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*Update*
"Into the Wild" is a 2007 film written and directed by Sean Penn, adapted from Jon Krakauer's 1996 non-fiction book "Into the Wild" (based on Christopher McCandless's travels across N America and his life in the Alaskan wilderness).

Sean Penn's popular quote
"We've let the blade of our innocence dull over time, and it's only in innocence that you find any kind of magic, any kind of courage."

"YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — Myanmar's official media said Tuesday that 10,000 people were killed by a cyclone in just one town, confirming fears of a spiraling death toll from the storm's 12-foot tidal surges and high winds that swept away bamboo homes in low-lying coastal regions... Fishing boats were crushed by the tropical cyclone in the port of Yangon, Myanmar, on Sunday. Winds reached 120 miles per hour."

Images courtesy of Associated Press

Original Source

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Bob Dylan came up with one way to remember Albert Einstein: “Now you would not think to look at him/But he was famous long ago/For playing the electric violin/On Desolation Row.”

This is the pure distillate of celebrity. Dylan’s folk-rock vision of “Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood” is one in which the original man has disappeared into a symbolic fog where more or less any meaning may be found. Nowadays, such content-less fame has become common, though there aren’t many out there who match Einstein for resonance. But when he first exploded into public view, there were no precedents. No scientist before or since has so completely transcended the role of expert to become a universal emblem of reason.

...

Photographers caught that wit as well as the gravitas. It helped that he was astonishingly willing to play along. No one made him ride that bicycle or stick out his tongue straight into the barrel of an oncoming lens. Whatever weariness he felt at the crush of the public gaze, he was almost always willing to pause for the shot. There is a story that he was once asked—by perhaps the only person on earth who did not recognize him—what he did for a living. He replied that he was a photographer’s model.

He was just as open to sharing his ideas. Einstein took seriously questions about his science, up to the point of writing one of the best introductions to relativity for the lay reader. (Called Relativity, it’s still in print.) He handled the ridiculous questions, too, with humor and enormous stamina. He told his interrogators what he thought of Prohibition (against, though he didn’t drink), the death penalty (against, at least some of the time), and abortion (for, up to a certain point in the pregnancy). No scientist before Einstein had been so willing to stand before his public.

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Images courtesy of NASA

Original Source

"Records stretching back to 1960 prove what climate models had predicted: warmer oceans contain less oxygen. Oceanographer Lothar Stramma of the University of Kiel in Germany and his colleagues report in Science that an analysis of historical records and recent samples show that as the globe has warmed, waters with low oxygen content have expanded in the tropical Atlantic and equatorial Pacific oceans.

"The oxygen concentrations in these oxygen-minimum zones have decreased with time," says oceanographer and study coauthor Gregory C. Johnson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Wash. "The regions of low oxygen have also expanded vertically by both extending deeper into the ocean and closer to the surface."

Fish and other sea life cannot survive in such waters—and this expansion reduces the area where fish can thrive, says oceanographer Janet Sprintall of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., who also coauthored the study. She notes that fisheries may be affected as well."

Image courtesy of Scientific American

Original Source

A police officer in a small town stopped a motorist who was speeding down Main Street. "Officer," the man began, "I can explain."
"No explanation needed!" snapped the Officer. "I'm going to let you cool your heels in jail until the chief gets back."
The man tried again. "But Officer, I have to tell you something."
"Just keep quiet! You're going to jail and I'm not interested in what you have to say!" the Officer barked.
A few hours later the Officer looked in on his prisoner and said, "Lucky for you the chief is at his daughter's wedding. He'll be in a good mood when he gets back."
"Don't count on it," answered the fellow in the cell. "I'm the groom."

Original Source

Microsoft has decided to withdraw its three-month-old offer to buy Yahoo, as expressed in a formal letter from Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer to Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang.

"The companies had finally engaged in merger talks this week and appeared closer than ever to a deal Friday, but they still remained billions of dollars apart in their assessment of Yahoo's worth. Ballmer said today that the company had raised its buyout price to $33 a share from the initial $31 offered, which added $5 billion to the deal that was initially worth $44.6 billion.

That would have represented a 70% premium over Yahoo's closing stock price on Jan. 31, the night that Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft made its unsolicited offer.

But in recent talks Yahoo had insisted on receiving at least $5 billion more than that, or at least $37 a share, which Microsoft was unwilling to pay, Ballmer wrote in a letter to Yang.

Ballmer said he had decided against launching a hostile bid for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo, including trying to take control of the company's board and offering the deal directly to shareholders. He said Yahoo had signaled that it would take action that could prolong such a proxy fight and make the company less valuable to Microsoft, including striking a partnership with Google Inc. in which the search giant would deliver ads alongside many of Yahoo's search results."

Image courtesy of The Los Angeles Times

Original Source