According to a Texas jury, it was OK for a man to say "shit" when referring to cat shit to a 13-year old neighbor child. More precisely, his use of the word "shit" didn't constitute "disorderly conduct."
I caught this on Reddit.com. Even if (like me) you know next to nothing about guns, this will impress you. Meet deservedly cocky Bob Munden:
What do young Jewish adults in Israel and the U.S. think of Barack Obama's speech in Cairo? Max Blumenthal got an earful of offensive language, much of it hateful toward Obama. Who looks moderate now?
The context for this post is provided by Michael Lynton, CEO of Sony Pictures, who recently stated:
I'm a guy who sees nothing good having come from the Internet. Period."
Now, in light of that bizarre, politically motivated statement, what's going on at the FCC? FreePress advises:At this very minute, the Federal Communications Commission is crafting America's first national broadband plan. Whether the plan will give more control over our Internet to the likes of Sony Pictures, Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable and Verizon depends on what we do right now.
These companies' well-heeled lobbyists are flooding the FCC's public docket with comments in support of policies that let them:
What can you do to keep things on track at the FCC? Write a comment to the FCC. It will only take a minute. Let your voice counter-balance the monied corporate interests that are trying to grab hold of the Internet for the sole purpose of squeezing out profits, just as they grabbed hold of all other electronic media during prior decades. Note that we now have a president who is committed to keeping the Internet open and free:
- Tilt the Web’s level playing field to favor the Web sites of corporate partners;
- Deploy content-sniffing devices that would randomly open and sift through our private Web communications;
- Impose usage penalties on people who use the Web for more than simple e-mail and Web surfing;
- Block innovative Web services that compete against their phone, cable and entertainment products; and
- Disconnect users for any reason or without justification
Want to watch/read an entertaining and inspiring three-part discussion covering the frontier of astronomy? All you need to do is follow this link to the article and videos at Discover Magazine. The participants include Saul Perlmutter, Debra Fischer, Mike Brown and Andrea Ghez, in a panel moderated by Discover's Phil Plait. It's lively, accessible and mind-blowing. Here are a few of my favorite quotes: [Debra Fischer]
We started out with a solar system where many planetesimals were forming, and that evolved into a system where all the stable niches are filled. To me that’s one of the most exciting discoveries in this field.
[Mike Brown][I]t’s the small objects that really matter. The small ones are little particles that sit in the outer solar system, and they’re gravitationally swept around by planets. The analogy I like is that these objects in the outer solar system are the blood splattered on the wall after some horrendous murder. I love this analogy—it’s disturbing, but I love it. As Debra just suggested, there might have been additional planets that used to be here in our solar system [but were ejected due to gravitational instability]. The bodies have all been removed.
[Andrea Ghez]The question that I started off with was, I thought, very simple. It was just “Is there a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way?” But one of the things I love about science is that you always end up with new questions. What happened with my research is that the stars we studied to prove that there was a black hole turned out to be very young. Young stars have absolutely no right to be next to a black hole because a black hole should shear them apart. We have no idea how these stars formed. So that’s one of the major questions we’re trying to address today: “How do baby stars form next to this completely inhospitable object?”