Clipmarks | birdie-brain's Pops

Flat Earth

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:56:47 GMT

clipped by: Fast T friend
clipper's remarks: I'm not a strong fan but I thought the map was cool

I had some fun yesterday writing about people who believe in a flat Earth and how their ideas compare with climate change deniers. As I reread my essay this morning I was reminded of the fact that one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett, has made a career writing about a fictional flat planet. His Discworld fantasy-humor novels are set on just such a planet as Flat Earthers may envision for the Earth. Here is an illustration of the Discworld:

Remember, this is fantasy, not reality. Do not plan trips for business or pleasure, especially ocean cruises, or attempt to follow world events by referring to this map. Discworld is a magical planet. Its Sun is about the size of a basketball and revolves around the flat planet. And, yes, the oceans flow off the edge into space in a continuous cascade. The fact that Discworld’s oceans never dry out is obviously due to magic rather than conventional physics.

Tags: flat, earth, disc, world, map

The Red Hat Society

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:48:07 GMT

clipped by: Fast T friend
clipper's remarks: Fun after 50!

Clip Source: www.redhatsociety.com

Welcome to the place where there is fun after fifty (and before) for women of all walks of life. We believe silliness is the comedy relief of life and, since we are all in it together, we might as well join red-gloved hands and go for the gusto together. Underneath the frivolity, we share a bond of affection, forged by common life experiences and a genuine enthusiasm for wherever life takes us next.

Clip Source: www.redhatsociety.com

A. The Red Hat Society is often referred to fondly as a "dis-organization," though we have been forced to impart a degree of order to our operations. It was inadvertently begun by Sue Ellen Cooper of Fullerton, California when she and a few friends took inspiration from a popular poem entitled "Warning" by Jenny Joseph, which begins "When I am an old woman..." Since the poem mentions wearing a red hat and purple attire, she and her friends formed a group that met on a regular basis for tea in their red hats and purple dressesï¿½in public, of course.

Tags: social, group, women, of, certain, age, red, hat

Super Sushi - in LEGO

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:25:03 GMT

clipped by: hitchhiker08
clipper's remarks: Mouthwatering?!

Clip Source: www.flickr.com

Super Sushi

05 hon maguro

06 tamago

07 Ebi

08 maguro

09 ikura

10 hoso maki

11 futo maki

12 tekka maki and oshinko maki

13 Wasabi

14 no hashi?

15 oishii

Tags: lego, sushi, creativity

Women spend 3,276 hours getting ready

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:38:22 GMT

clipped by: hitchhiker08
clipper's remarks: At the risk of losing some more lady friends...

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Women spend 3,276 hours getting ready

Women spend 136 days of their lives getting ready for a night out - enough time for an astronaut to fly to the moon and back 22 times.

The time women spend putting on make up and getting dressed works out at 3,276 hours over their lifetimes while men only devote 1,092 hours to looking their best.

A survey of 1,000 women also showed that 67 per cent thought that the time spent getting ready was actually a chore.

Only a third of women said they enjoyed preening themselves.

They spend about half an hour washing and styling their hair followed by 20 minutes applying make-up and 15 minutes applying nail varnish.

And there is evidence of a north south divide. Two thirds of northern women spend an average of 146 minutes getting ready compared with southerners who take 117 minutes to pamper themselves.

The figures come as no surprise considering the pressure that today's women are under just to make themselves look good.

Tags: makeup, glamor, glamour, women, fashion, grooming, salon

5 Reasons to Write Down Everything You Eat For a Week

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 07:13:40 GMT

clipped by: hitchhiker08
clipper's remarks: I'm giving it a shot ...

Clip Source: www.dumblittleman.com

5 Reasons to Write Down Everything You Eat For a Week

I lost 50 lbs. (going from a US size 10 to US size 4)by writing down everything I ate and making changes based on the results. The more I thought about it, the more I think this habit is good for anyone - dieters, and non-dieters alike.

You snack a lot more than you realize

Carry a notebook with you and jot down every item of food and drink that passes your lips

You’re not eating enough fruit and vegetables

Are you hitting your five servings of fruit and veggies every day? Maybe you reckon that you’re “close”. Chances are, you’re sometimes only getting two or three – if that.

You drink WAY too much soda

if you’re chugging down five cans of coke a day, you’re swallowing a total of 175 grams of sugar

You spend too much on junk

In addition to watching your food intake, you're also watching the budget.

You don’t get enough variety in your diet

Are you writing down the same things for meals almost every day?

Try to get more variety

Tags: diet, eating, fruits, vegetables, health, weight, slimming

Afghan women jailed for being victims of rape

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:30:16 GMT

clipped by: hitchhiker08
clipper's remarks: Atrocious - famous last words?
"please take our words somewhere where people will be kind and help us" - any takers?

Clip Source: www.independent.co.uk

The Afghan women jailed for being victims of rape

In Lashkar Gah, the majority of female prisoners are serving 20-year sentences for being forced to have sex. Terri Judd visited them and heard their extraordinary stories

Zirdana, right, with her son and Saliha, centre, in Lashkar Gah prison

Saliha's slender frame and voice betray her young age.Asked why she was serving seven years in jail alongside hardened insurgents and criminals, the 15-year-old giggled and buried her head in her friend's shoulder.

"She is shy," apologised fellow inmate Zirdana, explaining that the teenager had been married at a young age to an abusive husband and ran away with a boy from her neighbourhood.

Saliha was convicted of escaping from home and illegal sexual relations. The first carries a maximum penalty of 10 years, the second 20. These are two of the most common accusations facing female prisoners in Afghanistan.

please take our words somewhere where people will be kind and help us

Tags: victims, assault, rape, afghans, women, lashkar gah, afghanistan, elope

A face you can trust

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 05:05:10 GMT

clipped by: dakotayii
clipper's remarks: When deciding who to trust, the research suggests, people use shortcuts. For example, they look at faces. According to recent work by Nikolaas Oosterhof and Alexander Todorov of Princeton's psychology department, we form our first opinions of someone's trustworthiness through a quick physiognomic snapshot. By studying people's reactions to a range of artificially-generated faces, Oosterhof and Todorov were able to identify a set of features that seemed to engender trust. Working from those findings, they were able to create a continuum: faces with high inner eyebrows and pronounced cheekbones struck people as trustworthy, faces with low inner eyebrows and shallow cheekbones untrustworthy.

In a paper published in June, they suggested that our unconscious bias is a byproduct of more adaptive instincts: the features that make a face strike us as trustworthy, if exaggerated, make a face look happy - with arching inner eyebrows and upturned mouths - and an exaggerated "untrustworthy"

Clip Source: www.boston.com

Human beings are social animals, and our first instinct is to trust others. Con men, of course, have long known this - their craft consists largely of playing on this predilection, and turning it to their advantage.

Researchers have discovered that surprisingly small factors - where we meet someone, whether their posture mimics ours, even the slope of their eyebrows or the thickness of their chin - can matter as much or more than what they say about themselves. We size up someone's trustworthiness within milliseconds of meeting them, and while we can revise our first impression, there are powerful psychological tendencies that often prevent us from doing so - tendencies that apply even more strongly if we've grown close.

"Trustworthiness is the very first thing that we decide about a person, and once we've decided, we do all kinds of elaborate gymnastics to believe in people."

Tags: science

How to Call in Sick When You Just Need a Day Off

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 06:31:28 GMT

clipped by: dakotayii
clipper's remarks: Sound good , I will call in sick tomorrow

Clip Source: www.wikihow.com

Complain about fake symptoms. A day before your day-off, make hints about your flu by casually reporting about your untrue flu-like symptoms throughout the whole day to your colleagues.

Call your boss early the next morning. Do not delay because it will cause displeasure to your boss. And also you will want to avoid you boss from labeling you as a bad employee by not informing him or her early.

Make the call a short one. Just say that you are not coming in as you are calling in sick that day. Excellent choices are severe headache or stomach ailment, as they are common. Don't get too detailed

Be prepared for a Q&A session. Is your boss nosy? Anxious about the sickness (if you work in food service, for example)? Try to imagine what kinds of questions your boss might have. Food poisoning? Contagious?

Try to have answers for these questions prepared ahead of time; otherwise you'll be fumbling and might lose your story

Get off the phone as quickly as possible; stories are told by liars

Tags: health

World’s Most Spectacular Skylines

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 07:04:50 GMT

clipped by: hitchhiker08
clipper's remarks: 'Spectacular' is right - each city/location has its own mesmerizing charm!

Clip Source: matadornights.com

The World’s Most Spectacular Skylines

Something about the outline of a city against its clear, crisp sky stops us in our tracks and commands our attention.

Below are staggeringly beautiful images where city meets sky all across the globe.

Miami, Florida, USA

Bangkok, Thailand

Vancouver, British Columbia

Republic Plaza, Singapore

Sydney, Australia

Shanghai, China

London, England

South Perth, Australia

Cologne, Germany

Graz, Austria

Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Hong Kong

Detroit, Michigan

Berlin, Germany

Venice, Italy

New York, New York, USA

Warsaw, Poland

San Francisco, California, USA

Tags: skyline, horizon, architecture, photography, landscape, buildings

Russian Lies About Why They Entered S Ossetia

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 03:47:45 GMT

clipped by: bmeuppls
clipper's remarks: And the western media bought it.. hook, line, and sinker...

Clip Source: www.mcclatchydc.com

TSKHINVALI, Georgia_ As Russian troops pounded through Georgia last week, the Kremlin and its allies repeatedly pointed to one justification above all others: The Georgian military had destroyed the city of Tskhinvali.

But a trip to the city on Sunday, without official escorts, revealed a very different picture. While it was clear there had been heavy fighting — missiles knocked holes in walls, and bombs tore away rooftops — almost all of the buildings seen in an afternoon driving around Tskhinvali were still standing.

Russian-backed leaders in South Ossetia have said that 2,100 people died in fighting in Tskhinvali and nearby villages. But a doctor at the city's main hospital, the only one open during the battles that began late on Aug. 7, said the facility recorded just 40 deaths.

Tags: russia

Typewriter Art

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 08:38:03 GMT

clipped by: thedoorway
clipper's remarks: This is an amazing story of a man born with spastic cerebral palsy. Though disabled in many ways, he taught himself to create detailed pictures using one finger on a typewriter that resembled pencil or charcoal drawings. Another tribute to the indomitable human spirit.

Clip Source: www.fourwinds10.com

Paul Smith, the man with extraordinary talent was born in Philadelphia on September 21, 1921 with severe cerebral palsy.

Not only had Paul beaten the odds of a life with spastic cerebral palsy, a disability that impeded his speech & mobility but also taught himself to become a master artist as well as a terrific chess player even after being devoid of a formal education as a child.

'When typing, Paul used his left hand to steady his right one. Since he couldn't press two keys at the same time, he almost always locked the shift key down and made his pictures using the symbols at the top of the number keys. In other words, his pictures were based on these characters .... @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ .

As his mastery of the typewriter grew, he developed techniques to create shadings, colors, and textures that made his work resemble pencil or charcoal drawings.'

This great man passed away on June 25, 2007

Typewriter Art

Can you believe that this art was created using a typewriter?

Tags: typewriter art, art, pictures, typewriter, paul smith, creativity, cerebral palsy

Smoke Art

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 02:31:46 GMT

clipped by: Kelika

Clip Source: www.darkroastedblend.com

Natural smoke (and its Photoshop variety) seem to become more and more a media of choice for artistic expression. Artists inherently like smoke for its flux and dynamic properties, and the public seem to enjoy asking the perennial question "What were they smoking?" when seeing a radical and challenging piece of art.

Tags: photos

LOLOLOLOL

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 23:12:29 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: my pal just sent this to me, roflmao

Clip Source: img171.imageshack.us

Tags: geography, funny, sad but true, lol

5,000-year-old skeletons laid on bed of flowers found in Sahara

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:45:22 GMT

clipped by: hitchhiker08
clipper's remarks: Serendipitous find...'were searching for the remains of dinosaurs in the African country of Niger when they came across the startling find.'

Clip Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Amazing 5,000-year-old skeletons laid on bed of flowers found in Sahara - proving desert was once green and lush

A tiny woman and two children were laid to rest on a bed of flowers 5,000 years ago in what is now the barren Sahara Desert.

Researchers discovered the slender arms of the youngsters still extended to the woman in a perpetual embrace.

The body of one of the children, an 11-year-old girl Tenerian girl buried wearing an upper-arm bracelet carved from the tusk of a hippo

Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago and colleagues were searching for the remains of dinosaurs in the African country of Niger when they came across the startling find.

The triple burial contained a woman and two children, their limbs intertwined

The first group, known as the Kiffian, hunted wild animals and speared huge perch with harpoons. They colonised the region when the Sahara was at its wettest, between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago.

Kiffians were tall, sometimes reaching well over 6ft.

Tags: sahara desert, skeletons, kiffian, tuareg, discovery, bizarre

Gallup Poll: Americans Favor Conservation & Efficiency

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:15:09 GMT

clipped by: hitchhiker08
clipper's remarks: Not a surprising outcome...

Clip Source: redgreenandblue.org

Poll: Americans More Likely to Vote For a Candidate Who Supports Conservation and Efficiency

Despite the fact that a plurality (less than half) of Americans favor a pro-nuclear-energy candidate, more say they would rebuff a candidate who wants to build nuclear power plants than say this about any of nine other possible energy reforms, according to a new Gallup Poll.

Clip Source: redgreenandblue.org

focus on demand-side management (consumer conservation of energy), raising fuel efficiency standards, increasing government spending on alternative fuels, establishing price controls on gasoline, imposing a windfall profits tax on oil companies, and easing restrictions on offshore drilling.

The two positions receiving the strongest “Less Likely to Vote For” percentages - “Building more nuclear power plants” and “Suspending the federal gas tax for several months” - are both positions Senator McCain has strongly endorsed throughout the summer.

Tags: americans, gallup poll, conservation, efficiency, gasoline, oil drilling, nuclear plants