http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall_%E2%80%93_Live_in_Berlin

From The New York Times: “Where will you be on Sunday, May 2, at 15:00 hours (U.T.C.) ? Wherever you are, we hope you’ll have a camera — or a camera phone — in hand. And we hope you’ll be taking a picture to send to Lens that will capture this singular instant in whatever way you think would add to a marvelous global mosaic; a Web-built image of one moment in time across the world.”

NOTE: 15:00 hours U.T.C. = 11:00 AM E.S.T.
Link: http://submit.nytimes.com/moment
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{Photography © 2010 by Toscana Enterprises …

SUPPOSE we had a theory that could explain everything. Not just atoms and quarks but aspects of our everyday lives too. Sound impossible? Perhaps not.
It’s all part of the recent explosion of work in an area of physics known as random matrix theory. Originally developed more than 50 years ago to describe the energy levels of atomic nuclei, the theory is turning up in everything from inflation rates to the behaviour of solids. So much so that many researchers believe that it points to some kind of deep pattern …

MY HOROSCOPE this week says that now is the perfect time to relocate, or at least de-clutter. I know it’s nonsense, but I can’t help wishing there was a genuine way to predict the future.
Perhaps there is. One self-styled “predictioneer” believes he has found the answer. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a professor of politics at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. In his new book, The Predictioneer (The Predictioneer’s Game in the US), he describes a computer model …

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{Photography © 2010 by Toscana Enterprises Corporation, all rights reserved}

You can call me: “Captain my Captain”

Understanding Poetry, by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D. :
To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions:

How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and
How important is that objective?

Question 1 rates the poem’s perfection; question 2 rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem’s greatness becomes a relatively simple matter. If the poem’s score for perfection is plotted …

The Nazca Lines are a series of ancient geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert of Peru. They have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The high, arid plateau stretches more than 80 kilometres (50 mi) between the towns of Nazca and Palpa on the Pampas de Jumana. Although some local geoglyphs resemble Paracas motifs, scholars believe the Nazca Lines were created by the Nazca culture nearly a millennium ago, between 200 BCE and 700 CE. The hundreds of individual figures range in complexity from simple lines to stylized …

Experience the entire photo gallery with commentary at: Gizmodo
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{Photography by Marcin Wichary}

http://Discuss2010.com

REACH FOR GINGER
When you want to: Soothe a sour stomach. Ginger is also known to help quell motion sickness, reduce lousy LDL cholesterol, thwart artery-clogging clots, kill ovarian cancer cells, quash inflammation and maybe even fend off the common cold. Of course, consuming 50 ginger cookies isn’t the way to get the goodness of this root; better to take it in extract form (which, in fact, has been shown to reduce the stiffness and pain of osteoarthritis if taken every day).
REACH FOR PEPPERMINT
When you want to: Wake up and …

It all started with the sound of static. In May 1964, two astronomers at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were using a radio telescope in suburban New Jersey to search the far reaches of space. Their aim was to make a detailed survey of radiation in the Milky Way, which would allow them to map those vast tracts of the universe devoid of bright stars. This meant that Penzias and Wilson needed a receiver that was exquisitely sensitive, able to eavesdrop on all the emptiness. And so …

Researchers claim to have deciphered the way primates communicate

The secret behind the origins of human language may lie in the jungle chatter of a species of monkey, a team of scientists has claimed.
The researchers spent months studying the calls of the Campbell’s monkey, or Cercopithecus campbelli, which lives in the forests of the Tai National Park in the Ivory Coast. They discovered that the animals not only use distinctive alarm calls to warn of specific predators nearby but can also combine them with other sounds to convey extra information …

An international team of scientists has observed four super-massive black holes at the center of galaxies, which may provide new information on how these central black hole systems operate.
Their findings are published in December’s first issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
These super-massive black holes at the center of galaxies are called active galactic nuclei. For the first time, the team observed a quasar with an active galactic nucleus, as part of the group of four, which is located more than a billion light years from Earth. The scientists …