Blog Heap of Links for the day 25 March 2009

President Obama gave his longest interview so far to Steve Kroft on CBS's "60 Minutes" Sunday night, and he couldn't seem to stop laughing about all of the problems facing our nation. The president's uncontrollable giggling prompted Kroft to ask him if he was suffering from an interesting affliction.... "Are you punch drunk?" ... a state induced by suffering a brain injury that is a result of repeated head blows and is typically marked by mental confusion, incoordination and slurred speech.

What kind of politician brings a teleprompter to a news conference? A careful one. President Barack Obama took no chances in his second prime-time news conference .... It was a carefully modulated statement, and Obama—relying on a familiar crutch—read it off a flat-screen monitor perched at the back of the East Room.

"He read that opening statement from one massive TV monitor from the back and middle of the East Room. White House officials removed the normal glass teleprompters that usually are positioned on both sides of the podium. That change likely a reaction to the focus on the President's heavy use of teleprompters."

Hector Huerta Rios was arrested Tuesday in the state of Nuevo Leon, which borders Texas in the southwestern United States. They say he was one of dozens of drug suspects on a most-wanted list published by the Mexican government on Monday. Authorities have described Huerta Rios as a member of the powerful Beltran Leyva cartel and that he was sought on a murder charge.

the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power. ... A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event — a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun. ... an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.

a man wearing a ski mask walked into the store at Biscayne Boulevard and 54th Street and demanded money from a clerk. A customer, who has a concealed weapons permit, pulled a gun, said Officer Jeff Giordano, a Miami police spokesman. The customer and robber exchanged fire. The robber was shot dead at the scene. ... The customer... had several gunshot wounds... in serious but stable condition....

Geologists estimate that during the gold rush of 1849 in California, about 80 percent of the gold was never found. Today, with the price of gold soaring and the economy falling, the idea of panning, digging or diving for precious metal has become serious business.

The 112th anniversary of the historic Nellie Johnstone No. 1 oil discovery will be celebrated Wednesday with a drilling demonstration and gusher plus the presentation of a gift by a chapter of the Colonial Dames XVII Century Oklahoma Society.

A tornado is confirmed to have touched down in Washington County during storms that hit the area Thursday evening.... "The sirens were never sounded in the city of Bartlesville...."

The Vermont Senate has given its final stamp of approval to a bill that would allow same-sex couples to marry in the state. Lawmakers passed the measure on Tuesday in voice vote with no debate. Now the issue moves to the House, where the a committee has scheduled a week's worth of testimony on the bill.

Legislation that would streamline the review process for nuclear power plants in Oklahoma was sent to the floor of the state House Tuesday, but critics said the measure does little to protect consumers from onerous rate increases that would be needed to help pay for it.

Endeavor Power Corp. (OTCBB:EDVP) is pleased to announce that its joint venture partner on the Patrick Henry Lease (the "Lease") located in Oklahoma, Federated Energy, believes that the existing 13 wells that are being reworked should be producing, in the aggregate, approximately 30 barrels of oil per day by late spring to early summer.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, on a two-day visit to Mexico, accepts that the U.S. market for narcotics and a cross-border trade in U.S. guns contribute to Mexico's drug violence. "We know very well that the drug traffickers are motivated by the demand for illegal drugs in the United States, that they are armed by the transport of weapons from the United States to Mexico.... We see this as a responsibility to assist the Mexican government and people." [So, if everybody would just ... not inhale?... Oh, that was Bill. This is Hill.]

Tackling a series of controversial measures, the New Hampshire House has voted to repeal the death penalty and to approve doctor-certified medical marijuana for people with serious illnesses. ... Both bills head to the state Senate, where their fate is uncertain ...

They are taking more of your quarters every day. And Chicagoans are in revolt. While some are saying enough by avoiding them, others are taking out their frustrations on the parking meters - literally! ... Near Broadway and Addison, meter after meter are broken....

Strontium sulfide, a material that can emit corrosive gases in moist air, was found at trace levels in testing of Chinese-made drywall.... gave off a sulfurous odor when heated, and in at least one case, sulfide gases corroded copper coils in an air conditioner of a Florida home containing Chinese drywall....

For the first time, scientists were able to track an asteroid from space to the ground and recover pieces of it. The bits are unlike anything ever found on Earth. ... spotted entering Earth's atmosphere over Sudan in October and was believed to have fully disintegrated, but an international team found almost 280 pieces of meteorite in a 11-square-mile section of Sudan's Nubian Desert. The largest was the size of an egg. ... from a rare class of asteroids known as ureilites, which contain a lot of carbon, much of it in the form of graphite, as well as diamonds produced by shock. The Sudan specimens show evidence of volcanic activity, which means they came from a parent body that was almost big enough to call a planet. ...

Hurdia victoria was originally described in 1912 as a crustacean-like animal. Now, researchers from Uppsala University and colleagues reveal it to be just one part of a complex and remarkable new animal that has an important story to tell about the origin of the largest group of living animals, the arthropods. ... Although the first fragments were described nearly one hundred years ago, they were assumed to be part of a crustacean-like animal. It was not then realised that other parts of the animal were also in collections, but had been described independently as jellyfish, sea cucumbers and other arthropods. ... had a segmented body with a head bearing a pair of spinous claws and a circular jaw structure with many teeth. But it differs from Anomalocaris by the possession of a huge three-part carapace that projects out from the front of the animal's head.

Researchers have found evidence which suggests that evolution drives animals to become increasingly more complex. ... "If you start with the simplest possible animal body, then there's only one direction to evolve in — you have to become more complex.... Sooner or later, however, you reach a level of complexity where it's possible to go backwards and become simpler again. "What's astonishing is that hardly any crustaceans have taken this backwards route. Instead, almost all branches have evolved in the same direction, becoming more complex in parallel. "This is the nearest thing to a pervasive evolutionary rule that's been found. "Of course, there are exceptions within the crustacean family tree, but most of these are parasites, or animals living in remote habitats such as isolated marine caves. "For those free-living animals in the 'rat-race' of evolution, it seems that competition may be the driving force behind the trend. "What's new about our results is that they show us how this increase in complexity has occurred. Strikingly, it looks far more like a disciplined march than a milling crowd."

There may soon be another option to play video games at home, in a very different way we have been used to so far. Rather than buying a fairly expensive console or PC, a small box promises to deliver games through the Internet to your TV or PC, no matter how powerful your local hardware is. Will cloud gaming have a chance to break through the barrier of modern game consoles and high-end PCs?

A video that appears to show police fatally beating a Tibetan protester was a fake concocted by supporters of the Dalai Lama, China said Tuesday — the same day the video-sharing network YouTube said its service had been blocked in China.

There is a similarity between Scientific Theory and Religion and The Urantia Book. "When the elements were arranged in increasing order of atomic weight it was found that elements with similar properties tended to recur at periodic intervals. [Frank Jakubowsky]

The Border Patrol plans to poison plant life along a mile stretch of the Rio Grande riverbank in Texas to eliminate the dense foliage used by suspected illegal immigrants and criminals to hide. If successful, the $2.1 million pilot project, which is set to begin this week, could later be duplicated along as many as 130 miles of river in the patrol's Laredo Sector, as well as other parts of the U.S.-Mexico border.... opponents of the action say it harkens to the Vietnam War-era Agent Orange chemical program and could be harmful over the long-term.