August 17, 2010
Bohemian Grove is a 2,700-acre campground located at 20601 Bohemian Avenue, in Monte Rio, California, belonging to a private San Francisco-based men’s art club known as the Bohemian Club. In mid-July each year, Bohemian Grove hosts a three-week encampment of some of the most powerful men in the world. The Club motto is ‘Weaving Spiders Come Not Here,’ which implies that outside concerns and business deals are to be left outside.
The Grove is particularly famous for a Manhattan Project planning meeting that took place there in September 1942, which subsequently led to the atomic bomb. Those attending this meeting, apart from Ernest Lawrence and military officials, included the president of Harvard and representatives of Standard Oil and General Electric. Grove members take particular pride in this event and often relate the story to new attendees.
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August 17, 2010
According to various esoteric, occult, and mystical teachings, living beings are constituted of a series of psycho-spiritual subtle bodies, each corresponding to a subtle plane of existence, in a hierarchy or great chain of being that culminates in the physical form. It is known in different spiritual traditions; ‘the most sacred body’ and ‘supracelestial body’ in Sufism, ‘the diamond body’ in Taoism, and ‘the light body’ or ‘rainbow body’ in Buddhism.
Clairvoyants sometimes say that they can see the subtle bodies as an aura. The practice of astral projection is supposed to involve the separation of the subtle body from the physical, but the existence of subtle bodies is unconfirmed by the mainstream scientific community.
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August 16, 2010
The Nazca Lines are a series of ancient geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert of Peru. They have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Scholars believe the Nazca Lines were created by the Nazca culture between 400 and 650 AD. The hundreds of individual figures range in complexity from simple lines to stylized hummingbirds, spiders, monkeys, fish, sharks or orcas, llamas, and lizards.
The lines are shallow designs made in the ground by removing the ubiquitous reddish pebbles and uncovering the whitish ground beneath. Hundreds are simple lines or geometric shapes; more than seventy are designs of animal, bird, fish or human figures. The largest figures are over 660 ft across. Scholars differ in interpreting the purpose of the designs, but they generally ascribe religious significance to them, as they were major works that required vision, planning and coordination of people to achieve.
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August 16, 2010
In some Native American legends, a skinwalker is a person with the supernatural ability to turn into any animal he or she desires, though they first must be wearing a pelt of the animal to be able to transform. Similar lore can be found in cultures throughout the world and is often referred to as shapeshifting by anthropologists.
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August 16, 2010
A scramjet (supersonic combustion ramjet) is a type of jet engine in which the combustion process takes place in supersonic airflow. Both ramjets and scramjets rely on high vehicle speed to forcefully compress (ram) the incoming air, but whereas a ramjet decelerates the air to subsonic velocities before combustion, airflow in a scramjet is supersonic throughout the entire engine.
This allows the scramjet to efficiently operate at extremely high speeds: theoretical projections place the top speed of a scramjet between Mach 12 and Mach 24, which is near orbital velocity. For comparison, the fastest manned airbreathing aircraft, the SR-71 Blackbird, has a maximum speed of Mach 3.2.
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August 16, 2010
Bele Chere is an annual music and arts street festival held in downtown Asheville, North Carolina. The festival has been held annually on the last weekend in July since the late 1970s. It is the largest free festival in the Southeastern United States, attracting over 350,000 people. Displayed art covers a variety of media types including painting, photography, pottery and jewelry. A variety of music genres are represented at the festival, including Country, Blues, Folk, Mountain, Rock and Jazz .
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August 16, 2010
Scarification [skar-uh-fi-key-shuhn], sometimes called cicatrization, involves scratching, etching, burning, or superficially cutting designs, pictures, or words into the skin as a permanent body modification.
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August 16, 2010
Gossamer is an animated cartoon character in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. The character is a hairy, orange monster. His rectangular body is perched on two giant tennis shoes, and his heart-shaped face is composed of only two oval eyes and a wide mouth, with two hulking arms. The monster’s main trait, however, is bright uncombed red hair.
In fact, a gag in the 1980 short Duck Dodgers and the Return of the 24½th Century lampoons this by revealing that Gossamer is, in fact, composed entirely of hair. He was originally voiced by Mel Blanc and has been voiced by Joe Alaskey and Jim Cummings. The word ‘Gossamer’ refers to things light, delicate, or insubstantial. The name is meant to be ironic, since the character is large, menacing, and destructive.
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August 16, 2010
Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a secure seedbank located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago, about 1,300 kilometres from the North Pole. The facility preserves a wide variety of plant seeds in an underground cavern. The seed vault will provide insurance against the loss of seeds in genebanks, as well as a refuge for seeds in the case of large scale regional or global crises. The seed vault is managed under terms spelled out in a tripartite agreement between the Norwegian government, the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT) and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center.
Construction of the seed vault, which cost approximately $9 million, was funded entirely by the Government of Norway. Storage of seeds in the vault is free of charge. Operational costs are paid by Norway and the Global Crop Diversity Trust. The primary funding of the Trust came from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, United Kingdom, Norway, Australia, Switzerland, and Sweden, though funding has been received from a wide variety of sources including four developing countries: Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, and India.
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August 16, 2010
Mamihlapinatapai is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the ‘most succinct word,’ and is considered one of the hardest words to translate. It describes ‘a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that they both desire but which neither one wants to start.’
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August 16, 2010
Baidu is a Chinese search engine established in 2000 by co-founders, Robin Li and Eric Xu. Both of the co-founders are Chinese nationals who have studied and worked overseas before returning to China. Baidu.com Inc. is registered in the Cayman Islands. In April 2010, Baidu ranked 7th overall in Alexa’s internet rankings.
In December 2007, Baidu became the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 index. Baidu proactively censors its content in line with government regulations. The name Baidu, whose literal meaning is ‘hundreds of times,’ is taken from the last line of Xin Qiji’s classical poem ‘Green Jade Table in The Lantern Festival.’
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August 16, 2010
Yandex is a Russian IT company which operates the largest search engine in Russia (with 64% market share, ranked eighth-largest in the world) and develops a number of Internet-based services and products. Yandex was launched in 1997 and began earning a profit in 2002. Its name stands for ‘Yet Another iNDEXer.’
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