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POPS7 Writing Habits of Amazing Writers This extremely prolific writer has won numerous awards, including the National Book Award. She writes in longhand, and while she doesn’t have a formal schedule, she says she prefers to write in the morning, before breakfast . She’s a creative writing professor, and on the days she teaches, she says she writes for an hour or 45 minutes before leaving for her first class. On other days, when the writing is going well, she can work for hours without a break — and has breakfast at 2 or 3 in the afternoon!
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POPSAwesome Innovations from the Underdeveloped Male Mind Hesh says that “the curtain may contain appropriately placed openings to allow for communication by or to the user”, which will allow for interaction like this: Man without Portable Rain Covering: “Dude, that’s really a sweet little device you’ve got there.” Man wearing Portable Rain Covering: “Thanks. I’ve had it for about a month now and I …..” Man without Portable Rain Covering: “Dude, that was sarcasm.”
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POPSThe Last Victorian Leviathan Steam Ship Alas, the end of the Eastern came with more of a whimper than bang. After suffering far too many accidents, and far too many money troubles, the Eastern passed from one hand to another until eventually the largest ship in the Victorian world came to a humiliating end, first as a floating billboard in Liverpool and then finally broken up and sold as scrap. - It took two full years just to dismantle this ship (gives you an idea how big it was). - A mysterious dead body was found inside the special double hull (one can only imagine the desperate story of that stowaway...) At least Brunel didn't see the sad and pathetic end to his magnificent Great Eastern, though he didn't live to see its majesty either. Brunel died only four days after the great ship's first sea trial.
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POPSAribeth Aribeth appeared on CM the other day. Hiya, Aribeth!
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POPS6 Micronations You Can Join Would be unfair not to point to some close to mine, here are the links: Farthingdown http://clipmarks.com/tags/micronations/ http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sealand&oldid=107619578 alnocu http://clipmarks.com/tags/micronations/ http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/32D78F32-A044-48E6-BDB0-C35894D311B3/ Aribeth http://weburbanist.com/2008/03/09/5-floating-utopia-and-ocean-city-projects-from-seafaring-condos-to-to-oceanic-micronations/ http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/8DE7616D-D1A4-4741-A240-79F833A33F95/
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POPSNaturmobil: Cart runs on "horse power" "My friends and relatives thought of me as a somewhat eccentric half-mad inventor attempting the impossible," said Mirhejazi who has brought his invention to Dubai. Nevertheless, one friend was prepared to rustle up enough cash to put the project under starter’s orders. "It took me 26 months to build the vehicle in my workshop in Tehran. I got it patented by a special department in Iran after professors at universities there attested that it was a scientific invention."
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POPSMysterious people who appeared in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, UK, in the 12th century. The children were brother and sister and they had green colored skin. Their appearance was normal in all other areas. They spoke an unrecognized language and refused to eat anything other than pitch from bean pods. Eventually their skin lost its green color. When they learned English they explained that they were from the ‘Land of St Martin’ which was a dark place because the sun never rose far above the horizon. They claimed that they were tending their father’s herd and followed a river of light when they heard the sounds of bells - finding themselves in Woolpit.Some of the more unusual theories proposed for the origin of the children are that they were Hollow Earth children, parallel dimension children, or Extraterrestrial children.
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POPSCould Jupiter wreck the solar system?
"So what's the likelihood Mercury could crash into the Earth? If it did, the asteroid that most likely wiped out the dinosaurs will seem like a drop in the ocean compared with a planet 4880 km in diameter slamming into us. There will be very little left after this wrecking ball impact. But here's the kicker: There is only a 1% chance that these gravitational instabilities of the inner Solar System are likely to cause any kind of chaos before the Sun turns into a Red Giant and swallows Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars in 7 billion years time. So, no need to look out for death-wish Mercury quite yet… there's a very low chance that any of this will happen. But some good news for Mars; the researchers have also found that if the chaos does ensue, the Red Planet may be flung out of the Solar System, possibly escaping our expanding Sun. So, let's get those Mars colonies started! Well, within the next few billions of years anyhow…" Good stuff for the next science-fiction movie :-)
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POPSMen aren't all from Mars Taken together, the findings provide a much more nuanced picture of men's sexuality than is promoted by men's magazines, Janssen pointed out. "There's huge variability among men in how easily they're turned on or turned off, how easily they experience sexual desire and arousal," he explained. "The differences among men and the differences among women are much larger than the average difference between the sexes in almost anything sexual."In fact, the researcher added, as many as 30 percent of women may be more easily sexually aroused than most men. "This study's challenging the idea that men are simple," he said.
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POPSThe man who invented Mars It is Lowell's vision of Mars that has enthralled and inspired earthlings ever since.In 1895, Lowell published a book about what he believed he saw.He became famous and immensely popular.Lowell was born at 131 Tremont Street in Boston on March 13,1855,into a family at the pinnacle of what passed for American aristocracy. The appearance of Lowell's book about Mars in 1895 came at a time of canal-building on earth. The Suez had recently been constructed; the Panama was in the works. For both Lowell and his adoring public, the prospect of canals on a neighboring planet was too captivating to dismiss. He published his second book about the Red Planet, Mars and Its Canals, in 1906.In 1908, he published his third and final book on the planet, Mars as the Abode of Life. Back at his observatory on Mars Hill, Lowell renewed his attention to another matter: the possibility of a ninth planet beyond Neptune, which he called "Planet X."
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POPSRobin Hanson on the "Great Filter" there is a "Great Filter" along the path between simple dead stuff and explosive life. The vast vast majority of stuff that starts along this path never makes it. In fact, so far nothing among the billion trillion stars in our whole past universe has made it all the way along this path.... ne or more of these steps is much more improbable than it otherwise looks. If it is one of our past steps, such as the development of single-cell life, then we shouldn't expect to see such independently evolved life anywhere within billions of light years from us. But if it is a step between here and a choice to explode that is very improbable, we should fear for our future.... Optimism (as defined here) regarding our future is directly pitted against optimism regarding the ease of previous evolutionary steps. To the extent those successes were easy, our future failure to explode is almost certain...
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POPSsmart kids vs popular kids Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better.But I think the main reason is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy. It's important for nerds to realize that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.<< Interesting read.Written by someone who was considered to be a "nerd" at school.
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POPSLife on the edge That throws up a tricky problem for engineers sending space craft to explore these alien worlds. What if the craft were to carry its own cargo of Earth microbes which set up home there?One major problem for any accidental interplanetary microbe would be how to survive the punishing radiation bombardment in space. Most would be rapidly frazzled en route. Most, but not all. Deinococcus radiodurans, nicknamed "Conan the Bacterium", is listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the "world's toughest bacterium". By rapidly replacing its DNA, it can survive cold, dehydration, vacuum, acid and a hefty radiation dose. Its Latin name means "terrifying berry that withstands radiation".
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POPSAnimal senses humans don't have You might think you're smart, but none of your senses rival the keenest abilities in the animal world. Animals see in the dark, sniff prey miles away, and detect electrical output from muscle twitches in hidden meals. Read on, so you don't become one of those meals.<<
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POPSMale menopause? Yes, it’s real Andropause is a medical condition, diagnosed with a blood test by a physician that reveals testosterone levels below a certain level. If a diagnosis of andropause is warranted, treatment with testosterone replacement may be an option, depending on a man’s health history. However, the biggest, and most misunderstood, symptom of declining testosterone is a decrease in libido. Testosterone is truly the hormone that stokes the flames of desire. Many men confuse andropause with erectile dysfunction (ED), because they often occur around the same time. These men often turn to an ED medication, such as Viagra, to improve their erectile ability, which works for a time in most cases. However, as men get older, the gap between desire and arousal widens and many men become deeply disappointed when Viagra doesn't give them the desire to have sex. That's because Viagra doesn't boost testosterone levels.<<
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POPSRaindrops on roses The team tried to replicate the effect.They put some polyvinyl alcohol onto rose petals and allowed it to set, then peeled off a thin plastic cast of the petal surface.This film had the same properties as the rose petal:the film could hold droplets of between 3-5 microlitres even when held upside down. It seems that the physical shape of the surface is much more important than any chemical properties of the material in creating 'stickiness',says Ronald Fearing, a biomimetic engineer at the University of California at Berkeley. For a rose, this stickiness might come in handy as reflective water drops that glisten in the Sun might attract pollinating insects. In the lab, such materials might be useful for 'lab on a chip' devices that need to hold and shunt around tiny quantities of liquid without leaking or being contaminated by nearby materials. "These findings present many interesting applications in microfluid handling," says Fearing.
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POPS"Mad, Bad and Sad" If male doctors conspired to define madness, responding to behaviors that flouted the social conventions of their culture, female patients, in the attempt to understand themselves and their context, and maybe even to create or bolster identity, colluded with those same doctors to satisfy the changing definitions of madness. “Often enough,” Appignanesi notes, “extreme expressions of the culture’s malaise, symptoms and disorders mirrored the time’s order.” While “Mad, Bad and Sad” echoes and enlarges upon Elaine Showalter’s book “The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980,” Showalter’s perspective is more exclusively feminist, arguing that psychiatry as practiced on women is a history of their subjugation and control by men. But as Appignanesi makes clear, women have had no little role in creating and fulfilling the definitions of their madness.<< "Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present" by Lisa Appignanesi.
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POPSSpam reaches 30 "It was the first really bad thing that people started doing on the internet, in terms of letting the small town rules break down and start abusing people."
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POPSPain as an art form Mr. Collen wrote to pain doctors around the world to solicit examples of art from pain patients. Working with San Francisco college student James Gregory, 21, who suffers from chronic pain as the result of a car accident, the two created the Pain Exhibit, an online gallery of art from pain sufferers. The images are evocative and troubling.“Some of them are painful even to look at,'’ Dr. Basbaum said. Finding ways to communicate pain is essential to patients who are suffering, many of whom don’t receive adequate treatment from doctors.Mr. Collen said the main goal of the exhibit is to raise awareness about the problem of chronic pain.“People don’t believe what they can’t see,'’ Mr. Collen said. “But they see a piece of art an individual created about their pain and everything changes.'’
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POPSCity road networks grow like biological systems "Beyond the economic, demographic and geographic "forces" that shape a town, there are a myriad of small "accidents" that contribute",says Marc Barthélemy of the French Atomic Energy Commission in Bruyères-le-Châtel."Although these are unpredictable, they can be understood in terms of statistics and simple modelling." The researchers will now study how road networks developed over time in old cities, such as London and Paris. They hope to unearth other possible universal features that might be present to refine their model.
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POPSStrange things happen at full moon On the moon's dayside this effect is counteracted somewhat by sunlight: Photons knock electrons back off the surface, lessening the negative charge. But on the night side, electrons accumulate and the charge can climb to thousands of volts. The extreme differences in charge might cause dust to fly from the negative night side to the less-negative day side, becoming strongest along the regions where the sun is rising or setting. Astronauts walking on the charged terrain might get electrified like sock from a hot dryer. "Touching another astronaut, a doorknob, a piece of sensitive electronics — any of these simple actions could produce an unwelcome zap."
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POPSYou Bet Your Tintype, Buckaroo Mr. Kendrick belongs to a growing group of commercial and art photographers who have retreated in recent years from the ease and exactitude of the digital age and taken up the difficult, ethereal techniques of early photography, including the ambrotype (in which a unique image is created on a glass plate), daguerreotype (on polished silver) and tintype (usually on tin-plated iron ). The pictures — made by exposing and developing the metal plates after they have been coated with a light-sensitive solution of silver nitrate — are a kind of ideal meeting of subject and style. Mr. Kendrick, like most cowboys, is much happier when doing things the hard way.“Making these kinds of pictures, you don’t need the mental skills that you have to have a Ph.D. for,” he said. “It’s more like learning to be a carpenter. It’s work and it’s satisfying. What you get is unique, not mass-produced. You can’t repeat the process. So it’s the antithesis of digital.”
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POPSYou walk wrong “It took 4 million years to develop our unique human foot and our consequent distinctive form of gait, a remarkable feat of bioengineering. Yet, in only a few thousand years, and with one carelessly designed instrument, our shoes, we have warped the pure anatomical form of human gait, obstructing its engineering efficiency, afflicting it with strains and stresses and denying it its natural grace of form and ease of movement head to foot.”
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