Happy new year We got to celebrate it 15 hours before most of you reading this in the States. So we win Nha Trang has been really fun so far starting with the trip here. Instead of taking a boring ol' bus from Da Lat to Nha Trang we decided to ride bicycles. You actually don't bike the whole way the trip starts and ends in a minibus. The biking portion is 70 km with the last 34 km being ALL
How to Find Discount Hotels in Barcelona
Europe is all about romanticism be in its scenic beauty or the poems of Wordsworth. Barcelonarsquos old city is beyond doubt one of the most romantic and picturesque of Europe. Most of the tourists while traveling with family or in groups look for discount hotels in Barcelona. These hotels help them to save money that can be spent on more sightseeing entertainment or even covering more destina
Our trip in BKK
Our last trip was in AmpawaBKK during Oct 17212009. We first went to Ampawa with our friends. It's the one hours drive. We've never been to Ampawa before..so it's kind of new place and experience for us especially the native floating market. We stayed at Baan Din Benjan resort for one night.
Sight for Mysore eyes
On the move again on New Yearrsquos Eve this time by car to Mysore in Karnataka. A great trip down the mountain side 36 hairpins in a row with great views of the extent of the Negrili hills. We werenrsquot expecting to drive through forests and reserves but there they were elephants and monkeys tigers too but a too shy to be observed this time. Within an hour the temperature zooms up to
New Years Eve Day
We spent the morning of New Years day in Kings Cross. We finally saw a hooker in the area and she was very stereotypical fishnet stockings etc which was amusing as we have been to Kingrsquos Cross a lot now and hadnrsquot seen any. We then went campervancar shopping. As we had left it pretty late literally only one rental company had one vehicle left for us to rent. The good news was that i
Katmandu
Kathmandu greeted us with a culture shock as expected. Getting the visa for Nepal at the airport was fairly straightforward however once out of the airport we were very pleased to have organised a ride to our hotel. As we walked out of the airport hundreds of people tried to grab our bags offering the lsquobestrsquo deals for taxis and hotels. The traffic is crazy. There appears to be no roa
New and Old Happy 2010
Happy New Year I have to admit that unless you are young and heading out to the bars New Year's is a little boring here. Everything is open as usual today and life goes on as a usual Friday. The only difference is that some international newspapers aren't available. But that's ok. I still wish you and all the world more peace more compassion more blessings and more understanding as we beg
Patan
This is a medieval city in the Kathmandu Valley. Durbar square is located in the centre and is loaded with temples and shrines and a huge palace that makes up the whole eastern side of the square. We really enjoyed Patan as it was not as hectic as Kathmandu and the children were really friendly always asking our names or posing for a photo. The only blip was witnessing a fight between two motorcy
Bhaktapur
The is another medieval city in the Kathmandu Valley and the best preserved. This place was also stacked with temples and shrines with some pretty interesting erotic carvings photos on request. While turning a corner we got a fright to see two headless buffalos with blood streaming from there necks down the street if I needed another reason not to eat meat this was it. We caught a local rusty
Pashupatinath
The next day we met up with the people on our Everest Base Camp tour. Chris from Wellington NZ and Louise and Dave from Chester in the UK. We were introduced to Padesh our Kathmandu guide for the day. He took us out to Pashupatinath. This is Nepalrsquos most important Hindu temple on the banks of the holy Bagmati River. The river is considered holy despite how polluted it is. The most interesti
Everest Base Camp Trek
Today was the first day of our trip up Everest and we were all keen to get underway. I had heard about the flight up to Lukla before arriving in Nepal and was excited to be finally getting up in the air. The flight was about 30 minutes and there were some good views of the Himalayas. Getting closer to Lukla we skirted over some mountains before diving through a hole in the clouds to get visual wit
Our life their lives Kutch
Our life their lives Kutch Gujarat Hector Dsouza It was mid morning when we reached the outskirts of the village of Nirona in Kutch Gujarat. The nomadic rabaris tribe seemed to be in wait for us. We took our places in a make shift courtyard and listened to what our amiable guide Mahesh had to say. 039The tribe lives on the outskirt o
Chitwan National Park
Today we left Kathmandu by local bus and headed to Chitwan National Park. The roads were appalling some of them not completed others with huge potholes not helped by truck drivers who decided to take a break who would leave their trucks in the middle of the road for people to go round. I decided not to look out the front window out of fear but Matt could not resist watching the dangerous and
Oppose “Big Floss”; practice alternative dentistry
We survived almost all of human history without it. Yet in the last 100 years people have allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by a huge corporate conspiracy into believing that we “need” their products. They cite studies and claim we don’t understand science; they ignore ancient folk wisdom and have no respect for our intuition. They peddle their products without regard to the dramatic increase in chronic diseases and weakened immune systems of recent decades. I’m speaking, of course, of “Big Floss.”
It’s time to take our mouths back from corporate domination. It’s time for alternative dentistry.
To hear the corporate “tools” of Big Floss tell it, we need to use their products not simply every day, but many times a day. They’ve created a seemingly limitless array of products that they are forcing, literally, down our throats. Toothbrushes, toothpaste, floss, mouth wash! There appears to be no end to the number and type of products they insist we must buy to fuel their corporate ambitions. And even if we behave like sheep and buy their tainted wares, their allies the dentists insists that we must visit them not merely once a year, but twice.
We’re supposed to believe that we benefit from this meddling with the natural order. Really? So please explain how the human race survived just fine to this point without Big Floss. Clearly we didn’t need toothbrushes to survive and even thrive. So why, suddenly, should we be gullible enough to believe that every person should brush his or her teeth after every meal? Has there been even a single randomized controlled double blind study that proved that brushing saves teeth? No, there hasn’t.
Big Floss insists that it has a product for every person, often more than one. Toothpaste to prevent cavities, toothpaste for kids, toothpaste for dentures. Is there any limit to what they will sell in order to increase their profits? And are we really supposed to believe that four out of five dentists recommend Crest? Where’s the data for that claim?
They tricked people into brushing ever day and using toothpaste each time, but that’s not enough for Big Floss. They say that toothpaste prevents plaque buildup and then they turn around and insist that we need mouthwash, too, to kill the harmful germs that cause plaque. Do we look that gullible? And what’s wrong with plaque anyway? It’s natural and probably exists to strengthen our immune system, which has been weakened by constant exposure to toxins and Frankenfood.
Big Floss is not content with tricking us into buying toothbrushes, toothpaste, floss and mouthwash. They insist that we see a dentist twice a year. If their products are so great, why would we ever need to see a dentist? We wouldn’t, but the unholy alliance of Big Floss and Dentistry has colluded to increase the profits of both. Don’t believe me? The dentist always tells you that you should brush every day, and Big Floss always recommends dental checkups. What more evidence do you need?
It’s time to end our reliance on Big Floss. It’s time for alternative dentistry. Those who truly educate themselves about teeth in nature know that toothbrushes and toothpaste are unnecessary. If our ancestors didn’t need them, we don’t need them, either. We can care for our teeth with a diet of fruit, vegetables and vitamin supplements.
In the rare situation in which more is needed, we can dose ourselves with ancient herbs or pull out rotten teeth the natural way, by tying a string around the both the tooth and the doorknob and giving the door a big shove. Forget novocaine. Why would we dose ourselves with medication to numb the pain of a tooth extraction? Those who really care about their teeth want to savor every natural feeling, not deaden it with chemicals.
And let’s not forget preventive care. If you want to be sure that you have healthy teeth, all you need to do is buy powdered Bio-identical Teeth®. Unlike artificial toothpastes or mouthwashes, powdered Bio-identical Teeth® is all natural, made from human teeth with no fillers or animal products. Because it is “bio-identical” it is more effective than artificial toothpaste could even be.
It’s time to unite and fight the corporate conspiracy of Big Floss. No more toothbrushes, no more toothpaste, and no more visits to the dentist. Let’s live as Nature intended with no artificial colors or preservatives. Let’s care for our teeth naturally for as long as they last.
Brought to you as a public service by the American Pureed Food Industry
(This piece is satire.)
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Book Feature: The Best Spiritual Books of 2009
Our choices of the spiritual books of 2009 that best explore the quest for meaning and purpose, wholeness and healing, commitment and community, contemplation and social activism.
"Radicals In Their Own TIme" – Introduction & Selected Excerpts
I've just posted here the Introduction and excerpts from three chapters in my forthcoming book (Cambridge University Press), "Radicals in Their Own Time: Four Hundred Years of Struggle for Liberty and Equal Justice in America," on my Berkeley Press Selected Works page (http://works.bepress.com/michael_lawrence/).
Here are the first few paragraphs from the Introduction:
In teaching history, there should be extensive discussions of personalities who
benefited mankind through independence of character and judgment.
-Albert Einstein, 1953
America in the twenty-first century exists in a perpetual Dickensian sort-of “best
of times, worst of times” state when it comes to putting into practice the sacred principles
of liberty and equal justice. On one hand, the once-unthinkable occurred in November
2008 when the nation – a land that had permitted and promoted human slavery for more
than half of its four hundred year history - elected an African-American man president.
The symbolic importance alone of placing Barack Obama at the pinnacle of power in the
United States, given its sordid past practices, cannot be understated. Yet, on the very
same day, a majority of voters in the most populous state in the union, California, voted
to deny thousands of their fellow citizens, gay Americans, the equal right to marry. The
California experience is only one of numerous legislative-judicial struggles beginning to
play out on the issue of gay marriage in other states around the nation.
Taking the long view, if history is any guide (and it is), there is little doubt the
discriminatory laws against gay marriage will eventually end up on history’s scrapheap.
The current battles will soon go the way of those of some fifty years ago involving
interracial marriage, during which one Virginia trial court, in upholding the state’s antimiscegenation statute, reasoned: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference
with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he
separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” Most Americans
today would view such language with a mixture of shock and disbelief - but it was not
long ago that legislative majorities in sixteen states gave official voice to such ignorant
biases.
Fifty years from now, the current arguments against gay marriage will seem
similarly archaic. As the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. limned, “the arc of the moral
universe is long; but it bends toward justice.” For all its faults, the United States
Constitution has, over time, provided a one-way ratchet toward greater, not lesser, liberty
and equal justice – every constitutional amendment but one (the eighteenth, itself
repealed by the twenty-first just fifteen years later), for example, has, if anything,
expanded Americans’ freedoms.
America’s story is remarkable: a Nation, sprouting from the seeds of
Enlightenment principles where “tolerance was a moral virtue, even a duty; no longer
merely the prerogative of calculating monarchs, but a fundamental element of the ‘rights
of man.’” For the first time in history a people - coming together toward the common
goal of liberty and equal justice, and clearly cognizant of human nature’s split personality
between good (freedom) and evil (tyranny and oppression) - created a government
explicitly designed to resolve the tension in favor of freedom.
That is the myth, anyway. But all is not well in the land of milk and honey; for
America’s constitutional structure has failed to thwart government’s moves to the darker
side: its shameful history of slavery and apartheid; its past oppression of women; its
systematic subjugation of Native Americans in violation of sacred treaty promises; its
pervasive discrimination against immigrants and homosexuals; and, among other currentday
repressions, its curtailments of civil liberties and inexcusable use of torture in the ill-considered “war on terror.” Consider also American geopolitics of the last hundred years: World War I Censorship (Congress’s and President Wilson’s 1917-1918 Espionage and Alien Acts imposing egregious punishments on political speech); World War II Nativism (the President’s authorizing the military to force 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, from their homes and to quarantine them in internment camps for nearly three years; Cold War McCarthyism (powerful committees of both the United States Senate and House of Representatives conducting modern-day witch-hunts of thousands of American citizens accused of having communist sympathies); and Millennial Cheneyism (the executive branch aggressively
exceeding long-accepted constitutional limits on its power - even while operating in a
system that separates powers in order to provide checks and balances on each co-equal
branch).
In each case, prejudice, greed, and political expediency took hold before being
beaten back – for the time being. It is a constant struggle. As much as America has
accomplished in advancing humankind’s perpetual quest for greater Freedom, it has
never completely lived up to its own promise, for whatever reason – whether because of
bitter class wars (Howard Zinn), its economically-motivated Constitution (Charles
Beard), or some combination of these or other factors.
Which viewpoint more accurately describes the true America - the mythic
common-interest pursuit-of-equal-liberty view; the grittier class-warfare explanation; or
the more cynical economic-interest rationale? The reality is that there are elements of
accuracy in each. And it is useful to keep them all in mind: Lest we become swept-up in
misty patriotic myth, we should recall America’s ignoble history of injustices and
intolerance; or, conversely, lest we lose hope, we should remember that the myth and
partial reality of America as beacon of freedom has for centuries truly inspired millions
around the world. In the end, the goals represented in the positive myth are worth
fighting for, both idealistically and practically, for they advance our individual and
collective humanity – and offer a model of ambition, idealism and hope for future
generations.
...
History of Two Worlds on Orbit
Keith's note: I will be seeing Scott Parazynski and Miles O'Brien in Houston next week. On 6 Jan at NASA JSC Scott will formally return the Moon rock I carried to Nepal (and Scott carried to the summit of Mt. Everest) and present a piece of Everest summit to the crew of STS-130. Miles will be the emcee. The STS-130 crew will carry both rocks into orbit and will permanently install them in the new node "Tranquility" that they will attach to the space station. By coincidence, the Moon rock we had in Nepal was collected in the Sea of Tranquility during the Apollo 11 mission.
Preview: Confessions of a Moon Rock Courier
"I facilitated telephone conversations with astronauts aboard the International Space Station and communicated via satellite with the real world on a daily basis. I lived amidst a place with powerful historic resonances. And I encountered a people - Sherpas - with an other-worldly and serene approach to life, teaching one of them to look up at the night sky to track satellites while I watched others treat the moon rock I carried as a sacred object."
Playing With Moon Rocks and Duct Tape at the Dinner Table
"You see, as a precaution of sorts, I had the Nugget [our code name for the Moon rock] blessed in a Buddhist Temple in Pengboche on the trek in to Base Camp. Climbers have all manner of things (including themselves) blessed all the time. But this was special. And how people (westerners and Sherpas) reacted to these little pieces of the Moon really caught Scott and I by surprise. But that's another story I'll have to write about soon."
Cool Cars: The 1929 Model A Snowbird
Model A and Model T snowmobiles are a perennial favorite around these parts, so we naturally investigated this particular 1929 Model A Snowbird that recently appeared on Hemmings.com, being offered out of St. Louis for $69,500. From the seller's description:
"This 1929 Ford Model A Tudor
Another circuit around the Sun begins | Bad Astronomy
I know it’s traditional to take this time to look back, and to look ahead. And while I’m not a traditional sort of fellow, I do want to take just a moment here and indulge myself. New Year’s is rather arbitrary for a number of reasons, but there is one substantive change that happens today.
As of right now, I am no longer President of the James Randi Educational Foundation. That job now falls on the able shoulders of my friend D. J. Grothe, who takes that position as of today, January 1, 2010. D. J. is, quite simply, a tremendous guy, and if this is the time for looking ahead, then I see great things happening with him at the helm. He brings loads of experience to the job as well as a fresh perspective. I won’t wish him luck — I don’t put much stock in either that verb or that noun, but I hardly need to. D. J. has earned my trust, and I know he’ll be great.
Like everyone else, I don’t know what 2010 will bring. I’m working on my sooper sekrit TV project, and I’ll have news for that in the coming months, no doubt. I’m hoping to let people see my tattoo very soon, too. I’ll let y’all know as soon as I’m able.
And for astronomy, the future is always uncertain. We have astonishing capabilities coming online, with Herschel, Kepler, and WISE opening their eyes. Hubble is newly refitted, and has already once again proven its worth. Cassini still dances around Saturn, returning one breathtaking image after another. And we still have Spitzer, Chandra, and a fleet of other space-borne instruments, as well as the solid ground-based observatories that are making vast leaps in our knowledge of the heavens.
But we’re still in a recession. Times are tough for everyone, and we’re still not sure as I write this just what President Obama has in store for NASA. We may find out as early as next week, at the annual American Astronomical Society meeting, which I’ll be attending. Hopefully I’ll have some fun stories and pictures from the meeting; there is always big news revealed then.
Anyway, enough rambling. You’re probably just reading this waiting for the antacid tablets to dissolve, so I’ll sign off for now. But stay tuned. One thing I don’t need psychic powers to predict: there will be lots of good news for science, as well as bad. Either way, I’ll be here to talk about it on this blog, as will my friends and colleagues at Discover Magazine and other sites.
Thanks to all my readers for the past year — the past decade. See you for the next one!
Carbon nanotubes show promise for high-speed genetic sequencing
n the current issue of Science, Stuart Lindsay, director of Arizona State University's Center for Single Molecule Biophysics at the Biodesign Institute, along with his colleagues, demonstrates the potential of a method in which a single-stranded ribbon of DNA is threaded through a carbon nanotube, producing voltage spikes that provide information about the passage of DNA bases as they pass through the tube - a process known as translocation.