Among these Confederate commerce raiders, the most far-ranging was the CSS Shenandoah. During its year-long voyage, it traveled as far as Australia and the Bering Sea. It was the only Confederate warship to circumnavigate the globe.Confederate agents purchased it in Britain and, in September 1864, sailed it out unarmed to the Portuguese island of Madeira. There it met another vessel which had been shipped with cannons and a crew. The crew of 73, led by Captain James Waddell (left), raised the Confederate ensign and went hunting.
By then, it was June of 1865. General Lee had surrendered his army. President Davis had been captured. General Johnston was negotiating the surrender of his army. For all practical purposes, the Confederacy had ceased to exist. Captain Waddell encountered these reports, even far away in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
He didn’t believe them and sailed on. This time, he turned south, planning to strike at the coast of California. Finally, in August, a British merchant captain convinced him that the war was truly over. Without a government to fight for, the Shenandoah could not legally continue to wage war. So Waddell dismantled the cannons, hauled down the Confederate colors, and sailed to Britain. He surrendered the ship to British authorities on November 6, 1865.
On
February 4, Bill Nye "The Science Guy" will debate Ken Ham, Creation
Museum founder and Answers In Genesis president/CEO, at The Creation
Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky just across the river from Cincinnati,
Ohio. The event is titled "Is creation a viable model of origins?" This
is gonna be good. Tickets are $25 from the Creation Museum. I hope the
museum makes a full video available but I bet that will depend on how it
plays out. Hopefully an audience member will record and post the whole
thing online. "
The repugican cabal power-brokers have raised a $50M war-chest to fight the nomination
of "fools" to repugican cabal seats in the upcoming mid-term elections. Effectively,
the repugican big-business-friendly establishment has declared war on
the tea party, in an effort to ensure donors that the slate will not be
full of 
The physicist's gray matter has been sitting in a cookie jar for half a century. What does it really reveal about human genius?
But
over the course of the next 40 years, neurologists ended up publishing
only three papers on Einstein's brain. Most found nothing extraordinary.
Harvey kept soliciting scientists to take another look, but the brain
chunks mostly just sat around, wrapped in cheesecloth and tucked into
wide-mouthed glass cookie jars of formaldehyde broth. The jars
themselves sat in a cardboard box in Harvey's office, tucked behind a
red beer cooler. When Harvey lost his job and took off for greener
pastures in Kansas (where he was neighbors with William S. Burroughs),
the brain rode shotgun in his car. 
Early
attempts to find the biological basis of intelligence were based on the
idea that bigger was better: More brain mass meant more thinking power,
just more muscles meant more lifting power. This theory had its
shortcomings; sperm whales and their 17-pound brains don't dominate the
globe. Today, the obsession with overall brain size had given way to
obsessing over the size of various parts of the brain. Primates have
particularly beefy neuron shafts (called axons) compared with other
animals and can therefore send information through each neuron more
quickly. Even more important is the thickness of the cortex, the
outermost brain layer, which promotes thinking and dreaming and other
flowery pursuits. Scientists know that certain genes are crucial for
growing a thick cortex, partly because it's so sadly obvious when these
genes fail. And Einstein's cortex had a few unusual features.
But
what about the fact that Einstein often though about physics mostly
through pictures? He famously declared, for example, that he formulated
relativity theory in part by imagining what would happen if he rode
around bareback on light rays. Perhaps that's due to the unusual
wrinkles and ridges in the cortex of his parietal lobe, a region that
aids in both mathematical reasoning and image processing. The Parietal
lobe also integrates sound, sight, and other sensory input into the rest
of the brain's thinking. Einstein once said that abstract concepts only
achieved meaning in his mind "through their connection with
sense-experiences." Indeed, his family remembers him practicing his
violin whenever he got stuck on a physics problem. An hour later, he'd
often declare, "I've got it!" and return to work. Auditory input seemed
to jog his thinking. The parietal ridges and wrinkles in Einstein's
lobes were steroid thick, 15 percent bigger than normal. And whereas
most of us mental weaklings have skinny right parietal lobes and even
skinnier left parietal lobes, Einstein's were equally buff.
