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Iraq PM says U.S. agrees to withdraw troops by 2011.
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi Prime Minister Prime Nuri al-Maliki said on Monday that an agreement had been reached in negotiations on a security pact with the United States to end any foreign military presence in Iraq by the end of 2011.
"There is an agreement actually reached, reached between the two parties on a fixed date which is the end of 2011 to end any foreign presence on Iraqi soil," Maliki said in a speech to tribal leaders in the Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone. [LINK]
“Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution,” a document by Jonathan Wells, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based group that advocates intelligent design, aims to highlight the weaknesses in evolutionary theory. Here are his questions, along with responses compiled by the National Center for Science Education.
N.C.S.E. answer: Because evolutionary theory works with any model of the origin of life on Earth, how life originated is not a question about evolution. Textbooks discuss the 1953 studies because they were the first successful attempt to show how organic molecules might have been produced on the early earth. When modern scientists changed the experimental conditions to reflect better knowledge of the earth’s early atmosphere, they were able to produce most of the same building blocks. Origin-of-life remains a vigorous area of research. Continued at LINK [LINK]]
More questions can be found on Dr. Wells’s site, http://www.iconsofevolution.com/ More information about biological evolution can be found at http://nationalacademies.org/evolution/.
Three dimensions can be so limiting.
Mathematicians, freed in their imaginations from physical constraints, can conjure up descriptions of objects in many more dimensions than that. Points in a plane can be described with pairs of numbers, and points in space can be described with triples. Why not quadruples, or quintuples, or more?
There is the minor difficulty that our nervous systems are only equipped to conjure images in three dimensions. But that doesn’t stop Étienne Ghys of the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, from visualizing the four-dimensional dynamical systems he studies: “I live in dimension four,” he says.
And you can too. Ghys has now created a series of videos teaching others to visualize four dimensions the way he does. His work is in collaboration with Jos Leys, a Belgian graphic artist and engineer, and Aurélien Alvarez, a mathematics graduate student at ENS Lyon. [LINK]
Click to continue reading “My Family Album: Part 2 of 2″
Hi there…this is me… Mom said I got all the good looks and no brains. I have a stomach ulcer.
This is my mom. She has lots of boyfriends. One of them has a job. She says with a little luck I could be a garbage man one day.
This is my brother Hank. He is in jail right now. When he gets out he is not allowed to be around animals and kitchen appliances.
My grandmom lives with us in our trailer. Shes smells real bad. She likes to hang out in bars and drink beer. Grandma has sores all over. The flies are terrible.
Click to continue reading “My Family Album: Part 1 of 2″
for the love of god, the truth sooner than later. I cringe as we involve ourselves with yet another war.
In September of 2005 a safety alert was issued by NASA’s confidential Aviation Safety Reporting System, which allows air crews to report safety problems without fear their names will be disclosed.
With fuel prices now their biggest cost, airlines are aggressively enforcing new policies designed to reduce consumption.
Just look at the complaints flooding into NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System:
"I know our program manager is ranking captains on landing with less fuel. I don’t care to be ranked. I think this is a safety problem and I believe fuel is your friend," the captain said. "Looking back, I would have liked more gas yesterday, and I was already carrying tanker fuel. If I wouldn’t have had this extra there would have been real problems."
1,695 of 1,728 people found the following review helpful: 
Great lesson for the kids!, September 9, 2005 By loosenut
I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger’s shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger’s scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said "that’s the worst security ever!". But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried to hijack it, she was mobbed by a couple of other heroic passengers, who only sustained minor injuries in the scuffle, which were treated at the Playmobil Hospital.
The best thing about this product is that it teaches kids about the realities of living in a high-surveillence society. My son said he wants the Playmobil Neighborhood Surveillence System set for Christmas. I’ve heard that the CC TV cameras on that thing are pretty worthless in terms of quality and motion detection, so I think I’ll get him the Playmobil Abu-Gharib Interogation Set instead (it comes with a cute little memo from George Bush).
its common sense, understand?
Best explanation of evolution I’ve read in a while
“#4.The Theory:Evolution
The Crazy Part: The part where the family tree of every living creature on Earth collides at a single point on a single day in the past, making you related to Hitler as well as every insect you’ve ever killed..
What It Says: We’re all familiar with the basics of evolution: that a munificent monkey-goddess birthed us all from Her banana-scented womb. But there are some lesser-discussed implications of natural selection that are just plain weird. For one, scientists have concluded that around 140,000 years ago in Kenya, there lived a woman called Mitochondrial Eve (cavemen had weird
names), so named because today, every living human on Earth has her mitochondrial DNA in their body (cavemen were also prescient). And only 3,000 years ago lived a person known as the Most Recent Common Ancestor, who, through exponential growth of the family tree, is the ancestor of every single person on Earth. And did you know that, based on the same principles (and a lot of rape), Genghis Kahn has over 16 million descendants? Who’s your Daddy now?!
So What Does This Do For Me? Well, for one, you can rest assured than anyone you ever have sex with in your entire life is at least your distant, distant cousin. So that’s nice. And if you’re really a nut for genealogy, why not trace your heritage back to the Last Universal Ancestor, the single-celled organism who, about 4 billion years ago, decided to go ahead and give rise to every living creature that will ever exist on the face of the Earth? Talk about a pimp. In essence, the whole of life on the planet can be considered one long, unbroken chemical reaction that is still resolving itself, like the foam flowing out of a science fair volcano.
Wait, It Gets Worse: The genetic chaos continues. The Endosymbiotic Theory says that the mitochondria in our bodies, without which we couldn’t live, let alone write snide humor articles, was at one point a separate organism that invaded our cells and set up camp. They formed a symbiotic relationship so beneficial that we’ve never booted them out. Furthermore, large chunks of the human genome are thought to be ancient retroviruses that managed to transcribe themselves into our DNA and have spent the remainder of their days happily clambering up and down our nucleotides like the McDuck children on a mansion banister. Basically your cells are millions of individual organisms, all huddled together in a you-shaped beehive. Now see how long you can go before wanting to shower.
Click to continue reading “Cracked’s 5 Scientific Theories That Will Blow Your Mind”