George Tiller

George Tiller was a Kansas doctor whose clinic is one of a handful around the country that performs late-term abortions. This morning he was shot to death outside his church by a pro-life domestic terrorist.

It wasn't the first time Tiller had attempts made on his life. His clinic was bombed in 1985, and he was shot in both arms in 1993.

George Tiller was 67 years old.

Axolotl

Axolotls are mole salamanders that lived only in Lake Xochimilco and Lake Chalco in Mexico City. Because of the rapid urbanization, however, the axolotl is now on the endangered species list.

The axolotl exhibits neoteny, in which the animal remains in its larval form throughout its adult life. It keeps its gills and fins, and it doesn't develop the protruding eyes and eyelids. But it does grow larger than a normal larval salamander. It also reaches sexual maturity in this larval stage.

Laodicean

Laodicean means "lukewarm or indifferent in religion or politics." The word is taken from the attitudes of the early Christians of Laodicea, a city now in modern-day Turkey.

Benjamin Wade

Benjamin Wade was a U.S. senator from Ohio who served from 1851 to 1869. He was a member of the Radical Republicans who fervently supported abolition and who wanted to give blacks equal rights. In 1864 Wade joined Maryland representative Henry Davis to come up with the Wade-Davis Bill. It required 50% of white men in each seceded state to take an oath of allegiance to the U.S. before that state could be readmitted to the Union. It passed both chambers of Congress but President Abraham Lincoln refused to sign it, favoring more conciliatory deals with the recalcitrant South.

Following Lincoln's assassination, President Andrew Johnson continued his predecessor's policies toward the South, which Wade and the Radical Republicans openly criticized. In 1868 they got a big opportunity to put one of their own in the White House. Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act, and needed a two-thirds vote in the Senate to be removed. If kicked out, the president pro tempore, Wade, would become president. Johnson was eventually acquitted, but survived by only a single vote. Thus, Benjamin Wade was one of the closest people ever to become president of the U.S.

Promenade

The word prom is short for promenade.

Brandon Darby

Brandon Darby is a former anarchist activist who had a change of heart and worked undercover for the FBI. He snitched on two of his fellow Texans who were planning to disrupt the 2008 Republican National Convention with eight Molotov cocktails.

He was also the Director of Operations for Common Ground Relief, a non-profit organization that offers support to the people of New Orleans. The documentary Solidarity Not Charity, which shows their relief work, can be found here.

This American Life broadcast of Darby.

How come members of the FLDS don't get arrested for polygamy?

The law states that heterosexual marriages should only be between one man and one woman. So to circumvent this pesky hurdle, male members of the radical denomination of the Mormon faith, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, exploit the loophole by marrying their first wives legally then marrying the rest (usually up to three or four per man) "spiritually." That way, the law can't go after them even though they do everything to their "spiritual" wives as they do their legal wives.

Clip starts at 8:42.

Hologram

This is how I remember what a hologram is. Imagine a picture with a star on it. If you cut that picture up, no matter if it's in half or in tiny pieces, the fragment(s) will still contain the same image.



A fern branch is kind of like a hologram, but it doesn't have to be torn up for one to realize its properties. The branch's leaflets show the same shape as the branch.



Extra fun: Read how the universe may be one giant hologram.

Stockholm Auction House

The Stockholm Auction House is the world's oldest auction house, established in 1674. It has more than 50,000 items to bid on with things in art, furniture, books, wine, and other auction stuff.

Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt was an American Impressionist painter who lived most of her adult life in France. Her work illustrated the public and private lives of women, especially the relationship between the mother and her kid(s).

She was born on this day in 1844.

La Toilette, c. 1891

Don't drink milk in poor nations

Cow blowing is a process which is used in a number of poor countries in which forceful blowing of air into a cow's vagina or anus is applied to induce her to produce more milk. It's one of the reasons why Gandhi became a vegetarian.

The Nile as it was thousands of years ago

Psychic Edgar Cayce made three readings regarding the Nile River:

The Nile entered into the Atlantic Ocean. What is now the Sahara was an inhabited land and very fertile.

In the one before this we find again in this same land now called Egypt (this before the mountains rose in the south, and when the waters called the Nile then emptied into what is NOW the Atlantic Ocean).

In those periods when the first change had come in the position of the land, when the Nile (or Nole, then) emptied into what is now the Atlantic Ocean, on the Congo end of the country. What is now as the Sahara was a fertile land.

It turned out to be true. The space shuttle Columbia took radar images of the Sahara in 1981 and discovered that buried beneath the great desert, there once existed a vast system of stream channels, broad flood plains, and river valleys, some of which were as wide as those of the Nile. It confirmed what scientists had long suspected: this region was once wet enough to support plants, animals, and humans thousands of years ago. So why is it so arid now? It's because the Sahara originally dried out 2 million years ago at the start of the Ice Age, but brief rainy periods occurred about 200,000, 60,000 and 10,000 years ago. (You can also read an NYT article about ancient tribes living in the once fertile Sahara.)

So the Nile used to flow west and empty into the Atlantic Ocean. Why did it change course? Who knows? There is no evidence that the ancient and modern systems were once connected. Make your own theory.

GoodGuide.com

From their website:

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Government-run pot garden in Mississippi

The Coy W. Waller Laboratory Complex on the campus of the University of Mississippi is where the U.S. government manages the nation's only legal pot garden.

Since 1968 the university has been allowed to grow, harvest, and process marijuana in order to ship it to licensed facilities across the country for research purposes. It also gathers samples of pot confiscated by police to determine its potency and see if a certain strain makes it big on the streets. That way, officers would be better informed on the type of weed people are smoking before locking them up in an overcrowded jail.

The lab has about 500 plants, with an overall weight estimated at 10 to 15 kilos.

Does it matter if you sign a contract with a name that's not your own?

No, courts have always said that names really don't carry that much weight. You can use any name, character, or symbol you like. The important thing is your identity and that you understand the terms of the contract.

In lots of cases, you will be held accountable for the contract even if you didn't sign anything at all, as long as you agree to the conditions. There are, however, contracts that require a signature -- marriage, debt defaults, and agreements to sell interest in real property -- but they too don't need your real name.

Missing link?

A 47 million year-old primate fossil in Germany may be a key link in explaining human evolution. It is of a raccoon-sized female, resembling a lemur, that is said to be "the most complete primate fossil ever found." It has opposable thumbs similar to those of modern-day humans but unlike those of other mammals. It also has fingernails instead of claws, and it might have been able to walk on two legs.

The fossil was discovered by amateur fossil hunters in 1983, at a site where many remains have been found from 50 million years ago. News of it was leaked last week. This newly found specimen is being named Darwinius masillae, and the History channel will air a two-hour documentary entitled The Link, to be shown on May 25.

Delaware

Delaware is the only state not to have a national park. The reason for this is the First State doesn't have the large open land required for one. So I guess Rhode Island, the smallest state, has large open land.

A couple weeks ago U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and a few other politicians and government officials detailed plans to designate a series of historic sites throughout Delaware in hopes of establishing its first national park.

Perambulator

Perambulator is what the Brits call a baby carriage, I guess to make it sound fancy. It also refers to a device for measuring distance.

Jack Churchill

Jack Churchill, or "Mad Jack," was a WWII British soldier known for his eccentricities. He fought with bow, arrows, and a sword, and played his bagpipes in the wee hours of the morning. He was once quoted as saying, “In my opinion, sir, any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed.”

In his later years Mad Jack confused train conductors and passengers by throwing out his briefcase out the train window on the way home. He explained that he tossed it into his backyard so he wouldn't have to carry it from the station.

Capitalist or entrepreneur?

Geoff Nunberg was on Think (the flagship program of the Dallas NPR station) promoting his new book The Years of Talking Dangerously, which discusses society's tendency to invent euphemisms for words to which we attach a particular mistrust. He said this that I hadn't thought of:

[The word] capitalist got a bad name in the late 19th and early 20th century, when it evoked all those top-hatted plutocrats and so on. And although capitalism was redeemed, capitalist (the word) wasn't, so you very rarely see Bill Gates referred to as a great capitalist. And Wall Street doesn't sing the virtues of our own American capitalists.

Entrepreneurs is the word that's used. In fact, entrepreneurs is the word that's used now even within corporations; they want their employees to be entrepreneurial, which means that they'd behave as if it were their own business. They have a sense of ownership, another word that's evoked in this context.

So entrepreneurs has been shifted to this other meaning, but in the hope that it will still retain the positive value that it had when it referred to the people that started these great businesses.

The clip starts at the 16:18 mark.

People actually DO worship the Jedi!

Yesterday I learned about a small group of people in the U.S. (and possibly elsewhere) who speak the language Klingon. Today I learned about a group of people in the UK who worship Star Wars characters, more specifically the Jedi, who are comprised of such make-believe personalities as Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda.

In 2001 about 404,000 people in Great Britain listed their religion as Jedi. The government laughed its ass off and put them down as atheists. Last year two brothers founded the UK Church of the Jedi, where they offer sermons on the Force, lightsaber training, and meditation techniques.

So now maybe the UK government will reluctantly add another category for Religion once the next census comes around. Or maybe they'll just laugh it up again and keep intentionally mistaking the Jedi worshippers as atheists. I'd bet on the latter.

Extra: Eight of these morons are serving with Scotland's largest police force. And they managed to proselytize two staff members.

People actually DO speak Klingon!

I don't know that much about Star Trek but I do recognize a Klingon when I see one. The first time I heard about them was on The Colbert Report a year and a half ago (don't try to skip over any of it, the clip is funny as hell):

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Honor-Bound
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Gay Marriage

Well, today when I was surfing Slate.com, I ran across this article. Marc Okrand, a linguist whose dissertation was a grammar of a now-extinct Native American language, invented the Klingon language and has even sold 250,000 copies of his Klingon dictionary. Okrand was hired by the producer of Star Trek II to write dialogue in Vulcan (another species on the show, the one to which Spock belongs) between two characters. Two years later he was hired again for Star Trek III, this time to write some scenes in Klingon.

He needed to make the language sound tough and macho, matching the demeanor of the warrior race. So the linguist combined Hindi, Arabic, Tlingit, and Yiddish to make the Klingon language incorporate all of those back-of-the-throat noises. And the language structure works like a mix of Japanese, Turkish, and Mohawk, but way more complex. In Spanish, there are 5 or 6 (depending on the country) conjugations of a verb, which all use suffixes. In Klingon, there are 29 and they all use prefixes. They indicate the person and the number of the subject, and the object.

To confuse matters further, Klingon also has 36 verb suffixes and 29 noun suffixes that reveal everything from the desire of the speaker to do something, to possession, to negation, and to other meaningless things that will only stress you out if you want your structure to be 100% accurate. Here is the Klingon word (not a phrase) for They are apparently unable to cause us to prepare to resume honorable suicide (in progress).

nuHegh'eghrupqa'moHlaHbe'law'lI'neS

There are about 20 or 30 people who can speak this language in an unscripted and casual conversation, and perhaps a few hundred who can read and write Klingon. So instead of learning, say, Spanish, which is becoming almost a second must-know language in the U.S., they would much rather prefer a fake and damn near impossible-to-learn language that they will never use and will only get them made fun of. But as long as they stay in their parents' basements then it's OK.

Extra: There is no Klingon word for hello; the closest is a translation for What do you want? This is because the Klingon race is so manly and laden with testosterone that they can never display any sort of perceived softness, even in the case of saying hello.

Why do pigeons live in cities?

There are two answers to this.

Pigeons that live in the cities descend from the rock pigeon, a bird that has adapted well to domestication. People brought the creatures to the cities for such things as food, pets, and simply for show. Birds that were released or escaped became feral city pigeons.

As to why they normally don't go outside urban areas: cityscapes more closely resemble the steep cliffs from which the rock pigeon originated. It's in their instincts to live somewhere with tall and closed structures where they have been residing for many generations.

Epicanthic fold

Epicanthic folds are skin folds of the upper eyelid covering the inner corner of the eye. It is most common in Asians, where the term "slanted eyes" is used to describe them. Their eyes are not really slanted, they just appear that way.

One evolutionary hypothesis for why epicanthic folds came into existence involves the climate in Asia, especially that of central Asia. Most Asian people originated from Mongolia, where there are lots of snow and sunlight. Because the sunlight hitting the snow would eventually make people blind, humans of this region developed an extra fold to protect the eyes from extra UV radiation.

All humans develop epicanthic folds in the womb but most lose them by birth. If they show on someone whose lineage does not display this trait, it may be a sign of Down syndrome or Williams syndrome, among other disorders. This can be caused by inbreeding, endogamy, fetal alcohol syndrome, etc.

Mike Rogers

Mike Rogers is a gay rights activist who runs the blog BlogActive. He outs and reports on closeted politicians who hypocritically vote against issues involving gay rights. He has never incorrectly outed someone who was not a homosexual.

The new movie Outrage, directed by Kirby Dick (This Film Is Not Yet Rated) and featuring Rogers, sheds light on outed policy makers (national, state, or local) with deplorable anti-gay voting records.

George Bridgetower

George Bridgetower was the mulatto son of a Polish-German mother and an Afro-Caribbean father. He was considered a musical prodigy, playing the violin as early as 9 years old, and possibly meeting such big names as Joseph Haydn and even Thomas Jefferson. More importantly, he inspired Ludwig van Beethoven and helped shape the development of classical music. In 1803 in Vienna, Bridgetower and Beethoven performed "Sonata Mulattica" publicly for the first time.

Few of Bridgetower's work survives today, but he associated with the greats of his time: Giovanni Viotti, the violin virtuoso, and Samuel Wesley, the organist and composer.

Bridgetower's music career never panned out (for obvious reasons) and his story has been buried deep until Rita Dove's new book Sonata Mulattica: Poems.

Psychic theories of why we dream

Why do we dream? I'll be exploring some evolutionary theories from a psychic perspective by paraphrasing a part in Diane Hennacy Powell's book The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena.

First off, REM (dreaming) sleep occurs in birds (which split from reptiles) and all mammals except the egg-laying ones, the only surviving ones being the platypus and the spiny anteater. So REM sleep probably emerged after the split from the common ancestor for marsupial, placental, and egg-laying mammals but before the split from an ancestor common to placental and marsupial mammals. Radiocarbon dating puts the schism between egg-layers and and other mammals at about 150 to 210 million years ago, and that of marsupials and placental mammals at 130 million years ago. That means the evolution of REM sleep started happening sometime between 130 and 210 million years ago.

Mammals and birds began using the limbic system -- the emotional apparatus of the brain and that which produces dreams -- much more than the reptiles preceding them. For example, mammalian and avian babies became more dependent on their mothers for survival. Since these babies were also fewer in number, their being became more important. The limbic system promoted social bonding and nurturing behaviors in the offspring.

Because survival was so crucial, more protection was needed and natural selection propagated the genes which led the way for psychic abilities. Jon Tolaas proposed a theory that helpless newborns spend so much of their time in REM sleep because dreaming lets them psychically detect threats to telepathically communicate to their parent(s). Indeed, humans, cats, rabbits, and dogs are species that are most helpless at birth and who also sleep the most. Tolaas' theory incorporates the research that telepathic dreams happen mainly during times of crisis and between loved ones. This rings true with anecdotes of mothers who wake up in the middle of the night without knowing why, then check on their children seconds before they awake crying.

Mark Mahowald advanced the idea that "almost the entire state of being before we're born is REM (dreaming) sleep." When a baby is still in the womb, dreaming is useless in shielding the child from predators and enemies, but it could be necessary for something else. Hypnotized people have accurately described traumatic events that happened in the outside world when they were in the womb. This enhances the possibility that a dreaming baby can access external information while within the womb. This theory is also supported by the fact that human newborns can immediately distinguish their mother's voice from those of other women, even though the mother's voice my be very muffled as heard from the inside of the womb. The newborn's uncanny aptitude to acclimate to the shock of the outside world might be aided by clairvoyant or precognitive dreams before birth.

Michel Jouvet developed the argument that dreaming allows the testing and practicing of genetically programmed behaviors in sleep. Doing things in dreams is just like actually doing them as far as the body is concerned, so dreams can help one cultivate one's skills. Jack Nicklaus, renowned golfer, claimed that he discovered a new way to grip his golf club in a dream that improved his game by ten strokes overnight. Psychoanalysts believe that many dreams substitute one's wishes for achieving something, so dreams may be a means by helping us develop our skills for the goal.

Whatever the true cause for dreams, psychic or not, I'm tired. So I hope I get as much REM sleep tonight as I can.

Mirror neurons

Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha will be a new search engine that is supposed to be "a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does." So if you ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Or if you want to find out what the weather was like in Sao Tome when President Nixon gave the Checkers speech, it will cross-check and provide the answer.

This is not a wiki, however. It is vetted by experts first and will probably need about 1,000 people to regularly update its databases. Mind you, these are all geeks, so the pop culture questions we'll be putting into the search engine will confuse the software, which is a major weakness thus far.

Wolfram Alpha was created by Dr. Stephen Wolfram, the guy whose software (Mathematica) we higher math nerds love because we can just type in the equations and get the answers right before the homework is due. Dr. Wolfram is 49 years old and got his PhD in particle physics by the age of 20, so the guy is clearly smart. I don't know if his new invention will take over titans like Google and Wikipedia, though. At least not instantly. Once he completes all the pop culture stuff, possibly by teaming up with one or both of the aforementioned entities, then Wolfram Alpha will be the next Kobe Bryant of the internet. It's already being hailed as something like a LeBron James, even before making its debut (set to be later this month).

Anyway, I'm tired of googling something to death (try Ratchet of Progress, you won't find it) and still not being able to get something that's damn near uncrawlable. So this is a welcome change.

Lisa McPherson

Lisa McPherson's story is the clearest example why the Church of Scientology shouldn't even exist.

New York Times special report in December 1997.
St. Petersburg Times follow-up in March 2004.

Be outspoken, ladies!

Research has shown that in a relationship, women who are not outspoken with their husbands are four times more likely to die at an earlier age as opposed to women who speak their minds. There is no difference, however, in a man's life span whether he is outspoken or not. The reasons for this are still unclear.

Listen to the Jerilyn Ross interview with Diane Rehm (26:36 mark).