From polluting power plants in the Midwest to auto manufacturers, a vast array of industries may have to clean up their acts to give the polar bear a chance to survive.
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POPSWhat's Wrong with Republicans? To the degree McCain can articulate the above, he will win; to the degree that he either cannot or believes the latest gurus that he must abandon them, he will lose. Moving toward a lite version of the Obamian/European "bipartisan"and socialist view of government and calling it a new conservatism is a prescription for utter disaster. No one can out-Obama Obama.
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POPSGreen Beret Receives Distinguished Service Cross O’Connor, 47, said he doesn’t believe he is a hero. He said that police officers and firefighters are courageous every day and that he was only completing his mission. “I am being recognized for a moment of courage,” said O’Connor, whose wife and four children attended the ceremony. “I firmly believe other soldiers in my place would have done the same thing.”
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POPSKentucky Vietnam Memorial Sundial Near the center are 154 names of those who died in one month during the worst slaughter of 1968. At 11:11 AM, each Nov. 11th, the shadow touches a marker for the WW-I armistice.
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POPSPondering the Size of Things So we dwell in the right place at the right time. It's a huge and ancient place made to our measure. It's large enough to contain a free people. And it's small enough that we can either spoil it or shape it into a fit dwelling.
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POPSForgotten Inventor - The Fresno Scraper Fresno Scrapers served the US army in WW-I. The two-horse model retailed for $28, yet today's bulldozer blades are its direct offspring. The gigantic scraper-carryall earth mover is its grandchild.
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POPSBirth of Radio Astronomy This now includes seeing some of it visually as "snow" on televisions. Yet with the new transition to digital tv coming next year (in the U.S. at least), I wonder if "snow" will be a thing of the past?
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POPSBrooklyn Jihadis Interrogate Tourist for Taking Picture At last, we blurted out that we were admirers of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad (Peace and Blessings Be Upon Him) and wanted to obtain information about conversion. We were even knowledgeable enough to blurt out “Salaam” and “Allahu akbar.” The last utterance seemed to be the “Open Sesame” that got us out of the basement and back to Bedford Street, where we managed to take a picture of the mosque before hailing a cab and making a getaway.
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POPSPower Company Destroys Tree House CenterPoint’s goal is to keep the areas around power lines free and clear of obstructions, said Alicia Dixon, CenterPoint’s manager of public relations. But Dixon could not point to a document or set of guidelines that spelled out how close to power lines property owners could build. CenterPoint’s power line clearance standards document does not include any measurements, saying only that tree-pruning is based on clearances the company thinks are necessary to provide and maintain service reliability. Banuelos said the tree house was 12 feet away from the lines, a gap too big for any child to reach across, especially through the structure’s back wall. And according to neighbors, the house was built at least seven years ago.
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POPSStorm Subsides Between William Gray, CSU The dean of CSU's College of Engineering, which oversees atmospheric sciences, said she spoke with Gray about terminating media support for his forecasts solely because of the strain it placed on the college's lone media staffer. "It really has nothing to do with his stand on global warming," said the dean, Sandra Woods. "He's a great faculty member."
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POPSThe Price of Gas Again, while just over nine percent of the price of a gallon of gas goes to oil company profits, approximately twenty percent of the price of a gallon of gas is composed of federal, state, and local taxes. Those who want the government to step in and do something about the high price of gas are either forgetful of recent history or too young to remember the oil crisis of 1979. During that time, restrictions on the price of gasoline led to the inability of some to find gas at all. Price ceilings always lead to shortages. The only thing worse than having to pay "too much" for gas is not being able to find gas at any price. Let us not be swayed by politicians out for power or by reporters out to create news where none exists. Facts and economic logic should prevail rather than rhetoric.
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POPSDark Stars The study says that particles of dark matter may have interacted with each other, producing other particles that heated the collapsing clouds. The heat kept the clouds from shrinking enough to ignite nuclear fusion.
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POPSScientific Literacy And that's what science really stands to give them. That's the reason you and I are drawn to science. And I can see no reason to offer them anything less.
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POPSThe Chord Scale This is also helpful in putting together simple progressions, or even whole songs.
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POPSShocker: Audit Reveals Abuse of Government Credit Cards In the fraudulent category, a longtime employee of the U.S. Forest Service in Oregon, Debra K. Durfey, wrote convenience checks worth more than $640,000 from 2000 to 2006 to a live-in boyfriend, who used the money for gambling, car expenses and mortgage payments In a case the GAO deemed "abusive," the Postal Service spent $13,500 in 2006 on a dinner at a Ruth's Chris Steak House in Orlando, including "over 200 appetizers and over $3,000 of alcohol, including more than 40 bottles of wine costing more than $50 each and brand-name liquor such as Courvoisier, Belvedere and Johnny Walker Gold." The tab came to more than $160 a head for the 81 guests, the report said. The GAO found that 41 percent of the transactions it examined did not follow government purchasing rules. The problem was worse with larger purchases: Forty-eight percent of transactions over $2,500 were in violation of federal rules, the report said.
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POPSForgotten Chinese Seismograph Members of the court thought the device had failed when the alarm sounded one day and they felt nothing. Doubt turned to astonishment a few days later. A messenger arrived from a town 400 miles away to report that it'd been savaged by an earthquake. Chinese writings talked about Chang Heng's seismograph and ones like it until the Mongols overran China. After that, it vanished as though it had never been...And why is such brilliance so badly remembered? It's probably because people like Chang Heng were tied so tightly to their patrons. They didn't belong to the same loose, open communities of freely moving scholars that have diffused knowledge so effectively in the West.
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POPS2300 Year Old Model Airplane Did anyone actually build a large version of this thing? Well, no one could have come this close to the real shape of flight without working on a larger scale. This little wooden model could hardly exist unless someone had worked with large, light models, or even with man-carrying versions. Archaeologists have looked in vain for a prototype. A large model light enough to fly would be too delicate to stand the ravages of 2300 years. The original -- if it ever was -- has long since joined the desert dust. Whatever form this Egyptian airplane might have taken, it has long since returned to the world of dreams and imagination from which it first came.
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POPSKoyunbaba - Presto Written by Carlos Domeniconi, an Italian born composer currently living in Germany; although this piece is Turkish in influence. Another facet of this composition is that the guitar is tuned to an open tuning, C#minor, which isn't very common in classical guitar.
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POPSStarry-eyed Quetzalcoatl in Texas Quetzalcoatl was one of the most important gods in Mesoamerica, and was worshipped by most major Mesoamerican cultures, from the Olmecs and Maya to the Aztecs.
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POPSAncient Chinese Bells The importance of that discovery grows when we realize that it took the West a thousand years to develop the cathedral bell, and we didn't have it until the middle ages. Bells are very hard to make, yet China had these remarkably sophisticated Zhong bells during the Golden Age of Athens. The bells produce a rich tone, they take far less bronze to get it than a cathedral bell, and then they deliver two sounds for the cost of one. It's easy to look right at something that's very sophisticated without seeing the sophistication. It took us eighty years to catch on to these remarkable, but unassuming, bells. The best inventions are like that. In the best inventions, elegance masquerades as simplicity.
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