Final Four
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5J6HcSP_nzavf0UJiZ4CZsc-vFyVPFI-zMVS1ur26zxiyn44HGz59x_upbMPnRJKRButTeOntAleIO5JJ9sjN-H7u8zVP2uCEcJovfV26VgJl6UTVDeYpGdfYY34H79llNN0l2g/s200/ncaaw-09.jpg)
I should take a hint: the only team I've rooted for since the early rounds that has won has been Stanford. So, Go Cardinal!
Labels: sports
Language Liberalism Freethought Birds
Verbing Weirds Language only if you're expecting it to work in a simple way. This is a special case of the more general truth that Language Weirds.
Only when a republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is in the wrong. There is no other time.
The church says Earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence in a shadow than the church.
If we can't find Heaven, there are always bluejays.
Labels: sports
13 minutes into the first half and UConn is only 1 point up.
Labels: sports
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Over at headsup: the blog, Fred has another insightful look at what Fox is doing when they say they're reporting. This time, Michiganistan and its threat to All We Hold Dear:
Dearborn is a Muslim dominated community, replete with mosques in every section of town and traditional foods from places like Pakistan and Syria. [ZOMG head for the hills they're coming for our cheerleaders!!!!! Our reporter needs to breathe deeply and visit -- oh, Dearborn's homepage! Wherein one can find a mayor named O'Reilly (a common Muslim terrorist name, as anybody at Fox ought to know), a city council populated by the likes of Tafelski, Hubbard, Thomas, Sareini, Shooshanian, Abraham and Darany, and a bunch of judges named Hultgren, Somers and Wygonik. True, the police chief is a Haddad, which is pretty scary, but we're going to get a lot of Schmidts and Herreras* in the dragnet if we bring him in for questioning. I think you'd have to be genuinely, massively delusional** to think of Dearborn as "Muslim-dominated," but it's a great place to eat. As long as you don't find the Arabic alphabet inherently terrifying.]It's part of Fred's long look at Fox and its agenda...
All that sort of suggests the point: This isn't journalism that's meant to inform, or to round up the current state of knowledge, or to set out a few sets of opposing viewpoints. It's journalism that's meant to scare.Good stuff, as always.
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Labels: birthdays
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Labels: birthdays
Happy Birthday to the most good-lookingest Ewan we know!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39A2J-yo2Nc
--Love, The Old Ladies
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Labels: sports
Well, I've got to go for the Big Ten team.
Like I said, I could live with Purdue. ABC, baby, ABC.
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Labels: sports
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Tonight Jeopardy! had a category called "First Lady Rhyme Time". The last clue: Julia Dent's Mother's Sisters
well there's always laugh too.
Of course, for the Brits it rhymes too, but the other way: Grawnt's awnts.
I believe that's spelled "laff", isn't it?
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Dead men alone bear frost and rain
On throbless heart and heatless brain,
And feel no stir of joy or pain.
Dead men alone are satiate;
They sleep and dream and have no weight,
To curb their rest, of love or hate.
I come to no flower but I pluck,
I raise no cup but I sip,
For a mouth is the best of sweets to suck;
The oldest wine's on the lip.
If I grow old in a year or two,
And come to the querulous song
Of "Alack and aday" and "This was true,
And that, when I was young,"
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This week's heaping helping of sciency goodness:
Labels: links, science, sciencelinks
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DVD: I got a nice set of Quatermass - the first one has only two extant episodes (oh, it's painful to think of the amount of great television just wiped away) but they included copies of the scripts for the missing ones.
Labels: entertainment
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Over at Language Log Roger Shuy has a post (comments not allowed) which begins:
Daniel Gross has a nice article in Slate called “Bubblespeak,” describing the way economists and politicians extend themselves, as Orwell put it, “to make lies sound truthful." Leading the list is “legacy loans,” “legacy securities,” and “legacy costs,” referring to those badly collateralized loans, mortgages, and problems of auto companies that we are hearing so much about in reports of the recent Federal Bank Rescue Plan. Linguist George Lakoff says “legacy” typically means something positive, while positive these financial instruments are not.All I can say is, legacy used this way - as a noun modifier, not as a standalone - doesn't have a positive connotation to me.
I agree with you, but I would go further, because in my experience the word (as a standalone) is as often as not full of darkness and drama and history on a grand scale. To me, it feels more at home in reference to a haunted castle (the legacy of a centuries-old political assassination) than it does in reference to my mother's diamond ring.
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Here's a wonderful analogy from a commenter named Indigo over at Slactivist (on the latest Left Behind post):
It boils down to a cultural difference. Although I didn't come up with it at the time, I've since clued in to the perfect analogy for the way Canadians (generally speaking - there are of course exceptions) think about religion. We treat it like underwear. We acknowledge that it exists and plays a role in the life of most people; we believe people should be able to obtain whatever kind of it they are comfortable in; we are even beginning to recognise that some people don't have much use for it and that's okay. But we are really not comfortable with people who run around showing theirs off in public and get a little freaked out about people who exhibit an interest in other people's, especially complete strangers'. To drag the analogy to the breaking point, relative to the Canadian political landscape, American politicians walk around without trousers on quite frequently.
Labels: freethought, links
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Today in Watkins, Minnesota, in 1921, Eugene McCarthy was born. I should have been for him in the '68 election, but I was young and I hated him for being alive when Bobby was dead... Older, I appreciated him more. We need men like him now.
«I should have been for him in the '68 election»
Indeed, and I was, in the mock election we had in my grade school.
And I have to add this, since many people are confused on the matter (including some who set up last year's Democratic National Convention): there's no connection, apart from the common last name, between Gene and the vile Joe McCarthy, of HUAC fame. None whatever.
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Today in 1936, in Arequipa, Peru, Mario Vargas Llosa was born. One of the great writers in the Latin American Boom, author of several brilliant novels (especially The Green House), Varga Llosa ran for the presidency of Peru, winning the first round but losing the run-off to Alberto Fujimori. He lives in London most of the time, returning to Peru for several months each year, and continues to write - his latest novel is 2006's The Bad Girl.
Labels: birthdays, entertainment
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Yesterday in 1874 Robert Frost was born in San Francisco.
His Collected Poems would come with me to that proverbial desert isle.
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Very creative shot. You have a good eye for detail. Thanks for sharing your creativeness.
That could be a painting! Exquisite shot and very creative indeed! Thanks for sharing! Have a great weekend!
The moon looks to be growing from the branch too. Well, I guess it's waning, so technically ungrowing, but yeah. Nice shot.
The moon is like a feather caught in the tree. Great.
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My brother recently moved from Denver, Colorado, to Zebulon, Georgia. I just sent him email asking if he was glad he had. His response?
yes!!! yes!!! yes!!!I reckon so...
Labels: miscellaneous
Ask him him in August.
Yeah - August is Georgia can be brutal. Hot and humid.
Well, he grew up in hot&humid summers. And at least you don't have to go outside and shovel 18" of humidity off your driveway and sidewalk!
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Today in 1859 Alfred Edward Housman was born in Worcestershire, England.
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Luke fulfills a number of the characteristics that you see in mythic heroes: A royal lineage that he grows up ignorant about in a simple, obscure way, and he has special powers and abilities that are brought out by a series of teachers.
In classic mythology, the hero reluctantly leaves the homeland (in Luke's case, the planet Tatooine) on a quest that takes him over a supernatural threshold into a strange land. A helper/co-hero such as space jockey Han Solo lends a steady hand through a series of ordeals. Comic relief is provided by tricksters such as the Greek muse Thalia or C3PO and R2-D2.
Ultimately, the hero must stand on his own, face the darkness and conquer it before returning to reality, stronger and wiser.
For Luke, the darkness was the evil side of the Force, a cosmic spiritualism that Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda taught him to harness for good purposes, another element of the Hero Cycle. Luke and Han, by association with the Force, both evolve from self-centered people into crusaders with a grand purpose. (source Steve Persall, St Petersburg Times Film Critic
Labels: birthdays, entertainment, links
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Christopher Clavius was born today in 1538 or maybe 1537, depending on when you count the year beginning, which was not Jan 1 back then. That's not the only thing we don't know for sure about this astronomer and mathematician - his surname may have been Klau, Clau, or even Schlüssel.
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Labels: birthdays, entertainment
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Just in case you don't already read Fred Clark's Slactivist regularly (which you should, and not just for his tour-de-force marathon dissection of Left Behind, either), head over and look at this:
Appreciate that Franks' notion of the "Dover effect" only makes sense if one believes that war is an option -- a choice that a supposedly fickle and weak-willed public may choose to stop choosing.
If this were actually the case -- if a given war really were optional, then it would also be a war that we should not have been fighting in the first place. It would be, in other words, an unjust war. And, therefore, it would be a war that a just nation cannot win -- a war for which "victory" is not one of the possible outcomes.
This is true regardless of public opinion. No amount of public support can make an unjust war winnable.
And just as an unjust war is unsustainable, with or without public support, so too protest against a just war tends to be unsustainable, with or without success on the battlefield.
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Trees are indeed amazing.
Next time you're standing next to a large tree, think about the fact that the brown wrinkly cylinder next to you is pumping vast amounts of water from the ground, up to the tips of every single branch and twig and leaf, right to the very top of its height. And is doing so in utter silence, with no moving parts, non-stop, every day of the year, for what might be several hundred years, while standing exposed to everything the elements can throw at it, without breaking down or requiring maintenance of any sort.
Things we take for granted because they are so common can be amazing when you stop to think about them.
It is amazing.
Never thought of it that way. :)
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Labels: birthdays
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The admin at my office is pregnant. Last week she found out it's a girl.
Labels: language
When I was in high school, I had a male classmate named Leslie. I imagine that's off-limits now.
This is a funny coincidence: This same topic -- boys' names becoming girls' names but not vice-versa -- was just covered on another blog I read here. With graphs!
"Leslie" was one of her examples. I've seen that one in action as well: my grandpa's middle name is Leslie, but the only Leslies I've ever met in my age group are girls.
Good insight - I'd never really noticed that the trend is so uni-directional. The linked graphs from comment 2 are good too. So I'm "worried" now.
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This is why I am finding my excitement for The Humanist Symposium renewed. This blog carnival is not about critiquing religion or mocking the superstitious, although my regular readers will know that I occasionally indulge in both. No, this carnival is about promoting humanism. With humanism, we have something that can be celebrated and promoted. Think of it as the yin to atheism's yang. We need both.Head over and celebrate.
I last hosted this gathering of the godless all the way back in July 2006, for its 44th edition, and nearly three years later, we're still going strong. In fact, the carnival has grown considerably - so much so that I decided to feature only one submission from each entrant, for the sake of brevity - but even so, the sheer scope of this post is a welcome testament to the growing outspokenness and influence of atheism in the First World.Definitely worth your time.
Labels: carnivals, freethought, links
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Labels: sports
Sorry about your Lady Vols - I saw the game. My Lady Hawkeyes lost too. I guess I'll have to cheer for LSU's teams; if I don't my son will disown me!
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This week's sciency goodness:
Labels: links, science, sciencelinks
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Film: The Great Buck Howard - I saw some lukewarm reviews, but I'm recommending it. Malkovich is weird (what's new?), Colin Hanks is low-key (ditto), and the story is both predictable (mostly) and sweet. But it made me smile - a lot. I like it.
Labels: entertainment
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This is cool. WVEC in Hampton Roads has an eagle cam from Norfolk Botanic Garden - two chicks hatched, one still in the shell (as of right now). While I was grabbing these screen shots, dad showed up with a fish.
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However questionable some of the data might have been, Bolt had a very great deal of themPart of it is also that "very great deal", too...
Witnesses speak of huge wavelike shakings of the earth; and though some speak of up to three full minutes of shaking, an unprecedented duration, most agree that it was just some forty or fifty seconds' worth of nightmarish movement that wrecked all the army huts, tore most of the trees from the earth, and killed a woman at the nearby Reed's Ranch. The local Kern River ran backward; fish were thrown hundreds of yards from where they swam in Tulare Lake; long zigzag cracks appeared in the ground at San Bernardino; massive ridges, five feet high and fifteen feet across, rose and started to snake through fields; the Los Angeles River was hurled out of its bed and began, if only briefly, to flow along another channel; and up on the Carrizo Plain the fault jerked so dramatically that many of the rivers coursing down from the Temblors were thrown off course by as much as thirty feet in a matter of microseconds.Did you catch it? As I said, I stopped at went back to see if I'd misread the first time. It "killed a woman" at the ranch, but "only two people (the rancher and one other man...)" were killed.
The event was felt across all Southern California. It was not felt at all north of Parkfield, because of the more lubricated nature of the ever-moving fault up there. Had it struck in modern times, it would have caused dreadful damage forty miles away in Los Angeles. But, as it was, only two people (the rancher and one other man in a village plaza) were killed; and the 4,000 people who lived in the sprawling village that was Los Angeles got little more than a jostling.
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"Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable."Or, as she put it in an interview with Guernica:
Yes, I think we have to be faithful to the context. But it’s very important to differentiate between fidelity and literalness. Because you can’t be faithful to words, words are different in different languages. You can’t be faithful to syntax, because that changes from one language to the other. But you can be faithful to intention and context. Borges allegedly said to one of his translators, “Don’t translate what I said. Translate what I meant to say.” That is, in fact, what a translator does. Because languages are very resonant and various levels of diction and styles of discourse echo in the mind of the native reader and native speaker. I always think that my job is to find the English that will resonate like the original Spanish for the English speaking reader.And here's a bit about translating García Márquez for the first time, from a piece in Criticas:
“I knew this Colombian writer was eccentric when he wrote me saying that he doesn’t use adverbs ending with -mente in Spanish and would like to avoid adverbs ending in -ly in English.” She remembers thinking, what do you say in English except slowly? “Well, I came up with all types of things, like without haste.”
Labels: birthdays, links, translation
First of all, Happy Birthday. Most of all, thank you for the beautiful work that you do. I work as a translator and a business woman. I love reading and experiencing the use and choice of words that my colleagues apply. Your hand is one of the most elegant and artistic. Thank you and enjoy your day.
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Labels: birthdays
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Alex just pronounced Caiaphas with two syllables - kaɪ'-fəs (KYE-fas).
It TOTALLY throws off the music in Jesus Christ Superstar to pronounce it KYE-fas! :)
Maybe he's just a DOO-a-fuss after all.
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Spring weather fluctuates. Snow one day, 60s two days later, and cool rainy days the week after that. Today the sky was gray as far as the eye could see. (Unlike the host photo, which you really must see - use link below)
But rain is good, right? And it's not a dull gray. It has some interest and texture to it.
And gray is beautiful in it's own way -- I suspect by this time of year we're just all sick of cold weather. This one, as Louise wrote, does have some texture and it is the promise of better things to come -- we just can't see them as easily! Happy SWF!
You made a grey day look beautiful, well done.
Have a great weekend!
Guy
Regina In Pictures
Call it silver and it feels so much better.
It's beautiful - I love the sandbar ripples in the clouds.
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Late this afternoon as I was taking some pictures of juncos in the grass, they suddenly scattered, shrieking in alarm. Overhead, a hawk sailed past, landing in a tree near the paved courtyard. He (she?) shifted from tree to tree around the area before sailing off again. I'm not sure what kind it was, though: the book says Sharpies are "blue-jay sized" and Cooper's are "crow sized", and this was bigger than a blue jay for sure. Also, his neck seems pale, like the picture of the Cooper's. On the other hand, in the (not terribly good) shot of him spreading his wings and tail as he takes off, they look like a Sharpie's: broad tail, pale wings. Anybody out there have a definitive answer?
Always a tough call, these two. If your a viewing distance was such that you could reliably say it was bigger than a jay, then I'd go with the Cooper's. Most of the time they're too far away from me, or flash by too quickly to be sure, so I end up saying, Oh there goes a ShinCoop!
Cooper's - the head isn't really round or small enough for a Sharpie and the tail is clearly rounded at the tip (caused by the outer tail feathers being shorter than the ones in the middle).
Oh, I was close enough. He wasn't ten yards away most of the time. It's just such a gray day!
Johh, thanks for the tip on the tail.
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Another wacky crossword clue: 4 letters, "Gull friend?"
Your knowledge of birds is your own undoing. "Erne" was my first guess because I have no clue what any of them look like or what they do. I just know that if I am doing a crossword puzzle and there is something about a bird on the shore... erne and egret seem to show up a lot.
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Labels: birthdays, civilrights, politics, race
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David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo:
Irony doesn't even begin to cover it...
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Oy. Doing the crossword - the clue is "She played both Anna Christie and Anna Karenina".
Labels: humor, miscellaneous
The famous actress, Great Gabor, of course, yes.
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Сейчас я буду очень много говорить, а вы будете очень внимательно слушать. Потом я буду говорить меньше, а вы будете слушать и думать, и, наконец, я совсем не буду говорить, и вы будете думать своей головой и работать самостоятельно, потому что моя задача как учителя - стать вам ненужным...
"Now I will speak a great deal, and you will listen very attentively. Then I will speak less, and you will listen and think, and finally I will not speak at all, and you will think to yourselves and work on your own, because my task as a teacher is to become unnecessary to you."
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Today in 1690 Christain Goldbach was born, in Königsberg, part of Brandenburg-Prussia.
Every even integer greater than 3 can be written as the sum of two primesremains unproved (though intuitively obvious), but he's also remembered for the the Goldbach–Euler theorem (also known as Goldbach's theorem), which states that the sum of 1/(p − 1) over the set of perfect powers p, excluding 1 and omitting repetitions, converges to 1. (The perfect powers are 4, 8, 9, 16, 25, 27 - whole numbers which are other whole numbers raised to a power (squared, cubed, etc).) So the theorem is that 1/3 + 1/7 + 1/8 + 1/15 + 1/24 ... = 1.
Labels: birthdays
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Oh, this is too funny. A category on Jeopardy! tonight is "The John C. Frémont Experience". Alex started off calling him "Fray-mon" but after three contestants and a taped clue-giver said "Free-mont" Alex started saying it that way, too.
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Nancy Franklin writes in the March 23d New Yorker (I love how magazines are dated, don't you?) about Bernie Madoff's guilty plea. Unfortunately, she betrays not only her contempt for Madoff but her ignorance of English:
Two sentences later, Madoff said, “When I began the Ponzi scheme, I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme.” As he read this, he betrayed no sense of how absurd it was to use the passive voice in regard to his scheme, as if it were a spell of bad weather that had descended on him. Still, he had faith—he “believed”!—that it would soon be over. Yes, “soon.” In most of the rest of the statement, one not only heard the aggrieved passive voice but felt the hand of a lawyer: “To the best of my recollection, my fraud began in the early nineteen-nineties.”Passive? Aggrieved or not, she hasn't actually quoted any passive voice sentences here. There's nothing passive about "it would end shortly" or "my fraud began". Lawyers may have helped him write it, but nobody put in any passive voice. And for crying out loud, he's not even indulging in obscuring the agent here: "I began the Ponzi scheme" is about as clear to agency as you can get, and "my fraud" ditto - unless you think frauds have a life of their own, so "my fraud" is like "my dog"...
I had quite an extended argument, a couple of years ago, with someone who insisted that any construction using a form of "to be" is in passive voice.
So, "We made mistakes," is active, while "Mistakes were made," is passive. "We require your presence," is active, and "Your presence is required," is passive.
Therefore, this person said, "The suspect is guilty," is in the passive voice. No amount of discussion would disabuse him of this misunderstanding. Rather like "God did it," he just kept coming back to his assumption that the presence of "to be" automatically made it passive... to prove that a sentence was passive.
There's a lot of confusion out there....
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Labels: birthdays
Great Picture of James.
Thanks
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This one's for Deborah.
Labels: entertainment, jeopardy, language, Ukrainian
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This week's science (a tad late, sorry):
Labels: links, science, sciencelinks
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A friend sent me this, labelled only " you NEED to see this".
Sweet. I was actually thinking about stopping to see the cranes in person next week.
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1 Comments:
I'd like to see Stanford beat UConn. It should be a great game. I'd like to see Stanford - Oklahoma in the final.
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