Of interest (Wed, Aug 17th, 11am)

Local Blogger Swears Off Mirrors for a Year – Culture Feed – The Bay Citizen
Gruys has been blogging about the experiment and it’s finding an audience … She let her readers decide via vote whether she gets to look at her wedding photos. They said she could.
“I don’t know if I will,” she said, “But it’s nice to have the option.”
The hardest part, not surprisingly, is avoiding mirrors.
Medical Association Offers Support to Muslim Health Care Workers – The Bay Citizen
The Islamic Medical Association of North America, or IMANA, is launching its first chapter in the Bay Area. A network of Muslim physicians and other health care professionals all over the country, the Chicago-based organization promotes Islamic medical values and provides medical relief to disaster-affected areas around the world.
Start-Up Recruits Immigrants to Teach Cooking Classes – The Bay Citizen
The basic idea behind Culture Kitchen is to have exceptional home cooks who specialize in the cuisines of their home countries teach their secrets, recipes and culture to eager local cooks wanting to try something new. The instructors, most of whom have never had formal training, are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, who have literally been cooking their family recipes and cultural staples since childhood.
> food
Feds Probe BART’s Unprecedented Cell Phone Shutdown – The Bay Citizen
“BART initiated this action, and it’s an unprecedented action in the US,” said Franklin. “When personal safety collides with first amendment rights that’s the national debate.”
Yaron Dori, president of the Federal Communications Bar Association and a partner at the law firm Covington & Burling, said that the FCC isn’t just making idle talk.
“As a policy matter, who can control the operation or shutdown of wireless networks that have become critical to everyone is going to be of substantial interest to regulators,” Dori said.
> 2011_protests civil_liberties
2011 Cartoon Contest Contestants | Union of Concerned Scientists
ACLU: Tell the FCC: Government Agencies Cannot Censor Communications
When San Francisco’s mass transit agency BART shut down cell phone service in its stations to interfere with a protest against BART police, the agency violated a central tenet of our democracy, that the right to free speech is paramount. Pulling the plug on cell phones and the internet is the wrong response to political protests, whether it’s in China, Egypt or San Francisco.
Tell the FCC to conduct a thorough investigation and insist that government agencies must not censor cell or internet communications, even if it doesn’t like the content of those communications.
> call_for_action 2011_protests civil_liberties
Stop the privatization of California’s public libraries
> call_for_action

Super-Dense Stars May Squash Neutrons Into Cubes | Wired: Science • by Dave Mosher
“If you take this result purely at face value, it means neutron star theoreticians are in trouble. [Neutron stars] should collapse into black holes at lower masses,” said theoretical physicist Felipe Jose Llanes-Estrada of Complutense University of Madrid…
“There’s an optimum packing density with spheres, including neutrons. It’s about 74 percent. No matter how efficiently you arrange them, like oranges on display at a supermarket, there’s always space in between,” Llanes-Estrada said. “If you want to be most efficient, you distort the oranges. Pack them a mile high and squish the ones on the bottom.”
Gravity shapes aggregate particles of matter into the simplest, most efficiently-packed object possible, normally a sphere like the Earth. …
> science

[My bookmarks live at delicious.com/camryl. In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. Also, signal boosts are awesome! --L.]

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