Santa Rosa council hears from legal, energy experts before power vote

Published: Saturday, June 29, 2013 at 3:12 p.m.

Last Modified: Saturday, June 29, 2013 at 3:12 p.m.

Santa Rosa has hired two consultants to help city council members understand the possible pitfalls of joining the Sonoma Clean Power Authority.

Their advice could prove pivotal for a council that is struggling to get its questions about the public power agency answered before a scheduled July 9 vote.

?I can't even begin to guess how the council as a whole will go on this,? Mayor Scott Bartley said. ?I go up and down, in and out, and any which way you can on this.?

The two consultants, one an attorney the other an energy engineer, have been answering questions from the council's three-member subcommittee over the past two weeks. Both will also be on hand to answer questions from the full council at the meeting, which starts at 1 p.m. Tuesday, July 2.

?They've helped us identify issues that we think are critical,? Bartley said.

The consultant with the most experience with issues surrounding public power authorities is Michael Dean, an attorney and founder of the Sacramento law firm Meyers Nave, which specializes in advising public agencies in California.

Dean, who has been practicing law since 1976, is general counsel to the Northern California Power Agency. The Roseville-based public power agency provides electricity to several agencies in Northern and Central California, including Healdsburg and Ukiah, the Port of Oakland and Bay Area Rapid Transit.

In 2008, Dean helped negotiate a 20-year, $500 million power purchase agreement between the agency and Western GeoPower for ?100 percent clean, green and renewable, electricity? from its geothermal power plants at The Geysers.

Dean is the chairman of the firm's Public Power and Telecommunications Practice Department. He will answer council members' questions about liability and any other legal concerns they may have, City Attorney Caroline Fowler said.

Any reports or opinions Dean puts in writing to the council will remain confidential, Fowler said.

The second consultant is John Rosenblum, a Sebastopol-based engineering consultant specializing in industrial water and energy efficiency projects.

He has 23 years of experience and has previously done work for the city, mostly recently to help install more efficient pumps at the wastewater treatment plant on Llano Road.

He also has experience analyzing how water demand will impact greenhouse gas emissions and targets, authoring a report on the subject for the Sonoma County Water Agency and Climate Protection Campaign in 2007.

He'll also be on tap to answer technical questions for the council during the July 2 session.

Windsor and Cotati have both voted to join Sonoma County in the launch of the agency, which seeks to displace Pacific Gas & Electric Co. as the area's main electricity supplier. Together, they account for about 40 percent of PG&E meters in Sonoma County.

Of the eight cities being solicited by the county, Cloverdale, Rohnert Park and Petaluma have chosen not to join for now. Sebastopol is set to vote July 2, followed by Santa Rosa on July 9, and Sonoma July 15.

Santa Rosa council members have said they need advice from experts unaffiliated with Sonoma Clean Power to help them get unbiased answers to their questions and insights to help them ask better ones.

?We need ? I, the subcommittee, and the whole council ? need and want to understand what we are getting into,? Bartley said. ?Then, you either accept the risk or you don't.?

The participation of Sonoma County's largest city, where nearly 170,000 residents and businesses consume 35 percent of the electricity sold by Pacific Gas & Electric, is considered vital to the fledgling agency's ability to spread costs over a larger base and negotiate the best possible rates from potential power suppliers.

There is intense pressure for council members to join the program, but they have so far resisted the power politics at play, winning an extension of a June 30 decision deadline and pushing for a variety of changes to language in the joint powers authority that would govern the new agency.

But at this late date, it's not clear to Bartley just how much say the city has over a JPA it has yet to join.

?We're not going to reinvent Sonoma Clean Power at this point, and that shouldn't be our goal,? Bartley said.

But other council members appear to be holding out for additional revisions to the JPA.

Councilwoman Julie Combs said she wants a pledge of no purchases of nuclear power in the JPA as well as clear language obligating the agency to build clean power projects that would produce local jobs.

?Don't claim it if it's not there in writing,? Combs said.

She also wants to see greater ratepayer protections and living wages paid on future energy projects, she said. Sonoma Clean Power officials have said the time to craft many such changes is after the cities sign on.

(You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter@citybeater)

Source: http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20130629/articles/130629442

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07/02/2013 - College Heights Stadium Closure

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Source: http://www.collegeofsanmateo.edu/calendar/events/index.php?com=detail&eID=10553

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Young Imbeciles Destroy Largest Lego Helicopter Ever

Yesterday a group of idiots destroyed the largest Lego helicopter in the world, the 100,000-piece Erickson Air-Crane. Built by Ryan McNaught over the course of six weeks, the pieces alone are valued at $25,000.

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Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/fgnjXZF1OKA/young-imbeciles-destroy-largest-lego-helicopter-ever-614196901

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Scientists view 'protein origami' to help understand, prevent certain diseases

June 28, 2013 ? Scientists using sophisticated imaging techniques have observed a molecular protein folding process that may help medical researchers understand and treat diseases such as Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's and cancer.

The study, reported this month in the journal Cell, verifies a process that scientists knew existed but with a mechanism they had never been able to observe, according to Dr. Hays Rye, Texas A&M AgriLife Research biochemist.

"This is a step in the direction of understanding how to modulate systems to prevent diseases like Alzheimer's. We needed to understand the cell's folding machines and how they interact with each other in a complicated network," said Rye, who also is associate professor of biochemistry and biophysics at Texas A&M.

Rye explained that individual amino acids get linked together like beads on a string as a protein is made in the cell.

"But that linear sequence of amino acids is not functional," he explained. "It's like an origami structure that has to fold up into a three-dimensional shape to do what it has to do."

Rye said researchers have been trying to understand this process for more than 50 years, but in a living cell the process is complicated by the presence of many proteins in a concentrated environment.

"The constraints on getting that protein to fold up into a good 'origami' structure are a lot more demanding," he said. "So, there are special protein machines, known as molecular chaperones, in the cell that help proteins fold."

But how the molecular chaperones help protein fold when it isn't folding well by itself has been the nagging question for researchers.

"Molecular chaperones are like little machines, because they have levers and gears and power sources. They go through turning over cycles and just sort of buzz along inside a cell, driving a protein folding reaction every few seconds," Rye said.

The many chemical reactions that are essential to life rely on the exact three-dimensional shape of folded proteins, he said. In the cell, enzymes, for example, are specialized proteins that help speed biological processes along by binding molecules and bringing them together in just the right way.

"They are bound together like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle," Rye explained. "And the proteins -- those little beads on the string that are designed to fold up like origami -- are folded to position all these beads in three-dimensional space to perfectly wrap around those molecules and do those chemical reactions.

"If that doesn't happen -- if the protein doesn't get folded up right -- the chemical reaction can't be done. And if it's essential, the cell dies because it can't convert food into power needed to build the other structures in the cell that are needed. Chemical reactions are the structural underpinning of how cells are put together, and all of that depends on the proteins being folded in the right way."

When a protein doesn't fold or folds incorrectly it turns into an "aggregate," which Rye described as "white goo that looks kind of like a mayonnaise, like crud in the test tube.

"You're dead; the cell dies," he said.

Over the past 20 years, he said, researchers have linked that aggregation process "pretty convincingly" to the development of diseases -- Alzheimer's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease, Huntington's disease, to name a few. There's evidence that diabetes and cancer also are linked to protein folding disorders.

"One of the main roles for the molecular chaperones is preventing those protein misfolding events that lead to aggregation and not letting a cell get poisoned by badly folded or aggregated proteins," he said.

Rye's team focused on a key molecular chaperone -- the HSP60.

"They're called HSP for 'heat shock protein' because when the cell is stressed with heat, the proteins get unstable and start to fall apart and unfold," Rye said. "The cell is built to respond by making more of the chaperones to try and fix the problem.

"This particular chaperone takes unfolded protein and goes through a chemical reaction to bind the unfolded protein and literally puts it inside a little 'box,'" Rye said.

He added that the mystery had long been how the folding worked because, while researchers could see evidence of that happening, no one had ever seen precisely how it happened.

Rye and the team zeroed in on a chemically modified mutant that in other experiments had seemed to stall at an important step in the process that the "machine" goes through to start the folding action. This clued the researchers that this stalling might make it easier to watch.

They then used cryo-electron microscopy to capture hundreds of thousands of images of the process at very high resolutions which allowed them to reconstruct from two-dimensional flat images a three-dimensional model. A highly sophisticated computer algorithm aligns the images and classifies them in subcategories.

"If you have enough of them you can actually reconstruct and view a structure as a three-dimensional model," Rye said.

What the team saw was this: The HSP60 chaperone is designed to recognize proteins that are not folded from the ones that are. It binds them and then has a separate co-chaperone that puts a "lid" on top of the box to keep the folding intermediate in the box. They could see the box move, and parts of the molecule moved to peel the chaperone box away from the bound protein -- or "gift" in the box. But the bound protein was kept inside the package where it could then initiate a folding reaction. They saw tiny tentacles, "like a little octopus in the bottom of the box rising up and grabbing hold of the substrate protein and helping hold it inside the cavity."

"The first thing we saw was a large amount of an unfolded protein inside of this cavity," he said. "Even though we knew from lots and lots of other studies that it had to go in there, nobody had ever seen it like this before. We can also see the non-native protein interacting with parts of the box that no one had ever seen before. It was exciting to see all of this for the first time. I think we got a glimpse of a protein in the process of folding, which we actually can compare to other structures."

"By understanding the mechanism of these machines, the hope is that one of the things we can learn to do is turn them up or turn them off when we need to, like for a patient who has one of the protein folding diseases," he said.

Rye collaborated on the research with Dong-Hua Chen and Wah Chiu at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Damian Madan and Zohn Lin at Princeton University, Jeremy Weaver at Texas A&M and Gunnar Schr?der at the Institute of Complex Systems in Germany.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/PfjFPU7j0xE/130628120759.htm

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US Lab to Reduce Biomedical Testing on Chimpanzees (Voice Of America)

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Good Reads: From algorithms, to Roman walls, to the new liberals and conservatives

This week's round-up of Good Reads include doubts about algorithms' 'all-power,' the recipe for Roman concrete, the need for a Turkish Mandela, young liberals who may be more conservative than they realize, and the usefulness of military 'land power.'

By Marshall Ingwerson,?Managing editor / June 28, 2013

Johnny Depp is one of only three actors who reliably bring a positive box office return.

Evan Agostini/Invision/AP/File

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Algorithms all-powerful?

In spite of appearances ? from the US National Security Agency searching American phone records for patterns to Google counting keywords in e-mails to decide which ads to display ? the algorithm may not conquer all.

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This is the conclusion that science reporter Tom Whipple comes around to in his article ?Slaves to the Algorithm? in the magazine Intelligent Life, a sister publication of The Economist. An algorithm is how so-called big data is crunched into something meaningful. ?If p, then q? is an algorithm, but in the age of fast computers, the ?p? can include billions of data points.

Mr. Whipple explores the work of a company, Epagogix, that forecasts the earning power of proposed movies for Hollywood studios, based on thousands of factors punched into its software. It seems to work. And has uncovered some fun facts. One is that so-called bankable movie stars are almost nonexistent. Only three actors, Epagogix has found, actually bring a positive return on investment ? Will Smith, Brad Pitt, and Johnny Depp.

But human judgment has hardly left the picture. The head of Epagogix notes that his program assumes that everything about the movie is done well ? that the dialogue is credible and the actors good (stars or not). And even so, his algorithms can?t discern if the movie is good, only if, done well, a lot of people are likely to pay to see it.

Whipple discusses another facet of algorithms. They are good at finding patterns, sometimes surprising ones, in big numbers. They are not so good at predicting the behavior of individuals. Dating sites, for example, have yet to show any scientific evidence that they can predict who will hit it off with whom.

Lost recipe for Roman concrete, cracked

Some technology just isn?t what it used to be. The Portland cement that we use to make concrete these days doesn?t have a fraction of the lasting power of the aggregate the Romans used a couple millenniums ago. According to a report by Bernhard Warner in Bloomberg Businessweek, research engineers studying 12 ancient Roman-built harbors found that the breakwaters made of Roman concrete have stood the pounding waves for 2,000 years and are still intact. Modern concrete has a working life under water of a mere 50 years. The older, stronger stuff had an added advantage: Its manufacture was relatively clean. Creating Portland cement releases a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.?

Needed: a Turkish Mandela

One of the central dangers in Turkey today is of a slide into two sharply polarized camps ? the government and its conservative, religious, largely rural backers on one side and the more affluent, secular, and modernizing protesters on the other. They have come to be called ?black Turks? and ?white Turks.?

Daron Acemoglu, a Turkish-born economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been writing about the current troubles in his country of origin on his Why Nations Fail blog. He notes that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently grouped Turks into ?black? and ?white,? putting himself among the ?black Turks.?

How do societies break out of cycles of polarization? Mr. Acemoglu consults history and finds several routes, but the most attractive is when a leader musters the vision and courage to make peace across the fault lines and show goodwill to the other side.

?So bottom line: we badly need a Turkish Mandela,? he says.

What they really mean by ?conservative??

Meanwhile, Americans may not be quite as polarized as they think they are. A series of three new studies find that young adults who call themselves liberal Democrats are overall not quite as liberal on the issues as they think they are. But young people from the rest of the political spectrum tend to bill themselves as more conservative than they are on the issues. The biggest disparity is among those who regard themselves as most conservative. Not so much, it turns out. When asked their stands on a dozen major issues from welfare to gay rights, they didn?t toe as conservative a line as they thought they did, according to the studies, which were reported first in an academic journal, and brought to us by Tom Jacobs in Pacific Standard magazine. Clearly, conservatism is the more popular brand, even when it?s not an obvious fit.

The benefits of military ?land power??

With US forces finally checking out of Afghanistan and American attention pivoting to East Asia, it?s time for some soul-searching: What?s the Army for?

Maj. Robert M. Chamberlain, writing in the Armed Forces Journal, sees future peace and prosperity in currently unfashionable land power. Terrorists who hole up in the world?s backwaters can best be pursued by special forces teams and armed drones. The Navy can protect the world?s sea lanes and global commerce. Air power can strike awesomely anywhere. But land power ? the job of the Army and Marines ? is inherently less threatening, he argues. ?Land power is the only avenue by which America can enhance regional security and stability, deter Chinese militarism and encourage Chinese commitment to the global status quo.?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/c6nz-yHibak/Good-Reads-From-algorithms-to-Roman-walls-to-the-new-liberals-and-conservatives

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NASA launches sun-watching satellite from Calif.

File-This undated image provided by NASA shows technicians preparing at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. for the launch of NASA?s latest satellite, Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), that will study the sun. The Iris satellite is set to ride into Earth orbit on a rocket, which will be dropped from an airplane flying over the Pacific some 100 miles off California?s central coast Thursday June 27, 2013. (AP Photo/NASA,VAFB, Randy Beaudoin,File)

File-This undated image provided by NASA shows technicians preparing at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. for the launch of NASA?s latest satellite, Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), that will study the sun. The Iris satellite is set to ride into Earth orbit on a rocket, which will be dropped from an airplane flying over the Pacific some 100 miles off California?s central coast Thursday June 27, 2013. (AP Photo/NASA,VAFB, Randy Beaudoin,File)

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) ? NASA launched a satellite late Thursday on a mission to explore a little-studied region of the sun and to better forecast space weather that can disrupt communications systems on Earth.

Unlike a traditional liftoff, the Iris satellite rode into Earth orbit on a Pegasus rocket dropped from an airplane that took off around sunset from the Vandenberg Air Force Base on California's central coast. About 100 miles off the coast and at an altitude of 39,000 feet, the airplane released the rocket, which ignited its engine for the 13-minute climb to space.

Mission controllers clapped after receiving word that Iris separated from the rocket as planned, ready to begin its two-year mission.

"We're thrilled," NASA launch director Tim Dunn said in a NASA TV interview.

The launch went smoothly, but there were some tense moments when communications signals were temporarily lost. Ground controllers were able to track Iris by relying on other satellites orbiting Earth. It also took longer-than-expected for Iris to unfurl its solar panels.

In a statement, NASA said it received confirmation that the satellite deployed its solar panels and was generating power.

Previous sun-observing spacecraft have yielded a wealth of information about our nearest star and beamed back brilliant pictures of solar flares.

The 7-foot-long Iris, weighing 400 pounds, carries an ultraviolet telescope that can take high-resolution images every few seconds.

Unlike NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which observes the entire sun, Iris will focus on a little-explored region that lies between the surface and the corona, the glowing white ring that's visible during eclipses.

The goal is to learn more about how this mysterious region drives solar wind ? a stream of charged particles spewing from the sun ? and to better predict space weather that can disrupt communications signals on Earth.

"This is a very difficult region to understand and observe. We haven't had the technical capabilities before now to really zoom in" and peer at it up close, NASA program scientist Jeffrey Newmark said before the launch.

The mission is cheap by NASA standards, costing $182 million, and is managed by the space agency's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Engineers will spend a month making sure Iris is in perfect health before powering on the telescope to begin observations.

The launch was delayed by a day so that technicians at the Air Force base could restore power to launch range equipment after a weekend outage cut electricity to a swath of the central coast.

The Pegasus, from Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., is a winged rocket designed for launching small satellites. First flown in 1990, Pegasus rockets have also been used to accelerate vehicles in hypersonic flight programs.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/b2f0ca3a594644ee9e50a8ec4ce2d6de/Article_2013-06-28-US-SCI-Sun-Satellite/id-8cb5098c2e9f413c8a8faa895fbbf808

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The New York Times has a wonderful feature about Wikipedia-founder Jimmy Wales which you should go r

The New York Times has a wonderful feature about Wikipedia-founder Jimmy Wales which you should go read. Spoiler: he's not a billionaire.

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Will Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx Go On Tour After Viral Vid?

'(I Wanna) Channing All Over Your Tatum' was a hit, and the 'White House Down' stars reveal to MTV News what's next.
By Todd Gilchrist

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1709666/channing-tatum-jamie-foxx-viral-video-tour.jhtml

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Windows 8.1: Everything You Need to Know

Microsoft rolls out the next version of windows, 8.1, at its annual Build developers conference today. It's a big deal. Windows 8 was a crazy ambitious step, what follows is just as important. This is what Microsoft's taken from your months of feedback (or just, yelling).

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Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/ozW7ikv27UM/windows-8-1-everything-you-need-to-know-585637162

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Not All Artists Hated Napster When It Launched

When Napster exploded onto the scene in 1999, not every musician responded by frothing at the mouth. In this exclusive clip from the Napster documentary Downloaded, you'll see that artists' reactions were as diverse as the music they make. Trent Reznor's smug braininess meets multiple Spice Girls and everybody walks away wondering how Spice Girls haven't heard of the Internet. In 1999. Seriously?

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Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/m5VJq6RaeDE/not-all-artists-hated-napster-when-it-launched-576039818

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Anti-Gay Is Yesterday

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference, Feb. 9, 2012.

Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

You can also listen to William Saletan read this piece.

Once again, the Supreme Court has infuriated conservatives. They say the court?s decisions in United States v. Windsor and Hollingsworth v. Perry?voiding part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act and disqualifying the plaintiffs who sought to reinstate California?s ban on gay marriage?override and disrespect the will of the people. But the will of the people isn?t what it used to be. In states where voters once passed ballot measures against same-sex marriage, they now support it. The country as a whole supports it. The court, in striking down what voters believed 10 or 20 years ago, is upholding what voters believe today.

Shortly after the court?s opinions were released, House Republicans held a press conference to denounce the rulings. They argued that marriage policy should be made by ?elected representatives instead of unelected judges.? The problem is that in this case, California?s elected officials?its governor and attorney general?refused to defend the state?s ban, which voters approved in a 2008 referendum. At the press conference, Rep. Doug LaMalfa of California decried this treachery. He said voters lose faith in democracy when they?re abandoned by ?their elected officials, like an attorney general in California that refused, because of politics, to defend what the people had done.?

That?s an odd complaint. When elected officials play politics, they generally comply with the people?s will. And that?s what happened in California. In 2008, as the National Organization for Marriage notes, ?Proposition 8 was passed with over 52% of the vote.? But in the most recent Los Angeles Times poll, taken four weeks ago, Californians affirmed, 58 to 36 percent, that ?same-sex couples should be allowed to become legally married.? The state?s leaders have abandoned what Californians thought five years ago to support what Californians think today.

Another speaker at the Republican press conference, Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan, accused the court of ?taking away the voice of the people.? He boasted that ?in my state, we have clearly defined marriage to be that relationship between a man and woman.? That?s true: In 2004, 59 percent of Michigan residents who cast ballots on a proposal to forbid gay marriage voted for the ban. But a campaign is now underway to repeal the ban, and in the most recent Michigan poll, 57 percent of voters said they support gay marriage. Fifty-four percent said they?d like to replace the ban with an amendment authorizing same-sex marriage.

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., declared at the press conference that ?the people are more important than the Supreme Court.? She said the court ?undercut the people?s representatives. When they [Congress] voted on the Defense of Marriage Act in the first place, the people were duly represented. They represented the will of their constituencies.? That was true in 1996, when DOMA passed. A decade later, when Bachmann, as a state senator, led the fight in Minnesota for a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, she could still claim to represent the people: 54 percent of Minnesotans opposed legalizing same-sex marriage, while only 29 percent favored it. But last fall, by 51 to 47 percent, Minnesotans voted down a ballot measure to define marriage as exclusively heterosexual. A month ago, the new Democratic-controlled legislature legalized gay marriage. Today, a tentative plurality of Minnesotans?46 to 44 percent?supports that decision. That?s an eight-point increase in support since the same question was asked in February.

What?s happening in California, Michigan, and Minnesota is happening everywhere. ?Thirty-eight states have affirmed the belief of their citizens that marriage exists between a man and a woman,? Rep. Vicky Hartzler of Missouri pointed out at the press conference. Her reliance on the past tense was telling. According to a report issued two months ago by UCLA?s Williams Institute, ?In the last eight years, every state has increased in its support for marriage for same-sex couples with an average increase of 13.6%. If present public opinion trends continue, another 8 states will be above 50% support by the end of 2014.? Based on the average rate of increase in support for gay marriage?about 1.5 percentage points per year?Nate Silver projects that by 2016, support will exceed 50 percent in 32 states. By 2020, all but six states will have crossed that threshold, and in all but two, support will exceed 48 percent.

The National Organization for Marriage also uses the past tense. ?The vast majority of American voters have expressed with their votes their desire to maintain marriage as the union of one man and one woman,? it argues. ?That decision should be respected and left undisturbed." But that old consensus has already been disturbed by the people themselves. In fact, they?ve trashed it. In last fall?s state ballot measures, they voted 4-0 for gay marriage. Every national survey shows the same trend. In 1996, Gallup found that Americans opposed recognizing same-sex marriages, 68 to 27 percent. By 2004, the gap had narrowed to 55-42. Today, it has turned in favor of same-sex marriage, 53 to 45. In 2003, the Pew Research Center found that Americans opposed allowing gays to marry legally, 59 to 32 percent. Today, they favor legalization, 50 to 43 percent. In 2007, only 40 percent of Americans in a CNN poll said gay marriages should ?be recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages.? Today that number has risen to 55 percent. A year ago, in a CBS/New York Times poll, Americans opposed the legality of same-sex marriage, 51 to 42 percent. Now they support it, 51 to 44 percent.

As the people have changed, so have their elected representatives. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal institute involved in the Supreme Court cases, protests that ?DOMA was hardly controversial at the time it was passed: far from creating a partisan political divide, DOMA united Democrats and Republicans?passing by a bipartisan 84 percent of Congress (85-14 in the Senate, 342-67 in the House).? Again, note the past tense. Today, the Human Rights Campaign lists 54 senators and 184 House members as supporters of same-sex marriage.

Cheer up, conservatives. The court, at long last, has done what the people want. Unelected judges are no longer the nosy outsiders defying the country?s values. You are.

Read more from Slate?s coverage of gay marriage.

William Saletan's latest short takes on the news, via Twitter:

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2013/06/gay_marriage_polls_and_public_opinion_the_supreme_court_s_rulings_upheld.html

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Monkeys' winter death toll shows true value of friendship in natural ...

The devastation caused by an exceptionally cold winter to a population of wild monkeys has enabled scientists to show for the first time a link between an animal's social relationships and its chances of surviving in extreme environmental conditions.

Thirty endangered Barbary macaques native to a region of the Middle Atlas Mountains in northern Morocco died over the course of the 2008/2009 winter, when snow almost one metre deep covered their home range for more than three months, drastically reducing access to food on the ground.

This death toll, most likely due to starvation, represented two thirds of the total population of two groups of macaques that a multinational team of primatologists and ecologists has been observing as part of the Barbary Macaque Project. Only 17 monkeys survived into the spring which finally arrived in March 2009.

Dr Richard McFarland and Dr Bonaventura Majolo from the School of Psychology at the University of Lincoln, UK, analysed data they had gathered in the six months prior to the cold weather arrived, to see which socio-ecological factors best predicted the monkeys' survival.

Their findings, published in the latest issue of the Royal Society's peer-reviewed journal Biology Letters (26th June 2013), represent the first known scientific study to establish a correlation between sociality (i.e. the number of social relationships an animal holds within its group) and survival of extreme ecological conditions. It supports the view that factors which contribute to establishing and maintaining social relationships are favoured by natural selection.

Lead author Dr McFarland, who undertook the study during his PhD studies at the University of Lincoln, and is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, said: "Previous studies investigating the link between sociality and fitness have mainly focused on the long-term reproductive benefits afforded by maintaining strong and stable social relationships. However, our findings indicate that the effect of sociality on fitness is so strong that it can predict survival in the short-term, across an unpredictable environmental event. These findings support the theory that sociality has adaptive value, and furthers understanding of the potential impact that environmental change may have on social species."

The research team, who were based at a field site near the Moroccan city of Azrou, considered several sets of data, covering the number and quality of social relationships, gender, rank and time spent feeding. They used a statistical method known as backward stepwise regression to determine which variables best predicted the probability that an individual would survive the winter.

Co-author and founder of the Barbary Macaque Project Dr Majolo added: "We found evidence that it is the quantity, not the quality, of these social relationships which predicts an animals' survival. This may be due to the increased feeding tolerance resulting from a larger network of social relationships reducing the amount of time and energy expended in foraging. Our results also suggest that monkeys with a greater number of social relationships may also have better access to huddling partners at night and in cold periods."

The Barbary macaque is an IUCN Red List species and is listed as endangered with a decreasing population trend.

Explore further: Wild monkeys watch fights to exploit losers for grooming

Source: http://phys.org/news/2013-06-monkeys-winter-death-toll-true.html

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Yahoo News Calls Kenya "Country of Obama's Birth"

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/06/yahoo-news-calls-kenya-country-of-obamas-birth/

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These Ads Were Named The Best Creative Work ... - Business Insider

Barbarian Group / Vimeo

Cinder won the Mobile Grand Prix. See what it is in the slideshow.

Every year, the top advertisers in the world gather in Cannes, France to vie for the most prestigious ad awards in the world.

Prizes are given in subjects ranging from mobile ads to outdoor ads that are more than your average billboard.

The best work receives a Grand Prix Cannes Lion.

We've collected the ads that won the top honors.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/these-ads-were-named-the-best-creative-work-in-the-world-2013-6

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Watch the trailer for Anderson Silva?s latest movie

UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva is in "Tapped," the latest movie to try to profit off of capture the beauty of MMA. The trailer shows Lyoto Machida and Krysztof Soszynski are in it, too. What the trailer does not show is what the movie is about, except for maybe punching bags and getting choked out by Silva?

For the plot of the movie, we turn to IMDB:

A disgruntled teenager, sent to do community service at a rundown Karate school, enters an MMA tournament to face the man who killed his parents.

Obviously. Here's the other part we learn from IMDB: It stars Martin Kove. If you don't recognize the name, perhaps you remember John Kreese, the terrifying sensei of Cobra Kai? The guy who ordered Daniel-San's leg swept at the All-Valley Karate Tournament? Yes, Silva got to work with the villain from "The Karate Kid."

In the past, Silva has worked with Steven Seagal. The movie star was even cageside for Silva's fights and took credit for teaching him the kick that knocked out Vitor Belfort. But with this movie and work with Kreese mean we'll be hearing Silva yell, "Cobra Kai, never die!" at UFC 162?

Thanks, With Leather.

Related coverage on Yahoo! Sports:
? Native American fighter Dan Hornbuckle more than a face in the crowd
? Yahoo! Sports' half-year MMA awards
? Is Chris Weidman the one to take out Anderson Silva?

Source: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mma-cagewriter/watch-trailer-anderson-silva-latest-movie-152628084.html

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For second time in 12 hours, suspicious object detonated at ...

The Minton-Capeheart federal building was evacuated as Indianapolis police bomb detonated a suspicious object Monday, June 24.

By M. Alex Johnson, staff writer, NBC News

A woman was in custody Monday after police detonated a suspicious object at a federal building in Indianapolis, only hours after they blew up a suspicious package at a second federal building nearby, authorities told NBC News.

The Minton-Capehart building in downtown Indianapolis houses offices of the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, the Drug Enforcement Agency and other federal agencies had been evacuated early Monday afternoon after an object registered a possible hit for explosives as it was being scanned through security X-rays about 2 p.m. (3 p.m. ET), authorities said.

The object was spotted in a woman's bag as it passed through a security X-ray, authorities told NBC News. The woman who brought the object to the building was being questioned by the FBI, NBC station WTHR of Indianapolis?reported.

The explosion came about 12 hours after the Indianapolis police bomb squad detonated a backpack at the U.S. Courthouse about four blocks away.

A police dog "hit" on the package about 3 a.m., police said, and it was detonated after nearby hotels were warned.

Police told WTHR that fireworks and marijuana were found in the bag.

Both facilities were cleared and had been reopened by the middle of the afternoon.

Watch US News crime videos on NBCNews.com

Source: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/24/19119164-for-second-time-in-12-hours-suspicious-object-detonated-at-indianapolis-federal-facility

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AFL-CIO opposes banning deductions for PAC funding ? Business ...

The Texas chapter of the AFL-CIO is opposing a bill introduced in the state House of Representatives that would criminalize payroll deductions for contributions to political action committees.

H.B. 1980, sponsored by Reps. Tan Parker and Jim Murphy, would make it a Class A misdemeanor for a business or labor union to automatically deduct a political contribution from an employee?s paycheck without first getting the individual?s permission. Employees would have to explicitly choose to donate under a system distinct from existing agreements to pay dues or deduct other funds.

A statement from the AFL-CIO state chapter called the bill ?an attempt to prevent unions from engaging in political activities.?

Currently, unions may solicit PAC contributions and collect them through payroll deductions, although workers may choose to opt out.

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Advantages Of Owning Your Own Home Fitness Equipment - ????

Do you feel the need to get in shape and firm up because of consuming too many high calorie food and drinks that were served up during the holidays and special occasions you attended? Let? face it, you may know that you need to watch your diet and exercise more but who wants to get up early and go exercise. If you like to run or walk for exercise outside, it is usually either too hot or too cold. And who wants to have to drive to the gym and touch all the equipment that hundreds of others have touched. Even if you don? mind driving to the gym, do you really have the time to commute there tom brady jersey and back?

If you have trouble squeezing in extra time to go to the gym or you only like to exercise during ?ood weather? you might like the idea of being able to exercise in your home at anytime of the day and night.

Having a personal home fitness regimen can give you the flexibility you need to be able to exercise and trim excess calories and fats from your diet. Having a home fitness regimen falls into two categories. One, you either do your own thing whether it? dancing, jogging or aerobics. Or two, you buy your own exercise equipment and devices to use in your own home. Having your own home gym gives you a lot of flexibility and you can tone specific areas while burning extra calories.

The advantages of using physical fitness equipment in your home are:

* First, you can exercise whenever it is convenient for you. You have the option of exercising first thing in them morning or later at night. It gives you more freedom to work exercise into your busy schedule and do it at a time that is convenient for you, even if that time is at midnight.

* Second, you can use your exercise equipment as long as you like and san francisco 49ers jerseys however you like. At a gym, the popular exercise equipment can have long waits and you feel rushed once you actually get access to the machine. You don? to worry about losing access to it if you want to get a drink.

* Third, you have the privilege to us the equipment for the necessary amount of time to burn the optimal amount of calories. Depending on your schedule, you can exercise once a week, three times, a week, etc. Since you own the equipment, you don? have to pay extra to use it for as long as you like. If you have fallen off your diet during the day, you can exercise a little longer or harder without costing more.

* And finally, owning your own equipment will save money in the long run. At a gym, you have monthly fees to belong and many times you are required justin smith jersey to spend frank gore jersey some time with a trainers and staff. You are charged for any time that you spend with staff at the gym. You vince wilfork jersey also don? incur extra fees for using the equipment more than is allowed. You will be surprised at how much money you can save when you buy your own equipment.

Depending on your weight loss and exercise goals, there are a lot of different types of exercise equipment that you can purchase. You need to think about your goals and your own fitness level and health before you purchase anything. Items like treadmills, elliptical trainers, stationery bikes and fitness balls are a few of the types of equipment that are ideal. There are usually different price ranges involved and you may look at a used sports store to get good equipment a lot cheaper.

Living a healthy life style will improve the quality of your life and allow you to live longer. Diet and exercise are the key to staying young and feeling young. Exercise is the best way to help boost your weight loss goals. But if you don? follow a diet plan, you will be exercising in vain. The biggest problem facing most people today is that they are just too busy to stick to a strict diet program or exercise regime. ??PC9527newnfljersey.org/

Source: http://iclarks.org/2013/06/26/advantages-of-owning-your-own-home-fitness-equipment

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Apple?s hopes of barring knockoff Lightning cables purportedly dealt fatal blow

DEAR ABBY: I was taken away from my parents at 13 and placed into foster care, where I stayed until I aged out at 21. My biological mother is a drug addict who abandoned me to my father when I was 11. She never tried to contact me while I was in care.I am now 24 and she won't leave me alone. She sends Facebook messages that alternate between begging me to let her get to know me, and condemning me for being vindictive and not having forgiveness in my heart. Abby, this woman exposed me to drugs and all manner of seedy people and situations. ...

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/apple-hopes-barring-knockoff-lightning-cables-purportedly-dealt-031520468.html

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Google Cloud Playground lets you dip your toes in the Cloud Platform waters

Google's Cloud Platform holds a certain amount of appeal for developers looking to quickly build robust web apps. Of course, getting started is a bit involved. You'll first need to download and install several tools and an SDK on your local machine. Cloud Playground offers the chance to dip your toes in the water and experiment with services like App Engine, Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL sans the lengthy installation process. The browser-based tool is designed for testing out sample code, evaluating APIs and even sharing code snippets without the hassle of building a complete development environment. This isn't a proper solution to web-based development, however. For now you're limited to Python 2.7 App Engine apps, and the code editor and mimic development server have a rather basic feature set. Still, for those who are tempted by Cloud Platform, but not quite ready to dive in head first, the Playground is a welcome treat.

Filed under: Internet, Google

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Via: TechCrunch

Source: Google Cloud Platform Blog

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/aJlzdIF7Htk/

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