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POPSThey did not give up R. H. Macy failed seven times before his store in New York City caught on. When Bell telephone was struggling to get started, its owners offered all their rights to Western Union for $100,000. The offer was disdainfully rejected with the pronouncement, "What use could this company make of an electrical toy." Rocket scientist Robert Goddard found his ideas bitterly rejected by his scientific peers on the grounds that rocket propulsion would not work An expert said of Vince Lombardi: "He possesses minimal football knowledge and lacks motivation." Michael Jordan and Bob Cousy were each cut from their high school basketball teams. Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because "he lacked imagination and had no good ideas." After Fred Astaire's first screen test, the memo from the testing director of MGM, dated 1933, read, "Can't act. Can't sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little." When Lucille Ball began studying to be actress, she was to"Try any other profes
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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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POPSFinding the Shapes of Alternative Spatial Dimensions String theory proposes that particles, described in the Standard Model as point-like entities, are in fact more like vibrating strings of energy. The different frequencies at which they vibrate through the fabric of space-time gives them their unique physical properties. Gary Shiu, professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, proposes a model in which the shape of the extra spacial dimensions determines the properties of the universe, much in the same way the shape of a musical instrument determines its sound, meaning that string theory predicts that the particle masses and the forces exerted in the universe are in direct relation to the vibrating frequency of the string which, in turn, is given by the shape of the spatial dimensions.
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POPSFive questions for a galactic visitor The simple fact is that certain people have always opposed progress while other, better people have driven it. "Experts" decried boiled water as unhealthy compared the vital stuff straight from the river, cursed antibiotics as a temporary placebo, and confidently declared that computers were nothing but expensive toys. As an intelligent species we must make every effort to contact anyone or thing we can - and if you don't like it, there are some lovely caves you can move back to. what are your questions?
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POPSScientists Develop New Computational Method To Investigate Origin Of Life "Retroelements are an ancient and highly diverse class of proteins; therefore, they provide a rigorous benchmark for us to test our approach. We are happy with the results we derived, even though our method is in an early stage," said Patterson. The team plans to make the algorithms that they used in their method available to others as open-source software that is freely available on the Web. Scientists map out the evolutionary histories of organisms by comparing their genetic and/or protein sequences. Those organisms that are closely related and share a recent common ancestor have greater degrees of similarity among their sequences.
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POPSGI's in Iraq no longer True Believers From the article: Safstrom, for example, comes from a thoroughly military family. His mother and father have served in the armed forces, as have his three sisters, one brother and several uncles. One week after the Sept. 11 attacks, he walked into a recruiter's office and joined the army. "You guys want to start a fight in my backyard, I got something for you," he recalls thinking at the time. But in Safstrom's view, the American presence is futile. "If we stayed here for 5, even 10 more years, the day we leave here these guys will go crazy," he said. "It would go straight into a civil war. That's how it feels, like we're putting a Band-Aid on this country until we leave here.
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POPSHow to build a Universe that doesn't fall apart two days later
Maybe, it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown of communication... and there is the real illness. ... One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly. ... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.
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POPSMen of War - photo essay TIME in partnership with CNN: "Ninety years of battlefield portraits taken by the greatest combat photographers of all time." last picture: Sergeant First Class Joseph Mosner was injured in Khalidya by a roadside bomb.2004, Iraq War
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POPSDisaster Gives Birth to Greenest Town in America To leverage environmentalism to rebuild and sustain itself in the wake of near total destruction, it just may unwittingly be writing a modern survival guide for rural America. Currently, the town has completed town houses for working class families that are LEED gold certified. Gold certification means these places will be almost twice as efficient as they used to be. A lot of what's happening in Greensburg is some of the first in the country.
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POPSFormer GOP Senator Quits Republican Party No room for moderates in the Republican Party. Good job Karl Rove. More: Chafee himself laid out some of the ways he disagreed with his party, notably as one of only 23 senators and the only Republican to oppose the resolution supporting the invasion of Iraq. He went on to criticize the “permanent deficits” caused by Republican tax cuts. Chafee referred yesterday to the broad-based, bipartisan Iraq Study Group that Congress created, a process Chafee approved of. The study group recommended a gradual pullback of American forces, and insistence that the Iraqi government take more responsibility for security. But he said that since the study group made its recommendations, which he agreed with, “no one’s paid any attention to them.”
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POPSBullies Pick On Pink-shirted Frosh - School Picks On Bullies They also brought a pink basketball to school as well as pink material for headbands and arm bands. David and Travis figure about half the school’s 830 students wore pink. When the bullied student put on his pink shirt Friday and saw all the other pink in the lobby, "he was all smiles. It was like a big weight had been lifted off is shoulder," David said. No one at the school would reveal the student’s name. Travis said that growing up, he was often picked on for wearing store-brand clothes instead of designer duds.
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POPSThe Pushkin factor in romantic relationships Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West.“Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.” James Collins, whose new novel, “Beginner’s Greek,” is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading “The Magic Mountain” on a plane, recalled that after college, he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” on her bedside table. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat’...
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POPSApples New iPhone / iPod "It's really thin, thinner than any smartphone. 11.6mm, thinner than the Q and the BlackJack, all of them. Ring and silent, volume up and down." 9:53am - "We have a 2 megapixel camera built right in, let's take a look at the top. A headset jack, 3.5mm, SIM tray, and a sleep-wake switch. Let's look at the bottom, we've got a speaker, mic input, and an iPod connector."
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POPSDo You Know Who I Am? Ah but wait, there's more. With the folks behind him in line laughing hysterically, the man glared at the United agent, gritted his teeth and swore "(Expletive) you." Without flinching, she smiled and said, "I'm sorry, sir, but you'll have to stand in line for that, too." The man retreated as the people in the terminal applauded loudly. Although the flight was canceled and people were late, they were no longer angry at United.
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POPSTeacher Removes Desks from Classroom Go to the source and read the rest of this story. There's a great lesson here for more people than just this class full of students. And consider this source. This is true, and a great teaching effort.
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POPSA Fresh Look At Catholicism Some good news from the article and one reason I am a Catholic: "In one session, religious scholar Angel Galindo Garcia discussed the role of the church in an era of globalization. He referenced George Orwell's Big Brother and critiqued growing inequality between rich and poor nations. However, I had to laugh out loud at this quote: "Can one be a homosexual without ever having sexual relations with a person of the same sex?" she asked the crowd rhetorically and then answered: "Yes, of course." Save your questions for later kiddies! OMG, do you know how CRAZY I drove my nuns in catethism class with questions? I was almost held hostage by my fellow classmates once for questioning the dogma of purgatory as a place rather than a state of being. The teacher LOVED me though. It's the first time I saw him come alive in that class.
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