“His aspiration is to socialize the U.S., though he’d probably settle for remaking it in Europe’s image in the short term,” wrote stratman1. “That’s why he doesn’t resonate with many of us.”Of course it was not wrong for the IRS to investigate the tea party.
“Obama is a Marxist and he wants the US to be a Marxist state just like his real home Kenya is becoming. He is a Manchurian candidate,” scribbled stephenlubinsbcglobalnet. “No-one knows where he was born, who his parents are, or anything else about him. But we do know he is a Marxist who is destroying this coutnry.[sic]”
“NoBama hates this country and everything for which it stands,” noted PhanMan69. “He is ashamed and apologizes for the leadership that the US has provided the world. He does not believe that America is exceptional and is doing his best to grind what’s left into the ground…No President of mine takes the oath of office and then shreds the Constitution that he swore to defend.”
Some
families with money to burn have found a nefarious way to bypass long
lines at Walt Disney World in Florida: hire a disabled person to be part
of your family for the day. The “black-market Disney guides” run $130 an hour, or $1,040 for an eight-hour day.It seems rich New Yorkers pay thousands of dollars to an Orlando area service that rents out disabled people to accompany them to Walt Disney World in order to jump the lines. The article says that there's a word-of-mouth underground in New York's priciest private schools, in which parents pass on the details of the service, which is allegedly called Dream Tours Florida:
“My daughter waited one minute to get on ‘It’s a Small World’ — the other kids had to wait 2 1/2 hours,” crowed one mom, who hired a disabled guide through Dream Tours Florida.
“You can’t go to Disney without a tour concierge,’’ she sniffed. “This is how the 1 percent does Disney.”
The woman said she hired a Dream Tours guide to escort her, her husband and their 1-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter through the park in a motorized scooter with a “handicapped” sign on it. The group was sent straight to an auxiliary entrance at the front of each attraction.
Disney allows each guest who needs a wheelchair or motorized scooter to bring up to six guests to a “more convenient entrance.”
Passing around the rogue guide service’s phone number recently became a shameless ritual among Manhattan’s private-school set during spring break. The service asks who referred you before they even take your call.
“It’s insider knowledge that very few have and share carefully,” said social anthropologist Dr. Wednesday Martin, who caught wind of the underground network while doing research for her upcoming book “Primates of Park Avenue.”
“Who wants a speed pass when you can use your black-market handicapped guide to circumvent the lines all together?” she said.
“So when you’re doing it, you’re affirming that you are one of the privileged insiders who has and shares this information.”
Jamie Smith Hopkins at The Baltimore Sun
writes about the tiny homes more and more Americans are opting for:
"U.S. houses got bigger for decades ... even as household sizes shrunk,
according to Census Bureau figures. But the housing crash, foreclosure
crisis and rough recession have pressed some to think differently."
The property was found near a church in the French capital's 9th arrondissement, between Pigalle red light district and Opera. Experts were tasked with drawing up an inventory of her possessions which included a painting by the 19th century Italian artist Giovanni Boldini.Inside was a treasure trove of art, furniture, and other knick-knacks - a time capsule from time gone by. The Daily Mail has more: Here.
One expert said it was like stumbling into the castle of Sleeping Beauty, where time had stood still since 1900. 'There was a smell of old dust,' said Olivier Choppin-Janvry, who made the discovery.
Franklin was confident that his new alphabet would easier to learn and, once learned, would drastically reduce bad spelling. He believed any difficulty in implementing a new alphabet would ultimately be overcome by its logic and simplicity. However, biographer Walter Isaacson has written that the alphabet “took his passion for social improvement to radical extremes.” But in the heady days after the Revolution, a national language seemed like a natural development for a new country. Franklin’s proposal found little support, even with those to whom he was closest. He did, however, manage to convert Webster, the pioneer of spelling reform.But it didn't catch on. Would you want to bother learning an entirely new alphabet and way of spelling after you'd spent years learning it the traditional way? Read about how Franklin's alphabet was constructed at Design Decoded.
Lord Kelvin is still making waves. In the 1880s, the great British physicist—then a commoner named William Thomson—argued that the wake of a boat fans out at the same angle regardless of how fast the boat is going. But scientists and engineers have long known that boats sometimes appear to have narrower wakes. Now two French physicists say they've explained that narrowing. Their idea may not sail smoothly into the textbooks, however, as experts in marine engineering are skeptical.The old theory, the new theory, and the counterarguments are discussed briefly at Science.
An avid seaman, Kelvin analyzed boat wakes and came to a rather curious conclusion: No matter the speed of the boat, it should produce a wake with a "wake angle" of 19.47°. (See figure.) That odd constancy arises for two reasons. First, the speed or "phase velocity," of water waves varies with their wavelength, with longer wavelengths traveling faster than shorter ones do. As the boat moves, it creates waves of all speeds slower than the boat itself. And the longer waves generally spread out behind it faster than the shorter ones.
Figure 1. Granny Smith Apple and Sunkist Orange 
Figure. 2 
"The bloodwood tree (Pterocarpus angolensis) is a deciduous, spreading and slightly flat-crowned tree with a high canopy. It reaches about 15 meters in height and has dark bark. The bloodwood grows in warm areas in the northeast of Africa, extending into Zimbabwe, northern Botswana, Mozambique and Namibia. The red sap is used traditionally as a dye and in some areas mixed with animal fat to make a cosmetic for faces and bodies."
But now, two teams of scientists have started to captured intimate series of images showing the same caterpillars metamorphosing inside their pupae. Both teams used a technique called micro-CT, in which X-rays capture cross-sections of an object that can be combined into a three-dimensional virtual model.Ed Yong explains more about this technology, and you'll more pictures of an insect going through the metamorphosis at Not Exactly Rocket Science.
By dissecting these models rather than the actual insects, the teams could see the structures of specific organs, like the guts or breathing tubes. They could also watch the organs change over time by repeatedly scanning the same chrysalis over many days. And since insects tolerate high doses of radiation, this procedure doesn’t seem to harm them, much less kill them.
