A collection of flotsam and jetsam from trolling the World Wide Web for your browsing pleasure.
An amazing mashup way of looking at the News, with a mashup of color-coded, catagorizeable, geographable, collage of headline links, which re-fresh every 10 minutes.
Mashups is the hot new Web 2.0 trend. Mashups originated with music when Aerosmith & Run DMC, re-did “Walk this Way” together.
Christopher Hitchens at his usual provocative best(Click here for the full article)
So, picture if you will the landing of Air Force One at Imam Khomeini International Airport. The president emerges, reclaims the U.S. Embassy in return for an equivalent in Washington and the un-freezing of Iran’s financial assets, and announces that sanctions have been a waste of time and have mainly hurt Iranian civilians. A new era is possible, he goes on to say. America and the Shiite world have a common enemy in al-Qaida, just as they had in Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban, and the Iraqi Baathists. America is home to a large and talented Iranian community. Let the exchange of trade and people and ideas begin! There might perhaps even be a ticklish-to-write paragraph, saying that America is not proud of everything it is has done in the past—most notably Jimmy Carter’s criminal decision to permit Saddam to invade Iran.
The Time Warp Family who walk on all fours
An extraordinary family who walk on all fours are being hailed as the breakthrough discovery which could shed light on the moment Man first stood upright.
A new analysis shows that the Sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years.Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star's activity in the past.
They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer. (If you have PowerPoint installed, you can view the Research paper's presentation)
And now a new report predicts activity will be 50 percent stronger in the next 11-year solar cycle than in the last one Continue reading “Sunspots reaching 1,000-year high”
Install the free RadioAgent24, select one of thousands of radio stations and let your computer run. RadioAgent24 records the music being played the whole day, converts the particular songs to MP3 files, names them with interpret and title and saves them on your computer…
If you listen to Internet Radio with Winamp, which has the largest selection of stations, try using Stream Ripper 32 to record the individual songs.
Fruits, vegetables not as nutritious as 50 years ago
the trend in agriculture toward encouraging crops that grow the fastest and biggest is a reason for the decline.
Origami artists use a little elbow crease – MIT News Office 
Strong mathematical minds at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed off their creativity and dexterity for the school’s fourth annual Student Origami Competition.
Click here to see a slide show
Ski Dubai, the world’s largest indoor ski resort — boasting Alpine chalets, 400-meter ski runs, and 6,000 tons of artificial snow — opened for business in late 2005.
Ski Dubai is actually one of the more modest in a series of extraordinarily ambitious commercial projects undertaken by the Gulf state of Dubai, including the world’s tallest building, the world’s first underwater luxury hotel, and, believe it or not, an archipelago of man-made islands shaped like a map of the world. (While you’re at this site look at some of the other Dubai Developments)
No wonder Michael Jackson moved there.
Not content with merely topping the rest of the world, Dubai will actually best its own record in 2008, if all goes well, with the opening of the new world’s largest indoor ski resort, the 15 million-square-foot Sunny Mountain Ski Dome.
Iraqi official blames Golden Mosque attack on Iran
The only ones who really stood to benefit, and those who really took advantage of the al-Askariya shrine bombing, is Moqtada al-Sadr and his counterparts in Iran. Now, a preliminary investigation by the deputy governor of Saladin, where the Shia holy city of Samarra and the shrine is located, has yielded that the perpetrators of the bombing was most like… dun dun dun… Iran!
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani immediately issued a fatwa following the attack and urged the Shia faithful to restrain themselves. it was al-Sadr who organized the mass extra-judicial killings of hundreds of Sunnis afterwards. It was his Medhi Army militia, along with men infiltrated into the Interior Ministry through the UIA, who ran people off the streets in fear to their homes, and attacked dozens of Sunni mosques. He was the first to call for revenge, yet he was the one praised for brokering compromise between the Shias and Sunnis afterward.
Al-Sadr is in a power struggle with the traditional Shia leader Sistani. The outcome will determine if Iranian-backed Islamo-Facists take over Iraq or if a Unity government can be formed. 
The Kurds, Sunnis and Secular Parities (Ex-Prime Minister Allawi) are trying to influence the outcome by refusing to back current Prime Minister Jafari, for the same position in the newly elected Parliament. Jafrai, Sadr’s candidate, won the Shia’s own Unity Party (UIA) backing by just one vote. Now the non-Shia parties, who have 53% of the elected seats, are looking for allies amongst the Sistani followers to back another candidate for Prime Minister. Previously they had backed the current Vice President, who lost when Al Sadr cast the deciding UIA party vote. Under the constitution, the nominee of the biggest bloc in parliament gets the first chance to form a new government. The Shiites won 130 of the 275 seats giving them the biggest bloc, but not enough to govern without partners.
If the religious Shia UIA is going to insist on having its way, and al-Sadr is going to remain the most dominant force in that coalition, then the rest of Iraq is ready to block his seemingly destined ascent to power. They realize the danger of a one-party monopoly based on religion, so they’re ready to make the UIA pick a new one or instead form an even larger bloc, allowing them the pick the new government. In our own history, the Second American Revolution was when power was first transferred peacefully from John Adams, who gave up power to Thomas Jefferson, after the presidential election of 1800, effectively realigning the nation. Now, Iraq will have its own. Can the Shia give up power peacefully should it be challenged?…