The mud has buried 12 villages and 20 factories, inundating roads and rice fields and displacing 15,000 people. It is still flowing, at more than 3.5 million cubic feet a day, and no one can say when it might stop.

“After two months, we realized that this was not stopping,” Mr. Bijaksana said, “so we started trying to figure a way to stop it.”

The idea is to jam the gullet of the geyser with 1,000 or more balls linked together like charm bracelets, in bunches of four, the biggest of them weighing about 175 pounds.
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Chief Sgt. Sumarono, a soldier stationed at the team’s media center, told The Jakarta Post that local soothsayers had said spirits who lived in the crater would be angry after being hit by the giant concrete balls.

“The mud explosion happened because the spirits in the crater are angry,” said Sergeant Sumarono, who like many Indonesians uses only one name.

“The insertion of the balls will only spark more anger. The soothsayers have already said there will be a new and much bigger burst. I believe this.”

stop. just please stop. you’ve broken into my car at least four times in the last four months. every time it’s the same thing. you come in, throw all the shit around in my car, find nothing, and then just steal the thing of the most incremental value. last time it was my fastrak, which obviously does you no good because everyone knows that i would just cancel it immediately. and then this time you took my small green nalgene bottle with the K7 and TRUE stickers on it. great. hope you enjoy my spit.

i know it’s hard to remember things when you’re going through crack withdrawal and you’re just trying to find something to sell so you can score, but maybe you can think back to EVERY OTHER TIME you robbed my car and didn’t find anything of value inside. and realize that THERE’S NOTHING OF VALUE INSIDE. BECAUSE I DON’T KEEP ANYTHING OF VALUE INSIDE MY CAR.

just STOP.

it’s pointless.

please.

thanks,
the owner of the green miata

AUSTIN, Texas (Billboard) - Former Talking Heads frontman

Byrne gave a presentation entitled “Record Companies: Who Needs Them?” at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas, Thursday. He offered a slide show that predicated digital sales would outstrip CD sales by 2012.

That year will be the “tipping point,” much like the mid-to-late ’80s when CDs overtook cassette sales. Once download sales became the norm, Byrne said, it will allow manufacturing and distribution costs to approach zero. “That is a fact,” he said.

He said at that point, record labels will be faced with a sort of choice — to ramp up marketing services to use music as a loss leader for tours and merchandise revenue, or aim only for international stars of the ilk of Britney Spears.
…
But Byrne seemed to imply that labels are not changing as rapidly as they need to be. He pointed to the royalties artists receive on each CD sale, and put the number at about $1.60. He said the royalty rate is essentially the same with an iTunes sale.

“There’s no manufacturing or distribution costs,” Byrne said, “but somehow the artist ended up with the exact same amount.”
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But first, he said, labels will have to remove their digital rights management (DRM) copyright-control technology. He said he buys most of his music online via eMusic, or obtains it illegally, due to the file constraints on files sold on iTunes. Byrne predicated that once DRM is removed, iTunes will no longer “have a monopoly,” and labels will be better prepared to deal with Web sales.

If the likes of the MPAA, RIAA and IFPI are to be believed, file-sharing is causing worldwide havok, costing billions of dollars and creating unemployment. It’s true that some people are feeling the P2P effect; they’re called ‘physical pirates’ and one of them says that file-sharing has ruined his business.
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According to Tony, the first 2 hours of every Saturday and Sunday morning at the local flea market always proved the most exciting. “We’d take 60 cases of CDRs down in the van and as soon as we got there a crowd would swarm around us. We had no competition and it was obvious the punters had no other suppliers. Inside 30 minutes, 90% of the stock would be gone with some customers taking 2 or 3 cases each, presumably to sell on. After 3 hours we were cleared out and on our way home, always with huge amounts of money.”
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Tony is very clear about why his rags to riches story has gone back to rags again. “File-sharing, P2P - call it what you like. When you asked a customer why he wasn’t buying anything, 9 times out of 10 it was ‘BitTorrent this, LimeWire that’. Add that to the fact that huge numbers of PC users have burners and fast broadband and its obvious why I had to get out and earn a living another way. We had it good for a while but I don’t think those days are coming back.”

“Why are you doing that?” I ask from the backseat. “It’s called ridge-riding,” he explains, using another term he’s invented. He ridge-rides to let people behind him know that he is moving slowly. I imagine it’s also a way to avoid dying plastered to the grill of a semi. Ridge-riding, Wayne explains, saves gas in the rain, as it gets the wheels out of the puddly grooves in the road created by more, let’s say, traditional drivers. “People are burning fuel to throw water in the air,” he says, adding that you can hear if you’re driving in the road’s grooves or out of them.
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“Buckle up tight, because this is the death turn,” says Wayne. Death turn? We’re moving at 50 mph. Wayne turns off the engine. He’s bearing down on the exit, and as he turns the wheel sharply to the right, the tires squeal—which is what happens when you take a 25 mph turn going 50.
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Wayne is paying attention to the road, not the banter. He’s had to turn the engine back on earlier than he usually does after taking the death turn. “I hit the turn at 50, 51,” he says. “I should have hit it at 52.”
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The morning after I arrive, Hobbit and I squeeze into the front seat of the Ranger to join Wayne on a milk run. He starts the truck—well, gets it rolling—by releasing the emergency brake and putting the gearshift in neutral before jumping out and pushing the 3,330-pound vehicle down his sloping driveway with the engine off. He jumps in and, without braking, turns right, swerves around a dead skunk in the road, and then takes a left turn—again without braking—to a stop sign. Ahead, the light is red. “This is a long light,” he says. “I’m screwed. We have to throw it away.” “Throw it away” is the phrase Wayne uses to describe what most of us do with gasoline. We throw gas away when we accelerate fast, when we turn on the air conditioning, when we leave heavy stuff in the trunk, when we drive with a roof rack, when we don’t change the oil, when we underinflate our tires, when we roll down the windows, when we speed, when we brake, or when we idle.

Lack of sleep can affect people’s moral judgement, a new study shows. The findings could have implications for people in positions of responsibility, whose decisions often have life or death consequences, such as overworked medical professionals and sleep-deprived soldiers.

William Killgore and colleagues at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, US, set up an experiment with 26 healthy adults, all of whom were active-duty military personnel.

The participants were presented with a variety of hypothetical dilemmas, first when well rested and later, after staying awake for 53 hours. Situations included complex moral quandaries such as having to choosing whether or not to let one person die in order to save the lives of several others. Less weighty dilemmas without a moral component were also included, such as “is it OK to substitute ingredients in a chocolate brownies recipe?”
…
The findings, along with previous brain-imaging studies, suggest that sleep deprivation has a particularly debilitating effect on decision-making processes that depend heavily on emotion. “When people go for more than 24 hours without sleep there are dramatic decreases in brain activity in the prefrontal cortex [the area of the brain involved in processing emotions and decision-making],” says Killgore. “It basically goes to sleep.”

Sleep deprived participants also showed slight shifts in what they deemed appropriate actions compared to when they were well-rested. The changes were more pronounced in individuals who scored lower in “emotional intelligence” tests. Killgore believes that those with a lower emotional capacity to begin with may have less resistance to the affects of sleep deprivation.

Whichever way you slice it - whether you drink your OJ fresh or from frozen - oranges are an ethical minefield…
Spain is the largest single source of UK citrus fruits, but 59 per cent is now imported from outside the EU - the bulk of oranges from South America. So getting our five-a-day entails serious carbon emissions. This is a new consideration for the fruit industry; in 2003 a Marks & Spencer advert boasted that its pineapple juice was rock star enough to travel from Ghana into British stores in just 48 hours, bagging the company a World Juice Innovation Award (yes, there is such a thing).

These days juice snobbery is rife, concentrate being the poor relation to freshly squeezed. In energy terms, frozen orange concentrate could be a more efficient means of getting your daily fix if it weren’t for the fact that concentrated juice is usually pasteurised (this is very energy intensive). Making a litre of fresh orange juice requires 958 litres of water for irrigation and 2 litres of tractor fuel. Then there are the pesticides. Orange production uses more than any other food crop, with obvious potential knock-on effects for both the biodiversity of the orange groves (bear in mind some 8 per cent of the world’s agricultural land is already irrevocably damaged) and the health of low-paid and unregulated fruit-picking staff. One Oxfam report found independent orange farmers in Thailand financially crippled by loans taken out to pay for insecticides, and in poor health from spraying for 44 weeks a year.

As with other commodities, orange-juice production favours the multinational over small producers: Tropicana - the label that appears in most British fridges - is owned by PepsiCo. But small independent farmers are starting to fight back through certified fairtrade orange juice, principally from Cuba (www.traidcraft.co.uk or www.fruit-passion.com, and from most supermarkets). A number of supermarkets now also sell fairtrade loose oranges and other fruits (www.fairtrade.org.uk), and these are the ones you should use in your juicer.

Use a manual juicer (such as the iconically designed Mighty OJ) and you won’t even have to worry about using extra mains electricity (and the extra CO2). But there is a downside to juicing your own fruit, particularly oranges: you throw away skins and husks that have used up energy travelling thousands of miles, so it could be argued that it’s not as efficient as buying ready-squeezed in, say, a recyclable PET bottle. But considering that 25 per cent of all fruit is thrown away rather than consumed, the issue shouldn’t necessarily be to juice or not to juice, but rather making sure you eat all the fruit you buy in the first place.

Inspector Bryan Hurst will not lead the Royal Grenada Police Band while investigators determine how his ensemble came to play the anthem of Taiwan instead of its rival to open the $40 million Queen’s Park stadium on Saturday, according to police spokesman Troy Garvey.

Garvey said the inquiry into the diplomatic gaffe will “utilize all the resources” of the Caribbean island’s national force and that Police Commissioner Winston James was expected to formally apologize to Chinese Ambassador Qian Hongshan.

Qian and scores of blue-uniformed Chinese laborers who built the stadium were visibly uncomfortable as Taiwan’s anthem reverberated inside the 20,000-seat venue, which will host matches during the cricket World Cup beginning next month.

Chinese Embassy officials did not immediately return calls for comment on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the Chinese delegation did not attend a reception hosted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for foreign dignitaries Monday evening.

China and Taiwan split in 1949 amid a civil war, and Beijing claims the democratically run island is a renegade province that should not have diplomatic ties with other countries.

The Asian rivals have both campaigned aggressively to win the allegiance of Caribbean nations. Grenada switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to China in 2005.

Deborah Hutchinson at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, US, and colleagues, found that snakes on Ishima had bufadienolide compounds – toad toxins – in their neck glands, while those snakes living on the toad-free island of Kinkazan had none.

The snakes are unable to synthesise their own toxins, so they can only have derived bufadienolide compounds from their diet. Hutchinson’s team confirmed this by feeding snake hatchlings either a toad-rich or a toad-free diet. Toad-fed snakes accumulated toad-toxins in the nuchal glands on the back of the neck; snakes on a toad-free diet did not.

“Rhabdophis tigrinus is the first species known to use these dietary toxins for its own defence,” says Hutchinson.

What is more, when attacked, snakes on different islands react differently. On Ishima, snakes stand their ground and rely on the toxins in their nuchal glands to repel the predator. On Kinkazan, the snakes flee.

“Snakes on Kinkazan have evolved to use their nuchal glands in defence less often than other populations of snakes, presumably due to their lack of defensive compounds,” says Hutchinson.

Moreover, baby snakes benefit too. The team showed that snake mothers with high toxin levels pass on the compounds to their offspring. Snake hatchlings thus also enjoy the toad-derived protection.

Over the years I’d read reports that this pleasure palace, on a stretch of West 45th Street closer to the edge of Manhattan than most diners venture, peddled more than one kind of seductive flesh. And I felt obliged — honestly, I did — to check it out, knowing that great food often pops up where you least expect it.
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As it happens, Robert’s has some of the very best steaks in New York City.

Its atmosphere, granted, isn’t for everyone, and it has other shortcomings as well. The men who actually wait on the tables are less attentive and personable than the women who hover around them (and, it should be noted, vanish quickly if shooed away). The prices of some dishes, pumped up to reflect the entertainment on hand, might also be called topless.

But no matter what your appetite for the saucy spectacle accessorizing these steaks, you’ll be turned on by the quality of the plated meat.
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At Robert’s Steakhouse I got char, richness, depth and a more pronounced degree of aging, an unmistakable tanginess that accentuated and stretched out the beef’s flavor. I got it in the bone-in strip steak ($53), the rib-eye for two ($104) and the porterhouse for two ($106). All of these had spent at least 6 and as many as 10 weeks in a special vault where their custodian, Adam Perry Lang, rigorously controls the humidity and the air flow.

Mr. Lang, the restaurant’s executive chef since it opened in 2003, is a serious carnivore. He divides his time between Robert’s and Daisy May’s barbecue, which is nearby and which he co-owns. His résumé includes Guy Savoy in Paris and Daniel on the Upper East Side.

What’s he doing with lap dancers? Let me rephrase that: what’s he doing in the same theater as lap dancers? He said in a recent phone conversation that he’s getting more control over the food than he might at another restaurant.