Ok so I know I said three weeks and it has hardly been one but I've had a change of plans.I did the trek to the sacred lakes of Gosainkunda as planned but then binned the next part largely because it would have been a partial repeat of what I did in 2008. But also because the 6th day of the trek 2000 metres of descent on sharp rock destroyed my walking bootsSo anyway I'm back in Kathmand
It’s a long way to Tipperary
Monday 15.3.2010 day 152It's a long way to TipperaryToday we got up and drove to town of Waterford in the Waterford County it is the oldest city in Ireland it was founded by the Vikings in 853. We went to Reginalds Tower one of the oldest building in town. Waterford is world famous for its hand cut crystal and the Waterford crystal factory is in the town. We then drove along the rugged copper coa
The World Is Too Much With Us
After yesterday's chillaxed vibe in which peaceful hours spent at camp were punctuated only by laundry internet and dinner at a cafe in the nearby village today felt like a series of intense experiences barging into each other and vying for thought space.We'd decided to stay another day at Fisherman's Camp partly because we didn't feel ready to leave especially in an early departure and par
Gosainkunda the mountains
Photos from part 2 of the Gosainkunda trek
Gosainkunda the fun bit
Photos from part 3 of the trek
St Patricks Day in Ireland
Wednesday 17.3.2010 day 154St Patrickrsquos Day in IrelandWe had heard that Dublin was the best place to be for St Patrickrsquos Day so we asked our resort and they told us it was more for young people and anyone over 21 would not have fun there. We asked where else to go and they told us getting in and out of anywhere would be a night mare and that they could get us a taxi to Kilkenny but we
Kilkenny Castle
Thursday 18.3.2010 day 155Kilkenny CastleAfter our big St Patrickrsquos night last night lol we slept in and when we got up we found a note on our door telling us that the Trad Irish night that was to be on tonight had been cancelled due to lack of numbers this is bad news as we were going to continue our St Patrickrsquos celebrations there and did not have other stuff for dinner. It was now
Nahtrang
So we arrived in Nhatrang on sat morning after the bumpiest ride ever on the sleeperbus. It shouldnt really be called a sleeper bus as sleep was impossible to achieve. but still. . an experience. especially as there wasnt a toilet on board and it was a 12 hour journey. which was interesting for some loud mouths americans would were forced to go on the side of the road haha. We arrived just as t
All Kinds Of Checks Available Here
To create a better impression on clients various companies and business personal have their own bank checks printed. This also includes printing your company logo in case your company possesses one on each and every check that they give out. This shows your professionalism towards work and your devotion for your company you are dealing with. Your clients also get a vivid picture of this through
Jaipur Travel Car Rental in Jaipur
Jaipur is a globally famous travel destination situated in the Indian state of Rajasthan. It is the capital city of the state. It is also one of the most beautiful and remarkable cities in the country. Fondly known as the Pink City of India this beautiful city appeals and attracts a large gathering of tourists and vacationers from all over the world. The city is one of the wellplanned cities in
The bag is back
The bag is backThere have been a lot of you wondering what happend to my friend Ander's bag. I just thought I would give you an update on this issue. Anders have had a couple of telephone conversations with the responsible delivery agency and the responsible airline during the last couple of days. Finally today ha has recieved his bagAnder's is now ready to move on in life. Kristian
Hot and Sticky
As we moved further north from Cervantes we said goodbye to the nice cool nights that we had grown accustomed to in the south and moved into ldquohot and stickyrdquo territory once again. In the very dry country that surrounds Geraldton we had heard of this little oasis called Ellendale Pool with a nice campground and a permanent waterhole where you could swim and cool off. So after a few rat
Travel to the Greek Islands
A holiday company specialising in Holidays to the Greek Islands is offering departures from Bristol International Airport for the first time this summer.Islands of Greece has seats available on flights operated by Viking Airlines from Bristol for Holidays to Corfu Kefalonia Mykonos Crete and Holidays to Skiathos. The company has been providing luxury Greek island holidays for 30 years and off
Carnac standing stones in Brittany
Thursday 11.3.2010 day 149Carnac standing stones in BrittanyWe drove from Paris to Carnac today. Once we got to Carnac we checked into our wonderful hotel with fantastic views across the river. We then went to the Carnac Alignments a Neolithic site that is 6000 years old. Legion has that the stones were Roman legionaries turned to stone and local belief had them to be Magical stones. From 1830
Ferry to Ireland
Friday 12.3.2010 day 150Ferry to IrelandWe drove to Normandie past the dday beachers which were very pretty we read in the French news paper that they are still fining unexploded bombs from dday and had found one on the 14 of Feb a few weeks before we where there where they evacuated 20000 people from their homes and they do not expect to find all the dday bombs until 2020. We got the 10 pm Ce
Ireland
Saturday 13.3.2010 day 150IrelandWe arrived in Ireland at 1 pm and did not know what side of the road they drove on until we was an Irish car as we drove off the ferry and itrsquos driverrsquos seat was on the right hand side so we knew that they drove on the Left hand side of the road It was good to know this before we got to the road.We then drove to our Resort in Knocktopher Abbey Knockto
To the Cradle of Western Civilization
I was hopelessly lost. All of the signs were telling me conflicting things and it didnrsquot seem like there were any people around that I could ask for help Everyone who was there hurried past me averting their gaze seemingly playing a game of ignore the lost man with the big backpack. The muffled voice came back on the intercom and announced a string of instructions regarding which train
FCC’s broadband plan: A possible dream – Washington Post (blog)
FCC's broadband plan: A possible dream Washington Post (blog) If you can pull up objective reports about the download and upload speeds and reliability of services near your home, as seen in the graphic at left ... |
1992 Libertarian VP candidate now Republican for local Prosecutor in Nevada
LIBERTARIAN BLAST FROM THE PAST!
From Eric Dondero
The year was 1992. Nancy Lord was a prominent civil liberties attorney in Atlanta. She had run for statewide office in Georgia on the Libertarian Party ticket. Attractive, energetic, and offering a chance for the Party to balance the ticket with a female presence, former Alaska State Representative Andre Marrou picked Lord to be his running mate.
Marrou and Lord crisscrossed the country and garnered some national media attention, including CNN. In the end, the ticket didn't do as well as hoped at the ballot box. In the year of Perot, Bush I, and a "guy from Hope," William J. Clinton, Marrou/Lord came in 4th place, with 292,000 votes.
Lord soon drifted away from the LP. There were reports that she rejoined the Republican Party and moved out West.
Now the reports have been confirmed. And Lord is getting back into the limelight.
From the Parumph Valley Times, March 17:
Nancy Lord, attorney for the Concerned Citizens for a Safe Community, and Michael Root, a Las Vegas attorney who promotes himself as an outsider, round out the field of five candidates for Nye County district attorney competing in the June 8 Republican primary.
The other two Republicans are incumbent Bob Beckett and former Nye County Chief Civil Deputy District Attorney Ron Kent.
The primary winner advances to the Nov. 2 general election to face the winner of the Democratic primary race between Brian Kunzi and Nicholas Anthony Del Vecchio.
Against Marijuana laws, but would still follow current laws
Continuing:
While she is running as a Republican, Lord said she is fundamentally still a Libertarian. She is against marijuana laws but will prosecute offenders as long as the drug is illegal in Nevada. But Lord said she won't prosecute a case where someone's Fourth Amendment rights were violated due to an illegal search.
"I am not required to represent the county commissioners personally. I will represent Nye County as if it's a corporate client, and I have over a decade of experience in that regard," Lord said.
Nye County is located in southwest Nevada and borders California (Death Valley area). Parumph is the largest town with a population of 28,000. It is considered an exurb of Las Vegas. The County is home to three legal brothels.
NASA’s Spitzer Unearths Primitive Black Holes
This artist's conception illustrates one of the most primitive supermassive black holes known (central black dot) at the core of a young, star-rich galaxy.
› Full image and caption
Astronomers have come across what appear to be two of the earliest and most primitive supermassive black holes known. The discovery, based largely on observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, will provide a better understanding of the roots of our universe, and how the very first black holes, galaxies and stars came to be.
"We have found what are likely first-generation quasars, born in a dust-free medium and at the earliest stages of evolution," said Linhua Jiang of the University of Arizona, Tucson. Jiang is the lead author of a paper announcing the findings in the March 18 issue of Nature.
Black holes are beastly distortions of space and time. The most massive and active ones lurk at the cores of galaxies, and are usually surrounded by doughnut-shaped structures of dust and gas that feed and sustain the growing black holes. These hungry, supermassive black holes are called quasars.
As grimy and unkempt as our present-day universe is today, scientists believe the very early universe didn't have any dust -- which tells them that the most primitive quasars should also be dust-free. But nobody had seen such immaculate quasars -- until now. Spitzer has identified two -- the smallest on record -- about 13 billion light-years away from Earth. The quasars, called J0005-0006 and J0303-0019, were first unveiled in visible light using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. That discovery team, which included Jiang, was led by Xiaohui Fan, a coauthor of the recent paper at the University of Arizona. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory had also observed X-rays from one of the objects. X-rays, ultraviolet and optical light stream out from quasars as the gas surrounding them is swallowed.
"Quasars emit an enormous amount of light, making them detectable literally at the edge of the observable universe," said Fan.
When Jiang and his colleagues set out to observe J0005-0006 and J0303-0019 with Spitzer between 2006 and 2009, their targets didn't stand out much from the usual quasar bunch. Spitzer measured infrared light from the objects along with 19 others, all belonging to a class of the most distant quasars known. Each quasar is anchored by a supermassive black hole weighing more than 100 million suns.
Of the 21 quasars, J0005-0006 and J0303-0019 lacked characteristic signatures of hot dust, the Spitzer data showed. Spitzer's infrared sight makes the space telescope ideally suited to detect the warm glow of dust that has been heated by feeding black holes.
"We think these early black holes are forming around the time when the dust was first forming in the universe, less than one billion years after the Big Bang," said Fan. "The primordial universe did not contain any molecules that could coagulate to form dust. The elements necessary for this process were produced and pumped into the universe later by stars."
The astronomers also observed that the amount of hot dust in a quasar goes up with the mass of its black hole. As a black hole grows, dust has more time to materialize around it. The black holes at the cores of J0005-0006 and J0303-0019 have the smallest measured masses known in the early universe, indicating they are particularly young, and at a stage when dust has not yet formed around them.
Other authors include W.N. Brandt of Pennsylvania State University, University Park; Chris L. Carilli of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Socorro, N.M.; Eiichi Egami of the University of Arizona; Dean C. Hines of the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.; Jaron D. Kurk of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Germany; Gordon T. Richards of Drexel University, Philadephia, Pa.; Yue Shen of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.; Michael A. Strauss of Princeton, N.J.; Marianne Vestergaard of the University of Arizona and Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark; and Fabian Walter of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Germany. Fan and Kurk were based in part at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy when this research was conducted.
The Spitzer observations were made before the telescope ran out of its liquid coolant in May 2009, beginning its "warm" mission.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about Spitzer, visit http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer .
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