Full screen. Sound up.
Astronomer’s Paradise, the first episode of a Atacama Starry Nights timelapse movie series. Atacama Desert in Chile, South America, is home to some of the world’s leading telescopes.
Sez filmmaker Chrisoph Malin:
I hope we could at least capture the magic of this very special place a bit – this is how the night sky looks like, if people care about light pollution. And we need more people to do that.
Via Neatorama
Confirmation from Bloomberg about the deal Greece did with Goldman Sachs in 2001. Former Fine Gael-appointed Attorney General Peter Sutherland, a vocal opponent of burning the bondholders, has been chairman of Goldman Sachs International since 1995
On the day the 2001 deal was struck, the government owed the bank about 600 million euros ($793 million) more than the 2.8 billion euros it borrowed, said Spyros Papanicolaou, who took over the country’s debt-management agency in 2005.
By then, the price of the transaction, a derivative that disguised the loan and that Goldman Sachs persuaded Greece not to test with competitors, had almost doubled to 5.1 billion euros, he said.
Papanicolaou and his predecessor, Christoforos Sardelis, revealing details for the first time of a contract that helped Greece mask its growing sovereign debt to meet European Union requirements, said the country didn’t understand what it was buying and was ill-equipped to judge the risks or costs.
In the past ten years, as self-proclaimed conservatives have increased from sixty-two per cent of the Republican Party to seventy-one per cent, the percentage of Republicans describing themselves as moderates has declined from thirty-one per cent to twenty-three per cent. The number who call themselves “liberal” is now close to the number who describe themselves as Aleut or Eskimo.
A rather large whooshing sound.
Daffodil (left) and Primrose.
From Dublin SPCA:
The charity is urging anyone with information regarding the identity of the people responsible for dumping two four-week-old female puppies from the back of a car at Millennium Business Park, Dublin 15 over the weekend to come forward.
The terriers are extremely nervous, underweight and heavily worm-burdened; but it is hoped with lots of TLC they will be ready to go to a foster home very soon.In a separate, incident, a 10 week old, ginger and white male kitten was rescued from the city centre by a member of the public having witnessed it being kicked about by a gang of children.
The Cheetah robot – developed by Pentagon military research agency DARPA – can run at 18mph: just 5mph faster than the previous record set in 1989, but plenty quick enough to run most humans down prior to destroying them.
DARPA sez:
The robot’s movements are patterned after those of fast-running animals in nature. The robot increases its stride and running speed by flexing and un-flexing its back on each step, much as an actual cheetah does.
The current version of the Cheetah robot runs on a laboratory treadmill where it is powered by an off-board hydraulic pump, and uses a boom-like device to keep it running in the center of the treadmill. Testing of a free-running prototype is planned for later this year.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NmndKIH5dQ
A deliciously wry video for the new Amnesty International Ireland campaign for reform to the healthcare system in Ireland.
Thanks Declan.
“When you’re as good as me, they [women] can’t keep away,”
Castlebar Man Jailed For Bigamy In Canada After 19 Marriages (Mayo News)
