Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Mid-Week Post



Don’t look behind you.




I’ll get the ball rolling.


Morsi tries his hand at stand-up comedy.

Q: How many Egyptian dictators does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: None. The Prophet Mohammad despised light bulbs just as he despised the Coptic Christians who would use them. Now let’s get the Americans to do our dirty work for us before my population riots over food shortages.


What? It’s what I got right now. YOU do better!


Do you want to see an awesome video? Sure you do.




Yes, but Jesus wasn’t a prophet. He preceded Mohammad, didn’t kill His enemies and died and rose for the sins of all. His followers didn’t kill people and now enjoy a higher standard of living.


Yes, rage is a very appropriate word.




The cats rise against Obama. Even they can’t stand him.






“Romney’s allegations that Palestinians are committed to the destruction of Israel are baseless given the fact that Palestinians have expressed support for the two-state solution, and repeatedly recognized Israel’s right to exist.”



Yes, about that:












Internal Department of Justice emails obtained by The Daily Caller show Attorney General Eric Holder’s communications staff has collaborated with the left-wing advocacy group Media Matters for America in an attempt to quell news stories about scandals plaguing Holder and America’s top law enforcement agency.

Dozens of pages of emails between DOJ Office of Public Affairs Director Tracy Schmaler and Media Matters staffers show Schmaler, Holder’s top press defender, working with Media Matters to attack reporters covering DOJ scandals. TheDC obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request.



And people think the media isn’t biased!












That may be the worst photo op since this one. Or this one.

North Korea’s KCNA state media said Kim was accompanied by his new wife, Ri Sol-ju, and that the exercise centre had been “built according to the direct initiative and plan” of the Young General, as he is known. It added that Kim is “always deeply concerned for the promotion of people’s health and living standards.”

So concerned that he blew enough rice money to feed a small town for a year on a new gym that no one in North Korea but him needs, in the middle of its 18th annual food crisis since his grandpa became North Korea’s largest stockpile of preserved meat.

Kim told the staff that if office workers who work indoors all day, “take exercise and receive medical treatment at the centre, they can devote themselves to revolutionary work in good health.” - The Telegraph, Julian Riall

Can you imagine what it must have been like to be one of the gym staff members, being lectured on fitness and exercise by a morbidly obese man … who showed up in a Mao suit? Suppress your amusement, comrade. Think of your children.



Yeah, I know.






Russia has signed a compact with North Korea that will write off 90 percent of the debt the DPRK has accrued since the Cold War, and will reinvest the remaining 10 percent back in the reclusive Asian country.

The total debt forgiven is approximately $11 billion.




Now, why would they do a thing like that? Could it be that Russia will never see a ruble of that money back or is there something else at play?



The deal could also help pave the way for a new gas pipeline, that could possibly run through North Korea and help supply the Asian market. 



Oh, will you look at that. China needs resources and North Korea was willing to grease a few Russian palms in exchange for debt forgiveness. Screw the North Korean proles, though, because, like the Ukrainians, they can’t fork over the big bucks Russia wants.
 

Watch your borders, South Korea. This has been played out before.






In science fiction, we'd just engage the hyperdrive, or power up the warp core, but that does us little good when we really need science fact. In 1994, a Mexican scientist by the name of Miguel Alcubierre came up with a real-life concept for a warp drive. The problem with developing the technology was how much energy it required. The minimum amount of energy to power such a drive would, by the mass-energy equivalence of Einstein's equation Emc2, consume the planet Jupiter.

The ship design wouldn't look anything like what Kirk and Picard commanded, though. The closest thing I can find is a Vulcan ship from the Star Trek: Enterprise tv-series — a roughly football-shaped vessel encircled by a ring, possibly constructed of currently-hypothetical 'exotic matter', which would bend space around it while the ship inside the ring would remain safe from any warping.

Harold White, of NASA's Johnson Space Center, recently tweaked the design of the Alcubierre warp drive, changing the original flat ring that encircled the ship to more of a rounded donut. That change reduced the mass-equivalent energy needed to power the drive from the planet Jupiter down to the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which had a mass of 722 kilograms. This put the idea of an Alcubierre warp drive far closer to the reach of science.

The basic idea behind the warp drive, both in Star Trek and in the real world, is a manipulation of a loophole in the laws of physics that govern space and time.

"Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light," said Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to achieving interstellar flight by the year 2100. "But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light."

If you could manipulate the fabric of space-time, contracting it in front of your ship and expanding it behind your ship, the amount of space-time between you and your destination would shrink and the amount of space-time between you and your origin would expand. Even though your ship did not actually move in any conventional sense — you didn't move from your location in space, but moved space around your location — you would still end up at your destination, light-years away from where you were.

This new 'Alcubierre-White' warp drive is currently being tested, in miniature form.







The story begins with the cuddly blue monkey, named Ah-ah, being given to the boy by his grandparents when he was just one-year-old.

It didn't take long for the two to develop a strong bond, with Ah-ah establishing himself as the boy's number one "lovey," the term given to transitional objects many kids latch onto as toddlers.
"Ah-ah became a member of the family, going everywhere my son went," the boy's dad writes in the text accompanying the online video.

Until the monkey was lost, that is, during a family camping trip to Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park in 2009.

"Somewhere along the way, Ah-ah went missing," the video explains, describing the boy as "absolutely devastated" by the loss. …

Frantic calls to all the places the family had holidayed proved fruitless.

Everyone gave up hope of finding the lanky stuffed monkey again, except the boy's mother.

Three years later, while shopping online for a musical instrument, she decided to enter a search for "blue monkey."

The query returned one result, from Florida, of a stuffed animal that bore a striking resemblance to the missing monkey.

Thinking it might be a suitable replacement for the long-lost loved one, she placed an order with the ebay store "Lost Loves Toy Chest" dedicated to reuniting misplaced playthings with their owners.

To the astonished parents' surprise, when it arrived the monkey didn't just bear a resemblance to Ah-ah.

"It was Ah-ah," the video explains, singling out its unique singed hair and the jagged remnants of where its tag had been cut as proof of its provenance.

In their reunion, caught on camera, the boy can hardly believe his eyes.

"I thought you were kidding," he cries, clutching and kissing his blue monkey for the first time in three years.




(Gracias, Harold)






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