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Informer editor ANDREW PERZO answers readers' questions, provides useful information and points out items of interest.

Archbishop suggests eight-minute homilies

Posted March 11, 2010 at 12:41 am
Filed Under Religion | Leave a Comment

From the Catholic News Service:

Homilies should be no longer than eight minutes — a listener’s average attention span, said the head of the synod office.

Priests and deacons should also avoid reading straight from a text and instead work from notes so that they can have eye contact with the people in the pews, said Archbishop Nikola Eterovic, secretary-general of the Synod of Bishops.

Link comes via dotCommonweal.

Lunar reflectors don’t reflect as well as they used to

Posted March 11, 2010 at 12:35 am
Filed Under Science | Leave a Comment

From Universe Today:

Representing what may be the first long term lunar environmental impact study, recent laser ranging data from the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico suggests the Lunar Ranging Retro Reflectors (LRRRs) left on the Moon by Apollo missions 11, 14 and 15 are beginning to shows signs of age.

Apache Point Observatory’s Lunar Laser-ranging Operation (the acronym says it all) has been collecting ranging data from the LRRRs since 2006, using a 3.5 metre telescope and a 532 nm laser. …

Recent Apache Point Observatory data has been compared to historical data collected by earlier observatories involved in lunar laser ranging. For the period 1973 to 1976, no Full Moon deficit was apparent in data records, but it began to emerge clearly in a 1979 to 1984 data set. The research team estimate that return signal efficiency at Full Moon has degraded by a factor of 15 over the approximately forty years since the Apollo reflectors were placed on the Moon.

‘Their only marketable asset’

Posted March 10, 2010 at 1:40 am
Filed Under People | Leave a Comment

Deborah Amos at Foreign Policy writes about the underground economy among Iraqi refugees in Syria:

Um Nour checked her watch. It was close to midnight and my guide to the Iraqi refugee underworld in Damascus wanted to get to the nightclub so she could start making money. I had failed the dress test, attempting to camouflage myself in an alluring outfit and eliciting only a pursed-lips stare, but Um Nour’s transformation was remarkable. I would not have recognized her on the street. On the many daytime occasions we had met during my reporting trips to Damascus in 2008, she dressed in baggy track pants, black hair tied back in a ponytail, her face lined and tired. This time, her long black hair was shiny and brushed with thick bangs that framed her face. She wore a tight-fitting black T-shirt sprinkled with sequins and black stretch pants tightly cinched at the waist. Her lipstick was deep red, her eyeliner heavy and black. She wore two rhinestone rings, her stubby fingers extended by fake red nails curled around an expensive cell phone. …

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the Iraqi exiles in Syria had turned to the sex trade for survival. In Damascus, refugees were not permitted to hold jobs. As resources dwindled, many were led into the underground economy. Female-headed households accounted for almost a quarter of the refugees registered with the U.N. refugee agency. Widowed, divorced, or separated from husbands by the war, many women had children or elderly parents to support. Sex was often their only marketable asset.

‘We highly modified the weapon’

Posted March 10, 2010 at 1:37 am
Filed Under Interesting | Leave a Comment

Ars Technica has the story behind the famous laser-sighted handgun from the first “Terminator” film:

“I’m vice president of the Operations Group. We keep the place running,” Reynolds said when we spoke on the phone. How did he get involved with the Terminator?

“I got a call from one of the prop houses, and they told me what they wanted to do. They came down and met with me, and told me they wanted something to go on the weapon.” What weapon? “AMT Longslide, Hardballer.”

This wasn’t the first time Reynolds had put a laser on a gun. As early as 1978 he designed a laser sight for the Colt Trooper .357 Magnum. “It was a viable product out in the marketplace, primarily law enforcement. They were also very expensive, and we highly modified the weapon. We had to machine the frame and mounts; the sights were taken off the weapon to mount the laser on top. We designed a power supply that was smaller than a small candy bar and had to fit inside the grip, fed by a rechargeable 12 volt battery.”

This was the early days of lasers for commercial use. “At that time we were dealing with helium neon laser. All the newer lasers are solid state, about the size of an aspirin or smaller.” HeNe lasers are much larger than that, he explained, and required about 10,000 volts to get started. Once ignited, they take 1,000 volts to keep them running. That makes the power supply a tricky thing to design.

Remembering the Black Fives

Posted March 10, 2010 at 1:18 am
Filed Under History, People | Leave a Comment

From The Root:

There’s a good 50-year gap in the story of basketball’s evolution. We go from the game’s invention late in the 19th century and fast forward to the NBA’s late-1940s inception. In the interim, though, there were the Black Fives (teams were called “fives” in reference to their five starters).

They were amateur, semi-pro and professional teams sponsored mostly by churches, athletic clubs, social clubs and “colored” YMCAs. The basketball equivalents to baseball’s storied Negro League were the Philadelphia Panthers, the Los Angeles Red Devils, the Washington 12 Streeters and many more, including the historic New York Renaissance (Rens). The Rens, from 1923 to 1948, won a dumbfounding 2,588 of 3,117 games and whose watershed rivalry with all-white Original Celtics (of New York) helped put the entire team in the Hall of Fame.

A closer look at the numbers

Posted March 10, 2010 at 12:36 am
Filed Under Interesting | Leave a Comment

John Allen Paulos at ABC News writes about our perception of numbers:

One problem is that people often view numbers as providing decoration rather than information. Over the last couple of weeks, for example, I performed a little experiment with people I randomly met.

If our idle conversation turned to current events, I mentioned a headline I claimed to have just read proclaiming, “Experts Fear Annual Housing Costs in the U.S. (Rent, Mortgage Payments) May Top $2 Billion.” I followed up with, “Imagine that — more than 2 billion dollars per year.”

People usually responded by bemoaning the mortgage crisis, foreclosures, Wall Street, and a host of other issues. Only one noticed that $2 billion is an absurdly low number. A population of 300 million translates to about 100 million households. Dividing 100 million into $2 billion results in about $20 in rent or mortgage paid annually by the average household. Just $20!

Link comes via 3 Quarks Daily.

Debating American exceptionalism

Posted March 10, 2010 at 12:26 am
Filed Under History, Interesting, People | Leave a Comment

Journalist Conor Friedersdorf and others have been engaging in a back-and-forth about the idea of American exceptionalism with National Review writers Rich Lowry — whose columns appear in the American Press — and Ramesh Ponnuru.

Pick on the debate here.

266 stars and counting

Posted March 10, 2010 at 12:18 am
Filed Under Science | Leave a Comment

Since your editor’s birth, the Earth has spun on itself about 13,680 times, the Milky Way has seen the birth of 266 stars and the universe has expanded by a distance equivalent to 23 solar systems.

Check the figures for your birthdate here.

Link comes via The Daily Galaxy.

Morality and looting after disasters

Posted March 9, 2010 at 12:30 am
Filed Under People | Leave a Comment

From The New York Times:

If crushed bodies were the enduring images of Haiti’s earthquake, the most memorable ones of Chile’s have been of looting. Because of stricter building codes, far more people survived in middle-class Chile than in impoverished Haiti.

Nonetheless, a pattern that now is a cliché of disaster journalism broke out there as well: Early reports of people raiding markets for food and diapers were quickly followed by pictures of people carrying TVs and dishwashers off into a city with no electricity. Intact stores were broken into. A department store in Concepción was set ablaze. In a few places, roving bands robbed anyone they could. Residents who formed self-defense posses were quoted saying that the “human earthquake” was worse than the geological one.

Which raises the questions: When are desperate people entitled to help themselves? And to what? At what chaotic point between the diapers and the dishwasher may the police shout, “Drop that (insert morally ambiguous item here) or I’ll shoot?”

Anorexia has ‘a strong genetic component’

Posted March 9, 2010 at 12:12 am
Filed Under Health | Leave a Comment

Benjamin Radford at Discovery News writes about an upcoming VH1 series:

A new VH1 show called “The Price of Beauty,” hosted by Jessica Simpson, will premiere soon. The theme of the show is the extreme measures that some women will endure to look beautiful. It’s a worthy subject, but unfortunately the series is already spreading misinformation about a serious disease: anorexia. …

Though many people are convinced that anorexia is a threat to most young women because of the media images they see, that’s not what the scientific evidence says. Anorexia is a very rare and complex psychological disorder with many indications of a strong genetic component; as anorexia expert Cynthia Bulik noted in her 2007 study “The Genetics of Anorexia,” published in the Annual Review of Nutrition, “Family studies have consistently demonstrated that anorexia nervosa runs in families.” Most research studies have failed to find a cause-and-effect link between media images of thin people and eating disorders.

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