Category Archives: Of Interest

Occupy Houston????

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The Occupy Wall Street protests are gaining steam — and they’re spreading. Houston, Dallas and Austin are all hosting protests on Thursday, and nearly every major US city is as well.

This is exactly how change happens. Libya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have all started major government reforms because their citizens took to the streets and told the government to change or else.

However, the Occupy Wall Street protests aren’t getting the same attention by the media that was given to similar movements in the Middle East this spring.

Whether that’s because the US population is jaded or the media simply doesn’t care is another question.

What’s clear is, no thanks to anyone but the supporters, the message is spreading.

According to the Occupy Houston website, the protest is starting in the morning but anyone can show up, on time or not.

“If you want to join us in the afternoon then please head directly to Hermann Square Park. Come join us and stand in peaceful solidarity with our brothers and sisters occupying Wall Street and the rest of the nation,” Occupy Houston says on the website. “Together we can END CORPORATE CORRUPTION OF DEMOCRACY!”

UH students can assist in spreading the message by participating in Houston’s version of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Occupy Houston is an autonomous arm of the Occupy movement.

That means it’s created by Houstonians for Houston’s benefit; the protests are put together from a Houston perspective; and the protest leaders are Houston-bred.

UH students who are concerned about the direction of our nation should make an effort to come out for the protest Thursday.

It will be a chance to let the Houston business community hear their dissatisfaction with the status quo, and it will be an opportunity for them to show solidarity with the protesters in other US cities.

from:    http://thedailycougar.com/2011/10/05/occupy-houston-starts-national-protest-trend/

Grassroots Movements on the Rise

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World uprising against corrupt thieves

07.10.2011

World uprising against corrupt thieves. 45568.jpegThousands of Americans occupied Wall Street without violence  – an epicenter of global financial power and corruption. They are the last rays of light in a new movement for social justice that is spreading rapidly around the world: from Madrid to Jerusalem, and 146 other cities, with others joining all the time. But they need our help to triumph.

The families of workers are footing the bill for a financial crisis caused by corrupt elites. The protesters are demanding a real democracy, social justice and fighting corruption. But they are under strong pressure from the authorities and some media are portraying them as extremists. If millions of us around the world support them, we will increase our determination and show the leaders and the media that the protests are part of a massive movement for change.

This could be our year, our 1968 of this century, but to succeed it must be a movement of all citizens of all social classes. Click to join the campaign for real democracy. A giant counter will be erected in the center of the occupation in New York and when one of us signs the petition, it will be shown and relayed live on the petition page:

http://www.avaaz.org/po/the_world_vs_wall_st/?vl

The worldwide wave of protests is the latest chapter in the history of this year’s global power of the people. In Egypt, people went to Tahrir Square and overthrew their dictator. In India, the fast of a man brought millions onto the streets and the government was forced to give in – winning a real action to end

For months, Greek citizens protested without a break against unfair cuts in public spending. In Spain, thousands of “angry” protesters defied the ban on pre-election demonstrations and set up a protest camp in Sun Square to speak out against political corruption and government manipulation of the economic crisis. And this summer, Israelis built “tent cities” to protest against rising housing costs and for social justice.

These national issues are linked by a narrative of global determination to end the connivance of the elites and corrupt politicians – that in many countries helped cause a damaging financial crisis and now they want the families of workers to pay the bill. The mass movement that is responding to this can only ensure that the onus of the recession does not fall on the most vulnerable, but it can also help to improve the balance of power between democracy and corruption.

In each revolt, from Cairo to New York, the request for a responsible government that serves the people is clear and our global community has supported the power of the people around the world, wherever it has appeared. The time when politicians were in the hands of the few corrupt is ending and, instead, we are building real democracies, of, by and for the people.

Translated from the Portuguese version by:

Lisa Karpova

Pravda.Ru

from:    http://english.pravda.ru/hotspots/conflicts/07-10-2011/119267-World_uprising_against_corrupt_thieves-0/

Steve Jobs and Zen Buddhism

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The Zen of Steve Jobs

By Dan Gilgoff, CNN.com Religion Editor

(CNN) – Steve Jobs’ admirers praised him for de-cluttering the world of high-tech gadgetry. The products that made him famous, from the Macintosh computer to the iPad, exemplified minimalist design and simplicity of use, enabling what some called a Zen-like experience.

“Apple products are as defined by what they’re missing as much as by what they contain,” wrote tech and pop culture columnist Jeff Yang this year in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The spiritual side of Steve Jobs

Might Jobs’ approach to innovation and design have been provoked by real-life Zen, as in Zen Buddhism?

The Apple chief, who died Wednesday at 56, had a decades-long relationship with a Zen master, who presided over his wedding and whom Jobs reportedly appointed as a corporate spiritual adviser. Their ties have fed speculation about such a connection.

Early on in life, Jobs took a spiritual retreat to India that helped lead him to embrace Buddhism. But the teacher with whom Jobs bonded with in the United States was a Zen Buddhist, a tradition rooted in Japan.

According to Yang and to other press reports, Jobs studied at the Los Altos Zen Center in the 1970s and developed a close relationship with a Japanse-born Zen master, or roshi, named Kobun Chino Otogawa.

Kobun focused his teaching on developing a Zen meditation practice.

“The real purpose of practice is to discover the wisdom which you have always been keeping with you,” Kobun said in a talk that’s posted on the website for the Jikoji Retreat Center, a Zen center he founded outside San Francisco.

“To discover yourself is to discover wisdom; without discovering yourself you can never communicate with anybody,” said Kobun, who died in 2002, in the same talk.

Jobs seemed to echo that spiritual self-reliance in public comments, including his oft-quoted 2005 commencement address at Stanford University:

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

According to Yang, Jobs appointed Kobun as the official “spiritual adviser” for the company he founded after being fired as Apple CEO in 1986. Called NeXT, that company was eventually purchased by Apple, paving the way for Jobs’ second act there.

In the 2001 book “The Second Coming of Steve Jobs,” Alan Deutschman describes Kobun as:

a Zen Buddhist monk who had been Steve’s guru and friend since Steve was in his late teens. (Kobun) was a lovable, poetic, romantic personality who was known for speaking very slowly (even in his native Japanese) and giving unintelligible lectures… He was a renegade who rebelled against the strict discipline and burdensome responsibility of being a priest. He was the Steve Jobs of Zen.

Kobun presided over Jobs’ 1991 marriage to Laurene Powell.

The relationship between Jobs and Kobun is the subject of a graphic novel, soon to be published by Forbes. The book, which is fiction but is inspired by the real-life relationship, is titled “The Zen of Steve Jobs.”

from:   http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/06/the-zen-of-steve-jobs/

Explosion on the Sun 10/04

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fr/spaceweather.com

FARSIDE CME: Yesterday, October 4th, something exploded on the far side of the sun and propelled a spectacular CME into space. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory recorded the cloud as it emerged from behind the sun’s limb:

Analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab have combined observations from SOHO and the twin STEREO spacecraft to calculate the CME’s trajectory: It is heading for Mercury. The CME will hit the innermost planet on Oct. 5th around 04:30 UT plus minus 7 hours. Energetic particles accelerated by shock waves at the leading edge of the cloud could also have minor effects on the MESSENGER probe in orbit around Mercury. The CME’s forecast track shows that Venus might also receive a blow on Oct. 6th.

2011 Ig-Nobel Prizes

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Doomsday Math & Beetle Sex: Highlights from Ig Nobel Science Awards

by Natalie Wolchover
Date: 30 September 2011 Time: 01:27 AM ET

beetle attempts to mate with a brown beer bottle
A male Australian jewel beetle attempts to mate with a “stubby” beer bottle.
CREDIT: Darryl Gwynne

The Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony is like a mad hatter’s tea party. Held each fall in olde-worlde Sander’s Theatre at Harvard University, it honors scientists from around the world who have made important, but also completely off-the-wall, contributions to their fields.

This year’s ceremony was a variety show of chemistry-themed sing-alongs, a Win-a-Date-with-a-Scientist contest, audience-wide paper airplane throwing, and hilarious acceptance speeches that had to end before the 8-year-old time-keeper started screaming.

Of course, ridiculous hats abounded.

Honorees at the 2011 Ig Nobels included Australian biologists Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz, who, 23 years ago, discovered a tendency among the males of a certain species of beetle to try to have sex with bottles of a certain brand of beer. “We’ve been waiting for the phone to ring ever since,” Gwynne said as he accepted his long-awaited Ig Nobel Prize in biology. [Photo gallery of 2011 Ig Nobel winners]

The theme of the 2011 ceremony was “chemistry,” and thus, winners received miniature periodic table tables.

The crowd favorite this year was Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuana, who received the 2011 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked cars can be solved by crushing them with an armored tank.

Judging by the cheers, it seems that many Ig Nobel audience members were among the millions who have watched a viral video showing Mayor Zuokas himself driving a tank over an illegally parked Mercedes. “It’s very popular everywhere. On Youtube it has almost 7 million hits!” Zuokas told Life’s Little Mysteries. Even better, his campaign worked — with drivers more mindful of their actions, the city of Vilnius has seen the problem of illegal parking significantly “curbed.”

Another winner was Peter Snyder, a neurology professor at Brown University who studied the cognitive impairment that results from really, really needing to pee. Apparently the “urge to void,” as Snyder calls it, destroys memory as much as going without sleep for 24 hours, or being drunk.

The honorees played along with the act. Makoto Imai, who, with a team of colleagues, was awarded for inventing a fire alarm that sprays wasabi in order to wake up sleeping people, told the audience: “The next application will be to use wasabi spray to reduce the uncomfortable smell of shoes.” Cue: his assistants, demonstrating the spraying of shoes with wasabi.

This year’s Mathematics Prize went to several people for making predictions of the end of the world that failed to come to fruition; among them was Harold Camping, the evangelical talk show host behind this year’s May 21 doomsday call.

None of the mathematics winners accepted invitations to attend the ceremony, but Marc Abraham, the founder and emcee of the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, said they had been awarded “for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.”

The Ig Nobel Prizes are ultimately meant to make people excited about science. They do this very well.

from:  http://www.livescience.com/16313-doomsday-math-beetle-sex-highlights-ig-nobel-science-awards.html

Protest Washington – Koch Industries

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Occupy DC: Protest Of Koch Industries’ Downtown Office Planned

Occupy Dc

WASHINGTON — Occupy DC protesters are planning a protest of Koch Industries‘ downtown offices Tuesday evening. Jeffrey Light, an attorney involved with the protesters, told The Huffington Post that protesters will meet in McPherson Square at 5 p.m. before heading over to Koch’s offices at 600 14th St NW.

“It might be closer to 5:30,” Light said. “But we’re telling people to be here at 5. We’re going to march down there and protest outside their building for a little bit.”

Light said the group is expecting 20 to 30 people to show up for the early-evening protest, which is inspired by Bloomberg News’ recent expose of Koch Industries and its owners. At 6 p.m., after the protest, Occupy DC will be holding a General Assembly meeting — one of the twice-daily meetings during which consensus is sought about every detail of the group’s existence and purpose, from food to philosophy — when they’ll talk about who and what to protest tomorrow. A protest of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s planned appearance at the Newseum could be in the works, Light said.

They’ll also be talking about whether to keep their camp going at all, given the complementary — but separate — Stop the Machine protest scheduled to begin on Oct. 6 in Freedom Plaza, six blocks away.

Light told The Huffington Post that Occupy DC is discussing the possibility of merging with Stop the Machine. He isn’t yet sure if the merge will happen; it’ll depend on what the General Assembly decides.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/04/occupy-dc-protesting-koch-industries_n_994288.html

Comet Hits Sun – Raises Questions

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COMET AND CME: A comet discovered by amateur astronomers on Friday, Sept. 30th, disintegrated in spectacular fashion the very next day when it plunged into the sun. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory recorded the comet’s last hours. The end was punctuated by an unexpected explosion:

Watch the movie again. The timing of the CME so soon after the comet dove into the sun suggests a link. But what? There is no known mechanism for comets to trigger solar explosions. Before 2011 most solar physicists would have discounted the events of Oct. 1st as pure coincidence–and pure coincidence is still the most likely explanation. Earlier this year, however, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) watched another sungrazer disintegrate in the sun’s atmosphere. On July 5, 2011, the unnamed comet appeared to interact with plasma and magnetic fields in its surroundings as it fell apart. Could a puny comet cause a magnetic instability that might propagate and blossom into a impressive CME? The question is not so crazy as it once seemed to be.

fr/spaceweather.com

10/01 Double Sunspot Eruption

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DOUBLE ERUPTION: On October 1st around 10:17 UT, widely-spaced sunspots 1302 and 1305 erupted in quick succession, revealing a long-distance entanglement which was not obvious before. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) recorded the double blast:

Since it was launched in 2010, SDO has observed many “entangled eruptions.” Active regions far apart but linked by magnetic fields can explode one after another, with disturbances spreading around the stellar surface domino-style. Saturday’s eruption appears to be the latest example.

The part of the eruption centered on sunspot 1305 hurled a coronal mass ejection toward Earth. The relatively slow-moving (500 km/s) cloud is expected to reach our planet on Oct. 4th or 5th, possibly causing geomagnetic storms when it arrives. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.

fr/spaceweather.com

Earliest Christian Engraving Has Pagan Elements

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World’s Earliest Christian Engraving Shows Surprising Pagan Elements

Owen Jarus, LiveScience Contributor
Date: 30 September 2011 Time: 10:09 AM ET
museum holding the earliest christian inscription
Scholars have identified what appears to be the world’s earliest Christian inscription, dating to the second century. It is in the collection of the Capitoline Museums in Rome which could not release an image at press time. Also shown, examples of other early Christian inscriptions, copied in 1880.
CREDIT: Left: © Zach123 | Dreamstime.com; Right: Christian Archaeology, Charles Wesley Bennett

Researchers have identified what is believed to be the world’s earliest surviving Christian inscription, shedding light on an ancient sect that followed the teachings of a second-century philosopher named Valentinus.

Officially called NCE 156, the inscription is written in Greek and is dated to the latter half of the second century, a time when the Roman Empire was at the height of its power.

An inscription is an artifact containing writing that is carved on stone. The only other written Christian remains that survive from that time period are fragments of papyri that quote part of the gospels and are written in ink. Stone inscriptions are more durable than papyri and are easier to display. NCE 156 also doesn’t quote the gospels directly, instead its inscription alludes to Christian beliefs.

“If it is in fact a second-century inscription, as I think it probably is, it is about the earliest Christian material object that we possess,” study researcher Gregory Snyder, of Davidson College in North Carolina, told LiveScience.

Snyder, who detailed the finding in the most recent issue of the Journal of Early Christian Studies, believes it to be a funeral epigram, incorporating both Christian and pagan elements. His work caps 50 years of research done by multiple scholars, much of it in Italian. The inscription is in the collection of the Capitoline Museums in Rome.

“Assuming that Professor Snyder is right, it’s clearly the earliest identifiable Christian inscription,” said Paul McKechnie, a professor of ancient history at Macquarie University in Australia, who has also studied the inscription.

As translated by Snyder, the inscription reads:

To my bath, the brothers of the bridal chamber carry the torches,
[here] in our halls, they hunger for the [true] banquets,
even while praising the Father and glorifying the Son.
There [with the Father and the Son] is the only spring and source of truth.

Details on the provenance of the inscription are sketchy. It was first published in 1953 by Luigi Moretti in the “Bullettino della commissione archeologica comunale di Roma,” an Italian archaeological journal published annually.

The only reference to where it was found is a note scribbled on a squeeze (a paper impression) of the inscription, Snyder said. According to that note, it was found in the suburbs of Rome near Tor Fiscale, a medieval tower. In ancient times, the location of the tower would have been near mile four of a roadway called the Via Latina.

How was it dated?

Margherita Guarducci, a well-known Italian epigrapher who passed away in 1999, proposed a second-century date for the inscription more than four decades ago. She argued that the way it was written, with a classical style of Greek letters, was only used in Rome during the first and second centuries.

to read more, go to:    http://www.livescience.com/16319-earliest-christian-inscription-pagan-artifacts.html

Solar Flares & Solar Wind

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CHANCE OF FLARES: Sunspot 1302, quiet now for three days, still has a ‘beta-gamma-delta’ magnetic field that harbors energy for X-class flares. NOAA forecasters estimate a 30% chance of such eruptions today. X-flare alerts: text,voice.

SOLAR WIND BLASTS MERCURY: At a NASA teleconference yesterday, researchers working with data from the Messenger spacecraft offered new evidence that gusts of solar wind are penetrating Mercury’s magnetic field and eroding material off the planet’s surface. The spacecraft has actually flown through plumes of ionized sodium scoured from the surface and escaping from weak points in Mercury’s magnetosphere. Click here and scroll down to “Presenter #4” for relevant data and images.

Another “scouring event” could be in the offing. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) observed two farside CMEs on Sept 29th, and one of them is heading for the innermost planet:

Using observations from SOHO and the twin STEREO spacecraft, analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab have modeled the trajectory of these CMEs. The one on the left should hit Mercury on October 1st at 02:13 UT +/- 7 hours. Forewarned, mission scientists for the Messenger probe can be attentive to the CME’s arrival and observe its effects on Mercury.

According to the CME’s forecast track, the cloud will hit Venus later the same day. The ability to forecast CME impacts on other planets is a new development in space weather forecasting made possible by NASA’s deployment of spacecraft around the full circumference of the sun.

fr/spaceweather.com