http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7580745.stm

“He reigned from 161AD until his death in 180AD.

In addition to his deeds as emperor, Marcus Aurelius is remembered for his writings, and is considered one of the foremost Stoic philosophers.

The partial statue was unearthed in the largest room at Sagalassos’s Roman baths. “

——————————–

(Getty Images)

(Copyright Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project)

 
(Copyright Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project)

Burdur muzesine mutlaka ugrayin. Turkiye’de gordugum en iyi i$iklandirilmis, en iyi bilgi panolari ile donatilmis muze olmakla birlikte icerisi de Roma koridorlari kadar serin… Hatta ziyaretiniz bittikten sonra bir de muzenin arka bahcesinde depo olarak kullanilan acik park yerini ziyaret edin. On bahcede sergilemeye deger bulunmayan eserlerin tika basa bir halde bu arka ardiye’de sergilenmesi oldukca ilgincti.

We thank you for your interest in our work in Sagalassos. Kim is working on the field for the summer.
Until August 23 there are guides available to give a free guided tour, the team will be working untill the end of August. The site can be visited in other periods of the year as well, but, due to its high location and snow fall this might be difficult during the winter months.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Kind regards,

– Isabelle

Can – Vitamin C (Ege Bamyasi 1972)

Download audio file (04_-_Vitamin_C.mp3)

Sixtoo - Storm Clouds & Silver Linings (Boxcutter Emporium 2004)

Download audio file (Sixtoo-Storm-Clouds-Silver-Linings_FeaturingDamoSuzukiofCAN.mp3)

Can spent some time recording soundtracks for art films and porno movies (music that was compiled on the album  Soundtracks) before releasing its second proper effort in 1971. The album “Tago Mago” introduced a new vocalist, Damo Suzuki, a twenty-one-year-old Japanese singer whom Liebezeit and Czukay saw busking outside a cafe in Munich. “I saw Damo from far away, and he was screaming and sort of adoring the sun,” Czukay told Bussy and Hall. “I said to Jaki, ‘Here comes our vocalist!’ and Jaki said, ‘No, no, it can’t be true!’” Suzuki was invited to that night’s performance. He began screaming at the audience and cleared the room in record time, thereby assuring his position in the band.

A Hot Chip remix of classical musicians already doing contemporary experimental pieces. Something close to techno. Cello, viola, violin and stuff. Take the generic robotic metaphors applied to techno music and put an ultra realistic skin on it. Click above link to listen. Also these links to purchase:

http://www.elysianquartet.com/photos/biogpic.jpg

http://playlouder.com/downloads/release/~gabriel-prokofiev-string-quartet-1/

http://www.yickvic.com/products-price.html

and

http://crs.edqm.eu/db/

#11 CALCITRIOL – Cas No [32222-06-3] – PH-3709  –

$20/mg

$20,000/g

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcitriol

Calcitriol is indicated for:^[1]

• Treatment of hypocalcaemia – hypoparathyroidism, osteomalacia (adults), rickets (infants, children), renal osteodystrophy, chronic renal dialysis
• Treatment of osteoporosis
• Prevention of corticosteroid-induced osteoporosis

Calcitriol is also sometimes used topically in the treatment of psoriasis, however the evidence to support its efficacy is inconclusive.^[2] The vitamin D analogue calcipotriol is more commonly used for psoriasis.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/medmaster/a682335.html

Calcitriol is a form of vitamin D that is used to treat and prevent low levels of calcium in the blood of patients whose kidneys or parathyroid glands (glands in the neck that release natural substances to control the amount of calcium in the blood) are not working normally. Low blood levels of calcium may cause bone disease. Calcitriol is in a class of medications called vitamins. It works by helping the body to use more of the calcium found in foods or supplements.

#10 ARBEKACIN SULFATE – PH-2853B  -

3 vial of 10mg $209/10mg

$20,900/g

http://sciencelinks.jp/j-east/article/200421/000020042104A0674569.php

“…Arbekacin sulfate (ABK) which is one of the anti-MRSA medicine..”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRSA

Although MRSA has traditionally been seen as a hospital-associated infection, community-acquired MRSA strains have appeared in recent years, notably in the U.S. and Australia.^[2]

#9 RHG-CSF – PH-4458A –

$22,000/g

Recombinant human granulocyte colony stimulating factor

http://www.ihop-net.org/UniPub/iHOP/gismo/87470.html

rhG-CSF is now widely used in the treatment of neutropenia including some reports of useful responses in. Felty’s syndrome.

#8 CARDIOTOXIN – PH-5509

$22/mg

$22,000/g

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiotoxin_III

Cardiotoxin III (CTX III, also known as cytotoxin 3) is a sixty amino-acid polypeptide toxin from the Taiwan Cobra Naja naja atra. Recent evidence has shown that CTX III may induce apoptosis in K562 cells via the release of cytochrome c ^[1]. This protein belong to large family of snake venom toxins [2].

http://www.seanthomas.net/oldsite/glossary.html

Cardiotoxin - a poison that can cause the heart muscles to cease functioning.

#7 RHGM-CSF – PH-4458B

$27,500/g

RHGM-CSF  / Human GM-CSF / Human GRANULOCYTE MACROPHAGE COLONY STIMULATING FACTOR

http://www.answers.com/topic/granulocyte-colony-stimulating-factor?cat=health

A naturally occurring protein that stimulates the production of granulocytes and macrophages by stem cells and is used as a drug by some immunosuppressed individuals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granulocyte_macrophage_colony-stimulating_factor

GM-CSF is a cytokine that functions as a white blood cell growth factor. GM-CSF stimulates stem cells to produce granulocytes (neutrophils, eosinophils, and basophils) and monocytes. GM-CSF is used as a medication to stimulate the production of white blood cells following chemotherapy. It has also recently been evaluated in clinical trials for its potential as a vaccine adjuvant in HIV-infected patients.

#6 EPIDERMAL GROWTH FACTOR – PH-1993  –

$27.5/mg

$27,500/mg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidermal_growth_factor

Epidermal growth factor or EGF is a growth factor that plays an important role in the regulation of cell growth, proliferation and differentiation.

EGF is currently being marketed as a therapeutic protein for the treatment of diabetic foot ulcers by at least three companies. Bharat Biotech International, a company based in India, is marketing EGF as REGEN-D, Daewoong Pharmaceutical, based in South Korea, is marketing EGF as Easyef, and the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, in Cuba, is marketing EGF as CITOPROT-P.^{[5] [6]} EGF is also used in a burn treatment cream product, Hebermin, manufactured by Heber Biotec S. A. in Cuba.^[6]

http://www-nmr.cabm.rutgers.edu/photogallery/proteins/htm/page3.htm

Epidermal growth factor (EGF) is a small mitogenic protein that is thought to be involved in mechanisms such as normal cell growth, oncogenesis, and wound healing.

#5 ALPHA-BUNGAROTOXIN – PH-5532  – Powder form  –

$88/mg
$88,000/g

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungarotoxin

Bungarotoxin (more accurately a-bungarotoxin) is one of the components of the venom of the elapid snake Taiwanese banded krait (Bungarus multicinctus). It binds irreversibly to the acetylcholine receptor found at the neuromuscular junction, causing paralysis, respiratory failure and death in the victim.

http://research.brown.edu/btp/technologies_detail.php?id=1116010711

May be used to prevent muscle contraction with possible uses as a muscle relaxant in general and cosmetic surgery.

#4 ERYTHROPOIETIN – Cas No [113427-24-0]  – PH-4458D  

^$107,800/g

^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythropoietin}

^{EPO is a glycoprotein hormone that is a cytokine for erythrocyte (red blood cell) precursors in the bone marrow. Also called hematopoietin or hemopoietin, it is produced by the kidney, and is the hormone regulating red blood cell production.In 1989, the Food and Drug Administration approved the hormone, called Epogen, which remains in use. culture. It is used in treating anemia resulting from chronic renal failure or from cancer chemotherapy. It has a history of usage as a blood doping agent in endurance sports such as bicycle racing, triathlons and marathon running.}

 

^{#3 MICROCYSTIN – Cas No: [101043-37-2]  – PH-5611A– 96% min  – Commercial Qty.  –}

^{1mg total $593.8}

^$593,000/g

^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcystin}

^{“They are cyanotoxins and can be very toxic for plants and animals including humans. Their hepatotoxicity may cause serious damage to the liver.”}

^{#2 CHINESE COBRA VENOM FACTOR – PH-5505 – Powder form}

^$693/mg

^$693,000/g

^{http://www.fuzing.com/vli/001357833328/Cobra-Venom-Factor}

 <sup>1. Source: from Chinese Cobra Venom
2. Usage fields:
(1) By way of treatment purpose: This product wildly used to cure heterotransplantation  
  urgent exclude reaction, delay reaction and breath embarrassement syndrome.
(2) By way of reagent purpose: For the reason of this product has much better stabilization  
  and high effect rate, strong single mature of anti-complementary it is an ideal tool in
  researching and application of molecular immunology and clinic immunology.
3. Mol wt: compose of 3 different substructures with different mol wt, its relative mol wt is about 145800.
4. Physical status: white lyophilizated powder.
5. Identification of biological activity:
A: Identification of snake venom factor hemolysis activity
B: identification of snake venom factor anticomplement activity
6. Storage: -20°</sup>

^{http://www.pirweb.org/pir04b_snake.htm}

^{“…Venom phospholipase A2, for example, obtained from the Chinese cobra, is used widely by biochemists and molecular biologists who study cell surface interactions and catalysis…”}

 

^{#1 – NERVE GROWTH FACTOR – PH-5504 – Powder form}

^$858/mg

^$858,000/g

^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_growth_factor}

• ^{Stanley Cohen and Rita Levi-Montalcini won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of NGF and other growth factors}
• ^{It has also been tied to Alzheimer’s disease.[8][9][10]}
• ^{NGF has been tied to human romantic love.[5][6][7]}

  • ^{^ Emanuele E, Politi P, Bianchi M, Minoretti P, Bertona M, Geroldi D (2006). "Raised plasma nerve growth factor levels associated with early-stage romantic love". Psychoneuroendocrinology 31 (3): 288-94. PMID 16289361.  link^ "NGF" gives passionate lovers just one year, Reuters, November 29, 2005.}
  • ^{^ John Harris Is love just a chemical?, Guardian, November 29, 2005.}

 

Rachel Knecht

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/10/fungible_goods.php

The Free And Independent Republic Of Washington Square

January 1917

“United Studios of Eldert”

June 2007

Thou still unravished bride of deliciousness,
      Thou foster child of joy and good time,
R2D2 version 2007, who canst thus cook
      A zucchini more sweetly than our oven:

What olive oil soaked taste haunts about thy shape now 
    Of vegetables or meat, or of both,
        In Bushwick or the dales of Gramercy?
    What men or gods took you? Why the urge to grill?
What mad hunger?  What struggle to party?
        What music and hipsters?  Why the need to steal?

When old oven shall this generation waste,
        Thou shalt remain, in midst of another rooftop
    Than ours, a friend to bohemian, to whom thou say’st,
"food is truth, truth food," - that is all
        Ye know in brooklyn, and all ye need to know.

(a rework of Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats, after our grill was stolen from our rooftop)

what will happen to our poor attention?

It’ll take no time to “download” but it will still take 105 minutes to watch Double Indemnity.

I cannot imagine what will happen to will.

I’ll try to create a simple guide on how to geotag your photos. This way you can

• Create map to follow on your pocket pc
• record your path
• create neat maps with embedded photos on them. Example here: http://picasaweb.google.com/turgan/FireIsland/photo#map

I am in no way an expert in any of these fields. Also English is my second language. Please excuse and alert me, on any errors I might have below.

Tools:

•   GPS Tuner 5.0 http://www.gpstuner.com/download/index.html
  
•   GPS Tuner Map Calibrator http://www.gpstuner.com/download/index.html
  
•   Firefox http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
  
•   Screen grab http://www.screengrab.org/
•   Photoshop (optional)
•   Super-Googer: http://pallit.lhi.is/bigice/bigpic.html
•   http://www.earthtools.org/

First we’re going to load a custom map (an actual geospatial image of the location) off the net to our GPS Tuner Map Calibrator on our desktop computer.
Then we’re going to calibrate and break this map into parts so Gpstuner can give us a high quality map covering a large area.
We are going to load these into our Pocket PC, preferable to our memory card.
Once in the pocket pc we’ll make sure our camera’s and our pocket pc’s time is synced. Then we are ready to start taking photos.
Once our trip is complete we’ll transfer the photos and the logs and if needed, convert them to a GPX format. (especially required for GpicSync)
Then we’ll use GPicSync or RoboGeo to tag the exif’s of our photos and generate google maps enabled photo gallery of our trip using either one of these software or the awesome Google Picasa.

Here we go

Part 1 - Getting our hiking map into pocket pc GPS Tuner

We are going to use geospatial images for our geocaching map.

It’s not easy to get tiles for anywhere we like, so we’re going to have to work our way to it.

Also

Warning: This one is a huge gray area. http://web.media.mit.edu/~nvawter/projects/googlemaps/index.html  It is semi-illegal to get these images without paying for them. These are all copyrighted images. I highly advise against saving them to your harddrive, printing them, and even using this guide to do your geocaching/gps photography.

Also don’t download mp3’s. As a matter of fact, try not to buy ipod’s because it is an incentive to download illegal mp3’s which fills up 80% of the ipods on the market today. Do support your favorite artists by linking to their purchasable songs from your pretentious neo-look-at-the-cool-mixtape-i-did mp3 blogs. Also don’t watch copyrighted illegal video’s on Youtube. If you see a copyrighted video on youtube, flag it and ask Google to remove them. Try to catch them on tv. A bit sarcastic here; but I’m serious.

Done with the warning. On to our piracy.

Super-Googer http://pallit.lhi.is/bigice/bigpic.html  Gives you the ability to display any location by simply pasting satellite map tiles code into this page. How do we find the code of a particular map tile?

By viewing the location we’ll be terkking at in Google maps. View the site you want to visit in Google maps and select the correct zoom level you want to maps in,

Example:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=garrison,+ny&ie=UTF8&ll=41.380979,-73.940649&spn=0.010481,0.020084&t=k&z=16&iwloc=addr&om=1

Now my starting point of the trip, thus my starting tile is the train station , so it’s somewhere around here:

  In your Firefox, go to TOOLS > PAGE INFO and browse to the MEDIA tab. Once in media tab, you’re going to have to find the exact tile that this image represents. In this case, it’s this:

“tqsqtstsstrrtstsq”

Each zoom level adds one letter to this code. Details are explained here. Be careful that this might not be the image of the exact zoom level you might be looking for. For example tqsqtstsstrr is from the same location as tqsqtstsstrrtstsq but 5 zoom levels up.

Anyhow, we paste this code into Super-Googer, change the Number of horizontal/vertical tiles as you like.

http://pallit.lhi.is/bigice/bigpic.html

This is our final trekking map that we’ll load into our pocket pc:

http://pallit.lhi.is/bigice/makeme.php?startPic=tqsqtstsstrrtstsq+&hTiles=15&vTiles=20

This page is made up of many small tiles, if you right click and choose Save as… it will only save one tile. Somehow we have to save them all as 1 image.

For this we need a great Firefox extension named Screen grab.

http://www.screengrab.org/

Once you installed Screengrab just fire it up by clicking on the status bar icon on the lower right corner of firefox and choose Save > Complete Page / Frame and save your map to a location.

(Notice: If your Number of horizontal/vertical tiles are HUGE, ie. 30 tiles x 30 tiles, you might have some memory problems)

Now that we saved our image, there’s only one adjustment to make before we calibrate this map and load it into our Pocket PC. Somehow the images saved with Screen Grab do not show the Pixels / Inch. Which I usually keep around 72 pixels / inch (GPS Tuner suggests 96dpi but their default map is 72 somehow). So I open this image up in Photoshop. Go to Image-Image Size, set the Resolution to 72 pixels / inch (even though it already shows so) and then save the image in MEDIUM quality format to the same location.

From GPS Tuner 5.0 Manual:

When scanning maps for GPS Tuner, we suggest a 96 dpi resolution.

For best results, keep map pixel size under 5000 x 5000 pixels.

Keep file size under 20 MB (use higher compression if necessary).

Although GPS Tuner supports the calibration of rotated maps, for best results we suggest to use North-oriented maps.

Now we load map calibrator and open our saved final map image.

http://www.gpstuner.com/download/index.html

In order to calibrate the map we’re going to use the page:

http://www.earthtools.org/

Go to Find Places on the main page, and type Garrison. Garrison in New York is somehow the 20th match. Click on the Zoom that’s right under Garrison - United States of America, New York

Switch to satellite view and zoom in further to find the train station in garrison. I’m going to use the corner of this overpass as a calibration point in Gps Tuner Map Calibrator. I drag the crosshair in the Earthtools maps to this corner, and click on LOCATION tab in Earthtools page on the upper left.

it shows me what the coordinates are:

Latitude

41° 23′ 3" N

Longitude:

73° 56′ 47" W

And this is exactly why I type in GPS Tuner Map Calibrator. In map calibrator I click and hold on the corner of this exact location of overpass until the Add New.. > Calib Point pops up, and I type the above values in there. I make sure that N and W values are correct. If not you’ll have to click on the E in the popup ADD CALIBRATION DATA window in map calibrator to change it to W, so that you have 73° 56′ 47" W rather than 73° 56′ 47" E.

I repeat this step 2+ times for other locations on the map, so that I get a finely calibrated map.

Once this is done, I save this map in Map Calibrator by Save… > Save Multiscale Map Slices

Once they are saved on my harddrive, I transfer them to my pocket pc under my memory card, under a GARRISON directory.

Then, on my Pocket PC the only thing I have to do is click on the map screen click on Open map button and select my map to load it into GPS Tuner.

PART 2 - The Trip, Recording our logs, optimizing Gps tuner tiles

If your GPS is working and positioned it will automatically center you on the map.

You have to make sure that GPS Tuner is recording logs. For this, under  click on the Manager Window icon and start your NMEA and Tracklog logs.

Once you’re on the border of a map image slice, a new slice showing your current location should show up…if not take a look at here:

http://www.gpstuner.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5184&sid=a9d796b7b336a57b5b1bfdcd93df25c4

“You may increase the speed of the load time by:
If your maps on stored on SD card, move them to a folder on your PDA "Main Memory".
Reducing the file-size of the map-slices.
Reducing the resolution of the map-slices.
Increasing the number of map-slices…“

Or here:

http://www.gpstuner.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=4889

“If you have an average hardware (average CPU speed, average RAM speed, average Card speed, etc), you would probably be well advised to load medium sized (1000×1000 pixel) pictures or smaller. The logic is that your hardware would need to access image slices less frequently, but the intitial tradeoff is that the loadtime for the image would be longer than, say - a 500×500 pixel image.

So here’s my theory: Make a map-slice based on the dimensions of your PDA screen (mine is 320×240), with the initial overlap set at half the larger number (320 for me). Then set your PDA overlap setting to half of that number (160 for me). This will follow the Developer’s logic (as show above), and only force the program to load those images of your map in whichever direction you might be travelling.”

SCREEN SIZES:

DELL X51v 640×480
Palm Tungsten T5 320×480
DELL AXIM X30 240×320
Treo 650 320×320

Or here:

http://www.gpstuner.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1239

demnos
“I just set the overlap to 50px (as I had exported with 100px) and it works like a charm!!!! No problems whatsoever!

I still cannot believe the solution was that simple. And actually logical, Map Export counts the pixels on both sides as it calculates how much bigger to make the map (a 933 pixel map becomes 1033 pixels in total with 100 overlap) and GPS Tuner on the other hand needs to know when to start loading the next slice, which of course is half of that.”

Developer
Site Admin

“You sould use 120 pixel overlap in GPS Tuner if you have redered map with 240 in Map Calibrator. Unfortunately Map Calibrator is undocumented, so the only thing I could do it to set the default overlap 320 in MC and 160 in GPS Tuner and until users leave them it sould work.

So, please try to use 120 px.”

PART 3 - Transfering Photos and logs to computer to create GPS Photo Tour of our trip

We’re going to transfer the photos to our computer, encode the location of each photo to the exif header, and upload them online to view them on a map.

We have many options to do this:

• GPS Visualiser
• GPICSync
• Robogeo
• Google Picasa (this is a fantastic solution for these reasons: Easy to upload, the photos have a Next-Previous button in the google maps balloon, it works very fast, it accepts 500 photos and processes them faster than any solution, it also has an amazing "Play" feature which switches through each photo and gives you a google maps tour of your trip!)

Once our map is ready, our batteries are loaded we, we synchronize the time of our PDA with that of our camera and take our trip. Then all you have to do is transfer the files to the computer. This includes the images from the camera as well the tracklog (trk file) or the NMEA log from the pocket pc.

Whether your file is a tracklog or a NMEA file, it’s best if you convert it to GPX first.

You can upload the file and have it converted here:

http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/convert?output

Once your file is converted and saved,

Install GPICSYNC from the following location. Load your pictures directory and your GPX file to the program and follow instructions.

http://code.google.com/p/gpicsync/

OR

You can also try ROBOGEO.

http://www.robogeo.com/home/

I’m not going to go into the detail of these programs. In all of these programs all you have to provide is a GPX or a NMEA tracklog, and a directory for photos. These programs automatically match the images with the gps log and stamp the location data to the exif of the photos.

Next is using these programs to create a google map. Getting a google api key is necessary for some of these solutions.

Or Google Picasa:

Google came out with a new feature on 6/27/2007. Geocode your photos with one of the above three programs and your geocoded photos to Picasa. Your Geocoded photos will have a little cross-hair in the lower left corner of their thumbnail in picasa. As seen:

 Result is here: http://picasaweb.google.com/turgan/FireIsland/photo#map

UPDATE 1.1 6/28/2008

Added Google Picasa solution above.

Leadbelly - In The Pines (Black Girl)
Download audio file (17.Black Girl.mp3)

Leadbelly - In The Pines
Download audio file (502-leadbelly-where_did_you_sleep_last_night-mfn.mp3)

Nirvana -Where did you sleep last night?
Download audio file (14_Where Did You Sleep Last Night_Nirvana.mp3)

A Simple Song That Lives Beyond Timeby Eric Weisbard

Immediately after the suicide of Kurt Cobain, lead singer of the rock band Nirvana, last April, MTV broadcast almost continuously an hour-long "Unplugged" special that the band had recorded the previous fall. The final song on the program was unexpected: it was the only one not previously recorded by Nirvana or even written by an alternative rocker. Called "Where Did You Sleep Last Night," it had the cadences of an old ballad or blues tune and lyrics that Mr. Cobain’s deathly rasp made absolutely haunting.

In fact, the song was a folk song, usually known as "In the Pines," which dates back at least to the 1870’s. Its appearance in the repertory of a Seattle grunge singer is only the latest chapter in its complex history. (An album of Nirvana’s MTV concert, "Unplugged in New York," was recently released on the DGC label.) Those who have recorded the song include the folk legends Leadbelly, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, the country pioneers Bill Monroe and Chet Atkins, the rockers Sir Douglas Quintet and Duane Eddy, the pop vocalist Connie Francis and the jazz saxophonist Clifford Jordan.

Even within alternative music, "In the Pines" has something of a history. Annette Zalinskas, formerly of the Bangles, recorded the song with her band Blood on the Saddle on 1986’s "Poison Love" album. Australia’s Triffids did a takeoff on "In the Pines." (The genre-crossing Beck used the phrase "in the pines" in doggerel he wrote for the booklet that accompanies his recent album "Mellow Gold.")

Researching the song for a 1970 dissertation, Judith McCulloh found 160 different versions, a finding that raises the question: Why does a song like "In the Pines" endure and permutate so insistently? The answer may be that its essence is not a specific story or even a musical style but the kind of intensely dark emotion that, as is the case with much in American music, survives longer in popular memory than does treacly sentiment.

The song probably has its origins in the Southern Appalachians, where it is still passed on as part of an oral tradition. The mystery writer Sharyn McCrumb says a college friend from Georgia taught her a verse that she used as a chapter heading in her 1992 novel, "The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter." As she demonstrated in a telephone conversation, she can also sing a very different "Mitchell County, N.C." version that includes a reference to the local Clenchfield railroad line.

Dolly Parton, who performs a version on her recent album "Heartsongs" says: "The song has been handed down through many generations of my family. I don’t ever remember not hearing it and not singing it. Any time there were more than three or four songs to be sung, ‘In the Pines’ was one of them. It’s easy to play, easy to sing, great harmonies and very emotional. The perfect song for simple people."

In the 1981 book "Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong," the music historian Norm Cohen notes that "In the Pines" has three frequent elements, not all of which always appear. There is the chorus "in the pines," a stanza about "the longest train I ever saw" and another verse in which someone is decapitated by a Train.

"The longest train" section probably began as a separate song, which merged with "In the Pines"; references in some renditions to "Joe Brown’s coal mine" and "the Georgia line" may date its origins to Joseph Emerson Brown, a former Georgia governor, who operated coal mines in the 1870’s. The earliest printed version was four lines and a melody compiled by Cecil Sharp in Kentucky in 1917. Another variant, mentioning the train accident, was recorded in 1925 by a folk collector onto cylinder, a precursor of the phonograph. The next year, commercial hillbilly recordings of "In the Pines" and "The Longest Train" began appearing.

How did Kurt Cobain discover "In the Pines"? Long before Nirvana’s rise, he and Mark Lanegan, leader of the Seattle rock group Screaming Trees, formed a friendship around a mutual love of Leadbelly. Mr. Lanegan owned a copy of the original Musicraft 78 rpm of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" that Leadbelly recorded in 1944. "My father gave me the record when I was a kid," Mr. Lanegan says. "He was a schoolteacher, and he found in the attic of an old school a box of blues records." Mr. Lanegan and Mr. Cobain recorded an EP of Leadbelly tunes, but only "Where Did You Sleep" was released on Mr. Lanegan’s 1990 album, "The Winding Sheet," with Mr. Cobain playing guitar.

Although Leadbelly is credited with authorship of "Where Did You Sleep" on "The Winding Sheet" and Nirvana’s "Unplugged in New York," his own discovery of the song was almost as secondhand as that of the Seattle musicians. Alan Lomax, the folk music archivist and promoter, reported to Ms. McCulloh that Leadbelly learned parts of the song from someone who had taken it from the 1917 Sharp version and other parts from the 1925 cylinder recording.

For all its complicated history, the meaning of "In the Pines" may be even more blurry, a vast continuum of different varieties of misery and suffering. "This unique, moody, blues-style song from the Southern mountain country is like a bottomless treasure box of folk-song elements," wrote James Leisy in his 1966 book "The Folk Song Abecedary." "The deeper you dig, the more you find."

The basic elements of the song remain similar from version to version, but the context can be altered with a few words. It may be a husband, a wife or even a parent whose head is "found in the driver’s wheel" and whose "body has never been found." Men, women and sometimes confused adolescents flee into the sordid pines, which serve as a metaphor for everything from sex to loneliness and death. The "longest" train can kill or give one’s love the means to run away or leave an itinerant worker stranded far from his home.

In the bluegrass and country versions popularized by Mr. Monroe, the song’s eerie qualities are rooted in the genre’s "high lonesome" sound, with fiddles and yodeling harmonies used to evoke the cold wind blowing. Lyrics about beheading drop out, but the enigmatic train is almost as frightening, suggesting an eternal passage: "I asked my captain for the time of day/ He said he throwed his watch away."

In other versions, the focus is clearly, as the novelist Ms. McCrumb notes, on a confrontation: "There’s a woman doing something not socially acceptable, and she’s been caught at it." In one case, a husband demands: "Don’t lie to me; where did you sleep last night?" In their traditional interpretation, the Kossoy Sisters begin: "Little girl, little girl, where’d you stay last night? Not even your mother knows." Despite all the variations of "In the Pines," these questions are almost never asked of a man. The woman may also be asked, "Where did you get that dress, and those shoes that are so fine?" and the answer is "from a man in the mines, who sleeps in the pines."

In Mr. Jordan’s jazz version, recorded for Atlantic in 1965, the singer Sandra Douglass makes the meaning even more explicit, drawing on a later Leadbelly version known as "Black Girl." Here the woman is in the pines because her husband has died under the train, leaving her with little choice but prostitution. "You caused me to weep/ And you caused me to moan/ You caused me to leave my home," she sings, perhaps to the cruel fates, perhaps to the ghost of her husband.

When Hole, the band led by Mr. Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, played in New York in September, the final encore was "Where Did You Sleep Last Night." The sense of ghosts was palpable: a widow singing a widow’s tune, biting as heavily into each "don’t lie to me" as her husband had. But the ghosts were already there in the Nirvana version, which looked at death square on — Mr. Cobain’s voice cracks and pauses during the final line, then soldiers through.

Nirvana’s "Where Did You Sleep" is so definitive that the stray ends of the history of "In the Pines" come together. Mr. Lanegan sang his version as a spectator might have, with a bit of a leer. "I like the blood and guts theme of it: betrayal and murder," he says now. But Kurt Cobain inhabits the place from which the song sprang. His voice mixes fatalism and placidity much as Leadbelly’s had 50 years before; one hears a folkish impassivity that may well have been found on the 1925 cylinder recording as well.

Mr. Cobain’s identification with female rockers, from Hole to the Raincoats, encompasses the trespassing woman of the tale. And his origins in the pines-stripped lumber town of Aberdeen, Wash., take in the "simple people" who, as Dolly Parton notes, have always turned this cry of anxiety into a source of strength. "In the Pines" will have other versions, of course. But there is really no need for anyone to ever sing it again.

Variations on a Theme

The folk song usually known as "In the Pines" dates back at least to the 1870’s. Here are three versions:

Black girl, black girl, don’t lie to me
Where did you stay last night?
I stayed in the pines where the sun never shines
And shivered when the cold wind blows.Lizzie Abner, 1917

The Longest train I ever saw
Went down that Georgia line
The engine passed at 6 o’clock
The cab passed by at 9.

In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines
And we shiver when the cold wind blows.

I asked my captain for the time of day
He said he throwed his watch away
A long steel rail and a short crosstie
I’m on my way back home.

Little girl, little girl, what have I done
That makes you treat me so?
You caused me to weep, you caused me to moan
You caused me to leave my home.Bill Monroe, 1952

My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me, where did you sleep last night?
In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through.

Her husband was a hard-working man
Just about a mile from here
His head was found in the driver’s wheel
But his body never was found.

My girl, my girl, where will you go?
I’m going where the cold wind blows
In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through.Nirvana, 1993

 

---

http://www.newstatesman.com/200704160044

"…Cobain’s companion is Leadbelly, a favourite of folk aficionados who to this day perceive him as a giant of "black music", even though the vast majority of his fans were white. (When white producers brought Leadbelly to New York City in 1935 to play "traditional" music, Life magazine declared in a headline: "Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel".) Cobain’s swan song, performed on MTV’s Unplugged a few months before his suicide, was a cover of Leadbelly’s "Where Did You Sleep Last Night", about a woman who wanders into the woods after her husband is hit by a train. Cobain, so deep into the authenticity trap by then that he’d never escape, seemed to be making one last attempt not to "fake it", by reviving a song by his "favourite performer", and exiting the stage without an encore.

But Leadbelly, Barker and Taylor reveal, was by necessity a master of "faking it", a sophisticated musician of cosmopolitan taste limited to a repertoire of "Negro" songs and told by his manager to perform in prison garb. That manager was John Lomax, one of the early 20th-century giants of what has come to be known as "roots music". "The music that was, for Lomax, the most authentic," write the authors, "the most black, the most free from ‘white influence’, was the most primitive." That doesn’t mean Leadbelly was primitive, only that Lomax and, decades later, Cobain decided to believe that he was, the better to break the bonds of artificiality they felt modernity and celebrity imposed. Leadbelly was a tool. This shifty truth comes to us by way not of postmodernism, but of old-timey Marxist analysis. In 1937, the novelist Richard Wright, profiling Leadbelly for the Daily Worker, declared his coerced performances "one of the greatest cultural swindles in history".

But that’s not quite right, either. Wright recognised Lomax’s manipulation of Leadbelly (who later successfully sued Lomax), but he assumed there was a genuine Leadbelly behind the music, a real black expression minstrel-ised by the white man. In fact, many of Leadbelly’s songs came from white folks, who’d learned them from black musicians, who’d composed them with African inflections as reinterpreted by white musicians eager to add "floating" rhythms to the marching beat of Scots-Irish reels. The strongest argument of Faking It is for the endless "miscegenation" of music. Great popular music is always a collage of cultures, while the quest for authenticity all too often functions as a means of policing racial boundaries…"

 

From The Library of Congress > American Memory Home > Search Results:

[Prison compound no. 1, Angola, Louisiana. Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter) in the foreground]. - 1934 July.

http://virtual.cvut.cz/kifb/wordnet/_body_motion.html

Related WordNet synsets for SUMO concept Expressing

http://virtual.cvut.cz/kifb/wordnet/_expressing.html

WordNet is a semantic lexicon for the English language. It groups English words into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets.

The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology or SUMO is an upper ontology intended as a foundation ontology for a variety of computer information processing systems. It was originally developed by the Teknowledge Corporation and now is maintained by Articulate Software. It is one candidate for the "standard upper ontology" that IEEE working group 1600.1 is working on. It can be downloaded and used freely.

SUMO was first released in December 2000. It defines a hierarchy of SUMO classes and related rules and relationships. These are formulated in a version of the language SUO-KIF which has a LISP-like syntax. A mapping from WordNet synsets for nouns and verbs to SUMO classes has also been defined.

Using the ESO 3.6-m telescope, a team of Swiss, French and Portuguese scientists discovered a super-Earth about 5 times the mass of the Earth that orbits a red dwarf, already known to harbour a Neptune-mass planet. The astronomers have also strong evidence for the presence of a third planet with a mass about 8 Earth masses.

“We have estimated that the mean temperature of this super-Earth lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius, and water would thus be liquid,” explains Stéphane Udry, from the Geneva Observatory (Switzerland) and lead-author of the paper reporting the result. “Moreover, its radius should be only 1.5 times the Earth’s radius, and models predict that the planet should be either rocky - like our Earth - or fully covered with oceans,” he adds.

http://planetquest1.jpl.nasa.gov/atlas/atlas_profile.cfm?Planet=340

http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/news/superEarth.cfm

http://www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=2703981

SETI Institute scientists Seth Shostak, Jill Tarter, and Frank Drake have all expressed their excitement about the news and the implications for SETI searching.  Gliese 581 has been targeted for SETI searches twice in the past with no hint of a radio signal, but this new information may mean a third search with the more powerful Allen Telescope Array. 

"the tissues of brain and heart suffer irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn’t receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can’t be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover.

That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope.

What they saw amazed them, . "After one hour, we couldn’t see evidence the cells had died. We thought we’d done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.But if the cells are still alive, why can’t doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour?

Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed.

"It looks to us," says Becker, "as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die."

 

With this realization came another: that standard emergency-room procedure has it exactly backward. When someone collapses on the street of cardiac arrest, if he’s lucky he will receive immediate CPR, maintaining circulation until he can be revived in the hospital. But the rest will have gone 10 or 15 minutes or more without a heartbeat by the time they reach the emergency department. And then what happens? "We give them oxygen," Becker says. "We jolt the heart with the paddles, we pump in epinephrine to force it to beat, so it’s taking up more oxygen." Blood-starved heart muscle is suddenly flooded with oxygen, precisely the situation that leads to cell death. Instead, Becker says, we should aim to reduce oxygen uptake, slow metabolism and adjust the blood chemistry for gradual and safe reperfusion.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18368186/site/newsweek/

Werner Meyer-Eppler, then the director of Phonetics at Bonn University, recognised the relevance of the machines to electronic music after Dudley visited the University in 1948, and used the vocoder as a basis for his future writings which in turn became the inspiration for the German “Electronische Musik” movement.

Check out the introduction:
Download audio file (voder.mp3)

The US space agency, Nasa, has said that human error was to blame for the failure of the $154m (£77.5m) Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6554525.stm

Human mistake stops Stock Exchange

“an employee of the Central Depository had switched off one of the servers of the Stock Exchange”

http://www.focus-fen.net/index.php?id=n108780

Big Bang at the atomic lab after scientists get their maths wrong

A £2 billion project to answer some of the biggest mysteries of the universe has been delayed by months after scientists building it made basic errors in their mathematical calculations.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1626728.ece

update may 2008:  I was listening to joseph campbell with bill moyers and he was talking about the idea that:

if you are in a journey, looking for an end, a destination, after enough time when you look back you see that the journey was the destination itself.

Download audio file (moodindigo.mp3)

"…One feels this strange fullness in the head and this sensation of having a cold, and one sees the puffy look on the faces of his fellow crewmen and hears their nasal voices. He feels his body assume the strange posture that one has in weightlessness, with the shoulders hunched up, the hands out in the front and the knees bent….Closing one’s eyes made everything go away. And now one’s body is like a planet all to itself, and one really doesn’t know where the outside world is. The first time I tried it, my instinct was to grab hold of whatever was nearest and just hang on, lest I fall. It was the only time in the mission when I had anything like a sensation of falling. I was telling that to my wife, and she pointed out that that’s like the reflex that a baby has. When you begin to drop it, it just reaches out and clutches. And we thought, it would be nice to write a story about a sort of evolution of the human being in zero-g, because one certainly gets used to it in a hurry and it certainly is different"

"The very first system that gave us a pleasant surprise was the vestibular system. All of us keep talking about it because not only was it so different from what was expected but it remains, subjectively, one of the primary memories that one gets from this "Alice in Wonderland" world of weightlessness."

"Our crew was fortunate enough not to run into the motion sickness problem in any clinical or full-blown form. Therefore, among our first pleasant or different impressions was the impression of a very changed relationship between ourselves and the outside world and, I would say there was no vestibular sense of the upright whatsoever. I certainly had no idea of where the Earth was at any time unless I happened to be looking at it. I had no idea of the relationship between one compartment of the spacecraft and another in terms of a feeling for "up or down"; this has some peculiar effects when one passes from one compartment into the other and walls turn into ceilings and ceilings turn into floors in a very arbitrary way. But all one had to do is rotate one’s body to the more familiar orientation and it all comes to right. What one thinks is up, is up. After a few days of getting used to this, one plays with it all the time; one just stands there and does a slow roll around his bellybutton. The feeling is that one could take the whole room and by pushing a button, just rotate it around so that the screens up here would be the floor. It’s a marvelous feeling of power over space—over the space around one." "We discovered that after a few days of decreased appetite in flight we were able to eat all our food. Indeed, as the missions progressed the amount of food the crew was allowed to eat increased and their exercise increased, they were essentially eating the same amount of food as they ate on the ground. That to me is a mystery. I still don’t understand how in an environment in which certainly muscular work is reduced, the caloric demand and the relationship between caloric intake and body weight remain just about the same as they do on the ground, I think that’s a very interesting problem that we haven’t yet been able to solve." A World Without Gravity http://www.busoc.be/general/microgravity/chap2.11.pdf "…Our sixth sense, the sense of motion, is mediated by the vestibular system. The inner ear contains two balance-sensing organs, both of which are designed to keep the individual upright, orientated, and moving smoothly. One organ, comprised of the saccule and utricle, sends messages to the brain as to how the head is positioned relative to the force of gravity (Fig. 2.1.6.3). The saccule and utricle are tiny sacs, lined with hair cells. Small calcium-carbonate particles, the otoliths, rest on these hair cells. When the head moves relative to gravity, the weight and movement of these otoliths stimulate the hair cells and give the brain information on ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘tilt’ and ‘translation’ in a particular direction. The other balance-sensing organ is comprised of three semicircular canals. It provides the brain with information on rotation about the three axes of yaw, pitch and roll… The question is whether the part of the vestibular system that is sensitive to gravity continues to operate in weightlessness. Head tilt is not sensed by the otoliths in the absence of gravitational force, but they are still activated by the inertial force of translational motion. Experiments performed in space to date, including those using the ESA 4 m-long Sled moving with very low accelerations, have not shown significant changes in sensitivity to linear acceleration during and after space flight. Since the brain receives inputs from the otoliths only when there is a translational head motion in weightlessness, it has been proposed that the brain re-interprets tilt-related otolith information as translation during space flight. This has been the theoretical basis of much space research for the last 15 years. Only recently has this hypothesis actually been tested, using a centrifuge installed onboard the Space Shuttle…"