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Dear friend, I just emailed Congress to urge them to oppose the Internet Blacklist Legislation, known as the PROTECT-IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. This legislation seeks to give the executive branch power to conduct slash-and-burn campaigns against websites that allegedly host – or even link…

This company called Xtranormal has offered this free service through their website where you can essentially upload text of dialogues and have it animated with various different characters.  The animation is not exactly Pixar-quality, but it does lend an element to what would otherwise be dry text interchanges between people. Somehow, as with many odd…

One issue that ladies with long hair face when going through their facial care routine is what to do with the hair.  Obviously one needs to hold one’s hair back when cleansing, and having it back while applying makeup also makes that process much easier.  Yet if you have curly hair like mine (type 2C/3A)…

I just saw this list of U.S. states and territories by area.  Its shocking to read this list and realize how much smaller many countries around the world are than I actually thought. For example, I didn’t know that California is larger than Japan, the Philippines, and New Zealand. I did not know that Burma…

I wrote a while ago about how it can sometimes be disgusting when someone kisses you, slobbering whatever microorganisms are growing in their mouths – and usually there are a lot of them – all over and possibly inside you as well.  Candida is a well-known yeast that causes infections in humans.  It can persist…

Astronomers have discovered Earth’s first trojan asteroid.  Trojan asteroids are asteroids which orbit in the path of another planet.  They are difficult to discover because they occupy a part of the sky where the Sun is.  However, this particular trojan was discovered because of its highly erratic orbit and thanks to the NASA’s WISE observatory.…

One of the very interesting phenomena of gravitational physics relates to how massive rotating objects actually drag space time around with them.  Imagine a ball spinning in a viscous fluid such as thick syrup.  As the ball spins, it drags some of the syrup around with it.  The syrup is like spacetime.  It sounds uncanny,…

From a just-published nytimes.com article entitled “‘Safety Myth’ Left Japan Ripe for Nuclear Crisis“.  I quote a few excerpts below: Near a nuclear power plant facing the Sea of Japan, a series of exhibitions in a large public relations building here extols the virtues of the energy source with some help from “Alice in Wonderland.”…

I decided to get a few different types of soft plastic jewelry organizers as an experiment.  The one that I like the most is the Household Essentials 01943 Ultra 80-Pocket Hanging Jewelry Organizer.   The actual quality of this organizer is very high.  It is not cheap, tacky plastic but very high-quality plastic.  It looks and…

This graphic was part of a recent OXFAM report “Growing a Better Future: Food justice in a resource-constrained world” I checked on of the links listed as a reference: http://faostat.fao.org/site/368/DesktopDefault.aspx On this page you can select a country and get detailed data about the amounts of various crops produced by it.  At the top of the…