Category: News

Eternal killjoy Joe Jackson doesn’t sound very pleased about his late son’s life being turned into a circus.

The penny-pinching stage parent – whose pop legend son Michael died from acute Propofol intoxication last June – says he doesn’t understand why world-renowned Canadian performance troupe Cirque du Soleil want to travel the world with a show about the “Thriller” star.

“That’s something else, isn’t it? I won’t see it,” the Jackson patriarch replied dryly when probbed for his thoughts about the Cirque show by reporters this week.

On Tuesday, the circus group struck a deal with the Jackson estate, which will see the production become a residency in Las Vegas from 2012 and will feature expansive acrobatics and dance routines set to the late King of Pop’s songs.

While Joe is unhappy with the show, his estranged wife Katherine Jackson is delighted about the show, which will provide Michael’s estate with 50 percent of all profits.

“Our family is thrilled that Cirque du Soleil will pay tribute to my son in such an important way,” Mrs. Jackson remarked.

It’s Earth Day … Again. Sometimes I feel like Bill Murray in the movie “Groundhog Dog”  (since the other Earth Day was celebrated on March 20 this year). Well, get up all you woodchuck chuckers and celebrate the environment and take one small step today in making this world a greener place.

This week I had the pleasure of communicating with John Weng, the project manager for a California student-run high school project led by the Los Altos Academy of Engineering (LAAE).

Students in Hacienda Heights, CA have created a hydrogen-powered internal combustion engine car they are calling HICE. The term HICE (and sometimes H2ICE on this website) is an acronym for Hydrogen Internal Combustion Engine.

The students have decided to forgo the popular hydrogen fuel cell car in favor of a high mileage vehicle using a four-stroke engine that will compete in next year’s U. S. Shell Eco Marathon.

According to Mr. Weng, “Mike Keirns was the instructor who started the idea back in the 2007-2008 school year. From there, it became our flagship vehicle. We originally planned on competing in the Shell Eco-marathon and we were actually the first high school to create a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle as well back in 2007, winning first place. We intend to enter HICE next year for the Shell Eco-marathon. HICE is different from your published vehicle in that it does not require any gasoline whatsoever and runs on a student modified engine.”

LAAE will be showing off their HICE vehicle (pictured) at their open house, May 8, 2010. Several political figures (such as Congresswoman Grace Napolitano) and other  VIP attendees are expected to join in the festivities.

It’s important for the scientists, researchers and engineers of tomorrow to get a head start today in hydrogen fuel technology. LAAE continues to be a leader in such technology preparing students for high tech job markets that will pay good wages for years to come.

And with any luck, they will not be forced to listen to repeated choruses of  “Babe, I got you Babe”. Happy Earth Day everyone … again!

A couple of years ago two neuroscientists wrote a book about a supposedly little-studied extinct group of humans whose bones were found in South Africa. A very large skull with child-like facial features was discovered, and the skeleton was dubbed “Boskop Man”.

The scientific community of South Africa was small, and before long the skull came to the attention of S. H. Haughton, one of the country’s few formally trained paleontologists. He reported his findings at a 1915 meeting of the Royal Society of South Africa. “The cranial capacity must have been very large,” he said, and “calculation by the method of Broca gives a minimum figure of 1,832 cc [cubic centimeters] .” The Boskop skull, it would seem, housed a brain perhaps 25 percent or more larger than our own.

[…]

Might the very large Boskop skull be an aberration? Might it have been caused by hydrocephalus or some other disease? These questions were quickly preempted by new discoveries of more of these skulls.

As if the Boskop story were not already strange enough, the accumulation of additional remains revealed another bizarre feature: These people had small, childlike faces. Physical anthropologists use the term pedomorphosis to describe the retention of juvenile features into adulthood. This phenomenon is sometimes used to explain rapid evolutionary changes. For example, certain amphibians retain fishlike gills even when fully mature and past their water-inhabiting period. Humans are said by some to be pedomorphic compared with other primates.Our facial structure bears some resemblance to that of an immature ape. Boskop’s appearance may be described in terms of this trait. A typical current European adult, for instance, has a face that takes up roughly one-third of his overall cranium size. Boskop has a face that takes up only about one-fifth of his cranium size, closer to the proportions of a child. Examination of individual bones confirmed that the nose, cheeks, and jaw were all childlike.

An extinct race of humans much smarter than us? Possibly killed off by their less evolved, savage human neighbors? Curious, I did a web search on the Boskops and found a debunking of sorts of the book by John Hawks.

That is pretty much where matters have stood ever since. “Boskopoid” is used only in this historical sense; it is has not been an active unit of analysis since the 1950’s. By 1963, Brothwell could claim that Boskop itself was nothing more than a large skull of Khoisan type, leaving the concept of a “Boskop race” far behind.

Today, skeletal remains from South African LSA are generally believed to be ancestral to historic peoples in the region, including the Khoikhoi and San. The ancient people did not mysteriously disappear: they are still with us! The artistic legacy of the ancient peoples, clearly evidenced in rock art, is impressive but no more so than that of the European Upper Paleolithic or that of indigenous Australians.

And their brains were not all that big. Boskop itself is a large skull, but it is a clear standout in the sample of ancient South African crania; other males range from 1350 to 1600 ml (these are documented by Henneberg and Steyn 1993). That is around the same as Upper Paleolithic Europeans and pre-Neolithic Chinese. LSA South Africans fit in with their contemporaries around the world.

To be sure, there has been a reduction in the average brain size in South Africa during the last 10,000 years, and there have been parallel reductions in Europe and China — pretty much everywhere we have decent samples of skeletons, it looks like brains have been shrinking. This is something I’ve done quite a bit of research on, and will continue to do so, because it’s interesting. But it is hardly a sign that ancient humans had mysterious mental powers — it is probably a matter of energetic efficiency (brains are expensive), developmental time (brains take a long time to mature) and diet (brains require high protein and fat consumption, less and less available to Holocene populations).

OK, so Boskop Man is not a separate human lineage. But at least one sample did have a very big skull. (According to the authors of the book, numerous other skeletons with oversized skulls were found in the dig area.) Was it then possible that a small tribe of very smart ancients in South Africa once existed? Did they suffer from a disease? Or were they just exceptional individuals on the upper end of skull sizes for their time?

Hawks mentions the fact that brains have been shrinking over time across the world. I have also read that Neandertals had larger brain volumes than modern humans. These leads to all sorts of depressing conjecture. Is it possible we are getting stupider? Our cultural achievements would suggest otherwise, but maybe Neandertals would have accomplished even greater intellectual feats than modern humans had they been born during a time with a supportive industrial infrastructure.

And is there an upper limit on just how smart humans can get? As brain volumes grow, women’s pelvises must grow wider in proportion, otherwise more big-brained infants die during childbirth. But very wide-hipped women would have trouble walking or running, not to mention they would look sexually grotesque to men searching for a mate. Northeast Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are known to have the highest average IQs in the world. Do their women have correspondingly greater than average hip widths to accommodate all those big brained babies?

Because of this inherent pelvic width limitation, there may be (anti)evolutionary forces at work that select against smarter babies. The direction of evolution is not necessarily one of progress; it is, instead, in the direction of survival and replication. Which is not synonymous with ever-expanding intelligence. A sobering thought that we could just as easily devolve backward to a more aggressive distant ancestor archetype than evolve forward into bulbous headed little grey men. Not to say that there couldn’t be ways around the pelvic trap. If the selection forces for smarts are strong enough (and in a cognitively demanding society like ours the evidence for smarts selection has disappeared under the lower fertility rate of educated women), then perhaps Darwinian expedience will jerry-rig a system to ensure our brains can continue growing larger. Maybe by moving most of the skull and brain growth post-natally, or rewiring the neurons to become more efficient.

Anyhow, it’s amusing to wonder if there was an ancient human population much smarter than our own who were killed off by the envious and aggressive idiocrats in their midst at the time. Is that what happened to the Neandertals?

Filed under: Hope and Change

Former Vice President Dick Cheney Thursday morning endorsed Florida Senate GOP candidate Marco Rubio and  unleashed some scathing views of Rubio’s GOP opponent, Florida Governor Charlie Crist.

“Washington is broken and Congress is already overflowing with politicians who need pollsters to tell them what to think. It certainly doesn’t need another one. Now more than ever America needs leaders with the strength of conviction. That is why I am proud to endorse Marco Rubio,” Cheney said in a statement.

“Charlie Crist has shown time and again that he cannot be trusted in Washington to take on the Obama agenda because on issue after issue he actually supports that agenda,” Cheney said.

Rubio was once trailing Crist in polls, but now Rubio has taken the lead — also clinching the endorsement of other big name Republicans including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former 2008 presidential candidate and Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. 

There’s also a swirl of rumors if Crist should or will run as an independent, although Crist so far has stayed course as a GOP candidate.  He has until April 30 to decide.

“Lately it seems Charlie Crist cannot be trusted even to remain a Republican. I strongly urge him to either stay in the Republican Primary or drop out of the race. The only winners from an independent bid by Crist would be Barack Obama and Harry Reid,” Cheney added.

The Florida GOP is also ensnared in controversy over whether or not it misused funds.  The IRS is reportedly looking into the tax records of former state party Chairman Jim Greer and former Executive Director Delmar Johnson and if they used party credit cards for personal use.  The inquiry though also ties in Crist & Rubio.  Greer was a close confidant of Rubio and  the investigation will look into the more than $100,000 Rubio spent on the GOP American Express card. 

As of now, there are no plans for a joint appearance with Cheney and Rubio.

by Joseph Romm

On Monday, Sens. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), John Kerry (D-Mass.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) will launch their bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs bill.  I’m quite certain there will be something in it to dissatisfy everyone.

On the other hand, has Congress ever passed a significant bill that didn’t dissatisfy everyone, particularly on the environment?  We haven’t had a major piece of clean-air legislation for almost exactly two decades now.  The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 (EPA history here), which ultimately passed by large margins, put in place a cap-and-trade system for acid rain pollution, but didn’t end the grandfathering of old coal plants.  And so they burn on.

No bill that could pass Congress right now or in the immediate future would be sufficient to put us on the path to stabilizing the world at 2°C. We simply aren’t sufficiently desperate to do what is needed, which is nonstop deployment of a staggering amount of low-carbon energy, including efficiency, for the rest of the century.

And so my criteria for judging the bill focuses on whether it will create the conditions that will allow more desperate policy makers in the not-too-distant future to have a realistic chance of getting on the necessary path.  My new book Straight Up includes one essay on the House’s astonishing yet dissatisfying achievement in passing the Waxman-Markey bill.  It explains that when we are that desperate, probably in the 2020s, we’ll want to already have:

substantially dropped below the business-as-usual emissions path
started every major business planning for much deeper reductions
goosed the cleantech venture and financing community
put in place the entire framework for U.S. climate regulations
accelerated many tens of gigawatts of different types of low-carbon energy into the marketplace
put billions into developing advanced low-carbon technology
started building out the smart, green grid of the 21st century
trained and created millions of clean energy jobs
negotiated a working international climate regime
brought China into the process

Waxman-Markey, had it become the law of the land, would have achieved all of those vital goals.  And that’s why I strongly supported it, even though its 2020 target and use of offsets meant that it was, from a purely scientific perspective, unsatisfactory.

The Senate bill will no doubt be weaker than the House bill, but my criteria remain the same.  There is one other criterion that many people, including me, feel is important:  Does the bill finally start shutting down the grandfathered coal plants—the dirtiest of the dirty? The answer to that question for the House bill was “Hell yes.”  What will it be for the Senate bill? 

Related Links:

Federal climate policy should preempt state and regional initiatives

Astute climate bill analysis from DJ Biz Markie

Raiding rainforest funds in climate legislation will turn cost projections into fantasy

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[JURIST] German federal prosecutors said Wednesday that they have charged former Red Army Faction (RAF) member Verena Beckman for the 1977 murders of federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback and two other men. Beckman was originally arrested two months after Buback’s assassination and served 12 years of a life sentence for her role in other killings before she was pardoned and freed in 1989 by former president Richard von Weizsaecker. Prosecutors reopened the case in light of new DNA evidence linking Beckman to the high-profile murder. The RAF, commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, was a leftist group that targeted political and financial institutions and personnel, killing 34 people between 1968 and 1998.
Some reports allege that, in the aftermath of the RAF’s terrorist attacks, German officials tortured RAF prisoners and compromised their trials. In 2008, a German court granted parole for RAF leader Christian Klar after he served 26 years in prison on nine counts of murder and 11 counts of attempted murder. The court found no grounds on which continue to detain him, and he was released last year. Before being granted parole, Klar had called for the defeat of capitalism and lost an appeal for clemency. Other prominent RAF members, including Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Eve Haule, have also been paroled in recent years.

(This is a guest post from Dances With Bears.)

A gas supply agreement signed yesterday by the presidents of Russia and Ukraine dramatically changes the prospects for both oil and gas shipment across and under the Black Sea; extends Russia’s Black Sea Fleet lease of the Sevastopol base by another 25 years; and costs Gazprom nothing.

The terms of the deal promise to change the future investment prospects for the Ukrainian ports of Odessa and Yuzhny at the expense of Burgas, Bulgaria. Constanta , Romania, will also gain at Burgas’s expense if the new agreement changes the routing for Gazprom’s South Stream gas pipeline across the Turkish and Bulgarian seabeds, to permit the shorter seabed route via Ukraine and Romania.

According to the press announcements so far, Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Victor Yanukovych have agreed to a 30% discount price for 30 billion cubic metres of Russian gas to be delivered to Ukraine this year, and 40 bcm to be delivered annually from next year to 2019. The effective purchase price for Kiev will be about $230 per thousand cm, well below the $334 asking price from Gazprom, which has been on the table since the start of this year. The export volumes to Ukraine for this year have been lifted from 33.75 bcm, agreed with Naftogaz-Ukraine last November, to 36.5 bcm; the discount will cover the first 30 bcm sent to Ukraine, and the first 40 bcm thereafter.

The savings, estimated at $40 billion ($4 billion per annum) over the term of the agreement, will be applied to the extension of the Sevastopol naval facility lease. But Gazprom will not lose this amount from its revenue stream. Instead, a zero export duty for Gazprom deliveries to Ukraine will be introduced, which is equivalent to the 30% discount in pricing. As a result, the Russian government will receive less tax – about $3 billion less per annum, according to one bank estimate.

By removing the risk of Ukraine-related disruptions of gas flows and Gazprom’s sales revenues to Europe, the agreement relaxes a costly drag on Gazprom’s share price and market value. The company’s current market capitalization is $141 billion, down 6% in the year to date, trailing well behind Russia’s other oil and gas companies, and behind the RTS stock market index as a whole.

A Ukrainian offer is also on the table for Gazprom to take equity in Ukraine’s gas distribution and pipeline system to further reduce the likelihood of supply cutoffs for European consumers in future.

Read more at Dances With Bears –>

Join the conversation about this story »

Airports are wonderful places, aren’t they? Everyone is friendly, the seats are comfortable, the prices reasonable, and the food delicious. I love hanging around airports. I relish the time between connecting flights, and I have been known to pack my bags and drive to the nearest international airport just to hang out and pretend I’m waiting for a flight.

However, I realise that these feelings aren’t universal; there are some people out there who don’t enjoy airports. While I would be happy to relish in the extra few days of airport merriment that the recent flight cancellations have caused, Skype seem to think I’m in the minority, and have taken it upon themselves to give free internet access at more than 100,000 WiFi hotspots worldwide.

Skype Access, the service that lets you pay for WiFi access using Skype credit, will be free until 23:59GMT on Friday 23rd April 2010. This means you can check your email, surf the web, and — most importantly — call your parents, for free.

While I view paying $20 an hour for an internet connection whilst sipping $5 worth of aged, extra-bitter coffee, as “all part of the experience” some people may not enjoy it. If you are one of those people, and want to take advantage of the free WiFi on offer, all you need is a nearby compatible WiFi access point, and the latest version of Skype.

[via Pocket Lint]

Apple has never played well with others, and is well known for their use of proprietary technology to lock in customers and vendors.

Despite opening their own chip design company, it must have rankled to still have to rely on Cambridge-based ARM Holdings for the basic design of their chips.

Given their $40 billion cash hoard however Apple does not have to put up with the situation for long.

Rumours are currently going round in the markets that Apple is looking to buy the chip technology company for a cool $8 billion, seeing the ARM’s share price shoot up  8.1p to 251.1p, and more than five million shares changed hands by midday.

“A deal would make a lot of sense for Apple,” said one trader. “That way, they could stop ARM’s technology from ending up in everyone else’s computers and gadgets.”

ARM is somewhat of standard, with their chip design being widely licensed by many companies, including Qualcomm, Samsung, Texas Instruments and Marvell and all current generation smartphone operating systems being tied to the chip design. Around 10 years ago this was not the case, with the MIPS and SH3 architectures still in use by many companies. If Apple were to stop making available further design improvements to others it could leave other smartphone makers scrambling for an alternative which no longer exists.

Can anyone think of a more evil company than Apple to own such a technology lynchpin? Let us know your thoughts below.

Source: Evening Standard via Trusted Reviews.com

When I was a kid, I used to haul my 25 cm ’scope out to the end of the driveway every clear night to observe. In the summer, one of my favorite targets was the Lagoon Nebula: it’s bright, easy to find, and even with the frakkin’ streetlight I had to peer past, details in the vast gas cloud were easy to spot.

But I kinda wish I had access to a 1.5 meter telescope. Their view is a wee bit better:

Wow! Click to embiggen, or grab yourself a ginormous 2000×2000 pixel image if your current desktop is boring. Compared to this, I bet it is.

This image of the Lagoon was taken using the European Southern Observatory 1.5 meter Danish telescope in La Silla, Chile. It’s actually kinda sorta true color, using filters that mimic the sensitivity of the human eye.

If you could find a nice dark spot away from city lights, the Lagoon is actually bright enough to spot with your unaided eye, which is quite a feat considering it’s 40 quadrillion kilometers away — that’s 40,000,000,000,000,000 if you like your zeroes. Even from moderately light-polluted skies it’s easy in binoculars.

The Lagoon is one of those giant star-forming regions I’ve written so much about. And it’s big: a hundred light years across, and busily forming lots and lots of stars.

A wider view of it shows why it’s such a great target for small telescopes. It’s bright, colorful, and has lots of cool swirls and shock waves that accentuate its shape. It’s also located between us and the center of the galaxy — think of it like being towards downtown of a big city when you live in the suburbs — so that whole area of the sky is lousy with gorgeous, interesting things to see.

That also makes these objects great targets for large telescopes, because then we can see all kinds of incredible details. The more of these we study, the better we understand the environment where stars are born, including the Sun. There’s lots of science here… but when I look at images like this, I can’t help but think of that poor dorky teenager (me!) struggling mightily to get that giant, heavy telescope positioned just right so he could see a few wisps of gas gazillions of kilometers away.

All I can do is mentally smile and give him a virtual decades-later pat on the back. Keep at it, kid. It’ll pay off. I promise.

Image credit: ESO/IDA/Danish 1.5 m/ R. Gendler, U.G. Jørgensen, K. Harpsøe

Boy, the money just keeps getting uglier, doesn’t it?  Our new $100 bill is now the official ugly stepchild of our currency family.

Start pricing up HTC’s Desire or Incredible, Nexus One owners, as Google has put down its hammer and announced “we are no longer investigating further engineering improvements.” You’re stuck with those bugs for good. More »

Back in 1999 at the height of the dot-com with the state treasury overflowing with money, Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa joined in a bipartisan move to share the wealth of California.

The beneficiaries were public employees and the vehicle for rewarding them was know as Senate Bill 400, a measure that started out tamely as updating the 40-year-old death benefits plan but became in the Assembly a massive enhancement to pensions for employees of the state, the schools and most local jurisdictions.

With only seven of the 120 legislators in both houses voting no, SB 400 allowed public employees to retire as young as 50 and to get pensions of up to 90 percent of their highest salaries in the case of police and firefighters, or 75 percent for civilians.

It was argued that it would save the state money in the short run and that the cost over time would be no more than $650 million a year.

Over the next two years, even as the boom was turning to bust, the City of Los Angeles got in  step with the state with then Mayor Richard Riordan and Police Chief Bernard Parks signing a ballot measure to get LA’s cops and firefighters the same pension deal — support that both have come to deeply regret

“This new funding structure is
projected to reduce the City’s General Fund contribution to the Fire and
Police Pension System by an estimated $196 million over the next five
years,” according to the ballot argument that drew no opposition. “Given current projections, the reduction in General Fund
contributions could continue for an additional five to ten years.”

And so the seeds of destruction were sown.

Today, taxpayers are putting more than $3 billion annually to keep the state pension funds able to pay their obligations with estimates of the total statewide unfunded liability to public employees running as high as $500 billion.

In LA, the payment to pension funds is eating the city budget alive at $j800 million this year and soaring potentially to more than $2 billion within a few years because of an unfunded liability of as much as $17 billion.

Just Wednesday, the governor declared public employee pension reform his No. 1 priority, saying, “”The single biggest threat to our fiscal health and California’s future
is our public pension system. I refuse to pass this crisis onto the next governor or the next
Legislature.”

For his part, Villaraigosa announced the city’s “pension system
is no longer sustainable” with benefit costs at 19% of the general fund budget and certain to rise sharply in coming years.

So what do they want to do about it?

Change the law so that new city and state workers get smaller pensions and can’t collect them until they are seven to 10 years older than current employees can.

There are no estimates available of how much these steps would reduce the burden to taxpayers but how much could it be when both the city and state are broke and not likely to be doing much hiring for years to come.

“The city and the state are legally prohibited from taking existing
benefits away from people already on the government payroll or receiving
a pension,” as the LA Times noted today.

Of course, bankruptcy — an option for the city but not the state — could make real pension reform possible, as Riordan is now advocating publicly.

But that would be political suicide for everyone in office so don’t expect your elected leaders to take such an honorable step.

Facing job eliminations and furloughs, public employee unions have shown
no inclination to negotiate new deals on pensions and lifetime health benefits.

Most of us who work or worked in the private sector didn’t have the same protections or rights. The company I worked for half my adult life closed its pension plan more than a decade ago and my wife’s employer just sent out notice her pension plan is being closed, reducing the projected payout to employees by more than half in most cases.

The disparity in wages and benefits between the public and private sectors is tearing our city and state apart. We are at loggerheads with no way out so things will have to get worse, a lot worse, before unions make concessions or a taxpayer revolt bring the situation to a moment of truth.

Services at every level of government are being cut and the cuts will grow deeper year after year because our leaders are papering over the deficits, borrowing against the future, praying for the Obama economic miracle to save us all.

This is insanity  We can keep going round and round in circles talking about pension reform and doing nothing to fix it even as our city and state spiral downward into economic decline with all of its consequences. “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” is how Einstein once defined insanity.

All the talk by our political leaders is nothing more than posturing. Their long-term failure as leaders has left them caught between the public’s refusal to pay more to government and the unions’ refusal to give up anything.

We can go on and on like this. We can keep on shouting the end of the world is coming unless we spend every cent we have to go green. We can keep on warning we need more cops to protect us from lawless gangs and criminals. We can keep on firing teachers and closing parks and libraries. We can keep on denouncing each other and saying “no” to every solution anyone else proposes.

Or we can come to our senses and see where this inevitably leads. It shouldn’t take catastrophe to get people whose lives and fortunes are inextricably tied together to seek the common ground but that’s the way it usually works.

The dangers of the fossil fuel industry have sadly come into focus again, after an “explosion and fire on an offshore drilling platform” off the coast of Louisiana left “least 12 people missing and seven critically injured.”  Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has the story in this repost.

The explosion on the rig Deepwater Horizon occurred at about 10 PM Tuesday, about 52 miles southeast of Venice on Louisiana’s tip. The rig is still “burning pretty good and there’s no estimate on when the fire will be put out,” a Coast Guard official said. The rig is leased by BP Exploration & Production from Transocean, a Houston-based company.

Offshore drilling advocates from Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to state Sen. Frank Wagner (R-VA) have repeatedly promoted the false notion that the practice is safe — for its workers and for the environment. The 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, was a particular booster:

This disaster comes on the heels of the Massey Energy coal mine explosion that took 29 miners’ lives on April 5, and the Tesoro oil refinery explosion in Anacortes, WA, that killed six workers on April 2. It is a tragic fact that fossil fuel extraction in America is not “safe.”

You have useless new Trophy-organizing features thanks to FW 3.30, might as well put them to use. Here’s another game to give you more shiny badges to sort out.
 
 
 
 

KNOXVILLE – UT Knoxville students will perform and compete in this year’s Carnicus, a lighthearted spoof of the popular MTV show “Jersey Shore,” this weekend.

This is the 81st year for Carnicus, a singing and drama competition among student groups presented by UT Knoxville’s All Campus Events.

“A Fist Pumping Carnicus” will feature skits performed by 13 student organizations. The fun begins at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 23, and Saturday, April 24, in the Cox Auditorium in Alumni Memorial Building.

Participating organizations are Alpha Chi Omega and Kappa Kappa Gamma, Alpha Delta Pi and Alpha Omicron Pi, Alpha Tau Omega, Baptist Collegiate Ministry, Chi Omega, Delta Zeta and Zeta Tau Alpha, Kappa Delta and Kappa Sigma, and Phi Mu and Phi Sigma Kappa.

Skit themes include “Shrek,” “Hercules,” “Toy Story,” “The Bible: SNL Transition” and more. Winners from the skit competition will be announced after the performance. Trophies are awarded for the first, second and third place skits, as well as for the best actress and best actor.

After Carnicus trophies have been presented, each organization’s score is combined with scores from other All Campus Events (ACE) competitions throughout the academic year, including the Volunteer Challenge, Homecoming and All Sing. The group with the largest overall score will be awarded the ACE Cup.

ACE is a component of the Central Program Council, which represents seven committees under the Office of Student Activities. The goal of this student-driven organization is to plan campus events that have become longstanding UT traditions. Each year ACE organizes Volunteer Challenge, Homecoming, All-Sing and Carnicus. For more information, contact the Office of Student Activities at (865) 974-5455.

Tickets to Carnicus are $10 for UT students, $13 for UT faculty and staff, and $15 for the general public. Tickets can be purchased at the UT Central Ticket Office or through Tickets Unlimited at (865) 656-4444 and http://www.knoxvilletickets.com.

C O N T A C T :

Rebekah Winkler (865-974-8304, [email protected])

Kerri Killgore Lovegrove (865-974-5455, [email protected])

About a week ago, I speculated on Gen. James Mattis’ future in the military, now that Gen. Ray Odierno is set to take over for him at Joint Forces Command. Mattis is a four-star Marine general. He’s leaving a major command. The military is an up-and-out system — you either get promoted or you call it a day. I wondered if he was going to become Commandant of the Marine Corps, the most obvious position open to him. So, Marine Corps Times asked, is Mattis retiring?

“This fall my tour at JFCOM is complete,” he said in an e-mail to Marine Corps Times. “At this rank, my future is up to the DOD leadership/Cdr in Chief, so I’ll see what, if anything, they intend for me to do.”

Coy as it may seem, that’s the equivalent of posting his resume for the next job. And Marine Corps Times pretty clearly wants Mattis’ next job to be Commandant of the Marine Corps, as you can see from the article produced. It’s not surprising: Mattis is one of the most respected generals in the entire military; easily the most respected Marine general; a commander of Marine infantrymen in Iraq; and a counterinsurgency scholar-practitioner.

This is all via Richard Allen Smith of VetVoice, who observes, “For anyone who has an interest in COIN, this is a good thing.”

North Dakota is bucking the downsizing trend by overflowing with jobs — many of them in the oil industry — the New York Times reports. Problem is, the state doesn’t have adequate housing to keep up with would-be carpetbaggers.

The Times sent a reporter to Williston to take the lay of the no-vacancy land:

The same forces that have resulted in more homelessness elsewhere — unemployment, foreclosure, economic misery — have pushed laid off workers from California, Florida, Minnesota, Michigan and Wyoming to abundant jobs here, especially in the booming oil fields.

But in this city rising from the long empty stretches of North Dakota, hundreds are sleeping in their cars or living in motel rooms, pup tents and tiny campers meant for weekend getaways in warmer climes. They are staying on cots in offices and in sleeping bags in the concrete basements of people they barely know.

The majority of Big Sky country job seekers must not have seen There Will be Blood.

A State With Plenty of Jobs but Few Places to Live [New York Times]