Links to cool places or things.
There are 1,530 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 118 of 153).
The city’s new website does offer a feature the old one doesn’t: a great account of the Community Build of the Lions Park playground. It includes some quotes from me and photographs of me and my family, among the many others who helped with the build.
I’m happy to have helped to make this fantastic new playground a reality for the folks who use Lions Park.
The New Yorker has a thoughtful article asking if end-of-life procedures for terminally-ill patients are only masking the inevitable, giving these patients false hope when medicine could instead be helping them make the most of their last days. It’s worth thinking about.
Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die. It started with a cough and a pain in her back. Then a chest X-ray showed that her left lung had collapsed, and her chest was filled with fluid. A sample of the fluid was drawn off with a long needle and sent for testing. Instead of an infection, as everyone had expected, it was lung cancer, and it had already spread to the lining of her chest. Her pregnancy was thirty-nine weeks along, and the obstetrician who had ordered the test broke the news to her as she sat with her husband and her parents. The obstetrician didn’t get into the prognosis—she would bring in an oncologist for that—but Sara was stunned. Her mother, who had lost her best friend to lung cancer, began crying.
via Hospice medical care for dying patients : The New Yorker.
Here’s a fascinating description of how the Skype VoIP application can poke holes through firewalls – bypassing your network security. What’s even more eye-opening is that there is little that can be done to block it.
Anyone who has used the popular Internet telephony software Skype knows that it works as smoothly behind a NAT firewall as it does if the PC is connected directly to the Internet. The reason for this is that the inventors of Skype and similar software have come up with a solution.
Naturally every firewall must also let packets through into the local network – after all the user wants to view websites, read e-mails, etc. The firewall must therefore forward the relevant data packets from outside, to the workstation computer on the LAN. However it only does so, when it is convinced that a packet represents the response to an outgoing data packet. A NAT router therefore keeps tables of which internal computer has communicated with which external computer and which ports the two have used.
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Back in the 1990s this show, “Metal Method with Sledge,” was the rage on Raleigh’s public access channel. Fortunately it lives on thanks to YouTube. Rock on!
The Telegraph has more dirt on the Libya-BP terrorist-for-oil deal. There’s certainly lots of smoke here. Could fire be far behind?
The name reads Dalia Advisory Limited, a company established by Libyan businessmen just a week after the country’s officials were told the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was being considered for release on compassionate grounds.
Dalia Advisory is in fact a “front” for the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), a sovereign wealth fund with £80 billion, to invest in Britain and beyond. The Georgian town house, bought for £6 million, is, ironically, only a few yards from the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square.
Senior business sources have told The Sunday Telegraph that had Megrahi died in a British jail, the LIA would have taken its vast sums elsewhere. “If Megrahi had perished in Scotland, we would have become a pariah state as far as the Libyans were concerned,” said one source.
via Special report: the Libya investment firm and the release of the Lockerbie bomber – Telegraph.
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with coffee. During my Navy days I would drink multiple cups a day, which usually led to my being agitated. I often point to my coffee-drinking friends’ near-homicidal behavior during Hurricane Fran as reason enough to give up coffee.
I’ve mostly given up drinking caffeinated coffee. I’ve speculated to myself that the years of drinking coffee have carved canyons through my brain which can only be filled by the next cup of Joe. As with any addiction, each cup never seems to reach the level the prior one did.
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Here’s a fascinating look at the ballooning American intelligence world, which has gone on a growth binge following the 9/11 attacks with no limit in sight.
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.
via Top-secret America: A hidden world, growing beyond control – The Denver Post.
Tulsi-Hybrid Solar Oven
Check out the Tulsi-Hybrid Solar Oven: a hybrid solar-electric cooker. I’ve been wondering if we could use the abundant sun on our back deck for cooking food, and this solar cooker looks like the perfect solution. When the sun isn’t available to do the cooking, the Tulsi-Hybrid uses electricity to keep your food warm – avoiding spoilage.
I’ve found the Tulsi-Hybrid available online for as low as $240 at the Solar Store.
Sun BD Corporation, presents Hybrid Solar Oven Technology at its finest, it is easy to use, portable, sets up in seconds and is safer to use because there are no dangerous open flames. The Tulsi-Hybrid produces zero carbon emissions!
Found this fascinating:
Some birds can sense the Earth’s magnetic field and orientate themselves with the ease of a compass needle. This ability is a massive boon for migrating birds, keeping frequent flyers on the straight and narrow. But this incredible sense is closely tied to a more mundane one – vision. Thanks to special molecules in their retinas, birds like the European robins can literally see magnetic fields.
In response to the overwhelming demand that 1,100 communities showed for the Google Fiber project, Google created the Fiber for Communities website. This site is a collection of resources that is intended to pave the way for communities to acquire fiber Internet.
I really like how Google has positioned this new effort. They know that their fiber project will only serve a handful of communities, leaving many to fend for themselves. By creating this site, Google shows it is committed to sharing its findings and supporting those communities who want to make this jump.
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