OVO

Scientists have determined how to fortify the cassava plant, a staple root crop in many developing countries, with enough vitamins, minerals and protein to provide the poor and malnourished with a day’s worth of nutrition in a single meal. The researchers have further engineered the cassava plant so it can resist the crop’s most damaging viral threats and are refining methods to reduce cyanogens, substances that yield poisonous cyanide if they are not properly removed from the food before consumption. The reduction of cyanogens also can shorten the time it takes to process the plant into food, which typically requires three to six days to complete. Studies also are under way to extend the plant’s shelf life so it can be stored or shipped.

[Article continues at link. When was the last time religion did something comparable? Who are held up as heroes of humanity, scientists or clergy? Here is science offering an actual solution to an actual problem. Religion offers imaginary solutions (salvation) to imaginary problems (sin). All praise to the scientists - practical moralists and hands-on philosophers - who are achieving this real-life miracle. - Trevor Blake]

Sens. Larry “Wide Stance” Craig and David “Diaper Boy” Vitter have signed on to co-sponsor yet another federal bill that would amend the Constitution define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Reason Magazine – Hit & Run > They Blame Gay Marriage

Scientists have determined how to fortify the cassava plant with enough vitamins, minerals and protein to provide the poor and malnourished with a day’s worth of nutrition in a single meal. [what has religion done recently?]

Fortified Cassava Could Provide A Day’s Nutrition In A Single Meal

A train-style record player. Users connect the chipped pieces of records together to make new tracks.

Sound Chaser

I’m tired of being a skinny scarecrow.

Atlas Museum

write content once and publish to multiple services. (e.g. Send a tweet and switchAbit will route it Facebook and Jaiku). Control how and when switchAbit is activated by setting up “switchboards” and tags you create.

switchAbit

Gary Bradbury

BRADBURY’s Page – W I R E D Lab

state law protects statements made to clergy members who are required by their faith’s practices to keep them secret.

Convicted molester sentenced to 45 years to life

#1: I met Kelly in Portland. #2: Which Portland? #1: What are you talking about? #2: Well there are two: one on the east coast, one on the west coast. (silence) #1: You know, it’s not funny to lie all the time like that.

Overheard in New York | ‘Two Coasts’? That’s Just Crazy Talk!

Sure they can sometimes be offensive. So can burps. But if you ban them even worse results happen.

The best God joke ever – and it’s mine! | | guardian.co.uk Arts

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does.

Your brain lies to you – International Herald Tribune

The cognitive strategies humans use to regulate emotions can determine both neurological and physiological responses to potential rewards

Using Mental Strategies Can Alter The Brain’s Reward Circuitry

“This organism is ideally adapted to extremely hostile environments. It likes to live in highly acidic solutions containing toxic heavy metals. It is unable to exist at all under normal conditions,”

Bacteria In Extremely Hostile Environments: New Protein Discovered That Repairs DNA Under Extreme Conditions

[From an e-mail message to a friend...]

I don’t claim to have any answers on this one, specifically any always-applicable answers. But I have benefited from adopting a note of caution any time I find myself thinking of ‘tipping points’ in history.

Over and again I’ve thought ‘there’s no way that the bad guys can keep getting away with it, this time they’ve gone too far, the tipping point has arrived.’ And I’ve been wrong every time.

When I apply that steady record of error to past events, I think it holds. It is easy to look back and say where tipping points where in history, but it is so easy that I wonder if it isn’t me imposing a pattern that didn’t really exist at the time. I can see the pattern in what you wrote about Mussolini and Hitler [they were supported by their nations but eventually there was a popular / middle class strike against them], but the pattern is so clear that I wonder if it is the filter I’m looking through rather than seeing something as it was.

Tipping point thinking fits in with my lefty / conspiracy background, something else I’ve grown to trust less. It came from a time when some part of me thought history was (a) going somewhere and (b) something I / we / someone could drive like a wagon train. Now I think history is going, but not going anywhere in particular. I want it to be going towards empowerment of the individual, but it isn’t – it’s just going where it’s going. I want to think I / we / someone can nudge history a little tiny bit, but that’s a far cry from seizing the reigns and plowing a path towards utopia.

Fascist Spain didn’t have a turning point, as far as I know. It changed, but there wasn’t a popular / middle class strike against it. The tyranny in North Korea and elsewhere goes on and on. This is evidence of another old belief of mine being in error – that oppression leads to rebellion. It doesn’t, not consistently.

I have [fewer and fewer] answers as I get older. And less sense that my opinions have any influence in the world. What a relief!

The Reconquista was a period of 750 years in which several Christian kingdoms expanded themselves over the Iberian Peninsula at the expense of the Muslim states of Al-Andalus

Reconquista – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

kNOw RELIGION.net

Together we can expose their lies and pave the way for an honest future.

Lying for Jesus

Obama asked which Biblical passages should guide public policy — chapters like Leviticus, which Obama said suggests slavery is OK and eating shellfish is an abomination

James Dobson accuses Obama of `distorting’ Bible – Yahoo! News

an emulator of some famous little machines

hobnox.com :: Your Music, Film & Urban Culture – Audiotool Startpage

A date palm seed some 2000 years old – preserved by nothing more than storage in hot and dry conditions – has germinated, making it the oldest seed in the world to do so.

Jesus-era seed is the oldest to germinate – life – 12 June 2008 – New Scientist