Eye of a Needle Art Forms - Buzz Aldrin

Major Miniaturist Makes Art That Comes With Its Own Microscope - WSJ.com: "Mr. Wigan, a 52-year-old Briton, is dyslexic and did poorly in school. Even today, he can barely read or write. Yet, he creates some of the smallest sculptures in the world, relying on nothing more than a scalpel and a microscope to see what he's carving.
His entire piece of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon fits on the head of a pin. His Statue of Liberty is made from a speck of gold. A recent carving of the Obama family is mounted inside the eye of a needle. Mr. Wigan says he used an eyelash to insert the president into the right slot. Mr. Wigan has made about 160 of these sculptures."

X Ray and R Rated views of Arti

Story Highlights

•Researchers have unveiled a 4.4 million-year-old skeleton of a hominid female

•The fossil, nicknamed Ardi, may be the oldest hominid skeleton ever found

•It replaces Lucy, a much-publicized skeleton that dates back about 3 million years

•Scientists: Ardi suggests humans and chimps evolved from a common ancestor

ardipithecus ramidus · Ardi ... Lucy move over...

After 15 years of rumors, researchers in the U.S. and Ethiopia on Thursday made public fossils from a 4.4-million-year-old human forebearer they say reveals that our earliest ancestors were more modern than scholars assumed and deepens the evolutionary gulf separating humankind from today's apes and chimpanzees.

The highlight of the extensive fossil trove is a female skeleton a million years older than the iconic bones of Lucy, the primitive female figure that has long symbolized humankind's beginnings.

An international research team led by paleoanthropologist Tim White at the University of California, Berkeley, unveiled remains from 36 males, females and young of an ancient prehuman species called Ardipithecus ramidus, unearthed in the Awash region of Ethiopia since 1994. The creatures take their scientific name from the word for root in the local Afar language.

"It is not a chimp and it is not human," said Dr. White. "It gives us a new perspective on our origins."

Already, the discoveries have experts reworking the human pedigree. "They are extraordinary fossils," said anthropologist Alan Walker at Pennsylvania State University, who wasn't part of the project. They undoubtedly will shape debates about human origins for years to come, as scholars argue whether these creatures should be counted among our most ancient direct ancestors or cataloged as an intriguing dead-end.

"There are going to be generations of dissertations based on this," said Carol Ward, an independent expert on ancient anatomy at the University of Missouri Columbia.

Documented in 11 research papers to be published Friday in the journal Science, the fossils offer a detailed look at a species of sturdy, small-brained creatures that dwelled in an ancient African glade of hackberry, fig and palm trees, by a river that long ago turned to stone. Despite their antiquity, their bodies were already starting to presage humanity, the scientists said.

Indeed, unlike apes and chimps, they had supple wrists, strong thumbs, flexible fingers and power-grip palms shaped to grasp objects like sticks and stones firmly. They were primed for tool use, even though it would be another two million years or so before our ancestors began to fashion the first stone blades, choppers and axes.

But they were still evolving the ability to walk upright, with a big toe better suited for grasping branches than stepping smartly along, an analysis of their anatomy shows. They made their home in the woods, not on the open savannah grasslands long considered the main arena of human development. Yet their upright posture, distinctive pelvis and other toes suggest they walked easily enough. Most importantly, they showed no sign they walked on their knuckles, as contemporary chimps and apes do.

"They are not what one would have predicted," said anthropologist Bernard Wood at George Washington University. Although the differences between humans, apes and chimps today are legion, we all shared a common ancestor six million years or so ago. These fossils suggest that creature–still undiscovered--resembled a chimp much less than researchers have always believed.

In fact, so many traits in chimps and apes today are missing in these early hominids that researchers now question the notion that modern chimps and apes embody vestiges of our primate past, retaining primitive traits once shared by our ancestors. "We all thought the ancestral animal would look more like a chimp," explained Yale University anthropologist Andrew Hill.

Instead, the new finds show that what seems most ancient about nonhuman primates today–such as canine fangs, long limbs with hooked fingers meant for swinging through trees and hands designed for knuckle-walking--may actually be the product of more recent development, the researchers said.

"It is the chimps and gorillas that have been evolving like crazy in terms of limbs and locomotion, not hominids," said Kent State University anthropologist Owen Lovejoy, a senior scientist on the research team. "We took a different tack. We went social."

The project began with the discovery of a single tooth. But it soon grew into arguably the most comprehensive effort in the field of hominid studies, involving 47 scientists world-wide, as scores of unusually fragile and shattered specimens emerged from the rock. The skull, for example, was in so many pieces it had to be reconstructed digitally, requiring hundreds of CAT scans and 1,000 hours of computer processing. The pelvis alone took six years to reconstruct.

"We took enormous flak" for spending so much time analyzing the fossils, said Dr. Lovejoy. "We wanted to get it right and people had to wait until it was right.'

Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com

Maybe, we have missed the opportunity to REFORM anything in terms of Healthcare costs in USA....

Why Obama Bombed on Health Care
The public wasn't dumb enough to believe
the public option would save money.
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR... WSJArticle

Someday this country will have a health-care debate that's not abject in its idiocy.

It will involve a term used by Congressional Budge Office chief Doug Elmendorf, who has become a notoriety for harping on the word "incentives." The same word was used the other day by Warren Buffett, about what's missing from the health-care plan on Capitol Hill.

We actually prefer the formulation of Duke University's Clark Havighurst, who speaks of restoring the "price tags" to health care.

Now that's a concept that the public could actually make sense of.

President Barack Obama made a "public option" his centerpiece not because it's the answer to what's broken in the U.S. system, but because it's a halfway house to a single-payer setup that liberal Democrats have always wanted. Team Obama also knew the public is concerned about rising costs, so they jammed together a hooey-filled argument that the public option was somehow the solution to rising costs.

The public is not as dumb as it's made out to be, and Mr. Obama's public option died a bipartisan death yesterday in the Senate Finance Committee. What's left is a package of "reforms" that are mere trite extensions of what we've been doing for decades. That is, piling up mandates on private insurers and then lying that this somehow isn't driving up the cost of health insurance; piling up subsidies for health consumption and then lying that this somehow isn't responsible for runaway health-care spending.

Yes, the politics are difficult when it comes to restoring price tags. Voters would have to understand how a tax code that allowed them to choose for themselves how much of their incomes to devote to health care would serve their interests.

They would have to be persuaded of the benefits of a marketplace where insurers are free to design policies to appeal to different budgets and needs.

They might have to decide for themselves whether they have better uses for their income and savings than extending life at all cost.

In that sense, the jabbering on Capitol Hill is irrelevant to the central problem, wherein consumers see larger and larger chunks of their income mysteriously and involuntarily sucked into health care for questionable benefit.

A few brave legislators, including Democrat Ron Wyden, are willing to say as much. But as Max Baucus put it in an unguarded comment to the Washington Post: "Basically the president is not helping."

Mr. Obama may be "not helping" because he doesn't understand or believe in the role of absent price tags in creating our current woes. He may genuinely favor a system in which government decides who will receive what care.

However, he's certainly also "not helping" because his base in organized labor doesn't want real reform.

Union members not only like the tax-free, open-ended health -care benefits they're used to getting. More important and often overlooked, organized labor itself is increasingly made up of health-care workers who benefit from an incentive system that artificially force-feeds great gobs of GDP into the industry's maw.

Their long retreat elsewhere in the economy may continue unabated, but unions are steadily growing their clout in government and health care, two sectors that increasingly overlap and would become even more overlapped under the bills in Congress. Consider a scheme being test-driven in Missouri, where Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon, AFSCME and SEIU last year backed a ballot proposition to create a "Missouri Quality Homecare Council."

As the A.P. matter-of-factly reported: "The ballot summary shown to voters said nothing about making it easier for in-home care providers to unionize." But that was precisely the function. Now some 13,000 home health workers hired by patients but paid for by Medicaid are on the verge of being recognized as a union.

But won't collective bargaining inevitably mean higher Medicaid costs for Missouri taxpayer? Gov. Nixon, whose campaign reportedly received $650,000 from SEIU and AFCSME, obviously has other priorities.

In Canada, where health care is largely government controlled, 61% of health-care workers are unionized. In the U.S., it's only 11%. Democrats are bent on changing that and the bills floating around Capitol Hill are rife with provisions to replicate the Missouri scheme nationally.

Mr. Obama's health-care thinking always lacked the bite of real "reform." He never claimed he was a wonk. He claimed he was a political mobilizer. He meant it.

He might have honestly sold the Democratic dream of a single-payer system, forthrightly explaining how resources would be allocated. He might have spoken of putting the price tags back on health care so consumers could decide instead. He did neither—and has botched an opportunity for real progress.

What is the "government option" for healthcare and health insurance reform?

Ask any employer that provides their workers with health insurance what they will do if the government offers every American a "government option" for their health care.

FD: I pulled this out of the Internet as a typical GOP, non-progressive position statement against the "government opinion" position....

Whether the employees want it or not, if the feds offer every American the option of buying a health insurance policy from the federal government, employers will be immediately begin sending out notices that health care is no longer a company-provided benefit and directing their workers to the 1-800 number for the new federal plan. The boss may even include a slight pay hike with the notice as a nod to the enormous savings he or she will be achieving by off-loading the cost of employee health care, but that bump --if it comes at all-- will be a short term analgesic that will mask the onset of long-term pain. The "government option" will quickly become the single payer nightmare that is Canadian health care, and Americans will look back at the summer of 2009 and wonder when this became the American way of medicine.

This is the great head-fake of the health "reform" debate taking place behind closed doors in D.C. Veterans of the 1993 Hillarycare debate know that "single payer" scares most Americans and with good reason. The vast majority of Americans are used to picking their doctors and getting great care in relatively rapid fashion. We don't like the idea of waiting months or even years for "elective" surgeries, and we abhor the idea of having only a handful of doctors available from which to chose our provider.

If the "government option" emerges from the high-stakes negotiations under way right now, it will be the "reform" that swallows the entire system. It is no secret that large companies want to dump the responsibility for providing health insurance to their employees. The costs are high and going higher because American workers want the best health care available. Unions demand it in negotiations, and businesses competing for top drawer talent must offer health plans that appeal to the cream of the workforce, plans which are then available to all levels of the employee network.

But if the mirage of a government-backed plan suddenly appears (complete with a vast new bureaucracy to enforce the rules and calculate the discounts for those at or near the poverty line) embattled employers will see the opportunity to escape en masse from their expensive obligations to their workforce. The big insurance companies may survive a while, but competing against the government dooms most of them to an obviously uncompetitive position vis-a-vis any federal plan.

The rhetoric of "competition" that single payer fans are using to spruce up the "government option" is deeply deceptive. Many if not most private sector plans will face extinction as they are pushed into a ruinous race to the bottom of the benefits pool by employers studying the bottom line advantage of shifting health care costs to the government. Think about "competing" with Amtrak for passenger rail service and you get the picture of the future of the health care system.

Doctors will quickly have to decide whether to refuse the government plan's rate and rules. Some will, but those with the sunk costs of education and equipment purchased under the old rules will have to try the option of going off the government grid, forcing an immediate fracturing of American medicine into two systems, one for the wealthy and one for everyone else. Right now most of the waiting rooms of America's health care professionals are as diverse as the workforce that is covered by employer-provided health care. Within months of the adoption of a government option, expect many of your doctors to greet your next request for an appointment with the news that he or she isn't accepting the government option.

Beyond that immediate series of dislocations, look for a sharp decrease in the number of talented young people heading towards medical school. Of course many thousands of young doctors will pursue their dreams of being healers regardless of the economics of the out-years of their practices, but only fools will deny that thousands of other would-be doctors will simply refuse to go to work for the government, which is what the government option means for health care providers.

It keeps being repeated again and again : The country is on the verge of an enormous, culture-changing shift when it comes to the most basic of its expectations with regards to medicine, and yet this potential radical shift is almost wholly unreported on in the MSM in the sort of detail that would allow for an informed debate. Thus is the old media working hand-in-hand with the Congressional left to completely rewrite the rules of healthcare.

Democrats in the House are surely going to face retribution for their breach of faith with their constituents once they experience the reality of single-payer, but that payback is 18 months away. The "government option," by contrast, is on the fast track for passage by early autumn.

The GOP has to take up the cause of patient choice and genuine reform, and it has to do so soon.

But you have to ask the question again:
Why do employers WANT TO GET OUT OF THE HEALTHCARE BUSINESS?


An estimated 47 million Americans have no health insurance, and those who are covered face spiraling costs. Employers can not afford to provide healthcare for employees as the cost rise.

At Tampa's Moffitt Cancer Center, McCain praised the doctors and researchers, saying they're a reminder of all that's good in American health care. The challenge, he noted, is making that kind of life-saving care available to all Americans, no matter where they work or how much money they have.

"We want a system of health care in which everyone can afford and acquire the treatment and preventative care they need, and the peace of mind that comes with knowing they are covered," the Arizona senator said.

"Rising health care costs hurt employers and the self-employed alike. And in the end, they threaten serious and lasting harm to the entire American economy," McCain said.

McCain differs sharply from Democratic rival Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on how to fix the problem. He criticized them for pushing a combination of tax subsidies and regulation in an effort to provide universal health care coverage.

"We will replace the inefficiency, irrationality and uncontrolled costs of the current system with the inefficiency, irrationality and uncontrolled costs of a government monopoly," McCain said.

the art of creating a paper butterfly to feed the paper mantis

Origami master Sipho Mabona and the art creating a paper butterfly Mail Online: "At first glance it looks like a praying mantis. However closer exmination reveals it to be a work of origami and only the leaf and stem are real"

After almost a year, ammo shortage starting to ease in Dallas-Fort Worth | Fort Worth | Star-Te...

Left to right are: .22, .25, .32, .380, 9mm, .357 SIG, .38, .357, .40, .45, & .223 caliber rounds.

Copied from:
http://www.ballistics-experts.com/Law%20Enforcement/Ammunition/Caliber%20Selection.htm





After almost a year, ammo shortage starting to ease in Dallas-Fort Worth Fort Worth Star-Te...: "David Foster of Bedford has had a hard time all year finding ammunition for his guns.
After finding mostly empty shelves at gun stores, he finally went to a gun show a few months ago to stock up.
'I couldn’t find it anywhere except the gun show, and even there I had a hard time,' said Foster, 31. 'And it cost a lot.'
But workers in the weapons industry point to signs that a nearly yearlong nationwide ammunition shortage may be winding down. More ammo is making it to store shelves now, and the price is slowly coming down.
'We’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel,' said DeWayne Irwin, owner of Cheaper Than Dirt, a Fort Worth store and online retailer. 'I’ve been doing this business since 1988, and I’ve never seen something like this happen with ammunition. But it’s not going to be like this forever.'"