TapwaterJ's blog, page 1

Online nowTapwaterJ: David is a 54 year old married guy from Chapel Hill, Awaiting Extradition To, Argentina.; Likes 21,034 pages, 649 videos, 1,886 photos • 1,595 fans • Received 385 reviews; Member since Mar 20, 2007

Favorites » His Blog

Display:
List
• Grid

Declaration of Independence: 6:07am 1 review history, usa •http://usgovinfo.about.com/bldecind.htm; "We must all hang together, gentlemen . . . else, we shall most assuredly hang separately."

Benjamin Franklin. July 4, 1776

"To Hell with King George . . . again."

Tapwater Jackson. July 4, 2008

Stars & Stripes Forever - - Muppets Variation

Long Trip: Magic Mushrooms Transcendent Effect Lingers: Scientific American

Jul 2, 7:07am

3 reviews

chemistry, science, brain, psychedelics •http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=l...

Long Trip: Magic Mushrooms' Transcendent Effect Lingers

Profound mental changes induced by psilocybin have lasted for more than a year

Scientific American, David Biello

"People who took magic mushrooms were still feeling the love more than a year later, and one might say they were on cloud nine about it, scientists report in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

"Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives," comparing it with the birth of a child or the death of a parent, says neuroscientist Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who lead the research. "It's one thing to have a dramatic experience you say is impressive. It's another thing to say you consider it as meaningful 14 months later. There's something about the saliency of these experiences that's stunning."

Griffiths gave 36 specially screened volunteers psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms. The compound is believed to affect perception and cognition by acting on the same receptors in the brain that respond to serotonin, a neurotransmitting chemical tied to mood.

Afterward, about two thirds of the group reported having a "full mystical experience," characterized by a feeling of "oneness" with the universe. When Griffiths asked them how they were doing 14 months later, the same proportion gave the experience high marks for transcendental satisfaction, and credited it with increasing their well-being since then."

Alexander Shulgin - Psychonaut

~ ~ ~

Photos: Ewa Brzozowska - fotocommunity: Jul 1, 7:33am 1 review photography •http://www.fotocommunity.com/pc/pc/my...; The Last Day Of Spring

ewa brzozowska homepage

The New York Times & Log In: Jun 29, 5:43pm 2 reviews jazz, politics, music •http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/art...; Music

When Ambassadors Had Rhythm

The New York Times, Fred Kaplan

"Half a century ago, when America was having problems with its image during the cold war, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the United States representative from Harlem, had an idea. Stop sending symphony orchestras and ballet companies on international tours, he told the State Department. Let the world experience what he called "real Americana": send out jazz bands instead.

Jazz was the country's "Secret Sonic Weapon" (as a 1955 headline in The New York Times put it) in another sense as well. The novelist Ralph Ellison called jazz an artistic counterpart to the American political system. The soloist can play anything he wants as long as he stays within the tempo and the chord changes -- just as, in a democracy, the individual can say or do whatever he wants as long as he obeys the law. Willis Conover, whose jazz show on Voice of America radio went on the air in 1955 and soon attracted 100 million listeners, many of them behind the Iron Curtain, once said that people "love jazz because they love freedom."

Benny Goodman in Moscow in 1962.

Count Basie in what was then Rangoon, Burma, 1971.

Dizzy Gillespie in 1956 in Zagreb, in what was then Yugoslavia.

Dave Brubeck in Baghdad, 1958.

Jazz Ambassadors Slide Show

~ ~ ~

Photos by F. Monteiro - photo.net: Jun 28, 10:48am 3 reviews photography •http://photo.net/photodb/member-photo...; Ocean

f. monteiro

Seed: Hunting Paper Tigers

Jun 27, 7:11am

1 review

government, internet, science, china •http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008...

Hunting Paper Tigers

China's netizens and scientists demand accountability.

Seed, Jane Qiu

"It's an exciting discovery that never was. At a press conference organized by the forestry bureau of China's Shanxi province last October, a farmer publicized photos he claimed to have taken of a South China tiger in the woods. As the species, last spotted in the wild in 1964, had been declared functionally extinct, the news caused much excitement around the world.

However, Fu De-zhi, a professor at the Beijing-based Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, noted that the plants are not to scale in relation to the tiger and questioned the photos' authenticity. In November a Chinese blogger posted an image of a tiger used in Chinese calendars; the creature and its pose look identical to those in the photographs "taken" by the farmer. The blog attracted tens of thousands of hits overnight, with many netizens pointing out additional flaws in the farmer's photos.

Public outcry, bolstered by the Chinese media, has put tremendous pressure on government officials. China's State Forestry Bureau ordered its Shanxi branch to set up a committee to investigate the incident. Although several researchers in forensics and image verification have concluded the photos are fake, officials in Shanxi have yet to release the results of their own investigation."

The South China Tiger Photographs

~ ~ ~

Times Square - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Jun 20, 12:23pm 1 review usa, new-york, times-square •http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Sq...; Times Square

I will be in a hotel overlooking Times Square for the next five days, attending a conference and speaking about IT security issues. You can watch the constant flow of Times Square on several Web cams, so look for me. I am the one with dark hair, a blazer, dress slacks, and a maroon tie. I will wave. Don't confuse me with the Naked Cowboy. I prefer boxers and smaller venues.

"Times Square is a major intersection in Manhattan, New York City at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue and stretching from West 42nd to West 47th Streets. The Times Square area consists of the blocks between Sixth and Eighth Avenues from east to west, and West 40th and West 53rd Streets from south to north, making up the western part of the commercial area of Midtown Manhattan.

Formerly Longacre Square, Times Square was renamed after the Times Building (now One Times Square), the former offices of The New York Times, in April 1904. Like the Red Square in Moscow, Trafalgar Square in London, and Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Times Square has achieved the status of an iconic world landmark and has become a symbol of its city. Times Square is principally defined by its animated, digital advertisements."

I wonder if this conference will still be going when I get there . . .

Official Times Square Site

~ ~ ~

One in Three Stars May Have "Super"-Earths: Scientific American

Jun 19, 8:26am

7 reviews

astronomy, science, cosmos •http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=m...

One in Three Stars May Have Super-Earths

Scan of nearby stars turns up super-Earth bonanza

Scientific American, JR Minkel

"The most detailed survey yet of planets orbiting nearby stars indicates that a full 30 percent of them may harbor jumbo versions of our own planet. Astronomers who presented the finding this week at an international conference also announced they had discovered a star system bearing three such super Earths -- potentially rocky planets up to 10 times as massive as our own.

Both results come from the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) instrument at the European Southern Observatory on La Silla mountain in Chile, which looks for tiny changes in the color of starlight that indicate the star is wobbling under the sway of an orbiting planet. The frequency and strength of the wobbles tells researchers the approximate mass of the planet, its distance from the star and the time it takes to complete an orbit.

According Queloz and crew's preliminary results, reported this week in Nantes, France, at a conference on super-Earths, nearly 30 percent of them do have planets after all. "It turns out that a large fraction of the stars that we had believed had no planets actually have planets, but of small mass," Queloz says. He says that he and his colleagues have closely analyzed about 45 stars on their list."

La Silla Observatory

~ ~ ~

Little Birds on the Behance Network: Jun 18, 6:11am 13 reviews humor, arts, illustration •http://www.behance.net/Gallery/Little...; Little Birds

Generally up to no good . . .

kate wilson

Tyrannosaur Trap - National Geographic Magazine: Jun 17, 7:36am 3 reviews paleontology •http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/200...; Tyrannosaur Trap

The Real Jurassic Park

A fossil bonanza in northwestern China.

Peter Gwin, National Geographic Staff, Photograph by Ira Block

"Perhaps the shriek of a dying animal enticed the dinosaur into the trap. Or maybe it was the scent of rotting flesh. Whatever the bait, once the predator was lured into the mud pit, it quickly forgot its prey. It thrashed futilely in the mire for a long while, but its legs couldn't reach the bottom. Doomed, the animal slowly accepted its fate and succumbed to exposure, but not before its struggle attracted another predator to the pit, continuing the cycle of the death trap. Eventually the mud turned to stone, entombing its victims, stacked one on top of another, for 160 million years.

This is the story contained in a column of rock unearthed in northwestern China's Junggar Basin. But that column is just part of a startling collection of fossils excavated over the past seven years by paleontologists James Clark and Xu Xing with support from the National Geographic Society. Their discoveries are opening a new window onto an obscure period in Earth's geologic history--a violent interval that lasted from about 165 to 155 million years ago and saw the continents breaking apart and dinosaurs undergoing a burst of evolution."

Earliest known ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex

Photo Gallery

~ ~ ~

Please login or join to view older archives

StumbleUpon

Favorites » His Blog

People he is a fan of

Show pages he liked about