Photo: Homes floating down the river in Iowa

Buildings and debris are seen floating in the Cedar River against a railroad bridge Saturday, June 14, 2008, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Days after it rose out of its banks on its way to record flooding in Cedar Rapids, the Cedar River has forced at least 24,000 people from their homes, emergency officials said Saturday. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

Billionaire’s sex cave plans

Dr. Nicholas III: photo from blog.jambaz, original source unknown

Now, imagine you are a 6ft 6in genius billionaire. What would you build under your mansion, a Bat Cave or a Sex Cave? Yeah baby.

The alleged plans for the covert underground hideaway, to be connected to Nicholas’ Laguna Hills home, were detailed by Roman James of Newport Beach, the lead contractor on the project, and six other contractors, engineers and construction workers who worked on it and filed a lawsuit against Nicholas in 2002. – lat

—

Dr. Henry T. Nicholas, III, (b.1959) co-founded Broadcom Corporation, an American supplier of integrated circuits for broadband communications. He was its President and Chief Executive officer from its inception in 1991 until January, 2003.^[1] He is currently under indictment for felony drug conspiracy. ^[2] Nicholas is ranked number 195 on the 2007 list of Forbes’ richest Americans, with a net worth of $2.3 billion. ^[3]

—

Henry Nicholas III had the makings of a real-life “Iron Man.”

He was a 6-foot-6 genius billionaire with a chiseled frame, physical endurance and a taste for fast cars and gadgets.

He even had a secret cave.

And like the best-drawn comic-book heroes, the founder of chip-making firm Broadcom was haunted by demons: His sister was brutally murdered in 1984, and his father abandoned the family when Nicholas was 4.

But the Southern California tech whiz’s larger-than-life pedigree didn’t lead to a crime-fighting alter ego. Rather, it allegedly spurred marathon drug-fueled orgies inside his very own Xanadu, a suite in a warehouse in Laguna Niguel, Calif.

In an Oriental-themed, tricked-out parlor, Nicholas, his friends and a bevy of prostitutes would party and have sex for days – abusing cocaine, laughing gas and other drugs, as music from such chart-toppers as Led Zeppelin and Phil Collins played, according to court papers and a former employee.

The worker said the parlor had six couches. The main room was fashioned in a Far East motif and adorned in rugs and statues, including a four-foot stone figure of Medusa. There was a Jacuzzi for six. A bedroom in the back was used for sex and sleeping, the worker said.

… “The parties would last for 24 hours straight, sometimes longer,” the worker told The Post last week. But the high times came crashing down for Nicholas, 48, during the past year as court documents filed by former employees seeking back pay painted the billionaire as prone to making death threats against workers. – nypost

Schools, Facing Tight Budgets, Leave Gifted Programs Behind

Before her second birthday, Audrey Walker recognized sequences of five colors. When she was 6, her father, Michael, overheard her telling a little boy: ”No, no, no, Hunter, you don’t understand. What you were seeing was a flashback.”

At school, Audrey quickly grew bored as the teacher drilled letters and syllables until her classmates caught on. She flourished, instead, in a once-a-week class for gifted and talented children where she could learn as fast as her nimble brain could take her.

But in September, Mountain Grove, a remote rural community in the Ozarks where nearly three in four students live in poverty, eliminated all of its programs for the district’s 50 or so gifted children like Audrey, who is 8 now. Struggling with shrinking revenues and new federal mandates that focus on improving the test scores of the lowest-achieving pupils, Mountain Grove and many other school districts across the country have turned to cutting programs for their most promising students.

A comment on a related article caught my attention. Amen to this:

If you are in the 99.9th percentile in intelligence, you ARE a wierdo. At best, one in 1000 people will be in your intellectual peer group. This becomes a serious challenge for one’s psyche. Do you become arrogant and aloof because most everyone around you is an idiot? Do you dumb yourself down to fit in? Both? Remember, to these people, the vast majority of their peer group seems to be retarded. (Hellfire, make that the vast majority of all people.) Image being living your life amongst people who are mentally deficient – THAT is what life is for these people. -ah

The NY Times article gives some suggestions for helping gifted kids.

… Carolyn Groves, who taught gifted education here for seven years, fashioned creative projects intended to stretch the critical thinking of her students. One unit put ”Nursery Rhymes on Trial,” while in another, middle-school students created the government of Utopia. ”Mind benders” gave students systematic rules for deconstructing challenging mathematical questions.

”People say, ‘These kids are smart. They’re going to make it anyway,’ ” Ms. Groves said. But experts say that gifted children can easily grow bored and alienated.

”These are the kids who are either going to turn out to be nuclear scientists or Unabombers,” said Ms. Groves, who now teaches high school remedial students at the vocational school. ”It all depends on which way they’re led.” … Mr. Walker and his wife, Marilyn, shuttle Audrey to dance and Spanish lessons. They encourage her interest in filmmaking by helping her develop ideas for movies she shoots on the family’s video camera….

In small towns like Mountain Grove, Mr. Walker said, ”a tremendous amount of frustration can build up in these kids, because they’re different, but they don’t know why.” – nytimes

Yes, yes, yes! Gifted kids feel like freaks their whole lives because the world moves in slow motion around them. If you felt this way, why would you want to have kids and pass this experience on to someone else? I wouldn’t.

Science of Mentos-Diet Coke Explosions Explained

The startling reaction between Diet Coke and Mentos sweets, made famous in thousands of YouTube videos, finally has a scientific explanation. A study in the US has identified the prime factors that drive the fizzy plumes from Coke bottles: the roughness of the sweet and how fast it plummets to the bottle’s base. “If you drop a pack of Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke, you get this huge fountain of spray and Diet Coke foam coming out,” says Tonya Coffey, a physicist at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. “This was a good project for my students to study because there was still some mystery to it.”

When mint or fruit Mentos are dropped into a fresh bottle of Diet Coke, a jet of Coke whooshes out of the bottle’s mouth and can reach a height of 10 metres. Theories abound as to why this happens, with some bloggers speculating that it is an acid-base reaction because Coke is acidic.

Experiments in a 2006 edition of the Discovery Channel programme Mythbusters suggested the chemicals responsible for the reaction are gum arabic and gelatine in the sweets, and caffeine, potassium benzoate and aspartame in the Coke. But there have been no rigorous scientific studies of the reaction until now….

As it turns out the “rough, dimply surfaces of Mentos encourage bubble growth” and also factors which lower surface tension help cause the explosion.

… Measurements showed that the surface tension in water containing the sweetener aspartame is lower than in sugary water, explaining why Diet Coke creates more dramatic fountains than sugary Coke.

Another factor is that the coatings of Mentos contain gum arabic, a surfactant that further reduces surface tension in the liquid. Rough-surfaced mints without the surfactant did not create such large fountains.  – ns

From a related story:

With a bottle of Coca-Cola raised above his head, Ukec surprised reporters when he threatened to cut off imports of gum arabic, an emulsifier made from the acacia tree that adds to the fiziness of sodas.

“I want you to know that the gum arabic, which runs all the soft drinks all over the world, including the United States, mainly 80 percent is imported from my country,” Ukec said.

“I can stop that gum arabic and all of us will have lost this,” he said. – abc

Over 1000 Escape in Afghanistan Jailbreak

more about "afghanistan jailbreak – Google News", posted with vodpod

NATO admits Afghan jail attack a tactical success for Taliban

NATO has admitted that Taliban militants who launched a suicide attack on a prison in the Afghan city of Kandahar, allowing hundreds of inmates to escape, have scored a tactical success.

NATO says more than eleven hundred prisoners escaped after militants blew up a truck at the main gate of the jail.

But the spokesman for NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Carlos Branco, says it’s an isolated incident.

He says it is important not to overreact and exaggerate the impact of the incident until an assessment is made.

Habeas Ruling Lays Bare the Divide Among Justices

The Supreme Court’s decision that detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have a right to challenge their imprisonment before a judge revealed in vivid detail the justices’ deep divide over the role of the judiciary in wartime.

As a practical matter, the 5 to 4 decision returns to the spotlight Washington’s federal district judges, who are now conferring to develop a framework for handling about 200 cases filed by those the government suspects of terrorism held at the island naval base.

It is a role that practically consumed the court until Congress, at the behest of the Bush administration, stripped it of the responsibility. Indeed, the cases the Supreme Court decided Thursday, Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. U.S., arose from conflicting decisions by D.C. district judges.

As both sides of the court acknowledged in Thursday’s decision, the cases exposed fundamental differences in the court’s vision of judicial power. The conservatives favor adherence to strict rules and regulations promulgated by the political branches. The liberals are content to let judges judge, working out the boundaries between constitutional rights and national security.

The tie-breaker was Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the nomadic conservative who in this case espoused a strong role for independent judges.

His cool assertion in the majority opinion of an essential role for the judiciary brought heated dissents from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Antonin Scalia. It lauded the role of the courts as a check on executive power and downplayed deference to the political branches.

“Within the Constitution’s separation-of-powers structure, few exercises of judicial power are as legitimate or as necessary as the responsibility to hear challenges to the authority of the Executive to imprison a person,” Kennedy wrote. He was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

Roberts stopped just short of calling the opinion a power grab. “One cannot help but think . . . this decision is not really about the detainees at all, but about control of federal policy regarding enemy combatants,” he wrote.

He lamented that military and intelligence officials would have a lesser role in shaping policy toward enemy combatants than lawyers and “unelected, politically unaccountable judges.”

Scalia called the judiciary “the branch that knows least about . . . national security concerns” and penned the darkest line of the court’s 126 pages of back-and-forth: “It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”

Roberts and Scalia took the additional step of joining each other’s dissent, along with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

The decision is not a surprise; the court by a narrow margin has objected each time it has considered Bush administration attempts to handle the terrorism suspects outside the normal confines of the legal system. But both wings of the court displayed a clear impatience. – wpost

Keeping our system of checks and balances in place prevents far more Americans from dying in the long run.