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POPSSimilarities Between the Assassinations of Kennedy and Lincoln Lincoln was shot in the back of the head in the presence of his wife Kennedy was shot in the back of the head in the presence of his wife Lincoln shot in the Ford Theatre Kennedy shot in a Lincoln, made by Ford He was shot on a Friday He was shot on a Friday The assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was known by three names, comprised of fifteen letters The assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was known by three names, comprised of fifteen letters Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and fled to a warehouse *3 Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and fled to a theater Booth was killed before being brought to trial Oswald was killed before being brought to trial There were theories that Booth was part of a greater conspiracy There were theories that Oswald was part of a greater conspiracy Lincoln's successor was Andrew Johnson, born in 1808 Kennedy's successor was Lyndon Johnson, born in 1908
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POPS2012 Is Already Here "It started off same as always; coupla fossils saying how our Banjo Patterson was a better poet than Walt Whitman, how Con the Fruiterer is funnier than Seinfeld, only they're Aussies so no one knows about 'em," recalled witness Kevin Porter. "Then this bloke Martin pipes up and says Australia's main problem is that it's stuck in Australia, and everybody says 'Too right!'" "Well, it made sense at the time," Porter added. By 2 a.m., powered by national pride and alcohol, the 3-million-square-mile land mass was barging eastward through the Coral Sea and crossing into the central Pacific, leaving a trail of beer cans and Chinese take-away in its wake. When dawn broke over the Northern Hemisphere, the continent suddenly found itself, not only upside down, but smack in the middle of the Atlantic, and according to most of its 19 million inhabitants, that's the way it's going to stay.
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POPSNational Writing Day Now there's the computer and the internet. In the digital age, anyone with a laptop, a wi-fi card, and a place to sit at Starbucks can put material into cyberspace. The digital revolution means everyone's an author, every day is National Writing Day. And this sudden democratizing of the writing process generates its own set of complaints: * it's wrong to give so many people access to authorship -- after all, most people won't be very good at, and some people are going to write things that we don't agree with * computers make writing too easy -- something so important should only come with effort -- no pain, no gain -- maybe we should increase the entrance fees? * we need to control, license, censor what's on the 'net: after all, the web is full of lies, misinformation, nonsense, pornography, fraud, Nigerian money scams, and hate, not to mention all those pictures of little cats But despite the complaints, writers everywhere are grabbing their keyboards...
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POPSYour Brain On Words There is no one brain part which when taken away would suddenly rob you of your ability to read. We rely on the same old brain — the same brain that we inherited from our Homo Sapiens ancestors 200,000 years ago when they appeared in Africa. This means that the same brain that hunted wildlife and walked thru Ice Ages is the same brain that can now read a book a day.
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POPSFarthering Our Grammar Skills People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Here is the first reader's comment: Sep 24 2009 7:27 AM The Tim people went FURTHER; not farther! It's funny to have a grammar-related article use a wrong word. (Funny, he used a semicolon AND an exclamation mark)
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POPSBanned Books Week During the last week of September every year, hundreds of libraries and bookstores around the country draw attention to the problem of censorship by mounting displays of challenged books and hosting a variety of events. The 2009 celebration of Banned Books Week will be held from September 26 through October 3. The purpose of this Web site is to help the public join the celebration of our freedom to read. The easiest way is to visit a participating library or bookstore. There is a list of Events, to help you find one in your community. (If you want to post information about an event in your community, please click here.) There is also a list of suggestions of other activities that will help remind people of the importance of free speech, What You Can Do. If you want further information about BannedBooksWeek.org, contact us at info@abffe.com or bbw@ala.org.
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POPSEnglish Speaker Kicked Off Bus The driver, apparently alarmed by her "aggressive" Muslim passenger, called the cops, cleared the bus, and warned the bus behind her not to pick up any of her stranded passengers. Although he is investigating the incident, Michel Labrecque, the head of the Société de transport de Montréal, defended the driver's action because "French is the language of work" in Québec. Labrecque acknowledged that many bus drivers are bilingual, and that bilingual drivers tend to be placed on routes covering tourist areas and the English-speaking suburbs. But he also insisted that it would be against the law to require any of the drivers to actually speak English even if they can, "Ça, c'est interdite."
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POPSWomen Are Sort Of More Tentative Than Men Men were tentative when writing about make-up or other stereotypically feminine topics, especially when they thought they were writing to a woman, he found. For example, one man, believing he was corresponding with a woman, wrote: "… maybe girls prefer the quality of products at Sephora over other major department stores? I don't know." Women were tentative when writing about changing flat tires and other stereotypically masculine topics, especially when they thought they were writing to a man. For example, one woman, believing she was giving instructions to a man, wrote: "I think they start out by raising the whole car, or maybe just the one tire with a tire jack?"
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POPSMeet John Doe. No, Really! "Mr. Doe is hardly the first person to contend with such issues. The name is a centuries-old legacy of the English legal system where John Doe was often used as a stand-in for the real name of a witness who sought to protect his identity."
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POPSWhen ‘What Animals Do’ Doesn’t Seem to Cover It Mr. Levitis asked the professor for the full definition of a behavior. She referred him to their textbook, with its promising title, “Animal Behavior.” To his surprise, neither that textbook nor any other reference he consulted bothered to spell it out. “It was assumed that everyone knew what the word meant,” said Mr. Levitis, who is completing his doctorate at Berkeley. Mr. Levitis decided to ask the people who should know best: working behavioral biologists. The provocative and crisply written results of his quest, carried out with his colleagues, William Lidicker Jr. and Glenn Freund, appear in the current issue of the journal Animal Behaviour. Among the highlights of the report: biologists don’t agree with one another on what a behavior is; biologists don’t agree with themselves on what a behavior is;
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POPSA for Horses, B for Mutton V for la France (Vive la France) W for a Bob (double you for a bob - a bob was a shilling) X for Breakfast (eggs for breakfast) Y for Gawd's sake (why, for God's sake) Z for Breezes (zephyr breezes ) In the 80 years since that sketch was performed in music halls and recorded on vinyl discs, various wits have come up with variations. Here are some of them: C for Miles, or C for Yourself (see for miles, or see for yourself) D for Dumb (deaf or dumb) D for Kate (defecate) E for Brick (heave a brick) or E for 'ning Standard (Evening Standard newspaper) H for Consent (age of consent) I for the Engine (Ivor the Engine)
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POPSAlibris, For all Books I love this site! I wan ted to buy a book for a friend and was horrified at the price - 147 Euro!! I kid you not! I found it here for 1.99!! Used but in perfect condition. Very nice site, honest in their descriptions, deliver faster than they claim and all around perfect customer service! My friend was thrilled since the book is out of print and I managed to give her a perfect 1st edition hardback. and placed two more orders for other friends. Shipping cost 10E, but all the way from the US and in three days!! This is what the internet is all about!!
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POPSThe Mastery of Love http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX90DZq2OLA From an interview with Don Miguel Ruiz, author of The Four Agreements and The Mastery of Love. Full interview at the site :)
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POPSToltec: Don Miguel Ruiz 'Fortunately, the esoteric Toltec knowledge was embodied and passed on through generations by different lineages of Naguals. Though it remained veiled in secrecy for hundreds of years, ancient prophecies foretold the coming of an age when it would be necessary to return the wisdom to the people. Now, don Miguel has been guided to share with us the powerful teachings of the Toltec."
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POPSWorld's Biggest Thesaurus Born His team began transcribing information from the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary (OED) on to slips of paper. They plugged away for more than a decade, and disaster almost struck in 1978 when the building housing the only copy of their work caught fire. The entire building was gutted, but the slips remained intact because they were stored in metal filing cabinets. After that the slips were written in triplicate and stored in three different locations. As technology developed, the work in progress was microfilmed, and eventually computers were used.
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POPS[Astronomy Ireland] U2, Talking Live With ISS Astronauts From Astronomy Ireland: At the opening concert of their world tour on June 30, U2 had a very special surprise for concert goers in Barcelona. After the 4th song of the show, a live satellite link with the astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), appeared on the screens in the stadium, with one of the astronauts telling the audience "right now the most beautiful sight in our cosmos is the blue planet Earth". ISS will be visible in Irish skies again from July 6 - 23.
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POPSSpelling Lesson Please "Supporters of official English might also think it would be good to follow another Kyrgyzstan example and make all future American presidents pass an English test. After all, the English-speaking ability of some presidents – Andrew Jackson, Calvin Coolidge, George W. Bush – has been called into question."
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POPSComte De St Germain (Saint Germain) Their Masonic symbols can be seen on the dollar bill. He spent eighty five years with the Trans-Himalayan Brotherhood which was made up of El Moyra, Kuthumi, Djwhal Khul, and others. He lived for over 350 years, staging his death between lifetimes. As a writer he used the names Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Montaigne, Robert Burton, Cervantes, Valentine Andraes, and Comte de Gabalis. It is from his ascended state that he brings the ultimate gift of freedom - The Violet Flame. From The Ascended Masters Ruler of an Ancient Civilization More than fifty thousand years ago, a golden civilization thrived in a fertile country with a semitropical climate where the Sahara Desert now is. It was filled with great peace, happiness and prosperity and ruled with supreme justice and wisdom by this very Saint Germain.
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POPSPeople May be Able to Taste Words He and his co-author, Cesare Parise, tested 12 volunteers in trials during which an image flashed up on a screen at a slightly different time to one of two tones - one low-pitched and one high-pitched - being played. There were two sets of image: a large and a small black dot, or an angular and a very rounded shape, Dots of a certain size match tones of a certain pitch. People associate the low-pitched sound with the larger dot
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POPSDecoding Antiquity: Eight Scripts... in 1823, they extended the span of recorded history by around 2000 years and allowed us to read the words of Ramses the Great. The decipherment of the Mayan glyphs revealed that the New World had a sophisticated, literate civilisation at the time of the Roman empire. So how do you decipher an unknown script? There are two minimum requirements. First, there has to be enough material to work with. Secondly, there must be some link to a known language. It helps enormously if there is a bilingual inscription or identifiable proper names - the Rosetta Stone (see image), for example, is written in both ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek, and also contains the name of the Ptolemy dynasty. If there is no clear link, an attempt must be made to relate the concealed language to a known one.
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POPSDoodle for Google: 6th-Grader Wins In addition to her 24-hour exhibit on Google.com, Engelberth also earned a $15,000 scholarship, a laptop, a trip to Google's New York office, and a $25,000 technology grant for her school. After the jump, check out our pics of the winner and other contestants, a few more designs, and the awards ceremony. (Here's last year's Doodle 4 Google winner.)
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POPSA Degree in English Roman writers composed some of the world’s most thrilling verse and were masters of historiography, oratory and philosophy. But diploma Latin is some of the most depressing and long-winded legalese you can find. Hiding behind the lovely calligraphy are maddening syntax and appalling neologisms. How do you say the name of every college town in Latin? You shouldn’t have to. (Nor should you have to struggle to read the text in the illustration that accompanies this piece, so let me help you out. It says: “I can’t understand this either.”)
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POPSJudging Honesty by Words, Not Fidgets In part, the work grows out of a frustration with other methods. Liars do not avert their eyes in an interview on average any more than people telling the truth do, researchers report; they do not fidget, sweat or slump in a chair any more often. They may produce distinct, fleeting changes in expression, experts say, but it is not clear yet how useful it is to analyze those. Nor have technological advances proved very helpful. No brain-imaging machine can reliably distinguish a doctored story from the truthful one, for instance; ditto for polygraphs, which track changes in physiology as an indirect measure of lying.
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POPSHow I Met My Wife: A Whelming Sory
the embarrassment that my maculate appearance might cause was evitable. There were two ways about it, but the chances that someone as flappable as I would be ept enough to become persona grata or sung hero were slim. I was, after all, something to sneeze at, someone you could easily hold a candle to, someone who usually aroused bridled passion. So I decided not to rush it. But then, all at once, for some apparent reason, she looked in my direction and smiled in a way that I could make heads or tails of. So, after a terminable delay, I acted with mitigated gall and made my way through the ruly crowd with strong givings. Nevertheless, since this was all new hat to me and I had no time to prepare a promptu speech, I was petuous. She responded well, and I was mayed that she considered me a savory char- acter who was up to some good. She told me who she was. "What a perfect nomer," I said, advertently. The conversation became more and more choate, and we spoke at length to much avail. But I
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POPSThere's No Klingon Word for Hello Most languages created for fictional worlds involve simple vocabulary substitutions, such as moodge for man in A Clockwork Orange, or meaningless streams of noise, like the high-pitched jabbering of the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. Klingon is something altogether different. There is a logic behind it; a linguist doing field research among Klingon speakers would be able to work out the system and describe it as he would an exotic indigenous tongue. This is not surprising, considering that Klingon was created by Marc Okrand, a linguist whose dissertation was a grammar of a now-extinct Native American language.
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POPSThe Code Even the CIA Can't Crack and the elusiveness of truth, its message written entirely in code. Almost 20 years after its dedication, the text has yet to be fully deciphered. A bleary-eyed global community of self-styled cryptanalysts—along with some of the agency's own staffers—has seen three of its four sections solved, revealing evocative prose that only makes the puzzle more confusing. Still uncracked are the 97 characters of the fourth part (known as K4 in Kryptos-speak). And the longer the deadlock continues, the crazier people get.
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POPSOf Loos and Language And this: Loose summer dresses catching in the crotch The leather boys stick together With coffee on the benches. Tulips dying gape open-mouthed At the fruit rotting after lunch.
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