May 25, 2011
Randy Marsh is a character on the US TV show, ‘South Park.’ His name is derived from series co-creator Trey Parker’s father, and Parker describes Randy as ‘the biggest dingbat in the entire show.’ Randy is voiced by Parker.
The show established Randy and his wife Sharon as being a couple as young adults during the flower power era. Their marriage has not been without its frequent arguments, which are usually instigated when Sharon is annoyed, ashamed, or disgusted by Randy’s eccentricities. The two even once went through a brief divorce. After quickly entering a new relationship, Sharon realized how much she was still in love with Randy, and the two promptly reconciled. Randy and Sharon tend to showcase liberal viewpoints, having protested the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supported Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential race.
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May 25, 2011
Creed Bratton (b. 1943) is an American actor and musician best known for playing a fictional version of himself on the American adaptation of ‘The Office.’ Born William Charles Schneider, he grew up in a small California town near Yosemite National Park.
His grandparents, mother, and father were musicians, and he took a liking to music at a very early age. He became a professional musician during his high school and college years. He decided to try life as a traveling musician and made his way on a global excursion, during which he changed his name to Creed Bratton. He traveled through Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Appearing with his group the ‘Young Californians,’ he played guitar at a large folk festival in Israel.
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May 25, 2011
Richard Frank Oznowicz (b. 1944) , better known as Frank Oz is an American film director and puppeteer who is known for creating and performing the characters Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and Animal in ‘The Muppet Show’ and for directing films, including the 1986 ‘Little Shop Of Horrors’ remake and ‘Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.’ He is also the operator and voice of Yoda in the Star Wars series, as well as Grover, Cookie Monster, Sam Eagle, and Bert on Sesame Street.
In addition to performing a variety of characters, Oz has been one of the primary collaborators responsible for the development of the Muppets over the last 30 years. His puppetry work spans from 1963 to the present, though he has retired from the Muppets. His Muppets were taken over by Eric Jacobson, though Oz still performs his characters on occasion. He also worked with the puppets on the movie Labyrinth, starring David Bowie.
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May 25, 2011
A tornado is a tube of violently spinning air that touches the ground. They are often referred to as a twister or a cyclone, although the word cyclone is used in meteorology in a narrower sense, only to name hurricanes or typhoons. Most tornadoes have wind speeds less than 110 miles per hour, are approximately 250 feet across, and travel a few miles before dissipating. The most extreme can attain wind speeds of more than 300 mph, stretch more than two miles across, and stay on the ground for dozens of miles.
Tornadoes often develop from a class of thunderstorms known as supercells. Other tornado-like phenomena that exist in nature include the gustnado (short-lived, low-level rotating cloud), dust devil, fire whirls, and steam devil. Tornadoes have been observed on every continent except Antarctica. However, the vast majority of tornadoes in the world occur in the Tornado Alley region of the United States (the area between the Rocky and Appalachian Mountains).
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May 24, 2011
A progress trap is the condition human societies experience when, in pursuing progress through human ingenuity, they inadvertently introduce problems they do not have the resources or political will to solve, for fear of short-term losses in status, stability or quality of life. This prevents further progress and sometimes leads to collapse.
The central problem one of scale and political will. The error is often to extrapolate from what appears to work well on a small scale to a larger scale, which depletes natural resources and causes environmental degradation. Large-scale implementation also tends to be subject to diminishing returns. As overpopulation, erosion, greenhouse gas emissions or other consequences become apparent, society is destabilized.
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May 24, 2011
Daqin [da-chin] is the ancient Chinese name for the Roman Empire and, depending on context, the Near East, especially Syria. It literally means ‘Great Qin,’ Qin being the name of the founding dynasty of the Chinese Empire. Following the opening of the Silk Road in the 2nd century BCE, the Chinese thought of the Roman Empire as a civilized pendant to their own empire. The Romans occupied one extreme position on the trade route, with the Chinese located on the other. China never managed to reach the Roman Empire directly in antiquity, although general Ban Chao sent an envoy, Gan Ying, who left a detailed account of the Romans, but it is generally considered to have been based on second hand information:
‘Their kings are not permanent. They select and appoint the most worthy man. If there are unexpected calamities in the kingdom, such as frequent extraordinary winds or rains, he is unceremoniously rejected and replaced. The one who has been dismissed quietly accepts his demotion, and is not angry. The people of this country are all tall and honest. They resemble the people of the Middle Kingdom and that is why this kingdom is called Da Qin [literally, ‘Great China’]. This country produces plenty of gold [and] silver, [and of] rare and precious [things] they have luminous jade, ‘bright moon pearls,’ Haiji rhinoceroses, coral, yellow amber, opaque glass, whitish chalcedony, red cinnabar, green gemstones, gold-thread embroideries, woven gold-threaded net, delicate polychrome silks painted with gold, and asbestos cloth.’
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May 24, 2011
A sinecure [sahy-ni-kyoor] (Latin: sine ‘without,’ cura ‘care’) means an office that requires or involves little or no responsibility, labor, or active service. Sinecures have historically provided a potent tool for governments or monarchs to distribute patronage, while recipients are able to store up titles and easy salaries.
A sinecure is not necessarily a figurehead, which generally requires active participation in government, albeit with a lack of power. A sinecure, by contrast, has no real day-to-day responsibilities, but may have de jure power.
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May 24, 2011
Tafoni (singular: tafone) are small cave-like features found in granular rock such as sandstone, with rounded entrances and smooth concave walls. They often occur in groups that can riddle a hillside, cliff, or other rock formation.
They also frequently occur in granitic rocks. Small versions of tafoni are sometimes called alveoli; like the former, they are hypothesized to be results of salt weathering.
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May 24, 2011
Semantic satiation is a cognitive neuroscience phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who can only process the speech as repeated meaningless sounds. The explanation for the phenomenon was that verbal repetition repeatedly aroused a specific neural pattern in the cortex which corresponds to the meaning of the word. Rapid repetition causes both the peripheral sensorimotor activity and the central neural activation to fire repeatedly, which is known to cause reactive inhibition, hence a reduction in the intensity of the activity with each repetition.
Several activities demonstrate the operation of the semantic satiation effect in various cognitive tasks such as rating words and figures that are presented repeatedly in a short time, verbally repeating words then grouping them into concepts, adding numbers after repeating them out loud, and bilingual translations of words repeated in one of the two languages. In each case subjects would repeat a word or number for several seconds, then perform the cognitive task using that word. It was demonstrated that repeating a word prior to its use in a task made the task somewhat more difficult.
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May 24, 2011
Bauhaus [bou-hous] is the common term for the Staatliches Bauhaus, an art and architecture school in Germany that operated from 1919 to 1933 in Germany and in the United States from 1937-1938. The most natural meaning for its name (related to the German verb for ‘build’) is Architecture House.
The Bauhaus school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. In spite of its name, and the fact that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department during the first years of its existence. Nonetheless it was founded with the idea of creating a ‘total’ work of art in which all arts, including architecture would eventually be brought together.
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May 23, 2011
Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (1890 – 1941), better known as El Lissitzky was a Russian artist. He was an important figure of the Russian avant garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the former Soviet Union.
His work greatly influenced the Bauhaus and constructivist movements, and he experimented with production techniques and stylistic devices that would go on to dominate 20th-century graphic design.
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May 23, 2011
Nyotaimori often referred to as ‘body sushi,’ is the practice of serving sashimi or sushi from the body of a woman, typically naked. Nantaimori refers to the same practice using a male model. This subdivision of food play is originally an obscure Japanese practice that has attracted considerable international media attention. Promoters, eating participants, and proponents of the practice often say that nyotaimori is a form of art. This argument is rejected by some feminists, who argue that it objectifies the woman or the man doing the serving.
Before becoming a living sushi platter, the person is trained to lie down for hours without moving. She or he must also be able to withstand the prolonged exposure to the cold food. Before service, the individual is supposed to have taken a bath using a special fragrance-free soap and then finished off with a splash of cold water to cool the body down somewhat for the sushi. In some parts of the world, in order to comply with sanitation laws, there must be a layer of plastic or other material between the sushi and the body of the woman or man.
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