Life of Alan

(tags: ????)

(tags: Kansas_City)

When he boarded his flight from London to Oslo, Farouk al-Kasim, a young Iraqi geologist, knew his life would never again be the same. Norway was a country about as different as it was possible to imagine from his home, the Iraqi port city of Basra. He had no job to go to, and no idea of how he would make a living in the far north. It was May 1968 and al-Kasim had just resigned from his post at the Iraq Petroleum Company. To do so, he had had to come to the UK, where the consortium of western companies that still controlled most of his country’s oil production had its headquarters. For all its uncertainties, al-Kasim’s journey to Norway had a clear purpose: he and his Norwegian wife, Solfrid, had decided that their youngest son, born with cerebral palsy, could only receive the care he needed there. But it meant turning their backs on a world of comforts. Al-Kasim’s successful career had afforded them the prosperous lifestyle of Basra’s upper-middle class.

(tags: Norway)

It never happened before, and it's not likely to happen again.

Wednesday before dusk, rangers at Zion National Park, in southern Utah, blocked all traffic on the highway that crosses the park so that 300 people holding rare and precious tickets could walk through the historic, pitch-black and narrow Zion Tunnel.

The tickets were snapped up in four hours when they were offered in June. And those lucky few ticket holders traveled from across the West to hike the mile-long tunnel, which was carved out in the late 1920s, 800 feet above the floor of Zion Canyon and 20 feet inside a sandstone cliff.

(tags: National_Parks)

(tags: Writing)

(tags: Music)

(tags: Florida)

The donkey I couldn't forget was coming around a corner in the walled city of Fez, Morocco, with six color televisions strapped to his back. If I could tell you the exact intersection where I saw him, I would do so, but pinpointing a location in Fez is a formidable challenge, a little like noting GPS coordinates in a spider web. I might be able to be more precise about where I saw the donkey if I knew how to extrapolate location using the position of the sun, but I don't. Moreover, there wasn't any sun to be seen and barely a sliver of sky, because leaning in all around me were the sheer walls of the medina—the old walled portion of Fez—where the buildings are so packed and stacked together that they seem to have been carved out of a single huge stone rather than constructed individually, clustered so tightly that they blot out the shrieking blue and silver of the Moroccan sky.

(tags: Morocco)

(tags: Opera)

The Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University (ACKU) is proud to be involved in the nation’s noteworthy goals. Established in Peshawar in 1989, the Centre was shifted to Kabul University in 2006 where it occupies temporary space in the Central Library at Kabul University. The Centre is regarded as the richest source of information on this troubled nation. The Centre’s overall purpose is to enhance nation building by providing reliable information to policy planners, strategy makers, programme implementers and future leaders of Afghanistan, including the faculty and students at Kabul University. There is also an outreach component, which sends mobile ibraries into the provinces to communities, high schools and provincial councils. The purpose of this programme is to provide information to the Afghan population to enable them to acquire the knowledge they need to participate fully in the new experiment in democracy.

(tags: Afghanistan)

The Chinese government has refused to prevent the rampant piracy of our software and movies in their country. Well, you better believe William Wallace has a few choice words to say to them.

(tags: Almost_Live)

Recent violence in China's western provinces shows that the state's dual policy of migration and development has failed. A political solution for Xinjiang and Tibet, however, could be closer than Beijing may think.

(tags: Xinjiang)

With July’s violence in Urumqi following last year’s riots in Tibet, is China under threat in its frontier provinces? Xinjiang’s minorities, the Muslim Uyghurs in particular, face discrimination. Though their dislocation is more social and cultural than religious, without real autonomy Islamic fundamentalism is set to grow

(tags: Xinjiang)

When it rains, geysers of water have been known to erupt from the floor drains of the art collective here known as Fluxspace, which makes its home in a mammoth former textile mill in the northern part of the city. The building has no air-conditioning, and on the harshest winter days its heating system borders on notional. It’s also a bear to find: one morning this week a taxi driver on his way to it ended up taking several unintended detours down trash-filled alleys, cursing the calm voice issuing from his dashboard G.P.S. But the three-year-old collective is becoming known in the Philadelphia art world for its monthly exhibitions of work by its members and other artists. And “we actually get awesome turnout for our shows, considering the location and everything,” said Danielle Ruttenberg, one of 25 young artists who either pay for raw studio space in the building or take on chores in exchange for it.

(tags: philadelphia)

(tags: Baseball)

(tags: pnw_environmentalism)

As Americans search for the cure to what ails our health-care system, we've overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced problems like ours, yet they've found ways to cover everybody — and still spend far less than we do.

I've traveled the world from Oslo to Osaka to see how other developed democracies provide health care. Instead of dismissing these models as "socialist," we could adapt their solutions to fix our problems. To do that, we first have to dispel a few myths about health care abroad.

(tags: Health_Care)

WhoDeyRevolution is a blog dedicated to demanding that the Cincinnati Bengals front office act aggressively and rationally in their pursuit of a Super Bowl.

(tags: Cincinnati)

(tags: almost_live)

(tags: NYC)

(tags: Banking)

(tags: Astronomy)

(tags: NGO:Jewish)

(tags: AIDS)

The Internet's great promise is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful. So how come when you arrive at the most popular dating site in the US you find a stream of anonymous come-ons intermixed with insults, ads for prostitutes, naked pictures, and obvious scams? In a design straight from the earliest days of the Web, miscellaneous posts compete for attention on page after page of blue links, undifferentiated by tags or ratings or even usernames. Millions of people apparently believe that love awaits here, but it is well hidden. Is this really the best we can do? Odd perhaps, but no odder than what you see at the most popular job-search site: another wasteland of hypertext links, one line after another, without recommendations or networking features or even protection against duplicate postings.

(tags: Internet_Phenomena)

Merck was in trouble. In 2002, the pharmaceutical giant was falling behind its rivals in sales. Even worse, patents on five blockbuster drugs were about to expire, which would allow cheaper generics to flood the market. The company hadn't introduced a truly new product in three years, and its stock price was plummeting.

In interviews with the press, Edward Scolnick, Merck's research director, laid out his battle plan to restore the firm to preeminence. Key to his strategy was expanding the company's reach into the antidepressant market, where Merck had lagged while competitors like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline created some of the best-selling drugs in the world. "To remain dominant in the future," he told Forbes, "we need to dominate the central nervous system." His plan hinged on the success of an experimental antidepressant codenamed MK-869.

(tags: Neuroscience)

(tags: Almost_Live)

(tags: Native_America)

(tags: pnw_environmentalism)

* The interaction between climate change and conflict started as early as 35,000 years ago.
* The Neanderthals, Vikings, and Mayans all benefited and suffered from a changing climate that affected resources such as water, game, and agriculture.
* By analyzing historical case studies of climate and societal collapse, we can identify a set of discernible lessons for today.

(tags: Global_Warming)

(tags: Soccer)

This website gathers in a single place everything known about Malagasy words and expressions. It already contains the largest collection of Malagasy words ever assembled, as well as many facts and illustrations about Madagascar.

It is available free of charge on the worldwide web. It does not make advertisements.

To find a word:

* browse the many lists provided provided at the top of the page, or
* type in the input field above a Malagasy, English or French word.

(tags: Madagascar)

(tags: Internet_Phenomena)

It’s a moment of confusion and loathing that most of us have experienced. You’re in a shop. It’s time to pay. You reach for your purse or wallet and take out your last note. Something about it doesn’t feel quite right. It’s the wrong shape or the wrong colour and the design is odd too and the note just doesn’t seem right and . . . By now you’ve realised: oh shit! It’s the dreaded Scottish banknote! Tentatively, shyly – or briskly, brazenly, according to character – you proffer the note. One of three things then happens. If you’re lucky, the tradesperson takes the note without demur. Unusual, but it does sometimes happen. If you’re less lucky, he or she takes the note with all the good grace of someone accepting delivery of a four-week-dead haddock. If you’re less lucky still, he or she will flatly refuse your money.

(tags: Banking)

The Encyclopedia of San Francisco is an ongoing Web-based project of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society. It aims to become the definitive reference work relating to the rich history of the city of San Francisco. As a work-in-progress, the encyclopedia is constantly growing, and is regularly updated with new entries provided by local scholars and subject experts. The encyclopedia staff wishes to invite any San Francisco history specialists or enthusiasts to participate in its development.

(tags: San_Francisco)

(tags: Media:Jewish)

Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions ?? whether
Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law ?? that place
controls on debt's potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the
current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the
creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to
protect the interests of creditors.

(tags: Fixed_Income)

(tags: PNW_History)

(tags: PNW_History)

(tags: Almost_Live)

(tags: Almost_Live)

Sources: Convicted burglars in North Carolina, Oregon, California, and Kentucky; security consultant Chris McGoey, who runs crimedoctor.com; and Richard T. Wright, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, who interviewed 105 burglars for his book Burglars on the Job.

(tags: Crime_and_Punishment)

(tags: Almost_Live)