Sahara Forest Project uses sunlight and seawater to produce food, fuel, and drinking water. A pilot plant will be constructed near the Red Sea in Jordan (1/21/11) – MSNBC.com

Hollywood is obsessed with explosive – and expensive – stunts. And those who have to perform them are paying the price (Saturday, 15 January 2011) – The Independent (UK)

Courtesy’s Sad Substitute (1/14/11) – Wall Street Journal  A decade ago Amtrak started designating “Quiet Cars” in which there was to be no cellphone yammering, no insect-like buzzing or muted thumping bleeding from headphones, no keening conversations. Now commuter lines are finally following suit.

Related: Colonial Manners, Based on the Exercise of a Schoolboy* – The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation George Washington, sometime before the age of 16, transcribed Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour In Company and Conversation. (Original errors in numbering have been corrected; original spelling is unchanged.)

 Beijing boasts in Times Square, but are they really Chinese?(1/21/11) – MSNBC.com – The video is supposed to introduce the U.S. – and the world – to Chinese people who have excelled and brought Chinese citizens a sense of pride.But it wasn’t long before someone posted a discovery on Twitter: At least three celebrities shown in the video are U.S. citizens; even more have permanent residency status in the U.S.

Cheers! Eight ancient drinks uncorked by science  – MSNBC.com

Memo to RMN: In the event of a moon disaster – Roger Ebert’s Journal Photocopy of a predrafted speech for Richard Nixon in case the Apollo 11 astronauts were unable to leave the moon.  – Mike Continue reading →

This video was made by the people at my wife’s friend’s lab.

One day, 26,000 hits! I think it’s going viral!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtube_gdata_player&v=Fl4L4M8m4d0

A 240-Year-Old Map Is Reborn (NY Times, 1/16/11): [Go to story to see map. Try to enlarge as much as possible, because the detail is amazing! – Mike] In May 2010, a tattered and brittle map was discovered in storage at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Experts identified it as a rare item, a Bernard Ratzer “Plan of the City of New York” map in its 1770 state. Until then, only three copies were thought to exist. After a painstaking restoration to remove layers of shellac and grime and repair dozens of breaks, the map is now behind plexiglass and ready to be displayed to the public. Below is the map before, left, and after restoration. For more details on the map and the story of its restoration, go to the related article.

“If you live to the age of a hundred, you have it made, because very few people die past the age of a hundred.” – George Burns (More George Burns quotes: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0122675/bio)

When I write commentaries about news or historical events, I like to find reliable information sources and cite them as needed. Right now, however, I am out of town with a laptop computer shared by three people. The other two are a Harvard student and a research scientist, so you can guess where I am in that pecking order.

Which is why this has been mainly a “Tweet week”.

And this is why I’ve you’ve heard nothing from me here about the assassination attempt on Rep.Gabrielle Giffords. 

Jared Loughner was pretty obviously a deeply disturbed young man. His mental issues went beyond the subtleties requiring a psychological evaluation. He was sufficiently odd that he, to quote a young female classmate’s email, “scared the crap out of [her].” When she was in class with him, she kept her purse close at hand and sat by a door for a fast escape if the necessity arose. Continue reading →