Is it a funny news? Britain’s advertising watchdog has banned a radio ad featuring a man speaking loudly in German and which asked: “Is your boss a bit of a tyrant?”

Thirteen listeners complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), saying it used an outdated stereotype.

The advert for the Reed Online recruitment agency featured a man speaking to his boss who responded angrily and loudly in German. The voice-over said: “Boss a bit of a tyrant? Find your perfect boss on the UK’s biggest job site …”

The ASA said: “We concluded that, given the extreme reaction and aggressive tone of the German speaking boss, the ad reinforced a negative and outdated cultural stereotype of German people as overpowering and tyrannical and therefore the ad had the potential to cause serious offence to some listeners.”

It banned the advert for breaching rules on good taste and decency.

Reed did not comment but industry body the Radio Advertising Clearance Center said it believed most listeners would regard the scenario as humorous and inoffensive.

It said the boss character was a generic “German-sounding orator,” which they believed was a well established type in British comedy culture.

No Comments  Email This Post

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

A rarely seen 400-year-old map that identified Florida as “the Land of Flowers” and put China at the centre of the world went on display Tuesday at the Library of Congress.

The map created by Matteo Ricci was the first in Chinese to show the Americas. Ricci, a Jesuit missionary from Italy, was among the first westerners to live in what is now Beijing in the early 1600s. Known for introducing western science to China, Ricci created the map in 1602 at the request of Emperor Wanli.

Ricci’s map includes pictures and annotations describing different regions of the world. Africa was noted to have the world’s highest mountain and longest river. The brief description of North America mentions “humped oxen” or bison, wild horses and a region named “Ka-na-ta.”

Several Central and South American places are named, including “Wa-ti-ma-la” (Guatemala), “Yu-ho-t’ang” (Yucatan) and “Chih-Li” (Chile).

Ricci gave a brief description of the discovery of the Americas.

“In olden days, nobody had ever known that there were such places as North and South America or Magellanica,” he wrote, using a label that early mapmakers gave to Australia and Antarctica. “But a hundred years ago, Europeans came sailing in their ships to parts of the sea coast, and so discovered them.”

The Ricci map gained the nickname the “Impossible Black Tulip of Cartography” because it was so hard to find.

This map – one of only two in good condition – was purchased by the James Ford Bell Trust in October for $1 million, making it the second most expensive rare map ever sold. The library bought another of the world’s rarest maps, the Waldseemuller world map, which was the first to name “America,” for $10 million in 2003.

The Ricci map going on display had been held for years by a private collector in Japan and will eventually be housed at the Bell Library at the University of Minnesota. It map symbolizes the first connection between Eastern and Western thinking and commerce, said Ford W. Bell, co-trustee of the fund started by his grandfather, General Mills founder James Ford Bell.

Custodians at the Bell Library focus “on the development of trade and how that drove civilization – how that constant desire to find new markets to sell new products led to exchanges of knowledge, science, technology and really drove civilization,” said Bell, who is also president of the American Association of Museums. “So (the map) fits in beautifully.”

The map was being shown publicly for the first time in North America. It measures about 3.7 by 1.5 metres and is printed on six rolls of rice paper.

The Library of Congress rarely exhibits artifacts it does not own because its holdings are so vast, but curators made an exception for the Ricci map. It will be on view through April alongside the Waldseemuller map and later will be shown at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

The library also will create a digital image of the map to be posted online for researchers and students.

Ti Bin Zhang, first secretary for cultural affairs at the Chinese Embassy, said the map represents “the momentous first meeting of East and West” and was the “catalyst for commerce.”

No examples of the map are known to exist in China, where Ricci was revered and buried. Only a few original copies are known to exist, held by the Vatican’s libraries and collectors in France and Japan.

Source: Canadian Press

2 Comments  Email This Post

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

As NASA decides the future of one of the two rovers exploring the planet, the agency is looking to the launch of the newest generation of robotic explorer next year.  In addition, NASA tells CNN Radio that the agency is close to a deal to merge its Mars program with that of the European Space Agency, a big step toward manned missions.  NASA’s Mars rover program is now heading into its sixth year. The rovers Spirit and Opportunity were launched in 2004 and landed on opposite sides of Mars for what was to be a 90-day exploration mission.

Almost six years and a wealth of information later, the rovers were still ranging across the planet until recently, sending back data to researchers on Earth.

Spirit stumbled into a sand trap nine months ago, however, and all efforts to free the vehicle have failed. In fact, the latest attempts resulted in it sinking even deeper into the soil.

NASA could make a decision as soon as next month, during its annual review, on whether to continue rescue efforts, the agency says.

“At this point, we intend to have the independent board look at our situation with Spirit and give us any additional recommendations as to whether we should continue to try and extract it or not, ” said Doug McCuistion, the director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.

Even if the sand trap becomes Spirit’s final resting place, the rover’s mission may not be over quite yet. McCuistion, calling Spirit an incredible success, said there are certainly things the lame rover can do scientifically, even if it’s not mobile.

“The types of science we could do if it were stationary include imagery. The seasons change. We’re going into winter now on Mars. And certainly the way the climate changes, the way weather changes, the way the weather patterns work, is something we can continue to monitor and learn more about,” he said.

“There’s a potential we can do some other geologic work, such as seismology, which is related to impacts of meteorites on the surface. … That is actually science that has never been done and is very important to understand. There’s even the potential to continue some geological work in regards to soil composition and makeup.”

In the meantime, NASA is preparing for the launch of its newest robotic space exploration vehicle, the Mars Science Laboratory, late next year. It weighs roughly one metric ton and is about the size of a small automobile.

The MSL rover, in addition to carrying cameras and other instrumentation, will carry a series of chemistry laboratories. And it will have the ability to test material in vastly different areas of the planet.

“There hasn’t been a mission, not only as complex but as capable, since the Viking landers in the ’70s went to the surface. The real difference is, this one can move around,” McCuistion said.

The MSL, when it arrives on Mars in 2012, barring any unforeseen delays, “will take science on the surface of another planet to a completely different step,” he said.

But what about a manned mission to Mars? Is that a near-term possibility, or is it much farther down the road?

Before any human can travel to Mars, scientists need to be able to analyze samples from the planet and answer many questions, NASA says. Martian dust, for example: What is its composition? How sticky is it? Will it stick to boots and clog zippers and Velcro fasteners? Is it toxic? If astronauts track surface materials into their habitat, will it cause problems?

Those are just some of the questions; there are hundreds more.

Undoubtedly, humans are still years away from paying a personal visit.

“That’s a very challenging mission of launching something from here, putting it into orbit at Mars, getting it to the surface and collecting samples, getting those samples back into orbit, then return them to Earth,” McCuistion said. “This is a mission that will change our understanding of Mars and change our understanding of planetary science significantly. It really needs to be a global effort.”

Toward that end, NASA and the European Space Agency have been in discussions over the past year on merging their Mars exploration programs. NASA officials say they’ve now taken a major step forward.

“The European Space Agency’s council and their program board have agreed to the terms that we’re working with and have endorsed this partnership to go forward. So we are starting the new year with a renewed excitement for missions beginning in 2016 to be done in a joint partnership between Europe and NASA,” McCuistion said.

With details remaining to be worked out, he predicted that it will take another six to 12 months for the merger to be completed.

The European agency is making major progress on landing technology, which is essential for not only getting samples from Mars back to Earth but for eventual human travel to Mars, he said.

The European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission is orbiting the planet right now. McCuistion said it has been involved in reaffirming observations made from the ground about methane potentially being in the atmosphere of Mars, which is a huge discovery over the past couple years.

McCuistion described the Mars Exploration Program as an exciting collaboration of many missions with the intent of changing the text books on the planet.

“We have accelerated our knowledge of the planet dramatically by sending missions every other year,” he said.

“So we will continue that thread, and we will continue to change science as we do it.”

I am very excited from this news after reading it from CNN.  Can we discover something interesting in Mars? Say a base built by ET, rich water source, and etc.

No Comments  Email This Post

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Justification for beer and Ice cream! But stay away from the pizza – a how to lose weight tips for you?

As we all know, it takes 1 calorie to heat 1 gram of water 1 degree centigrade. Translated into meaningful terms, this means that if you eat a very cold dessert (generally consisting of water in large part), the natural processes which raise the consumed dessert to body temperature during the digestive cycle literally sucks the calories out of the only available source, your body fat.

For example, a dessert served and eaten at near 0 degrees C (32.2 deg. F) will in a short time be raised to the normal body temperature of 37 degrees C (98.6 deg. F).  For each gram of dessert eaten, that process takes approximately 37 calories as stated above.  The average desser tportion is 6 oz, or 168 grams.  Therefore, by operation of thermodynamiclaw, 6,216 calories (1 cal./gm/deg. x 37 deg. x 168 gms) are extracted from body fat as the dessert’s temperature is normalized.

Allowing for the 1,200 latent calories in the dessert, the net calorie loss is approximately 5,000 calories.

Obviously, the more cold dessert you eat,the better off you are and the faster you will lose weight, if that is your goal.

This process works equally well when drinking very cold beer in frosted glasses.  Each ounce of beer contains 16 latent calories, but extracts 1,036 calories (6,216 cal. per 6 oz. portion) in the temperature normalizing process.  Thus the net calorie loss per ounce of beer is 1,020 calories.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to calculate that 12,240 calories (12 oz. x 1,020 cal./oz.) are extracted from the body in the process of drinking a can of beer.

Frozen desserts, e.g., ice cream, are even more beneficial, since it takes 83 cal./gm to melt them (i.e., raise them to 0 deg. C) and an additional 37 cal./gm to further raise them to body temperature. The results here are really remarkable, and it beats running hands down.

Unfortunately, for those who eat pizza as an excuse to drink beer, pizza (loaded with latent calories and served above body temperature) induces an opposite effect.  But, thankfully, as the astute reader should have already reasoned, the obvious solution is to drink a lot of beer with pizza and follow up immediately with large bowls of ice cream.

We could all be thin if we were to adhere religiously to a pizza, beer, and ice cream diet.

Happy eating!

Notes: Remind you that it is coming from a fun and joke source.  So, will you treat the advice in serious?  Think twice.

No Comments  Email This Post

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Paradigm Research Group, a leading UFO truth advocacy group, announced today a renewed international effort to convince Barack Obama to end the 62-year truth embargo preventing formal government acknowledgement of extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race.  Also Renewed is pressure on the White House press corps to start asking appropriate questions and demand appropriate answers about connections between key members of the Democratic Party – Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, John Podesta, Leon Panetta and Bill Richardson – and theUFO and ET issue.

Since June 1, 2009 letters, faxes and emails from around the world have been sent to the White House Correspondents’ Association insisting that the reporters in the White House press corps begin asking politically related UFO and ET questions and receive appropriate answers.

On the July 24, 2009 White Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about this correspondence which he declined to acknowledge. Subsequent queries to the WHCA from reporters such as Billy Cox of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune have also been ignored.

In similar fashion thousands of letters, faxes and emails to the President Elect and the President since November 4, 2008 demanding Barack Obama end the truth embargo and call for congressional hearings on the UFO and ET issue have not been acknowledged by the White House.

In similar fashion thousands of letters, faxes and emails to the President Elect and the President since November 4, 2008 demanding Barack Obama end the truth embargo and call for congressional hearings on the UFO/ET issue have not been acknowledged by the White House – no response.   Furthermore, the Citizen’s Briefing Book generated during the transition by the Change.gov website was stripped of all UFO/ET related input to the Book prior to submission to the President.

PRG executive director Stephen Bassett stated, “This is not acceptable. France, Denmark, Canada, Australia,Sweden, Brazil, Russia, the United Kingdom and other countries have recently released tens of thousands of UFO/ET related files into the public domain.  The message to the U.S. is clear, ‘If you do not end this truth embargo, one of us will.’”  “Either Russia or China would benefit enormously by acting first on this issue,” added Bassett.

Source: www.paradigmresearchgroup.org

No Comments  Email This Post

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•