Finestkind Clinic and fish market

Leaker or traitor?

noreply@blogger.com (boinky) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:48:44 PDT

InFromTheCold analyzes the latest security leak, shows what happened to whistleblowers who actually used legal means of whistleblowing, and then analyzes why we keep records on great grandmoms.

Ah, but what if Grandmom is an evil Republican? Will she get a visit from the IRS checking out her taxes?

and just wait til they get hold of your electronic medical records.

Edward Snowden deserves to be punished, but the debate he has spurred must also be a part of the public discourse. Wisconsin Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, who will never be confused with an ACLU member, says on-going surveillance activities go "far beyond" what was envisioned in the 2001 Patriot Act, a law that Mr. Sensenbrenner played a key role in crafting. It's time to ask exactly what is being done in our name, and what we've surrendered in our collective yearning for "safety."

Lecture of the week

noreply@blogger.com (boinky) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:46:54 PDT

LINK
for Percy Jackson fans, try this lecture series on Greek myths.

This on is on the Trojan war.

I downloaded this lecture series on iTunesU awhile back, but now it's on Youtube.

Video download of the day

noreply@blogger.com (boinky) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:49:41 PDT

The news is the same old WAGD scandals, so I am checking Youtube for lectures on science and history.

I ran across this lecture (part of a series) by the late professor Rupus J Fears on the wisdom of history.

quick before the copyright cops find it's there.

Flight of the butterflies

noreply@blogger.com (boinky) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:33:10 PDT

There is a nice film about the migration of the Monarchs on PBS (but won't stream outside the USA).

or you can watch it HERE.

Family news

noreply@blogger.com (boinky) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:22:39 PDT

Chano and Joy are busy at the farm (planting season).

I went with Ruby to the Palenke to get some flowers...she wants a window box, so we bought some miniture rose bushes.

When I got home, we found our old farmdog, Cocoa, dead. She's has ascites for a few months, and we figure she had cancer (she was at least 10 years old). Lolo and the cook Dita were crying, but I was expecting it... with everyone but us at the farm, I had Dita ask her son, who works nearby, to bury her under the banana trees in the back garden for us. Sigh.

Butterflies

noreply@blogger.com (boinky) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:21:47 PDT

DadCanDo has downloadable plans for making your kids a paper butterfly.

these were done by sugarplum.

Origami page has some instructions too, but the butterflies are much simpler (for small children).

here is a nice tutorial.

this video shows you how to fold your napkins (serviettes) into a butterfly.

spidergirl has several versions in her film.

stuff around the net

noreply@blogger.com (boinky) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:03:01 PDT

StrategyPage gives a summary of how information is analyzed to catch the bad guys.

and notes that politicians and companies also use this type of information analysis.

I agree: but the problem is that a lot of folks think it will be used against political enemies, not the guys who bomb marathons or who are PC so they know they are allowed to break the law.

more HERE.
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A German bomber that crashed off the coast of the UK is raised, and the story behind it.
Two of the crew actually survived to become POW's.

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want to see the steer your hamburger came from?

There's an app for that...

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the reason the Supreme court ruled against Arizona's voter law was because the federal law for motor voter voting trumped the state law.

So this is a states rights issue, not an issue about immigrants or voter fraud per se.

I am ambivalent: We voted in Minnesota because I used my driver's license, but Lolo, who no longer drove, only had a Pennsylvania ID, but I vouched for him so they let him vote. When we moved to Oklahoma, I got him a senior citizen ID at the police station...

Making things too strict only stops the poor and elderly: so those who can't figure out how to navigate the bureaucracy end up disenfranchised. Of course, voter fraud is rampant, but hey, nothing new about that: Kennedy won in 1960 partly thanks to the Chicago cemetery vote.

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The immigration bill weighs 24 pounds and has 1075 pages. Presumably everyone in congress and every reporter has read the whole thing...

I'm ambivalent: I can't see sending home hard working folks without papers, but when my son can't even get a visitor visa because he once had a green card and lost it when he moved "home", (and the immigration folks at the embassy worry he'll overstay his visa and find a job), one has to wonder about the system...

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Saudi won't allow christian churches and even private Christian worship services can be raided by religious police.

But this is not true for the small Gulf states: AbuDabi has a new church.

In the UAE there are an estimated 700,000 Catholics who go to 10 churches and served by about 40 priests speaking a dozen languages.
“The church is very much alive here, in Africa and certainly in Asia. All of the members are migrant workers. Besides Filipinos, Indians and Christian Arabs, we have a growing number of Korean Catholics too...
“The UAE,” said Gandolf, “is probably the most open country to Christians in the region.”

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Happy Father's day

noreply@blogger.com (boinky) — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 20:17:32 PDT

Black holes are everywhere

noreply@blogger.com (boinky) — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 19:32:44 PDT

It's been awhile since I had time to check the space blogs, but this caught my eye:

The Andromeda galaxy is full of black holes.

more at Space.com: 26 new black holes were found recently.

So how many black holes are there?

Hubble site on black holes says:

There are so many black holes in the Universe that it is impossible to count them. It's like asking how many grains of sand are on the beach. Fortunately, the Universe is enormous and none of its known black holes are close enough to pose any danger to Earth.

Stellar-mass black holes form from the most massive stars when their lives end in supernova explosions. The Milky Way galaxy contains some 100 billion stars. Roughly one out of every thousand stars that form is massive enough to become a black hole. Therefore, our galaxy must harbor some 100 million stellar-mass black holes. Most of these are invisible to us, and only about a dozen have been identified. The nearest one is some 1,600 lightyears from Earth. In the region of the Universe visible from Earth, there are perhaps 100 billion galaxies. Each one has about 100 million stellar-mass black holes. And somewhere out there, a new stellar-mass black hole is born in a supernova every second.

Supermassive black holes are a million to a billion times more massive than our Sun and are found in the centers of galaxies. Most galaxies, and maybe all of them, harbor such a black hole. So in our region of the Universe, there are some 100 billion supermassive black holes. The nearest one resides in the center of our Milky Way galaxy, 28 thousand lightyears away. The most distant we know of lives in a quasar galaxy billions of lightyears away.