I went because: Iran has been on my list for some time, but it never seemed the “right time.” I decided to finally just go and see what was happening there for myself.
Don’t miss: Iman Square, Isfahan. Secret Parties, Tehran. The wonderful people, all over the country. Fabulous fabrics from many counties on the silk road.
Sir Edmund Hillary: A Life in Pictures
Edmund Hillary (left) and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay approach 28,000 feet (8,534 meters) on Mount Everest on May 28, 1953. The next day Hillary would become the first human to stand atop the world’s highest mountain, with Tenzing joining him seconds later.
Surfing at Mavericks
Thousands of big-wave surfing fans straggled onto a small beach north of Half Moon Bay on Saturday morning to watch – or try to watch – the greatest surfers in the world battle the worst that the Pacific Ocean can throw at them.
Watching the fabled Maverick’s contest from the beach seemed nearly as challenging as riding the waves themselves, as close-in breakers blocked the view of the waves that the competitors were riding about a half-mile offshore.
But the fans, many of them tugging on beers as they scrambled for position before sunrise, didn’t care.
Grass Makes Better Ethanol than Corn
Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass—a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally—and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it.
Working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the farmers tracked the seed used to establish the plant, fertilizer used to boost its growth, fuel used to farm it, overall rainfall and the amount of grass ultimately harvested for five years on fields ranging from seven to 23 acres in size (three to nine hectares).
Once established, the fields yielded from 5.2 to 11.1 metric tons of grass bales per hectare, depending on rainfall, says USDA plant scientist Ken Vogel. “It fluctuates with the timing of the precipitation,” he says. “Switchgrass needs most of its moisture in spring and midsummer. If you get fall rains, it’s not going to do that year’s crops much good.”
The Green Bay Packer’s “Reclusive” Ted Thompson
In a year when New England Patriots executives are being hailed as football geniuses for engineering an undefeated season, Ted Thompson, the reclusive general manager of the Green Bay Packers, has achieved something equally remarkable.
Before this season, fans were calling for Mr. Thompson’s head. While the Packers had won just 12 of their last 32 games, he did not seem to care. No matter how loudly the fans complained, Mr. Thompson, who avoids publicity and rarely explains himself, continued sending away popular veterans and replacing them with untested college players, some of whom weren’t highly regarded by other NFL teams.
This year, led by a core of players that helped make Mr. Thompson a pariah, the Packers won 13 games and made the playoffs. What’s more, the players he’s brought into the league during his career are having an exceptional year — as the playoffs resume Saturday, nearly 10% of the active players on the remaining eight teams were signed out of college by Mr. Thompson.
The Airport Security Follies
Six years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, airport security remains a theater of the absurd. The changes put in place following the September 11th catastrophe have been drastic, and largely of two kinds: those practical and effective, and those irrational, wasteful and pointless.
The first variety have taken place almost entirely behind the scenes. Explosives scanning for checked luggage, for instance, was long overdue and is perhaps the most welcome addition. Unfortunately, at concourse checkpoints all across America, the madness of passenger screening continues in plain view. It began with pat-downs and the senseless confiscation of pointy objects. Then came the mandatory shoe removal, followed in the summer of 2006 by the prohibition of liquids and gels. We can only imagine what is next.
To understand what makes these measures so absurd, we first need to revisit the morning of September 11th, and grasp exactly what it was the 19 hijackers so easily took advantage of. Conventional wisdom says the terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling aboard box-cutters. What they actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings.
In years past, a takeover meant hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were trained in the concept of “passive resistance.” All of that changed forever the instant American Airlines Flight 11 collided with the north tower. What weapons the 19 men possessed mattered little; the success of their plan relied fundamentally on the element of surprise. And in this respect, their scheme was all but guaranteed not to fail.
Parc de la Chute-Montmorency
An impressive waterfall, particularly in Winter with ice climbers scaling the heights. Clusty search.
Bonjour Quebec:
The Montmorency Falls, cascading 83 metres down to the river below (30 metres more than Niagara Falls), are situated on a historical site of natural beauty in the Montmorency Falls Park. A cable car runs up to the Manoir Montmorency, where a restaurant, reception rooms and boutiques await the visitor.
Satellites build a picture of the past
Gone are the days of a fearless Indiana Jones battling through the jungle in search of ancient treasures. Today’s archaeologists are using high-tech tools – from NASA satellites to Google Earth – to do the hard work for them.
If they haven’t been destroyed or dismantled, many ancient structures were long ago enveloped by soil, water, sand, volcanic ash, or thick vegetation. Though they might not be obvious to the naked eye, archaeologists are learning how to spot them.
Since the World War I, aerial photography from low-flying aircraft has been widely used. These images can help to pick out relics betrayed by unusual mounds, lines or disjointed landscapes. In other places, buried structures are completely invisible to the naked eye. But they still reveal clues to their whereabouts – just not with visible light.
The Search Party: Google Squares off with its Capitol Hill Critics
In June, 2006, Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, went to Washington, D.C., hoping to create a little good will. Google was something of a Washington oddity then. Although it was a multibillion-dollar company, with enormous power, it had no political-action committee, and its Washington office had opened, in 2005, with a staff of one, in suburban Maryland. The visit, which was reported in the Washington Post, was hurried, and, in what was regarded by some as a snub, Brin failed to see some key people, including Senator Ted Stevens, of Alaska, who was then the chairman of the Commerce Committee and someone whose idea of the Internet appeared to belong to the analog era. (He once said that a staff member had sent him “an Internet.”) Brin told me recently, “Because it was the last minute, we didn’t schedule everything we wanted to.” It probably didn’t help that his outfit that day included a dark T-shirt, jeans, and silver mesh sneakers.
Brin did meet with Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, and they spoke about “network neutrality”—an effort that Google and other companies are making to insure that the telephone and cable companies that provide high-speed access to the Internet don’t favor one Web site over another. Around the time of Brin’s visit, an organization called Hands Off the Internet, financed in part by telecommunications companies, ran full-page newspaper advertisements in which it accused Google of wanting to create a monopoly and block “new innovation”; one ad featured a grim photograph of a Google facility housing a sinister-looking “massive server farm.” Brin recognized it as a warning. “I certainly realized that we had to think about these things, and that people were going to misrepresent us,” he said. “We should be entitled to our representation in government.”
Fascinating to see Herb Kohl mentioned here. He’s not been active on many issues so it is surprising to see him pick Google (perhaps there’s something on the other side?)
David Cay Johnston on How the Rich Get Richer
Investigative reporter David Cay Johnston explores in his new book how in recent years, government subsidies and new regulations have quietly funneled money from the poor and the middle class to the rich and politically connected.