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POPSGiant Turkey Chases Boston Woman, Pecks Bottom Repeatedly When dispatched to the scene of a turkey, Verrier offers advice instead. He tells people not to feed them, not to be intimidated by them, and to keep their distance. Still, some people cannot help themselves. They need to be near the turkeys. Distance-shmistance, we want to be near the turkeys. I, for one, am against the city of Boston trying to regulate mutually consensual human-turkey behavior. A light ass-pecking never hurt anyone, am I right? Even though this incident happened right near my apartment, I have not been lucky enough to experience any super-sized turkeys on my errands, sadly. Look at the size of that sucker...he's gotta be like 12 feet tall! :)
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POPSLaws of Nature, Source Unknown The ultimate Platonist these days is Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In talks and papers recently he has speculated that mathematics does not describe the universe — it is the universe. Dr. Tegmark maintains that we are part of a mathematical structure, albeit one gorgeously more complicated than a hexagon, a multiplication table or even the multidimensional symmetries that describe modern particle physics. “Everything in our world is purely mathematical — including you,” he wrote in New Scientist.
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POPSWhirl Like a Dervish! [pictures] Colorful and bright - photography that always catches my eye when I'm browsing Flickr......"The most famous Sufi master is Celaleddin Rumi. He was born in east Persia - in what is now Afghanistan - in 1207, and was brought to Konya, Turkey, by his family when he was a child. Rumi was a philosopher who is remembered today for his exquisitely beautiful devotional poetry. But he also "discovered" whirling as a means of communing with God."
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POPSTurkey censors Wordpress; blogs can't be accessed When I tried to post a new entry to my blog a few minutes ago, I came across this page. It says: "Access to this site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/195 of T.C. Fatih 2.Civil Court of First Instance." At first, I thought it was my blog but after trying to access Wordpress.com's main page, I noticed the total Wordpress.com domain was blocked by the authorities. Another ridiculous example of censorship on the Internet content, in Turkey. there are hundred thousands of blogs on Wordpress.com and none can be accessed from Turkey now. This decision of the court is a shame for a country which claims to respect free speech. I protest this unfair blockage on Wordpress and call all the Turkish bloggers to support free speech and to condemn censorship.
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POPSMath Behind Ancient Islamic Tile Patterns Decoded When Peter J. Lu traveled to Uzbekistan, he had no idea of the mathematical journey that he was about to embark on as well. See the full research article as published in Science . It's a wonderful example of original, multidisciplinary academic research bridging history and mathematics that happens to force us to re-think the sophistication of ancient geometrical knowledge. When Lu looked at photographs of Islamic buildings, he found that he could break the patterns on their surfaces up into the same shapes, even though the shapes often weren't immediately visible. "I couldn't sleep for days," he said. "I skipped Christmas break to work on it."
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POPSThe GREATEST Ad EVER and its making It's one of the 2 biggest banks in Turkey, belong to "Sabanci Group", the wealthiest corp in Turkey and well-integrated into international finance-capital world. The TV ad was done by computer generated characters and broadcasted intensely during the World Cup games.
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POPSTracking the Origin of the Cat Cats probably started living close to humans when people evolved from nomadic herding to raising livestock and crops and started storing food, which attracted mice and other rodents. Cats found good hunting there, and humans surely appreciated the sly little predators' help protecting their stocks."There was a mutual benefit," Lyons said. From there, domesticated cats started to radiate out to different parts of the world, often following humans on their migrations. Today cats can be divided genetically into four broad groups: those from Europe, the Mediterranean, East Africa and Asia. But Lyons and her colleagues also made surprising discoveries about individual breeds. The Japanese bobtail, for example, does not seem genetically similar to cats from Japan, indicating the breed may have originated elsewhere. Despite its name, the Persian, the oldest recognized breed, looks as though it actually arose in Western Europe and not Persia, which today is Iran.
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POPSArchitecture of Authority [images] The Architecture of Authority, illustrates the physical spaces of prisons, police stations, confessionals, schools, and much more from around the world. When asked what surprised Richard Ross in his experiences taking these photographs, he said... That my wife and kids let me go to Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Beirut, etc., and actually get these images.
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POPSStudy Of Countries I do not claim that sites such as this are the be all and end all of research regarding any given country. But still they are fairly comprehensive. If any given country or nation intrigues you then I recommend further research. If this site creates a even greater thirst for knowledge then I will have done something useful.