Tuesday, May 20, 2008
30 mins before the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China
Bizarre colorful (luminous/glowing) cloud phenomenon in the sky was observed about 30 mins before the May 12, 2008 Sichuan earthquake took place. This was recorded in Tianshui, Gansu province ~450km northeast of epicenter, by someone using a cell phone.
source: http://news.qq.com/a/20080513/004283.htm
See similar cloud formation captured 20 minutes later in a different city, ~200km east of this location: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzVamN...
A map of the locations with sightings of very similar phenomenon.
http://img223.imageshack.us/img223/24...
More photos:
http://shenyun.epochtimes.com/b5/8/5/...
These clouds seemed to be glowing or somewhat luminous and seemed to resemble some characteristics of the Auroras. I guess they were formed by some kind of charged particles released from the powerful seismic events below. Well, I am no expert anyways. See if any scientists are willing to give a full explanation.
Monday, May 19, 2008
10-year-old scholar takes Calif. college by storm
(AP) Moshe Kai Cavalin, 10, takes statistics college classes at the East Los Angeles College in Los...
One of his primary interests is "wormholes," a hypothetical scientific phenomenon connected to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. It has been theorized that if such holes do exist in space, they could - in tandem with black holes - allow for the kind of space-age time travel seen in science fiction.
If past success is any indication, his son will find a way to compensate. Cavalin, who enrolled in college more than a year ago, has maintained an A-plus average in such subjects as algebra, history, astronomy and physical education.
"I told his parents that his ability was much higher than that level, that he should take a higher-level course," Liao says. "But his parents didn't want to push him."
DOWNEY, Calif. (AP) - With the end of another school year approaching, college sophomore Moshe Kai Cavalin is cramming for final exams in classes such as advanced mathematics, foreign languages and music.
But Cavalin is only 10 years old. And at 4-foot-7, his shoes don't quite touch the floor as he puts down a schoolbook and swivels around in his chair to greet a visitor.
"I'm studying statistics," says the alternately precocious and shy Cavalin, his textbook lying open on the living room desk of his parents' apartment in this quiet suburb east of Los Angeles.
Within a year, if he keeps up his grades and completes the rest of his requirements, he hopes to transfer from his two-year program at East Los Angeles College to a prestigious four-year school and study astrophysics.
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"Just like black holes, they suck in particulate objects, and also like black holes, they also travel at escape velocity, which is, the speed to get out of there is faster than the speed of light," Cavalin says. "I'd like to prove that wormholes are really there and prove all the theories are correct."
First, he has statistics homework to finish. Later, he'll work with his mother, Shu Chen Chien, to brush up on his Mandarin for his Chinese class. Then it's over to the piano to prepare for his recital in music class.
His father, Yosef Cavalin, frets about the piano-playing, noting that his only child recently broke his arm pursuing another passion, martial arts. He has won several trophies for his age group.
"Finals are coming and everything and he cannot play with both hands. He'll just try to play with the right hand," he says. "I don't know how his grade's going to be in piano. It worries me a bit."
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College officials couldn't immediately say whether he is the youngest student in the school's 63-year history. Among child prodigies, Michael Kearney, now 24, is often cited as the world's youngest college graduate, having earned a bachelor's degree in anthropology from the University of South Alabama at age 10.
Cavalin's professors can't recall having a younger student in their classes.
"He is the youngest college student I've ever taught and one of the hardest working," says Daniel Judge, his statistics professor. "He's actually a pleasure to have in class. He's a well- adjusted, nice little boy."
Cavalin was an 8-year-old freshman when he enrolled in Guajao Liao's intermediate algebra class in 2006. By the end of the term, Liao recalls, he was tutoring some of his 19- and 20-year-old classmates.
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Cavalin's parents avoid calling their son a genius. They say he's just an average kid who enjoys studying as much as he likes playing soccer, watching Jackie Chan movies, and collecting toy cars and baseball caps with tiger emblems on them. He was born during the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese zodiac.
Cavalin has a general idea what his IQ is, but doesn't like to discuss it. He says other students can achieve his success if they study hard and stay focused on their work.
His parents say they never planned to enroll their son in college at age 8, and sought to put him in a private elementary school when he was 6.
"They didn't want to accept me because I knew more than the teacher there and they said I looked too bored," the youngster recalls.
His parents home-schooled him instead, but after two years decided college was the best place for him. East L.A. officials agreed to accept him if he enrolled initially in just two classes, math and physical education. After he earned A-pluses in both, he was allowed to expand his studies.
"He sees things very simply," says Judge, his statistics teacher. "Most students think that things should be harder than they are and they put these mental blocks in front of them and they make things harder than they should be. In the case of Moshe, he sees right through the complications. ... It's not really mystical in any way, but at the same time it's amazing."
Teen brings sweet idea to life
The Wayne girl, who spent three years gathering gum wrappers for a dress, plans to use them in other designs.
By MECHELE COOPER, Blethen Maine News Service May 19, 2008
Vanessa Randall of Wayne made her prom dress out of 3,000 gum wrappers.
WAYNE — Walking into the gym on prom night with a girl on his arm draped in a chewing-gum-wrapper dress was definitely different.
Max Pistner, a Maranacook Community High School senior, said he thought it was "very cool" that his girlfriend, Vanessa Randall, made her prom dress out of 3,000 gum wrappers.
Randall, a 17-year-old senior from Wayne, started collecting Wrigley gum wrappers three years ago to make the dress. Friends, relatives and co-workers saved wrappers for her.
Pistner, who lives in Manchester, said he was just glad she got the dress done in time. She started sewing it together only a week before their recent prom.
Randall said she reinforced the dress with duct tape inside along the edges and used elastic braids around the straps and collar and in between some of the chains down the back so she could easily slip into the dress.
She came up with the design after drawing sketches all year.
"I came up with how it was going to look like the week before the prom," she said. "The theme of the prom was Japanese, so I was inspired by that in making the collar and flower pattern around the middle and back."
Her father, David Randall, an artist and sculptor, said his daughter got the idea from an article she read about a Lewiston girl who made her prom dress out of Starburst candy wrappers.
"We had that newspaper article on the refrigerator. That was the inspiration for it," he said. "Vanessa wanted to do something different and came up with the gum wrappers. She was really enthusiastic about the whole thing. My only concern was that she wasn't going to get it done in time, but she kept at it."
"She has a lot of creative energy and uses it in a great artistic way," said her mother, Ellen Randall. "She is following her dad's footsteps in creating art."
She said her daughter enrolled in a yearlong internship program in Germany, where she hopes to study art. Last summer, she studied fashion design under the auspices of the Early College program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Vanessa said she will continue to fold gum wrappers into chains and turn them into her own designs, possibly one day to profit from her work.
"I have some extra that I was thinking of making corsages out of and accessories like purses," she said. "I might be able to sell them on the Internet.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
US wastes "27% of food available for consumption"
Posted by Cory Doctorow, May 18, 2008
This NYT article on global food wastage is timely -- just as the food riots have begun to break out around the world -- and shocking. Makes me want to become a freegan.
You’d never know it if you saw what was ending up in your landfill. As it turns out, Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American.
Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don’t use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week’s Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste. An update is under way.
Link, Link to Wasted Food blog
Weird cases: clamping half a car
The legal principle of ignoring trifling matters is sometimes overlooked with alarming results
Gary Slapper
There is a legal principle known as de minimis non curat lex – the law takes no account of trifling matters. It means, for example, that there should not be a prosecution for the theft of a penny nor litigation over a freight train full of fruit that arrives one apple short.
This principle may have been missing from the training of the wheel-clamper who recently secured Ian Taylor’s Ford Fiesta. The car had the necessary certificate for vehicles kept off the road (for instance on private property) but was not taxed to be on the road. At the moment the car was clamped, although almost the entire vehicle was off the road and on Mr Taylor’s front drive, two inches were protruding towards the road.
Since he bought the broken car for £50 to repair as a gift for his stepson, Mr Taylor, from Tredworth in Gloucestershire, was upset to discover that he would have to pay the clampers £280 to secure its release.
Instead, he took a large metal cutting machine - and the law - into his own hands. Enraged, Mr Taylor chopped the car in half and - with a thought as nimble as his handiwork - told the clampers to take the back half of the car, since it was that part which was fractionally overhanging the road. Moments later five police cars and ten officers were on the scene. In legal terms, things had escalated from de minimis to de maximis but common sense eventually prevailed and no prosecutions followed.
Applications of the principle of de minimis have varied and sometimes what seem like minimal matters do reach court. In 1983, a Kent couple removed a defective fence post on their land. After repairing the post, they replaced it two inches nearer their neighbour’s land. The two-inch dispute turned into a two-year stretch of litigation and the eventual court judgment was so convoluted it took two hours to read.
In another similar case, it was not the position of the fence post that was in issue but the width of string around it. The string was alleged to be a trespass on the adjoining land. It kept lawyers busy for a while but the de minimis rule was applied and the incident was not judged as a trespass.
In 1992, in Alberta, Canada, Judge C.L Daniel acquitted Marion Harrison of assault when it became apparent that the charge related to an incident in which she had allegedly hit her ex-husband with a shopping bag filled with clothes. But in 2007, in Dubai, a British citizen, Keith Brown, was sentenced to four years imprisonment for possession of 0.003 grams of cannabis - about the weight of a grain of sand.
One person who could not rely on the de minimis rule was Dietmar Hehenberger, an Austrian hotelier. In 2006, following a court order, Mr Hehenberger sawed off part of his hotel roof because it was hanging over the Austrian border into the Czech Republic. The overhang was 12 inches - a definite inconvenience if it is the length of your bed at stake but much but less of an incursion into the Czech Republic, that extends over 30,450 square miles.
Professor Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University. His recent book How the Law Works is published by HarperCollins
Saudi wants divorce after husband lifts her veil
Never showed her face in 30 years of marriage
Saudi wants divorce after husband lifts her veil
DUBAI (AlArabiya.net)
A 50-year-old Saudi woman asked for divorce after her husband lifted her face veil while she was sleeping, local press reported.
For 30 years, the wife said she never showed her face to her husband in conformity with the tradition of her native village near the south western Saudi city of Khamis Mushayt.
"After all these years, he tries to commit such a big mistake," the wife told Saudi newspaper Al-Riyadh, after she left the house in total disbelief.
She said the husband apologized and promised never to do it again.
This is not the first case of husbands who have not seen their wives' faces in decades.
In the past Al Arabiya has reported the case of Ali al-Qahtani, whose wife had been wearing the face veil for the entire ten years of their marrage. When he tried to take it off, she threatened to leave and only decided to stay after he swore never to try again.
Hassan Al-Atibi threatened to marry another woman if his wife didn't show him her face. The woman nominated one of her friends who doesn't observe this tradition as a possible new wife for him, saying this would be better than her showing her face.
And neither the husband or children of Om Rabea al-Gahdaray, 70, have ever seen her face. Al-Gahdaray says it is a family tradition, also followed by mother and sisters, which her husband accepted and never tried to change.
When asked how she could have kids without her husband ever seeing her face, she replied: "Marriage is about love, not faces."
The practice of always remaining veiled, even in front of your husband, is not an Islamic practice but a very old tradition practiced by a minority of people in Gulf countries.
Hawaii-bound flight turns back after vibrations
Hawaiian Airlines Flight 29 is seen Friday, May 16 2008, after returning to Sea-Tac Airport.
Story Published: May 16, 2008 at 2:55 PM PDT
By KOMO Staff
SEA-TAC - A Hawaiian Airlines flight headed from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to Maui turned around and came back Friday after experiencing unusual vibrations and a loose wing panel, officials said.
Repair crews later found that nine rivets had popped off a nonstructural panel that gives access to the inside of the wing. Others were found to be loose.
An airline spokesman said there was no danger to the plane, a Boeing 767, nor was there any threat to the passengers. But the plane returned as a precautionary measure, due to the length of the flight over open ocean.
Technicians still have not determined how it happened, but the airline described the problem as "highly unusual."
Hawaiian Flight 29 took off from Sea-Tac at 10:35 a.m. Friday. The plane turned around less than an hour into the flight, landing safely back at Sea-Tac at 12:07 p.m., records show.
One passenger on the flight told KOMO News that she could see rivets popping off the aircraft's wing during the flight.
Another passenger, Lynn Barton, said passengers could hear a "popping sound" and then the plane started to vibrate.
The plane's 245 passengers were removed from the plane after it returned to Sea-Tac, and crews are now making repairs to the aircraft, the Hawaiian Airlines spokesman said.
The flight has been rescheduled to take off at 11:45 p.m. in a different 767 aircraft. Hawaiian Airlines has offered hotel accommodations and a meal to all of the passengers during the wait.
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