The city of Heracleion was engulfed underwater 1500 years ago. This grand city had been mentioned by the Greek writer Herodotus, the 5th-century BC historian. He had told a wonderful tale of Helen of Troy, who traveled to Heracleion, then a port of ‘great wealth’, with her Trojan lover, Paris.
—When French marine archaeologist Franck Goddio stumbled upon some relics, it led them to one of the greatest finds of the 21st century; a city underwater. The discovery took place when Goddio had been in search of Napoleon’s warships from the 1798 Battle of the Nile, when he had been defeated by Nelson in these very waters, but to his surprise, he stumbled upon this magnificent discovery.
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SL Letter of the Day: Partners Still
Posted by Dan Savage on Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 5:12 PM
My wife and I have been married for eight years and we have to daughters. A few nights ago my best friend, who is a woman, told me she loves me.
Let’s back up for a minute. Rachel is my best friend and has been since high school (we’re all in our early thirties now). I realized I was in love with Rachel when I was 18 and brushed it off as a crush or lust or infatuation. But as years passed my feelings grew. I never acted on them and she never gave me any sign that she felt the same so I suppressed my feelings so as not to ruin our friendship. Time passed. We dated other people. She had a son and moved out of state for a few years. I got married and my girls were born. When she moved back I was mildly nervous but she, my wife and I got along so well that I thought I had nothing to be concerned about. Her son and my daughters get along and we all have a nice time together.
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A pioneering study has shown for the first time that the brains of men and women are wired up differently which could explain some of the stereotypical differences in male and female behaviour, scientists have said.
—Researchers found that many of the connections in a typical male brain run between the front and the back of the same side of the brain, whereas in women the connections are more likely to run from side to side between the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
—This difference in the way the nerve connections in the brain are “hardwired” occurs during adolescence when many of the secondary sexual characteristics such as facial hair in men and breasts in women develop under the influence of sex hormones, the study found.
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Mr Ferman’s office was on the ground floor of a tall Victorian townhouse near to the centre of Exeter. There was no buzzer so I knocked on the door. ‘Come in,’ said somebody, and I entered a giant heap of files with a few walkways cut through it. I have never seen an untidier office. There was also a powerful odour of cat. I peered around and eventually spotted a decrepit but genial face smiling at me from behind a pile of tax reference books. “Mr Ferman?” I said. “No, he’ll be with you in a minute. Do sit down,” said the unnamed man, and an emerging hand indicated a hard chair directly underneath the coat stand, which was full of coats. I perched awkwardly on the chair’s edge but no sooner had I done so when a female voice shrieked “Oh you CRETIN!”, and I jumped up in alarm. Now I could see that there was a second person in the office, sunk down behind a computer screen. It was a decrepit old lady, and these two decrepit persons, it transpired, comprised Mr Ferman’s staff. The focus of her ire seemed to be her computer rather than me, so I sat down again to wai
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The selfish gene is one of the most successful science metaphors ever invented. Unfortunately, it’s wrong
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Since he was just a small boy, Carl Sarno has been thinking of new ideas and inventions in hopes of changing the world for the better. After ninety-three years, Sarno hasn’t given up on his lifelong passion. In this short look into Carl’s life, he offers a glance at some of his inventions, as well as some valuable lessons he’s learned along the way.
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The drowning of Avishek Sengupta at an obstacle challenge last April was ruled an accident, but his family and friends believe that the sport’s most prominent company did a terrible job of monitoring safety at a water obstacle called Walk the Plank. Elliott D. Woods looks at the life of a remarkable amateur athlete and explains why his tragic end may lead to a multimillion-dollar legal fight.
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Movie villains: The 50 best bad guys (and gals) of all time
From Cobra Kai to Colonel Kurtz, we’ve got the movie villains you love to hate. Go to the dark side with our ranked list of evildoers.
Many people say they would like to write a book. That statement is usually in the form of “I have this great book idea”, “I’ve always wanted to write a novel” or “I will write it when I have more time.”
I used to say things like that. I kept promising myself that I would write a book someday. Then I realized something important.
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Behaviour can be affected by events in previous generations which have been passed on through a form of genetic memory, animal studies suggest.
Experiments showed that a traumatic event could affect the DNA in sperm and alter the brains and behaviour of subsequent generations.
How America’s biggest banks took part in a nationwide bid-rigging conspiracy – until they were caught on tape
by Matt TaibbiJUNE 21, 2012
—Someday, it will go down in history as the first trial of the modern American mafia. Of course, you won’t hear the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, called anything like that. If you heard about it at all, you’re probably either in the municipal bond business or married to an antitrust lawyer. Even then, all you probably heard was that a threesome of bit players on Wall Street got convicted of obscure antitrust violations in one of the most inscrutable, jargon-packed legal snoozefests since the government’s massive case against Microsoft in the Nineties – not exactly the thrilling courtroom drama offered by the famed trials of old-school mobsters like Al Capone or Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo.
—But this just-completed trial in downtown New York against three faceless financial executives really was historic. Over 10 years in the making, the case allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street.
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Legend has it that’s what Bill Murray says after he covers your eyes from behind and then turns you around to reveal he’s Bill Murray. If you’re not familiar with the legend of Bill Murray, he’s also been known to show up at student loft parties, crash kickball games, and to be reachable only by an 800 number. No one knows which stories are true, but it doesn’t matter; The fact that we discuss them at all is what makes Bill Murray a legend.
—I was lucky enough to run into the legend himself at a Tribeca Film Festival after-party. There he was, sitting at the bar. My first thought was, “Holy shit. That’s Bill Murray.” My second thought was, “Bill Murray looks old.” Straggly hair, bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows, baggy eyes. He had this smug look like he was the most important guy in the room, which he probably was. No one was talking to him. I had to try.
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A Reddit community called NoFap wants you to rethink your relationship with Internet pornography. And they’re not the only ones – Project Know, a drug, and alcohol rehab program, gives you its rundown on porn addiction and how the NoFap community “reboots” from it.
This infographic lays out some biological reasons why Internet porn can be a serious problem for some and gives you an overview of NoFap.
via INFOGRAPHIC.
Have you ever heard of a bird’s eye view? Well one little bird has brought a new meaning to 
the phrase. A sea eagle decided to steal a camera that was being used to record crocodiles in northwest Australia and carried it over 70 miles on a journey to Mary River.
Sea eagles are known to travel great distances to hunt for food. Once they capture their prey, they bring it back to their nests to feed their young. Why this bird decided to take the camera is unknown, but it may have confused it for food or just been curious about it.
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Veterans and Homelessness – RL34024.pdf.
Female Fort Hood soldiers recruited for prostitution ring, trial hears .
This Pentagon Project Makes Cyberwar as Easy as Angry Birds .
4 December SWJ Roundup | Small Wars Journal.
Why Nuclear Weapons Don’t Spread (Quickly) .
Truck with dangerous radioactive materials hijacked in Mexico .
Some NSA Opponents Want to ‘Nullify’ Surveillance With State Law .
“War Ends!: MacArthur to Rule Japs!” (Los Angeles Examiner, August 1945). I work in a frame shop, and this was brought in to be framed.
In Photos: Animals That Mimic Plants .
West vs Asia education rankings are misleading .
Alzheimer’s risk gene may begin to affect brains in childhood, research shows.
Women find sexually explicit ads unappealing — unless the price is right .
Gender-bending Plant Discovered .
Fear of being single leads people to settle for less in relationships.
Study documents catastrophic collapse of Sahara’s wildlife.
Domestication of dogs may have elaborated on a pre-existing capacity of wolves to learn from humans.
New USB connector announced — type C.
Can virtual reality be used to tackle racism?.
Mom Recounts Using Medical Marijuana To Treat Her Son’s Epilepsy (VIDEO).
The great modern artists are mystics. They forge a personal relationship with the main currents of artistic tradition. They transform generally agreed-upon ideas into private ideas, subjecting the authority of the past to a process of reaffirmation and renewal. Gershom Scholem, in the opening pages of On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, says that in the hands of the mystic personality “the sacred text is smelted down and a new dimension is discovered in it. In other words: the sacred text loses its shape and takes on a new one for the mystic.” Although an admirer of Scholem’s writing will hesitate to make too easy an analogy between the nature of mystical experience in religion and in the arts, is it not the case that Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Bonnard have “smelted down” the fundamentals of pictorial art in order to discover new dimensions of pictorial art, losing an old shape and discovering a new one? Scholem himself might have accepted the analogy; at least he observes that “in a day when such mystical impulses seem to have dwindled to the vanishing point they still retain an enormous force in the books of Franz Kafka.” Of course Kafka had his own deep relationship with religious experience. But Kandinsky and Mondrian certainly took an interest in forms of mystical experience, and Matisse, Picasso, and Bonnard, for all their modern skepticism, saw art as a matter of mystery and revelation.
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Photographs by David Bacon.
–On the night of October 3 a beat-up, unseaworthy freighter left a dock in Tripoli, on the Libyan coast, carrying a human cargo of 500 migrants. Almost all had come from Eritrea and Somalia, through North Africa. The ship was headed across the Mediterranean Sea toward the southernmost piece of Italy, Lampedusa—a small island closer to Libya than to Sicily. In sight of the islet of Conigli its engines stopped and it began to take on water. One passenger set a blanket on fire to signal for help. But the flames spread to the engine’s spilt fuel, which exploded. People ran from the blaze, and the shifting weight capsized an already unsteady vessel. They were thrown into the sea. Most couldn’t swim. Only 155 were able to tread water long enough to be picked up. The other 359 people drowned, many of them children.
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Eric Talmadge / AP fileBy M. Alex Johnson, Staff Writer, NBC News
—They floated down from the sky Sunday — 2,000 mice, wafting on tiny cardboard parachutes over Andersen Air Force Base in the U.S. territory of Guam.
—But the rodent commandos didn’t know they were on a mission: to help eradicate the brown tree snake, an invasive species that has caused millions of dollars in wildlife and commercial losses since it arrived a few decades ago.
—That’s because they were dead. And pumped full of painkillers.
Child sex trafficking is an underground economy that thrives here, and everywhere. How can we help those who have been ignored for so lo
Wearing only a sports bra and boxers, bruises on her back, the girl surged through the salon’s door. Her feet were bare and bleeding from the race over asphalt, her speech a frenzied heave as she spilled the secret of where she had been, what she had been doing.
—Camille Johnson’s daughter confirmed the unthinkable.
—For weeks, Johnson had searched these north Sarasota streets, knocking on doors in the early morning, shouting in the rain, asking about her missing 17-year-old daughter, Wa-Das Crowle (WAH-Dez CROU-lee). Everyone calls her Moe.
—It was beyond frightening that Moe’s whereabouts and activities had been a mystery, for in this segregated tract of Sarasota, news both good and bad spreads fast and far through blood ties and marriage and church circles that connect nearly everyone by one degree. In this neighborhood, the gossip collides at Johnson’s meager salon.
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A chimpanzee, but not Tommy, via Valentina Storti/Flickr 
—In case you can’t tell from the name, the Nonhuman Rights Project is treading uncharted waters. The organization’s mission is “to change the common law status of at least some nonhuman animals from mere ‘things,’ which lack the capacity to possess any legal right, to ‘persons,’ who possess such fundamental rights as bodily integrity and bodily liberty.” The organization took a dramatic step this morning by filing a lawsuit that asks a judge to grant bodily liberty to a chimpanzee living in captivity named Tommy.
Richard Barlow was driving his 13-year-old motorhome through a mountain state’s blizzard the week before Thanksgiving when news broke of the Iran nuclear deal.
The Dutch writer Arnon Grunberg, at work on a novella in New York while attached to electrodes.
—Writers working on new books often complain about the pressure. But on a recent evening, the Dutch novelist Arnon Grunberg was sitting at a cluttered desk in his shoe-box apartment in Midtown Manhattan, with more reason to kvetch than most.
—First, there was the novella he was trying to get off the ground, the latest in a string of more than a dozen books that have made him, at 42, perhaps his country’s most celebrated novelist and a literary star in Europe.
—But more pressing — quite literally — was his headgear, a sort of bathing cap affixed with 28 electrodes that made him look like an extra in a mermaid mash-up of “A Clockwork Orange.”
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Journalists opposed to the surveillance state are accused of sensationalism and 
withholding context. But unlike our critics, we’re eager for the whole truth to out.
—Who has done more than anyone else to increase public understanding of what the National Security Agency does? A top-10 list would have to include James Bamford, its first and most prolific journalistic chronicler, and Glenn Greenwald, a primary recipient of classified documents leaked months ago by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Over the weekend, I engaged in a back-and-forth with a former NSA employee who harshly criticized both (and me, too) with words that illuminate how some insiders view the press and the national-security state.
Select one of the times from the list on the left and travel through time and check out what the Earth looked liked in the far distant past or what it might look like far into the future.
At each stop there is more information about each geological time period
HERE.
February 1942. “Madison, Wis. Farm short course school at the University of Wisconsin. This class in rural society often practices square dances. Interest in rural culture and customs is stimulated at the school.” You betcha! Medium format negative by Jack Delano, Office of War Information.
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This picture is the aftermath of a Snowstorm in New York City. The picture was taken in 1922. In the 1920′s most cars did not have side windows, so as you can see in the car in the back, the snow could just come right in the car. It looks like the car in front had some sort of side curtains. In any event, I bet it was hard to get those cars crank started in that weather!
