dizzymslizzy writes “With prompting from the Sunlight Foundation’s Open House Project, the US Library of Congress announced today that its online database THOMAS will now generate persistent URLs, known as legislative handles, for legislation documents. As Free Government Info states, ‘it is certainly nice to be able to link to legislation with a persistent link! But it would be much better if one could click to create a link rather than following a 600-word description of how to link on another page.’ Still, this is a definite step forward for the Library of Congress and for government transparency. From THOMAS: ‘Legislative Handles are a new persistent URL service for creating links to legislative documents from the THOMAS web site (http://thomas.loc.gov). With a simple syntax, Legislative Handles make it simple to type in legislative links to bibliographies, reference guides, emails, blogs, or web pages. Legislative Handles, for instance, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.110hconres196, are a convenient way to cite legislation.’

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Share This

Share This

CR0WTR0B0T writes “Richard Garriott, AKA Lord British, will be part of three experiments on the International Space Station. ‘Garriott has a ticket to the space station because he’s an orbital spaceflight client of Space Adventures, the only company that provides commercial human space missions … Garriott will be the first person in space who has had photorefractive keratectomy eye surgery. NASA has approved the PRK procedure for astronauts but has not yet been able to test its effects. Garriott will help scientists figure out if visual acuity of a PRK patient changes in orbit as inner eye pressure increases by up to 50% during space flights.’ Mostly, NASA wants to know if he has the ability to heal himself or provide resurrection to the other astronauts in case the experiments goes awry.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Share This

Share This

NASA and ATK Successfully Deploy 18 Foot Diameter Solar Array for ST8 - MSN MoneyCentral
Test Provides Risk Reduction Data for NASA and Lockheed’s Development of Orion MINNEAPOLIS , Oct. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — NASA and Alliant Techsystems ATK have successfully concluded initial testing and deployment of the UltraFlex solar arrays

In Depth: Voices From Main Street - Forbes
For the past few weeks, Tommy Haws, senior vice president of Pinnacle Bank, has been at the front lines of consumer angst. “People are coming in,” Haws says, “and asking, ‘Is my money safe?’ ” Pinnacle Bank has community assets of $127 million, $107

There’s nothing wonderful about the nation’s mortgage crisis - Seattle Times
George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) in “It’s A Wonderful Life. ” In Frank Capra’s 1946 film, “It’s A Wonderful Life,” Jimmy Stewart’s character runs the family savings-and-loan business. His financial institution made money the old-fashioned way: by paying

American National Offers Relief to Individuals Adversely Affected by - MSN MoneyCentral
GALVESTON, Texas , Oct. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — American National Insurance Company ANAT , and its subsidiary, American National Property and Casualty Company learned, shortly after Hurricane Ike, that one of its agents had failed to forward to

Free agents: The good, the bad and Javon Walker - CBS Sportsline
Free agency isn’t a cure for bad football teams, but it can help get them off life support. Case in point: Michael Turner in Atlanta. The Falcons needed a running back like I-75 needs traffic cops, and Turner was the best free-agent back out there

Transcript: Color of Money Live - Washington Post
Need advice about how to handle your personal finances? Whether the struggle is saving for retirement, organizing your bank files, or talking about money responsibility with your spouse or loved one, Post personal finance columnist Michelle

WKCR Faces Low Funds, Little CU Support - Columbia Spectator
Throughout its history on campus, WKCR has toed an odd line within the University’s governing board system. Neither a student enterprise nor a club, the radio station exists outside the umbrella of University governing boards, and thus is not in

McCain: Obama link to ex-radical is honesty issue - Seattle Post Intelligencer
Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. speaks to supporters at a rally at the Center Court Sports Complex in Waukesha, Wis., Thursday Oct. 9, 2008. (AP Photo/Darren Hauck) WAUKESHA, Wis. — Republican presidential candidate John

How To Save On Holiday Travel - Forbes
This holiday season, there’s good news and bad news for travelers. The bad news is that fares are high, capacity is down and last-minute deals are apt to be few and far between. The good news is that if you’re the type to do research and plan

Media Money Monkey: Firestorm - Seattle Post Intelligencer Blogs
I’ve been in the middle of some “crowning” fires. That means the flames of the forest fire have spread up through the understory, and into the upper reaches of the highest trees. The effect is incredible. Burning embers create a sky the appears full of

Share This

Share This

longacre writes “For all their incessant bickering in the first two presidential debates over conflicts of interest and government regulation, PopMech columnist Glenn Derene is puzzled that the candidates have yet to be challenged on a vital issue directly related to both those topics: Net neutrality. John McCain and Barack Obama have stated elsewhere their opposing views on the issue, with McCain being opposed to Net neutrality and favoring light regulation of the Internet, while Obama is in favor of neutrality and seeks Government involvement. In any case, since there is no standard accepted definition of “network neutrality,” until the candidates elaborate on their positions (which they both declined to do for this piece, nor anywhere else so far, for that matter), “both sides can make a credible case that they’re the ones defending freedom of innovation and open communication.””

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Share This

Share This

somegeekynick writes “The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been jointly awarded to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago ‘for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics,’ and Makoto Kobayashi of the KEK lab and Toshihide Maskawa of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, both in Japan, ‘for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Share This

Share This

Hugh Pickens writes “Although a variety of spore discharge processes have evolved among the fungi, those with the longest ranges are powered by hydrostatic pressure and include ’squirt guns’ that are most common in the Ascomycota and Zygomycota. In these fungi, fluid-filled stalks that support single spores or spore-filled sporangia, or cells called asci that contain multiple spores, are pressurized by osmosis. Because spores are discharged at such high speeds, most of the information on launch processes from previous studies has been inferred from mathematical models and is subject to a number of errors, but now Nicholas Money, an expert on fungi at Miami University, has recorded the discharges with high-speed cameras at 250,000 frames-a-second and discovered that fungi fire their spores with accelerations up to 180,000 g, calling it ‘the fastest flight in nature.’ Money and his students, in a justified fit of ecstasy, have created a video of the first fungus opera.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Share This

Share This