Why are we alive?: Feb 27, 2009

Friday, February 27, 2009

TD Bank Five Boro Bike Tour

TD bank what??

http://www.bikenewyork.org/rides/fbbt/index.html

I'm going to register.. $48 USD... See what there is!

Above is an actual picture, not a drawing, of Macropinna microstoma, who's eyes, seen here as the largish green balls, are inside its transparent head!

The things that look like eyes upfront are actual olfactory openings (umm... nose holes). Apparently this transparent head 'design' is to protect the eyes from stinging attacks as the Macropinna steals food from others! Here is a great video!:

More here: http://www.mbari.org/news/news_releases/2009/barreleye/barreleye.html

Katyn - Just watched... worth watching.

New Yorker: On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s forces invaded Poland; on September 17th, the Red Army did too, and the country was split into two occupied zones. The Soviets then captured around ten thousand Polish Army officers. What to do with them? Stalin was murderously prescient; he may have anticipated the future of the war—the coming German invasion of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet recovery and counterattack, which, in the event, rolled through Eastern Europe—and in that future he had his own plans for Poland. During April and May of 1940, the Soviet secret police, the N.K.V.D., shot nearly all the captured officers—many of them reservists who had built careers as engineers, doctors, and teachers—and dumped their bodies in mass graves in the Katyń forest and at other N.K.V.D. execution sites. At the same time, many other Poles held in Soviet custody were also shot. In all, more than twenty thousand people were killed. Then came the second betrayal: during the long Soviet domination of Poland after the war, the crime was officially blamed on the Nazis. It’s as if Poland’s grasp of the truth had been taken away along with its sovereignty.

IMDB: The film follows the story of four Polish families whose lives are torn apart when, at the outset of WWII, a great number of Polish soldiers (who are also fathers, husbands and brothers) fall into the hands of Soviet troops and later brutally become victims of Stalinism. The film also underlines the complicated circumstances of Poland's position both in the war and after.

New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2009/03/02/090302crci_cinema_denby

torrent download (1.4 Gigs): http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/4114241/Katyn.2007.%5BSubs.Eng%5D.DVDRip.Dolby.AC3%5B6ch%5D.DivX-LTT.4114241.TPB.torrent

Self adjusting eye-glass lenses, for $19.

"Joshua Silver models a pair of the self-adjusting glasses he developed for the poor. The glasses work on the principle that the more liquid pumped into a thin sac in the plastic lenses, the stronger the correction."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/08/AR2009010803492.html