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POPSBehind Closed Doors: Stalin, Nazis and the West The quintessential bloodthirsty tyrant and evil genius, Joseph Stalin, massacred millions of Soviet subjects during three decades as dictator, yet played a critical role in manipulating his Western allies and German enemies during the 1940s. Film maker Laurence Rees based this impressive series on Stalin’s actual conversations with Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Nazi fuhrer Adolf Hitler, and their far-reaching consequences.
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POPSWolframAlpha and True Knowledge I tested WolframAlpha and True Knowledge today. I found both very impressive they both gave me correct answers, Wolfram had a few problems but most probably because of traffic to the site They are not search engines, Wolfram computes answers not stock answers from a database but on the fly , True Knowledge had a more polished feel to it but I guess it has been around a bit longer. The detailed answers in WolframAlpha was impressive asking about the GDP of Australia and True Knowledge gave correct answers about OpenSim.
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POPSAnother Republican says health care reform will destroy America. Rep. Broun, that is. Right -- if a liberal like Grayson calls out Republicans (who have no health care plan), they get their freak on. But I guess they have already been immunized to conservative insanity. Oh, and we have Rep. Gohmert saying this: Dems Would Allow Seniors To "Die Off More Quickly" This is standard conservative behavior that never gets mentioned by the media. It only comes up when a liberal is attacked and then they spend 24-48 hours to defend themselves and are forced to use these outrageous statement made by Republicans. And of course they have no traction, because of the defensive position the media puts liberals in.
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POPSSubmarine turned into a home theater.. Someday I'm going to have a home theater but I can only dream of ever having one this cool. It's nice to see an artistic touch put into one of these since most are designed to be perfect listening rooms which usually means very boring...
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POPS‘Leopard Behind You!’ A human in a blue shirt is announced differently from a human in a yellow shirt. In and of itself, it’s not surprising that the sounds animals make are not just noise, or a reflection of the state an animal’s in (scared, happy and so on). But the subtlety of the calls — the full amount of meaning they contain — is only now being appreciated. Animals of one species often respond to the alarms of another. In a small way, it’s like those childrens’ stories that have rats talking to toads, or elephants arguing with ostriches. Predators sometimes respond too. After all, alarm calls don’t just let other animals know there’s danger in the area. They can also let a predator know that it’s been seen. Ambush predators, like leopards, often give up and go away once an alarm has been sounded. <<
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POPSCell phone orchestra... Absolutely Amazing! This is an unbelievable feet of cell phone technology. They had to film it at off hours due to the insane text's per second throughput they were attempting. Please go to the source and check out the video on the making of the commercial. This is real and done with real text messages.
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POPS "Truth to Power" by Mark Steyn
He came; he saw; he stimulated: “If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.” I suppose so. He could invade somewhere and force the natives to accept degrading roles in NEA-funded performance art. He could take out the Iranian nuclear program by carpet-bombing it with unreadable literary novels. That is, if you “accept the premise” that the United States is the most powerful country in the world. Rocco Landesman may, but it’s not clear, from his actions (or inactions) in Eastern Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, that the president does. But, even so, it seems an odd pitch to “American artists.” Rocco Landesman, Speaking Goof to Power, isn’t the first Obama groupie to enjoy the kinky frisson of groveling obsequiousness, but he’s set an impressive new standard in public revelation thereof.
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POPSOne person's perception.............. So, tell me again, what is it about Obama that makes him so brilliant and impressive? Can't think of anything? Don't worry. He's done all this in 5 months -- so you'll have three years and seven months to come up with an answer...! go to gather.com for rest of the list.
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POPSStock Shock! The Movie
The movie exposes a technique known as naked short selling, which has resulted in the collapse of the stock value of some of America’s most promising public companies. Sirius XM, often labeled as one of the most manipulated stocks in the market, is dissected in the movie. “Stock Shock” interviews individual investors who saw their stock price hit a high of $9.00/share and then plummet to a horrifying low of 5 cents in 2009. “Stock Shock” has spurred a grassroots movement helping convince the SEC to enact and make permanent an emergency rule to ban abusive naked short-selling. It’s no wonder. The reviews are impressive: “Shocking and eye-opening!” “It’s an awakening. Academy Award…Stock Shock should get one,” says radio host Jim Puplava of the Financial Sense Newshour. Industry expert and shareholder activist Bud Burrell remarks: “I will give it 10 stars of 10. It is the best doc of this length I have ever seen. I think this will go into the defining literature of this sp
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POPSAres I-X Launch: NASA's New Rocket Blasts Off On Test Flight The prototype moon rocket took off through a few clouds from a former shuttle launch pad at 11:30 a.m., 3 1/2 hours late because of bad weather. Launch controllers had to retest the rocket systems after more than 150 lightning strikes were reported around the pad overnight. Then they had to wait out interfering rain clouds, the same kind that thwarted Tuesday's try. The ballistic flight did not come close to reaching space and, as expected, lasted a mere two minutes. That's how long it took for the first-stage solid-fuel booster to burn out and separate from the mock upper stage 25 miles up. But it will take months to analyze all the data from the approximately 725 pressure, strain and acceleration sensors. Parachutes popped open and dropped the booster into the Atlantic, where recovery ships waited
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POPSThe Mircale Of Perm Russia's up and coming cultural capital. Russia overcoming its soviet past? Or Russia coming to terms with its soviet past? Either way, a place i'd love to visit and experience for myself!
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POPSRush Got Punked Let's hope someone kept their sense of humor in all this. Still, for a humble post to go from humor blog to major media outlet sure seems impressive. Someone ought to write their thesis on it. For real.
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POPSA Tale of Two Soundbites “Mao’s responsibility for the extinction of anywhere from 40 to 70 million lives brands him as a mass killer greater than Hitler or Stalin.” Hey, that’s pretty impressive when they can’t get your big final-score death toll nailed down to closer than 30 million. Still, as President Obama’s communications director might say, he lived his dream, and so can you, although if your dream involves killing, oh, 50–80 million Chinamen, you may have your work cut out.
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POPSAt 10% Unemployment America Still Doesn't Have Enough Workers But of course, it's really not much a paradox at all. After years and years of a housing bubble, we have millions of Americans trained in some capacity relating to housing, and those skills are no longer needed. Concepts like this should shred anyone's notion of an output gap. Sure, American hands are underutilized, but if those hands don't have anything to do that's productive, can they really be considered unused "capacity." No, they can't. And this is the problem with big, macro-thinking. You can point to two GDP trendlines and say "Look, undercapacity..." but that totally ignores the ground level where real employees have to find jobs that they're suited for, and no amount of expansionary practice can change that problem.
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POPSMother Nature's Tears. I rather thought this one image was particularly powerful. It is part of a slide show on religious sightings. I didn't think the other ones were very impressive. Interesting, but not very impressive.
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POPSJack LaLanne puts a reporter through her paces More: "I don't care if people are 80 or 85 when they start," he said. "They can double their strength and double their endurance in six weeks. You won't be able to do what you could when you were 20, but do the best you can with the equipment you have." LaLanne has slowed down in recent years, but suffers no joint pain and only occasional muscle aches. He's had two knee replacements - from football and car crash injuries, not exercise. He's never taken steroids, but did develop his own line of vitamins and of course, his juicer, made famous on late-night infomercials.… "Working out three or four times a week is plenty for most people, but it's an ego thing with me," he said of his regimen. "I'd like to see how long I can keep it up." In his prime, he could lift two 150-pound dumbbells doing chest presses and set a record of 1,033 pushups in 23 minutes at age 42.
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POPSAfghanistan - NOT a 'good war' "And of course, it is costing the people of Afghanistan more than anyone. Perhaps one of the most jolting things about watching the film is seeing image after terrible image of civilian suffering: desperate families mired in refugee camps, pain-stricken schoolgirls attacked with acid by the resurgent Taliban, countless injured men, women and children who are the "collateral damage" from errant U.S. bomb strikes. It is a punch-to-the-gut reminder of just how sanitized this war -- which Obama has always called the "right front" of the so-called war on terror -- has been".
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POPSCommonly overused words "When you write, use the most precise word for your meaning, not the word that comes to mind first. Consult this thesaurus to find alternatives for some commonly overused words. Consult a full-length thesaurus to find alternatives to words that do not appear here. Keep in mind that the choices offered in a thesaurus do not all mean exactly the same thing. Review all the options, and choose the one that best expresses your meaning."
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POPSUnearthed: Nero's revolving banquet hall Hard to make much of the pics. So ironic that these discoveries at a time when the world is in crisis, and the leaders are not able to make strong decisions ( and so they sit and fiddle with handkerchiefs)
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POPSGlenn "Chicken Little" Beck, the lowest of the low. The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."
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POPSI awoke last night to the sound of thunder... Hot damn, that's some Ghostbusters-style action there. I was in Marin a few years ago. The sky was bright blue and much less dramatic. The photographer captured an incredible shot. The photo has been viewed 194,337 times on Flickr. Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fgf/3912494498/in/photostream/ by Flickr user: fgfathome Additional photos available at: www.ffennema.zenfolio.com