June 1, 2011
Toots and the Maytals are a Jamaican ska and reggae vocal group. The Maytals were key figures in reggae music. Formed in the early 1960s when ska was hot, the Maytals had a reputation for having strong, well-blended voices and a seldom-rivaled passion for their music. Frederick ‘Toots’ Hibbert (b. 1945) is the group’s frontman.
He met Henry ‘Raleigh’ Gordon and Nathaniel ‘Jerry’ Mathias, forming in 1961 a group whose early recordings were incorrectly attributed to ‘The Flames’ and ‘The Vikings’ in the UK by Island Records. The Maytals first had chart success recording for producer Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd at Studio One. With musical backing from Dodd’s house band, The Skatalites, the Maytals’ close-harmony gospel singing overshadowed Dodd’s other up-and-coming vocal group, The Wailers.
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June 1, 2011
‘54-46 (That’s My Number)‘ is a song by Fred ‘Toots’ Hibbert, recorded by Toots & the Maytals and originally released on the Beverly’s label in Jamaica and the Pyramid label in the UK. It was one of the first ska songs to receive widespread popularity outside Jamaica and is seen as being one of the defining songs of the reggae genre. It has been anthologized repeatedly and the titles of several reggae anthologies include ’54-46′ in their title.
The lyrics describe Toots’ time in prison for an arrest for possession of marijuana. The song features the same riddim (instrumental accompaniment) to a song as ‘Train to Skaville’ by Toots & the Maytals’ contemporaries The Ethiopians. Hibbert later admitted that 54-46 was not his actual jail number, and that he was not arrested for a crime related to marijuana.
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May 31, 2011
Destino is an animated short film released in 2003 by The Walt Disney Company. The six-minute short follows the story of Chronos and the ill-fated love he has for a mortal female. It is unusual in that its production originally began in 1945.
The project was a collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí, and features music written by Mexican songwriter Armando Dominguez and performed by Dora Luz.
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May 31, 2011
Jellyfish Lake is located on Eil Malk island in Palau. Eil Malk is part of the Rock Islands, a group of small, rocky, mostly uninhabited islands in Palau’s Southern Lagoon. Jellyfish Lake is one of Palau’s most famous dive (snorkeling only) sites. It is notable for the millions of golden jellyfish which migrate horizontally across the lake daily.
The jellyfish found in the lake have stinging cells, but are not in general powerful enough to cause harm to humans. It has been reported that it is possible to notice the stings on sensitive areas like the area around the mouth.
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May 26, 2011
Addictive TV is a UK film remixer and chop-up duo formed in 1992. The DJ/producers and audiovisual artists are the team behind Optronica – the visual music and VJ festival held in London. In 1998 they produced Transambient for Channel 4 in the UK and from 2000 – 2005 produced the ground-breaking DJ:VJ music series Mixmasters for the UK’s ITV1. In 2003, working closely with the R&D area of Japanese manufacturer Pioneer Electronics they became instrumental with the testing and development of their DVD turntables, the first being the Pioneer DVJ-X1 released in 2004.
They are known for their bootleg film remixes, and in 2006 they became the first group to officially remix a Hollywood film, reworking New Line Cinema’s dance-centric Take the lead into an audiovisual Viral video. In 2006 they also worked on Snakes on a Plane remixing the film for its TV commercials.
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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 21, 2011
Marc Newson (b. 1963) born in Australia, and now based in London, is an industrial designer who works in aircraft design and product design. He incorporates a design style known as biomorphism to his various designs. This style uses smooth flowing lines, translucency, transparency and tends to have an absence of sharp edges.
He is currently adjunct professor in design at Sydney College of the Arts and is the creative director for Qantas. He co-founded and owns the Ikepod watch company. One of his three Lockheed Lounge chairs sold for $968,000 at Sotheby’s in 2006. Every year he races one of his four vintage sports cars – an Aston Martin, a Lamborghini, a Ferrari and a Cisitalia, in the Italian Mille Miglia.
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May 21, 2011
The limbic system (or Paleomammalian brain) is a set of brain structures including the hippocampus, amygdala, anterior thalamic nuclei, septum, limbic cortex and fornix, which seemingly support a variety of functions including emotion, behavior, long term memory, and olfaction (smell). The term ‘limbic’ comes from the Latin limbus, for ‘border’ or ‘edge.’ Some scientists have suggested that the concept of the limbic system should be abandoned as obsolete, as it is grounded more in transient tradition than in facts.
The limbic system operates by influencing the endocrine system (hormones) and the autonomic nervous system (visceral functions, e.g. breathing, urinating, salivating). It is highly interconnected with the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s pleasure center, which plays a role in sexual arousal and the ‘high’ derived from certain recreational drugs. In a 1954 experiment, rats with metal electrodes implanted into their nucleus accumbens as well as their septal nuclei repeatedly pressed a lever activating this region, and did so in preference to eating and drinking, eventually dying of exhaustion.
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May 18, 2011
Bitcoin is a digital currency created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. It is also the name of the open source software he designed that uses it, and the peer-to-peer network that it forms. Unlike most currencies, bitcoin does not rely on a central issuer, like a bank or government.Bitcoin uses a distributed database across a peer-to-peer computer network to record transactions, and uses cryptography to provide basic security functions, such as ensuring that bitcoins can only be spent once, and only by the person who owns them.
Bitcoin’s design allows for anonymous ownership and transfers of value. Bitcoins can be saved on a personal computer in the form of a wallet file or kept with a third party wallet service, and in either case Bitcoins can be sent over the Internet to anyone with a Bitcoin address. Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer topology and lack of central administration make it impossible for any government or other authority to change the value of bitcoins or induce inflation by producing more of them.
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May 18, 2011
Blue Velvet is a 1986 American mystery film written and directed by David Lynch. The movie exhibits elements of both film noir and surrealism. The film features Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, and Laura Dern. The title is taken from the 1963 Bobby Vinton song of the same name.
Although initially detested by some mainstream critics, the film is now widely acclaimed, and earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director. As an example of a director casting against the norm, Blue Velvet is also noted for re-launching Hopper’s career and for providing Rossellini with a dramatic outlet beyond the work as a fashion model and a cosmetics spokeswoman for which she had until then been known.
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May 17, 2011
Optogenetics is a neuromodulation technique employed in neuroscience where light pulses are used to activate and deactivate neurons which have been genetically sensitized to photons. It employs a combination of techniques from optics and genetics to control and monitor the activities of individual neurons in living tissue—even within freely-moving animals—and to precisely measure the effects of those manipulations in real-time. The key reagents used in optogenetics are light-sensitive proteins.
The earliest approaches were developed and applied in the lab of Gero Miesenböck, now Waynflete Professor of Physiology at the University of Oxford, and Richard Kramer and Ehud Isacoff at the University of California, Berkeley; these methods conferred light sensitivity but were never reported to be useful by other laboratories due to the multiple components these approaches required. A distinct single-component approach involving microbial opsin genes introduced in 2005 turned out to be widely applied. Optogenetics is known for the high spatial and temporal resolution that it provides in altering the activity of specific types of neurons to control a subject’s behavior.
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May 17, 2011
Burnt ends are flavorful pieces of meat cut from the point half of a smoked brisket. A traditional part of Kansas City Barbecue, burnt ends are considered a delicacy in barbecue cooking. Either the entire brisket is cooked whole, then the point end removed and cooked further, or the point and flat are separated prior to cooking. Due to the higher fat content of the brisket point, it takes longer to fully cook to tender and render out fat and collagen. This longer cooking gave rise to the name. Sometimes when the flat is done, the point is returned to the smoker for further cooking. Some cooks re-season the point at this time.
Kansas City style burnt ends are usually served cubed with sauce either on top or on the side. A ‘proper’ burnt end should display a modest amount of ‘bark’ or char on at least one side. Burnt ends can be served alone (sometimes smothered in barbecue sauce) or in sandwiches, as well as in a variety of other dishes, including baked beans and gumbo.
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