We're all glad that the British sailors are back home. Anyone following this story knows that these sailors were treated graciously by their Iranian captors. Nonetheless, while in captivity, the British sailors admitted that they had been trespassing in Iranian waters when whey were apprehended. But notice some of the things that…
Here's a short, well-written essay on one of the major problems with what now passes for "education": [W]e provide students with a meager curriculum which overemphasizes test taking, which neglects the essential and perennial issues of being a human being and which fails to give students a means of expressing…
Take a look at this beautiful movie image of Saturn taken by NASA:
This nighttime movie of the depths of the north pole of Saturn taken by the visual infrared mapping spectrometer onboard NASA’s Cassini Orbiter reveals a dynamic, active planet lurking underneath the ubiquitous cover of upper-level hazes. The defining feature of Saturn’s north polar regions–the six-sided hexagon feature–is clearly visible in the image.
“Who built that hexagon on top of Saturn?” one might ask. No one built it. It’s a self-organized pattern. And the area of the hexagon is large enough to fit four earths.
This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.
But this striking pattern is merely one of the huge numbers of beautiful self-organized patterns one can find in our universe. In Dynamic Patterns: the Self Organization of Brain and Behavior (1997), J. A. Scott Kelso describes the mysterious-seeming emergence of such dynamic patterns:
…Patterns in general emerge in a self-organized fashion, without any agent-like entity ordering the elements, telling them when and where to go . . . [S]ystems that are pumped
I wondered whether this link was pushing the boundary of good taste, so I checked with Jason and Grumpypilgrim and got their quick OK's. Now you know where to complain. If you've been wondering what really spurs the neocons on, click here. If you like it, I'll take the credit.
My wife and I adopted our two wonderful daughters from China on two separate occasions, in 1999 and 2001. We very much appreciated the way that the Chinese orphanages took good care of our daughters. When we traveled to China to meet our daughters, we were treated well by the many Chinese people we met who ran China’s adoption program. Everything was straight-forward and as we expected. I also cannot say enough good things about Children’s Hope International, the American adoption agency we used.
Throughout the adoption process one bit of irony repeatedly occurred to my wife and I: We had to be highly scrutinized before being allowed to adopt. The Chinese government (and our own agency) wanted to make certain that we were going to be good parents. My wife and I sometimes commented to each other that absolutely anyone is qualified to have a biological child, whereas people trying to adopt were treated with suspicion. To be approved for adoption, we had to produce our arrest records, medical records, recommendation letters and a home study.
We periodically get newsletters from Children’s Hope. This month’s letter includes the current requirements for adopting a child from China. Interesting stuff. In fact, the requirements are much stricter than they were a few years ago:
Families are not eligible to adopt if any of the following …