Posted by mixin on Monday, March 2, 2009,
In :
Everything Else
Or be a soulless version of you?" was the title of a thought-provoking article by Jesse Bering over at Scientific American. I must admit, I've never given any consideration to whether or not my clone would have a soul. As a Christian, I believe we all have souls and, as a kid, I must have asked my grandma a thousand times if my pets had souls so they could go to Heaven, too. The one conclusion I came to (during my youthful pondering) was when man has the ablity to create man, that would likel... Continue reading...
Posted by mixin on Friday, February 20, 2009,
In :
Our Planet
I always thought digging for fossils would be a fun job; until I seriously thought about the extreme weather conditions a person would be working in. So my fossil hunting was always limited to scanning any pile of rocks I happened to find, the shallows of Lake Michigan for Indian beads, railroad tracks and yes, even friends' lanscaping rocks. When I was selling real estate, on at least 2 occasions, the sellers let me have my choice of their collections. I recently went to an estate sale where ... Continue reading...
Posted by mixin on Wednesday, February 4, 2009,
In :
Everything Else
All my friends know I've always liked animals; even as a kid, I wanted to take a live lobster home from the grocery store. Eating it was the last thing I wanted; all I could think of was what a nice pet one would make. As I got older, I tried dining on lobster a few times but I could just never get past that *pet* thing. Even today, when I go by the lobster tank at the grocery store, they tug at my heart strings a little and I try not to look at them. When I saw this great story at Spiegel onl... Continue reading...
Posted by mixin on Wednesday, February 4, 2009,
In :
U.S. Economy
I was watching Tv the other night and I caught a bit of someone from the Federal Reserve being questioned by one of our elected officials. The issue was: who are the recipients our almost 2 trillion dollars which is still unaccounted for and why are you being so secretive about them? The answer went something like: *We're talking about them now, so it's obviously no secret. We just aren't going to name names and risk losing consumer confidence in those businesses*. Since I had found the site l... Continue reading...
Posted by mixin on Wednesday, February 4, 2009,
In :
U.S. Economy
I've been curious about the agreements between the banks and the Federal Reserve but haven't seen anything about them until just recently when I found the SEC filing by one of them. We know there aren't really any rules or regulations as to how the banks were supposed to spend the money; although most of us took it for granted they were going to use it to help stimulate the ecnomy. We now know the first part of the package was used for just about everything but that purpose. So here is a short ... Continue reading...
Posted by mixin on Sunday, January 18, 2009,
In :
Pictures
I saw an article today from Space Weather about ice flowers. As long as I've lived in Indiana, I have never heard of these; so I did a quick Google search and got almost 3 million hits. So far, I'm not finding anything about them in Indiana. Most of the pictures of the flowers have been from our southern states and appear to happen when the ground is still warm but the air temp drops low enough to cause a frost. It seems like we should have those same conditions in the fall.
Chyenne Star of Ed... Continue reading...
Posted by mixin on Wednesday, January 14, 2009,
In :
Medical
As much as I now hate to admit it, I have always been trusting of our government and its divisions... until the last 8 years or so. I *thought* the FDA was going a good job of keeping our drugs and food safe; but then the drugs recalls became more and more frequent and food safety (or lack of it) is becoming a familiar topic of discussion. This recent New York Times article by Garniner Harris enlightens us on just how lax the FDA and the National Institutes of Health really are. According to t... Continue reading...
Posted by mixin on Tuesday, January 13, 2009,
In :
All Things Oil
Earlier on my blog, I posted several charts showing the sudden rise and plunge of the cost of oil. I've read many articles indicating it was the result of supply and demand and the greedy oil producers. I even gave some consideration to the idea that the transportation sector was stockpiling fuel in the event of a pandemic or terrorist attack, as has been recommended by our government. None of these quite made sense to me, so I began to look to the speculators. It's taken a while of searching ... Continue reading...
Posted by mixin on Tuesday, January 13, 2009,
In :
U.S. Economy
One of Obama's many promises while campaigning was he will open the North American Free Trade Agreement for renegotiation. He apparently has a fair amount of support; according to the following linked article at Organic Consumers, the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch recent report notes the gain of 28 fair-trade members in the House and 7 senators who actively ran and won partly on that stance. Canada and Mexico both have their own issues with NAFTA; but for the U.S. the main issue is jobs.... Continue reading...
Posted by mixin on Friday, January 9, 2009,
In :
Pictures
This great picture was taken by Aleksandr Chernucho on the Kolyskia peninsula in Russia and posted on the Space Weather website.
What a great way to remind us that the biggest full moon of the year, known as perigee Moon, is coming this weekend.
Go to http://spaceweather.com/ to see the camera settings and other equally beautiful pics. Thanks to all for sharing!!
Continue reading...
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