Fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths dance together to produce visual traveling waves, standing waves, beating, and (seemingly) random motion.
...
The period of one complete cycle of the dance is 60 seconds. The length of the longest pendulum has been adjusted so that it executes 51 oscillations in this 60 second period. The length of each successive shorter pendulum is carefully adjusted so that it executes one additional oscillation in this period. Thus, the 15th pendulum (shortest) undergoes 65 oscillations. ...
album:In 2001, former president Bill Clinton delivered a speech at Georgetown University in which he discussed the West’s response to the recent terrorist attacks of September 11. The speech contained a short but significant reference to the crusades. Mr. Clinton observed that “when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem [in 1099], they . . . proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple Mount.” He cited the “contemporaneous descriptions of the event” as describing “soldiers walking on the Temple Mount . . . with blood running up to their knees.” This story, Mr. Clinton said emphatically, was “still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it.”Read the whole thing here.
This view of the crusades is not unusual. It pervades textbooks as well as popular literature. One otherwise generally reliable Western civilization textbook claims that “the Crusades fused three characteristic medieval impulses: piety, pugnacity, and greed. All three were essential.”1 The film Kingdom of Heaven (2005) depicts crusaders as boorish bigots, the best of whom were torn between remorse for their excesses and lust to continue them. Even the historical supplements for role-playing games—drawing on supposedly more reliable sources—contain statements such as “The soldiers of the First Crusade appeared basically without warning, storming into the Holy Land with the avowed—literally—task of slaughtering unbelievers”;2 “The Crusades were an early sort of imperialism”;3 and “Confrontation with Islam gave birth to a period of religious fanaticism that spawned the terrible Inquisition and the religious wars that ravaged Europe during the Elizabethan era.”4 The most famous semipopular historian of the crusades, Sir Steven Runciman, ended his three volumes of magnificent prose with the judgment that the crusades were “nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost.”5
The verdict seems unanimous. From presidential speeches to role-playing games, the crusades are depicted as a deplorably violent episode in which thuggish Westerners trundled off, unprovoked, to murder and pillage peace-loving, sophisticated Muslims, laying down patterns of outrageous oppression that would be repeated throughout subsequent history. In many corners of the Western world today, this view is too commonplace and apparently obvious even to be challenged.
But unanimity is not a guarantee of accuracy. What everyone “knows” about the crusades may not, in fact, be true. From the many popular notions about the crusades, let us pick four and see if they bear close examination. ...
What would it look like to approach Saturn in a spaceship? One doesn't have to just imagine -- the Cassini spacecraft did just this in 2004, recording thousands of images along the way, and thousands more since entering orbit. Recently, some of these images have been digitally tweaked, cropped, and compiled into the above inspiring video which is part of a larger developing IMAX movie project named Outside In. In the last sequence, Saturn looms increasingly large on approach as cloudy Titan swoops below. With Saturn whirling around in the background, Cassini is next depicted flying over Mimas, with large Herschel Crater clearly visible. Saturn's majestic rings then take over the show as Cassini crosses Saturn's thin ring plane. Dark shadows of the ring appear on Saturn itself. Finally, the enigmatic ice-geyser moon Enceladus appears in the distance and then is approached just as the video clip ends.
performs Toto's Africa
a capella, vocals only, no instruments:London welcomed the Red Bull Mini Drome to York Hall, where over 1000 spectators gathered to get a taster of the world's smallest velodrome in action.
Fixed gear riders from across the UK tried to hold on to the red line as they rode around the track aiming for the fastest time.
The purpose built track has been engineered in Germany by Velotrack, the team that built the velodromes for the Atlanta Olympics and the Delhi Commonwealth Games. The Red Bull Mini Drome track will maintain race-worthy dimensions in the smallest possible size to enable a single pursuit.
. The video is from a film taken in 1905 of a cable car traveling on Market Street in San Francisco, before the 1906 earthquake and fire devastated the area:
, played on a glass harp:Chocolate Mousse from Foodwishes on Vimeo.
(AINA) -- A mob of nearly four thousand Muslims has attacked Coptic homes this evening in the village of Soul, Atfif in Helwan Governorate, 30 kilometers from Cairo, and torched the Church of St. Mina and St. George. There are conflicting reports about the whereabouts of the Church pastor Father Yosha and three deacons who were at church; some say they died in the fire and some say they are being held captive by the Muslims inside the church.Read the rest here.
Witnesses report the mob prevented the fire brigade from entering the village. The army, which has been stationed for the last two days in the village of Bromil, 7 kilometers from Soul, initially refused to go into Soul, according to the officer in charge. When the army finally sent three tanks to the village, Muslim elders sent them away, saying that everything was "in order now." [nothing to see here, the Christians are perfectly safe, move along]
A curfew has been imposed on the 12,000 Christians in the village. [given that the muslims were the ones attacking Christians in their homes and churches, shouldn't the muslims be the ones confined by curfew to their homes? You know, so they can't attack the Christians?]
This incident was triggered by a relationship between 40-year-old Copt Ashraf Iskander and a Muslim woman. Yesterday a "reconciliation" meeting was arranged between the relevant Coptic and Muslim families and together with the Muslim elders it was decided that Ashraf Iskander would have to leave the village because Muslims torched his house.
The father of the Muslim woman was killed by his cousin because he did not kill his daughter to preserve the family's honor, [what a "peaceful" solution, no?] which led the woman's brother to avenge the death of his father by killing the cousin. The village Muslims blamed the Christians. [repeat after me: it's always the non-muslims' (Christians, Jews) fault] ...
How academic is this, let's take a brief trip from Pakistan to Egypt, home of the joyful Democratic revolution, where 98 percent of foreign women complained of being sexually harassed on a daily basis.
Let's step back and look at those numbers for a moment. Nearly every single foreign woman who visits Egypt can expect to be sexually harassed... every single day that she is there. [emphasis added] Where does that kind of attitude come from? ...
Wyoming --(Ammoland.com)- Wyoming is moving in the right direction, and it is because of men and women like you.Article here.
This afternoon, I watched as Governor Mead signed Constitutional Carry into law while saying his office had been clogged with emails and phone calls from people demanding he sign the Jennings-Jaggi Constitutional Carry bill.
Even though so called “political experts” say your activism doesn’t matter, today’s events show who has the real power in politics… You!
The anti-gun crowd fought this legislation every step of the way. The plain and simple truth is when push came to shove, it was your phone calls and emails that pushed this freedom-restoring bill through the legislature. ...
On one day of the year the Dogon people of Mali can fish in the sacred water of Lake Antogo. It's every fisherman for himself as the lake is emptied in minutes.
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