July 5, 2008
“ weight has fallen on me
like a part of the sky
and life’s hell getting up
off the floor
raise the blind
and let the day shine in
out with this grey into air
darkness tones
in our chinatown home
view of rain clouds
from the window
moving behind the pale of her face
a thousand circus mirrors
cannot move a frown
we are the real clowns
and the sun rarely shines
our way
and when it does
Red House Painters - Funhouse
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July 3, 2008
“ The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany’s University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet’s stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.
robert silverberg
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June 28, 2008
“ Gli yazidi credono in un dio primordiale, la cui azione è terminata con la creazione dell’universo. Melek Ta’us, invece, è un’entità divina attiva, in origine un angelo dalle sembianze di un pavone (Melek vuol dire appunto “angelo” e Ṭāʾūs significa “pavone”) che, dopo essere decaduto, si pentì e decise di ricreare il mondo che era stato distrutto. Riempì perciò alcune giare con le sue lacrime e se ne servì per estinguere il fuoco dell’Inferno.
melek taus
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June 26, 2008
“

No, the only really alien intelligence on this planet is natural selection, of which I have already spoken… for exactly this reason, that it gives you true experience of the Alien. Evolution knows no joy and no anger, and it has no facial expressions; yet it is nonetheless capable of creating complex machinery and complex strategies. It does not work like you do.

If you want a real alien to gawk at, look at the other Powerful Optimization Process.
overcoming bias
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June 25, 2008
“

In 2007, aidstruth.org, a website run by HIV researchers to counter denialist claims, published a partial list of AIDS denialists who had died of apparently AIDS-related causes.

For example, the magazine Continuum, run by HIV-positive denialists, shut down when its editors all died of AIDS-related causes.
aids denialism
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June 18, 2008
“ The initial mission design consists of a cylindrical spacecraft, 2 km long and 2 km in diameter, with a crew of one million and a cruising speed of 600 km/s. The spacecraft will be designed, constructed and tested over the span of 500 years and travel to a nearby solar system will take on the order of 10,000 years.
the ultimate project
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June 13, 2008
“ So often in my literature classes students told me what they “felt” about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one’s feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to—but did not—write: “D-, Too much love in the home.” I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality. Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement. Besides, one of the first things that people who really are significant seem to know is that, in the grander scheme, they are themselves really quite insignificant.
overcoming bias
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June 10, 2008
“ 1942. I libri per fanciulli avevano le pagine larghe e disegni floridi, le maiuscole finemente cesellate e illustrazioni che effondevano lo spirito dell’epoca, maiuscolo anch’esso. Misuriamo lo scarto tra ieri e oggi sfogliando un abbecedario di allora e confrontandolo con uno attuale. Il catalogo pedagogico del 1942 cominciava con la A di aereo (e già vedevi un gagliardo velivolo da battaglia), per arrivare al non plus ultra con la E di elmo (uno splendido esemplare romano), la F di fucile, e, udite udite, al posto di quella che oggi sarebbe stata di sicuro una rana o un rospo, la R di rivoltella. Inutile dire che anche la N di nave era abbinata all’immagine di una nave da guerra e non certo di un battelletto da crociera.
anna k. valerio
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“ While it would not be surprising to see colonists importing (and planting) other trees upon worlds like Mars, Ganymede and Callisto, it may not be an uncommon sight to behold thousands of bamboo forests upon dozens of solar worlds.
colony worlds
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