Check It Out

Links to cool places or things.

There are 1,524 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 86 of 153).

Do-It-Yourself After-Death Care

Here’s a look at another way of dealing with death on your own terms: the home funeral.

Alison and Doug carried Caroline upstairs to the bathtub, where they washed her skin and hair, dried her limp, 45-pound body with a towel and placed her head on a pillow on the bed in her old room. Alison slipped a white communion dress on Caroline, turned up the air-conditioning and put ice packs by her daughter’s sides. She put pink lipstick on the child’s paling lips, and covered up Caroline’s toes and fingers, which were turning blue at the nails, with the family quilt.

Caroline stayed in her bedroom for 36 hours for her final goodbyes. There was no traditional funeral home service, and no coroner or medical examiner was on hand. Caroline’s death was largely a home affair, with a short cemetery burial that followed.

via Home Funerals Grow As Americans Skip The Mortician For Do-It-Yourself After-Death Care.

Why You Never Truly Leave High School

This is a long but fascinating look at how we spend our adolescent years has an unusually strong effect on whom we become.

“If you’re interested in making sure kids learn a lot in school, yes, intervening in early childhood is the time to do it,” says Laurence Steinberg, a developmental psychologist at Temple University and perhaps the country’s foremost researcher on adolescence. “But if you’re interested in how people become who they are, so much is going on in the adolescent years.”

via Why You Never Truly Leave High School — New York Magazine.

How Doctors Die

Here’s something to think about when putting your end-of-life affairs in order.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

via Zócalo Public Square :: How Doctors Die.

Another doomsday threat dies out

Looks like the killer asteroid Aphohis won’t become a killer any time soon. New data shows it passing Earth in 2036 (2068 may be another matter).

Radar observations made during this week’s close encounter with the asteroid Apophis have ruled out the risk of a catastrophic cosmic collision in 2036, NASA says. Experts say it’ll be much farther away at that time than it is right now.

The crucial readings came on Wednesday when the space rock, which is thought to measure at least 885 feet (270 meters wide), approached within 9 million miles (14.5 million kilometers) of Earth. NASA is monitoring Apophis with its 230-foot (70-meter) Goldstone radio dish in California. Optical readings also have come in from the Magdalena Ridge Observatory in New Mexico and the Pan-STARRS observatory in Hawaii.

The bottom line? "We have effectively ruled out the possibility of an Earth impact by Apophis in 2036," Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said today in the all-clear news release. “The impact odds as they stand now are less than one in a million, which makes us comfortable saying we can effectively rule out an Earth impact in 2036. Our interest in asteroid Apophis will essentially be for its scientific interest for the foreseeable future.”

via Another doomsday threat dies out: Asteroid Apophis won't hit us in 2036 – Cosmic Log.

Call Time For Congress Shows How Fundraising Dominates Bleak Work Life

I first got an inkling of just how big of a problem fundraising is for Congressional members when I went to the Veterans Campaign seminar a few years ago. A large portion of the training emphasized the need to raise funds. The underlying message was that one would never be a good politician unless one were also a good fundraiser. It was an eye-opening introduction to the real world of a Congressional representative.

The question is what to do about it? Implement four-year terms for House members? Public financing? How does America wrestle its representation back from those who have bought and paid for it?

The amount of time that members of Congress in both parties spend fundraising is widely known to take up an obscene portion of a typical day — whether it’s "call time" spent on the phone with potential donors, or in person at fundraisers in Washington or back home. Seeing it spelled out in black and white, however, can be a jarring experience for a new member, as related by some who attended the November orientation.

via Call Time For Congress Shows How Fundraising Dominates Bleak Work Life.

Giving the gift of music to Gates County


As I walked out of my son’s piano recital at Ruggero Piano last month, a colorfully-painted piano, decorated with pencils, caught my eye. A sheet on a nearby music stand carried an explanation:

My name is Arnav Subramanya. I am asking for your help in obtaining a new acoustic piano for a rural elementary school in Gates County, North Carolina.

Last year my brother performed with a group at several elementary schools in the eastern counties of our state. He came back with horror stories of elementary schools which thought that a 51 key casio with no pedals and no speakers was a piano. I doubt very much that the students sitting on the gym floor 15 rows back even heard the music being played!

I decided to do something about improving this situation. I can’t fix our country’s budget deficit; but with your help, I can change the musical lives of 1500 elementary school children in one district. To achieve this goal a fund has been set up at Ruggero Piano. 100% of all money donated is going towards the purchase of a studio piano, to include delivery, 2 years of tuning, and a “truck”/dolly for the piano to sit on.
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Scrooge and Santa (On the Martin Report)

Writing in Indy Week, Thad Williamson sums up my thoughts on the Martin Report.

If the idea of the Martin Report—at least this version of it—was to close the book on the UNC academic scandal, clearly it has failed. Internal campus critics such as history professor Jay Smith as well as the News & Observer editorialists have been quick to point out that the report simply doesn’t investigate in any detail the question of whether athletes benefitted primarily or disproportionately from the suspect courses in the African and Afro-American Studies departments. Because this iteration of the report (a folllow-up is promised for next month) didn’t dig into all the hard questions, it’s hard to see why we should accept former Gov. Martin’s conclusion that this is simply an academic scandal.

via Scrooge and Santa (On the Martin Report) | Triangle Offense.

Downtown Raleigh at night

Downtown Raleigh at night (courtesy of NCDOT)


Earlier this year I actually found a photograph of downtown Raleigh that like better than my own. The NCDOT took this beautiful photo in December 2011 and tagged it with a Creative Commons license. This allows the photo to appear freely just about everywhere. If that wasn’t enough, its Flickr page also lists the exposure information used to take it. Thus, I can go out and take a photograph just like it, which I might do Friday or Saturday afternoon.