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n2doc's Journal
Church cites Scripture in barring gay musician from performing
BY LEE HILL KAVANAUGH
The Kansas City Star
HUTCHINSON, KAN. -- Chad Graber loved everything connected to church.
Especially the Tuesday night classes at CrossPoint Church called Celebrate Recovery. The prayer groups and Bible studies were his anchor after his substance abuse treatment ended.
“My goal was to put more good things in my life, and church was it,” he remembers.
Sometime around 2007 he joined the six-piece worship team for Celebrate Recovery, playing keyboards, learning Christian songs and practicing chord changes.
He belonged.
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/10/21/3876912/church-cites-scripture-in-barring.html
Uranus has Bizarre Weather
New infrared images of Uranus show details not seen before. Credit: NASA/ESA/L. A. Sromovsky/P. M. Fry/H. B. Hammel/I. de Pater/K. A. Rages
Here’s the scene: a thick, tempestuous atmosphere with winds blowing at a clip of 900 km/h (560 mph); massive storms that would engulf continents here on Earth, and temperatures in the -220 C (-360 degree F) range. Sounds like a cold Hell, but this is the picture emerging of the planet Uranus, revealed in new high-resolution infrared images from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, exposing in incredible detail the bizarre weather of a planet that was once thought to be rather placid.
“My first reaction to these images was ‘wow’ and then my second reaction was ‘WOW,’” said Heidi Hammel, a co-investigator on the new observations. “These images reveal an astonishing amount of complexity in Uranus’ atmosphere. We knew the planet was active, but until now much of the activity was masked by noise in our data.”
Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/98049/uranus-has-bizarre-weather/
The best of Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2012
Primal fear by Jabruson
Specially commended in The World in Our Hands Award
Heading to the north of Mozambique to photograph elephant poaching, Jabruson came across a group of village children with a tethered yellow baboon. It had been caught when its troop raided local crops, probably because they had lost their normal habitat. "Few animals show such human expressions," says Jabruson, "and this youngster's face spoke volumes."
Everybody loves penguins. They're cuddly, funny and sometimes, like here, remarkably graceful. More interested than most, though, is Paul Nicklen. He has just become the Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer Year for this photo, Bubble-jetting emperors, which was no easy task to capture.
Nicklen was near a colony of emperor penguins in a frozen area of the Ross Sea in Antarctica. He found a hole in the ice where he hoped the diving penguins would exit, leaving him a perfect window to catch them charging up to the surface. He waited underwater, holding himself still against the ice and breathing through a snorkel to avoid producing bubbles.
Practice run by Grégoire Bouguereau
Winner of Behaviour: Mammals
When a female cheetah caught but didn't kill a Thomson's gazelle calf and waited for her cubs, Grégoire Bouguereau guessed what was about to happen. He'd spent nearly a decade studying and photographing cheetahs in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, and he knew that the female's behaviour meant a hunting lesson was due to begin. The female moved away, leaving the calf lying on the ground near her cubs. At first, the cubs took no notice. But when it struggled jerkily to its feet "the cubs' natural predatory instincts were triggered", says Grégoire.
more
http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/wildlife-photographer-2012/
Tractor beam built from rings of laser light
Stand aside, Wesley Crusher: there's a new tractor beam on deck that pulls objects using nothing more than laser light. The device has already grabbed NASA's attention as it could one day prove useful on space missions.
It is well known that light can push on objects – this is the basis for using solar sails to propel a spacecraft. But getting light to pull on something is a bit trickier.
Previous laser-based tractor beams could act like tweezers to move particles, picking up the sample and putting it down a short distance away. A more recent version actually pulls on particles, but relies on temperature variations in the beam, which means it cannot function in space.
In 2011, researchers in China calculated that a type of laser called a Bessel beam, which puts out light in concentric rings, could be designed to make a particle inside the beam emit photons on the side facing away from the beam source. These photons should allow the particle to recoil towards the source. But nobody has so far managed to put the idea into practice.
more
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22406-tractor-beam-built-from-rings-of-laser-light.html
Paul Krugman- Rmoney's Awesome Awesomeness Plan!
Understanding Romneynomics
I’ve been delving a bit into what the Romney campaign and its economist fellow-travelers have been saying, and I think I have figured out the true economic doctrine Romney and his inner circle have in mind. It is, needless to say, not what the campaign has claimed.
The official line has been that the five-point program will create scads of jobs. This has a couple of problems. First, the program is vacuous — for the most part it’s a statement of desired outcomes, not policies. Second, as Glenn Kessler points out, the studies claimed as justification for the 12-million jobs number actually don’t say at all what the campaign asserts.
...
So the Romney campaign is lying about the rationale for its boasts about jobs. But what’s the real story?
The answer is actually pretty clear: CONFIDENCE. The Romney notion is that we’d be having a rip-roaring recovery right now, except that Job Creators feel that Obama is looking at them funny. And so all Romney has to do is show up, and happy times will be here again. No, seriously: in Boca Raton Romney declared that simply by being elected he could start a boom, “without actually doing anything”.
So there you have it. The true plan is to provide an economic stimulus in the form of Romney’s awesome awesomeness; the cover story is the pretense of having an actual program.
Are you feeling confident?
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/understanding-romneynomics/
New ‘Shiny’ Objects Found by Curiosity Rover Are Likely Indigenous
A bright particle found inside a scoop hole created by the Curiosity rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Last weekend, the Mars Curiosity rover scooped out a few “bites” in the small, sandy dune known as Rocknest and inside the second scoop hole was a small, shiny particle, as we reported earlier. This speck – and others like it in the pit — is different than the previous object that looked like plastic and may have come from the rover itself. After some analysis, the MSL science team thinks the shiny particle is just part of the soil on Mars.
“As the science team thought about it more and more, the bright object is about the same size as the granules that it’s in and it is not uniformly bright,” said John Grotziner, MSL project scientist. “We went back and forth, and the majority of the science team thinks this is indigenous to Mars.”
And so, Grotziner said, these shiny objects likely represent a science opportunity rather than an engineering hazard.
http://www.universetoday.com/98080/new-shiny-objects-found-by-curiosity-rover-are-likely-indigenous/
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