when you find the love, you find yourself

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080513.html

Saturn's ragged moon Rhea has one of the oldest surfaces known.

http://rss.sciam.com/~r/ScientificAmerican-News/~3/289728028/article.cfm

Despite the proliferation of antibiotics and assorted antibacterial hand lotions and wipes, bacteria remain a moving target for hospitals and clinics seeking to protect their patients from infections. One approach gaining traction in the effort to banish bacteria is to mimic the way the human body attacks these microorganisms by punching holes in bacterial cell membranes and hobbling their ability to morph into antibiotic-resistant pathogens. [More]

Tonight I am quiet. I have commited to paying for my tai chi class and then staying up as late as necessary to be in dhikr as I am commited to evryday but which I somitmes neglect.

I hav been so tired that I slept on the train on the way here and ended up in Breda, some miles from here. Perhaps I will just go to sleep, feeling a little bit guilty.

Here are two flickr accounts I regularly look at from Delhi and Jerusalem. The Delhi photos are by a vry interesting young man...more on that later.

So much has transpired emotionally in the last couple of weeks that I hav hesitated to begin writing, overwhelmed by the amount I have to say. Its hard to be back in th rawness of reality but its also good not to be living in a numb self-protective world where love is distributed to everyone but somehow not fully experienced in flawed humanity.

In short things may have gon vry strangely pear-shaped with both SS and HB. Ah well, at least I am awak for it...or snoozking on the way to Breda, or something prosaic.

Exhausted Salaams...

Rafal

http://rss.sciam.com/~r/ScientificAmerican-News/~3/289686098/article.cfm

Editor's Note: Associate editor David Biello is reporting from China during a 17-day stay. We'll be posting stories from him regularly. In his first installment, we present a slide show of the construction transforming Beijing. [More]

http://rss.sciam.com/~r/ScientificAmerican-News/~3/289668789/article.cfm

Abuse of opiates such as heroin, methadone and morphine destroy brain cells, reducing attention span and memory. But new research shows there may be a way to regain some lost patience and recall. [More]

http://rss.sciam.com/~r/ScientificAmerican-News/~3/289423644/article.cfm

SHANGHAI, China--The death toll from a 7.9-magnitude earthquake that rocked western China yesterday rose to nearly 12,000 and scores more were feared dead as rescuers continued to sift through the rubble of flattened schools and homes in search of thousands still missing, according to Xinhua news agency reports from the local government.

Wang Zhengyao, disaster relief division director at the Ministry of Civil Affairs, said that 11,921 people had died so far in the country's worst earthquake in three decades.

[More]

What universities offer graduate English programs with children's literature as a possible focus? Either as a certificate, a degree, etc.

I'm already aware of the following universities offering such things.

Simmons
Eastern Michigan
University of Florida
UNC Charlotte
Illinois State
Rutgers online youth lit certificate
University of Pittsburgh

Anything where I can get a certificate, or do a specialization in the field would be awesome. I'm looking through journals and finding professors publishing in the field, and looking up their respective universities, but this is a tedious process. I was wondering if anybody knew any universities to recommend.

United States only, please.

Thank you!

Sick (always sick in 2008) and rushed, but here's the short explanation. If you're in a weirdo "experimental" band there's really no good reason to dress like you're a roadie for Mogwai and stare frumpishly at a table of pedals for eight minutes of apologetically modest "noise", so it's back to elaborate, confusing and absolutely doomed live shows ala the Hudson Machinery Network all-night nightmares, which means the only real answer is obviously total glam spectacle. Oh lord, is it ever going to be *questionable*. Photographic updates probably in a couple weeks.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080512.html

Large galaxies and faint nebulae highlight this deep image of the

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1015

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "Vicious Cycle" - originally published 5/12/2008 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

http://rss.sciam.com/~r/ScientificAmerican-News/~3/289000467/article.cfm

A fatal, Alzheimer's-like disease that attacks cheetahs' internal organs and has impeded breeding of the cats in captivity may be spread by their feces. Researchers from Japan and China report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that the disease, AA amyloidosis, was transmitted to mice exposed to fecal proteins from a cheetah that died of it.

The cheetah is classified as an endangered species. Only 12,000 to 15,000 are believed to remain in about 25 countries, down from 100,000 in 44 countries in 1900, according to the Cheetah Conservation Fund. Breeders would like to have a self-sustaining population of cheetahs in captivity, but in North America only 20 percent of captive cheetahs reproduce, and only 75 to 80 percent of cubs survive to reproductive age, says Adrienne Crosier, a reproductive biologist at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.

[More]

http://rss.sciam.com/~r/ScientificAmerican-News/~3/288809199/article.cfm

SHANGHAI, China--The death toll from a 7.9-magnitude earthquake that rocked western China yesterday rose to nearly 12,000 and scores more were feared dead as rescuers today continued to sift through the rubble of flattened schools and homes in search of thousands still missing, according to Xinhua news agency reports from the local government.

Wang Zhengyao, disaster relief division director at the Ministry of Civil Affairs, said that 11,921 people had died so far in the country's worst earthquake in three decades. [More]

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080511.html

Why would Mars appear to move backwards?

The Willows is the only magazine of classic-style weird fiction, in the style of Bierce, Blackwood, Hodgson, Dunsany, Machen, etc.
We are also pioneering the new movement of steampunk horror, as exemplified in the writing of G. D. Falksen, Paul Marlowe, etc.
http://www.thewillowsmagazine.com/

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080510.html

Wandering through

I found this page and it totally freaks me out... but it confirms Shaikh Imran's claim about the Dajjal being British... scroll down to the part about the "white donkey."

http://www.geocities.com/muslimapocalyptic/WebProphecies.htm

So I'm sitting in the living room reading this to myself and my mom asks me what I'm up to so I say, "research."

"on what?"

So read the following Hadith: (the parentheses are added and I explain each one to her in detail)

"There will be a third war after two great wars in which many are killed. He who will light the fires of the second world war will be known as the 'Great Leader' (Der Fuhrer). 1300 years after the Hijra, count three decades (1330 Hijra is 1912. WWI started in 1914). At that time, the Greek King wants to wage a war against the entire world. A short while later, that is, in two decades (1350 Hijra is 1932. WWII started in 1937), a man whose name is associated with a cat name from the German lands, appears as a scourge on the Romans. He wages war against the entire world, both the warm and cold lands (the French and Russian front). After years filled with severe war fires, he meets Allah's punishment. Count five or six or seven or eight decades after 1300 of Hijra (1937-1967). At that time, a man called "Nasser" rules Egypt (Gamal Abdel Nasser lead the Egyptian revolution in 1952 and became president in 1954). Arabs call him "succa-ul Arab", the "brave of the Arabs." (He is called ‘the leader of the Arabs’ and is the father of Arab Nationalism) Allah despises him twice, once in a war (Suez Crisis lost to the British in 1956), and then in another one (The Six Day War lost to Israel in 1967). That "Nasser" can never attain victory. Upon this, Allah makes a dark-colored person, whose father is more enlightened than himself, the leader of the Egyptian people and the Arab nation (Anwar el Sadat). But, he makes an agreement with the thieves of the Masjid al-Aqsa (The Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty). Then a cruel man appears in Iraq. His name comes from confrontation (Saddam means to strike violently), and he is confrontational against his opponents. All the world gathers for him in small Kut (Kuwait), the region to which he came previously because he was deceived (Funding from US, then UN resolution). Count two or three decades after the year of Hijri 1400 (1999-2009). At that time, the Mahdi emerges. He fights the whole world and both the Christians and the Jews join against him with the hypocrites in the land of Isra and Miraj at Mount Megiddo (Israel)."


There's a silence and then, "don't get carried away with that stuff. It's like Nostramus, it's open to interpretation and you can read anything you want into it" I respond, "but these are specific dates and specific names"

More silence... and then back to video games and snoopy cartoons.

This is a deep deep sleep.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080509.html

On Tuesday, May 6, while standing on

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1014

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "Now you tell me??" - originally published 5/9/2008 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

http://rss.sciam.com/~r/ScientificAmerican-News/~3/287036597/article.cfm

Felled mangrove trees may have doomed the coast of Myanmar [More]

http://rss.sciam.com/~r/ScientificAmerican-News/~3/287046830/article.cfm

A company banking on drivers' weariness of skyrocketing gasoline prices unveiled a home refinery device on Thursday offering another option: ethanol. E-Fuel Corporation says its EFuel100 MicroFueler can produce up to 35 gallons (132 liters) of ethanol a week that consumers can pump directly into their cars and trucks. There is no combustion inside the device, which runs on a standard household 110- to 220-volt AC power supply (consuming about 150 watts*) and uses a membrane system to distill the sugar, yeast and water solution required to make ethanol rather than combustion heating elements, as commercial ethanol producers do. [More]