March 13, 2013

Florida Lieutenant Governor Jennifer Carroll Resigns .. Racketeering?

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Florida Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll announced her resignation Wednesday, a day after she was questioned by authorities investigating an Internet cafe company that she once represented.

Carroll’s resignation letter to Gov. Rick Scott, dated Tuesday, offered no details about her reason for leaving. But Scott’s chief of staff, Adam Hollingsworth, said she was interviewed by Florida Department of Law Enforcement officers Tuesday regarding her work with Allied Veterans of the World.

She resigned to ensure her ties to the company would not be a distraction for the administration, he said. Carroll, a Navy veteran, had owned a public relations firm that represented that company.

While serving as a state lawmaker, Carroll’s ties to the company were also questioned when she proposed a bill that would benefit internet cafes.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/fl-lieutenant-governor-resigns.php?m=1

March 13, 2013

Report: Man behind Romney ’47 percent’ video will reveal himself Wednesday

The Florida bartender responsible for capturing former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent” remarks will reveal his identity in an interview with MSNBC host Ed Schultz that will air Wednesday.

Both Schultz and Mother Jones, which released the video in September 2012, announced the interview on Tuesday, with Schultz playing clips from the interview.

“I debated for a little while, but in the end I really felt it had to be put out,” the bartender said of his decision to leak the video, secretly filmed at a May 2012 fundraiser for Romney. “I felt I owed it to the people who couldn’t afford to be there themselves to hear what he really thought.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/13/report-man-behind-romney-47-percent-video-will-reveal-himself-wednesday/




A real hero

March 13, 2013

Neanderthals Doomed by Vision-Centered Brains

Neanderthals' keen vision may explain why they couldn't cope with environmental change and died out, despite having the same sized brains as modern humans, new research suggests.

The findings, published today (March 12) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest that Neanderthals developed massive visual regions in their brains to compensate for Europe's low light levels. That, however, reduced the brain space available for social cognition.

"We have a social brain, whereas Neanderthals appear to have a visual brain," said Clive Gamble, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, who was not involved in the study. As a result, the extinct hominids had smaller social and trading networks to rely on when conditions got tough. That may have caused Neanderthals to die off around 35,000 years ago.
snip

Neanderthals were has been a long-standing debate.
"Either they get regarded as lumbering brutes, or the other side says, 'No, they weren't that stupid. They had enormous brains, so they must have been as smart as we are,'" said study co-author Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford.

snip

http://news.yahoo.com/neanderthals-doomed-vision-centered-brains-002516901.html

March 12, 2013

Official CPAC dress attire

Wow. Sounds like fun. They are bringing fashion (and politics) into the nineteenth century.



http://dcist.com/2013/03/fashion_recommendations_for_cpac_ye.php

March 12, 2013

Anti-gay Cardinal sleeping above the biggest gay sauna in Europe which is in Rome

An apartment building in Rome currently occupied by Cardinal Ivan Dias is also home to the biggest gay sauna in Europe.

The Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported that Cardinal Ivan Dias is living just one floor above the Europa Multiclub Sauna and Gym, which contains a king Turkish bath, Finnish sauna, giant whirlpool, waterfall whirlpool and other attractions for its gay patrons.

The socially-conservative Cardinal, who previously served as Archbishop of Bombay, has described homosexuality as an “unnatural tendency” and a disease of the soul.


The Vatican purchased about 20 apartments in the building in 2008. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone is said to be behind the purchase.




http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/11/anti-gay-cardinal-sleeping-above-the-biggest-gay-sauna-in-europe/#.UT6dUz3WQl8.reddit

March 12, 2013

Peruvian Pyramid Older Than Egypt, Civilization Rivals Sumerians In Age, 1200 Years Without War

The lost Pyramids of Caral are older than suspected, construction began in 3000 B.C (300-400 years before the people of Kemet, Egypt began the Pyramid of Djoser). These cities flourished peacefully for more than 1,200 years. Something very different from all other civilizations is that this people lived without fears, in peace. No traces of warfare have been found, a finding that had to make archaeologists in the world to re-invent their thinking and theories about why tribal people built and moved into large cities.



The Andean Center for Archaeological Research, CIARA, has made an extraordinary discovery in the Huaca Rosada Urban Center, located in the district of Ventanilla, Callao and which dates from 4500 years.The pyramid Huaca Pink belongs to the architectural tradition of Caral , which shows that the nation state of Caral is one of the oldest civilizations to be discovered. Caral was located in the Peruvian Barrranca provinces covering Huaura, Huaral, Lima, Callao, Huarmey and Casma, as well as the Central Coast area and north-central Peru and influencing the Midwest of our country.



http://beforeitsnews.com/science-and-technology/2013/03/peruvian-pyramid-older-than-egypt-civilization-rivals-sumerians-in-age-2555356.html?utm_campaign=&utm_term=http%3A%2F%2Fawe.sm%2Fq0D6y&utm_source=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F&utm_medium=facebook-post&utm_content=awesm-fbshare-small

March 12, 2013

Mathematicians Extend Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity beyond Light Speed

“Since the introduction of special relativity there has been much speculation as to whether or not it might be possible to travel faster than the speed of light, noting that there is no substantial evidence to suggest that this is presently feasible with any existing transportation mechanisms,” said Prof Jim Hill of the University of Adelaide’s School of Mathematical Sciences, who co-authored a paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

“About this time last year, experiments at CERN in Switzerland suggested that perhaps neutrinos could be accelerated just a very small amount faster than the speed of light; at this point we started to think about how to deal with the issues from both a mathematical and physical perspective.”

“Questions have since been raised over the experimental results but we were already well on our way to successfully formulating a theory of special relativity, applicable to relative velocities in excess of the speed of light.”

“Our approach is a natural and logical extension of the Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, and produces anticipated formulae without the need for imaginary numbers or complicated physics.”

The new formulas extend special relativity to a situation where the relative velocity can be infinite, and can be used to describe motion at speeds faster than light.


snip


http://www.sci-news.com/physics/article00645.html

March 8, 2013

Privatize

José de Sousa Saramago, GColSE (Portuguese: [ʒuˈzɛ ðɨ ˈsozɐ sɐɾɐˈmaɣu]; 16 November 1922 – 18 June 2010) was a Portuguese novelist, poet, playwright, journalist and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature.

His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor. Harold Bloom described Saramago as "a permanent part of the Western canon".[2]


Awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature,[3] more than two million copies of Saramago's books have been sold in Portugal alone and his work has been translated into 25 languages.


[4][5] He was a founding member of the National Front for the Defence of Culture in Lisbon in 1992. A proponent of libertarian communism,

[6] Saramago came into conflict with groups such as the Catholic Church. He was an atheist who defended love as an instrument to improve the human condition.



In 1992, the Portuguese government under Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva ordered the removal of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ from the European Literary Prize's shortlist, claiming the work was religiously offensive. Disheartened by this political censorship of his work,[7] Saramago went into exile on the Spanish island of Lanzarote, upon which he resided until his death in 2010.[8][9]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Saramago

March 8, 2013

Colbert."Yes, I used to beat my girlfriend

Stephen Colbert on challenging the Voting Rights Act: "Yes, I used to beat my girlfriend, but I haven't since the restraining order so we don't need it anymore."



http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/424438/march-06-2013/voting-rights-act

March 5, 2013

The 'habitable edge' of exomoons

The discovery of alien moons will open up an exciting new frontier in the continuing hunt for habitable worlds outside the Solar System. With the confirmation of exomoons likely right around the corner, researchers have begun addressing the unique and un-Earthly factors that might affect their habitability. Because exomoons orbit a larger planetary body, they have an additional set of constraints on their potential livability than planets themselves.


Examples include eclipses by their host planet, as well as reflected sunlight and heat emissions. Most of all, gravitationally-induced tidal heating by a host planet can dramatically impact a moon's climate and geology.


In essence, compared to planets, exomoons have additional sources of energy that can alter their "energy budgets," which, if too high, can turn a temperate, potential paradise into a scorched wasteland. "What discriminates the habitability of a satellite from the habitability of a planet in general is that it has different contributions to its energy budget," said René Heller, a postdoctoral research associate at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam, Germany.


The "habitable edge"





Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-03-habitable-edge-exomoons.html#jCp