Picture of the Day

This is for real! Lebanese pure air for sale. The can costs $3.5 :D

mind what you say facebookers,or you will end up in jail!

اعتصم امس طلاب من جامعة القديس يوسف ـ فرع زحلة والبقاع، احتجاجا وتضامنا مع زملائهم الاربعة الذين تم توقيفهم منذ الخميس الفائت على خلفية مزاح وتعليقات وكلام مسيء على الانترنت بحق فتاة، التي رفعت دعوى قضائية بحقهم نتج عنها تحقيقات وملاحقات، أفضت الى توقيف المذكورين.
وشارك أهالي الموقوفين في الاعتصام وطالبوا والطلاب بالإفراج الفوري عنهم من أجل سنتهم الدراسية والعمل على حل المسألة والإشكال بالطرق التوافقية وبعيدا عن القضاء، لافتين أن أبناءهم موقوفون من دون إحالتهم الى القضاء المختص.
ويواجه الطلاب الأربعة حسب بيان صادر عن زملائهم «خسارة عامهم الجامعي، خصوصا أن الامتحانات التي هي نهائية لبعضهم وفصلية للبعض الآخر جرت صباح أمس فيما هم موقوفون من دون أن يتمكنوا من الحضور».
وحسب الأهالي والطلاب فإن حكاية الانترنت والإشكال سببها تعليقات وأحاديث وضعت على موقع «فايس بوك» التي تعود للجامعة اليسوعية.

source

Weird, isn't it?! especially in a country like Lebanon. People can practice their right of free speech in real life more than on the internet? I mean, in Lebanon, you can curse the politicians , and the president himself, and nobody will sue you, simply because this is your opinion and you're free to express it! Lebanon is the country of democracy and freedom of speech, no?
Not anymore!

The Triumph of Love

I stopped at this event with amazement. US marine who was terribly burned in a suicide bomb attack in Iraq came back home and married his sweetheart . Their love and devotion is unbelievable. She married him despite his horrific burns. They called it The Triumph of Love. They say that they see love with their heart and not with their eyes. This reminds me of " beauty and the beast"... Beauty lies not upon the face, but within the heart...I'm speechless.. really.
Their story

The Eternal Embrace

Archaeologists in Italy have discovered a couple buried 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, hugging each other.

"It's an extraordinary case," said Elena Menotti, who led the team on their dig near the northern city of Mantova.

"There has not been a double burial found in the Neolithic period, much less two people hugging -- and they really are hugging."

Menotti said she believed the two, almost certainly a man and a woman although that needs to be confirmed, died young because their teeth were mostly intact and not worn down.

"I must say that when we discovered it, we all became very excited. I've been doing this job for 25 years. I've done digs at Pompeii, all the famous sites," she told Reuters.

"But I've never been so moved because this is the discovery of something special."
A laboratory will now try to determine the couple's age at the time of death and how long they had been buried.

How sweet! hehe.. Happy Valentine's Day by the way :)

Hanging Coffins

I came upon a picture titled "hanging coffins". Hanging Coffins? sounds so unfamiliar! I've heard of burning the bodies of the dead, and of mummifying them, but burrying them in "hanging coffins"? This is so unheard of. My curiousity drove me to search for more information about this and here's what I got:

Hanging coffin is a unique funeral and sacrifice custom of the minority groups in southern China. People put the bodies of their ancestors into wooden coffins that were later placed in caves of precipitous cliffsides.
Most coffins were made with one whole piece of wood into various shapes. It was said that the hanging coffins could prevent bodies from being taken by beasts and also bless the soul eternally.

Archeologists believe that the coffins were placed on the cliff faces in this manner so that they were closer to the heavens. Coffins were either placed in caves in the cliffs or suspended on pegs. A stairs was constructed up the cliff face so that the coffins could be placed up high.

weird!

The Family That Walks on All Fours

The ad for this programme on Future TV caught my attention, but of course I "forgot" when it's gonna be shown, that's why I had to search for it on the Internet. The documentary, however, aired on March 17 on BBC2 in case you got a chance to watch it. For those who didn't, check this out:

Five siblings from Turkey who walk on all fours could provide science with an insight into human evolution, researchers have said.

The four sisters and one brother could yield clues to why our ancestors made the transition from four-legged to two-legged animals, says a UK expert.
But Professor Nicholas Humphrey rejects the idea that there is a "gene" for bipedalism, or upright walking.

Professor Humphrey, from the London School of Economics (LSE), says that our own species' transition to walking on two feet must have been a more complex process that involved many changes to the skeleton and to the human genetic make-up.
However, a German group says a genetic abnormality does seem to be involved in the siblings' gait.


Coordination problem

Three of the sisters and one brother have only ever walked on two hands and two feet, but another sister alternates between a bipedal and quadrupedal gait. Another brother walks on two feet all the time, but only with difficulty.

The siblings live with their parents and five other brothers and sisters. They were born with what looks like a form of brain damage.
MRI scans seem to show that they have a form of cerebellar ataxia, which affects balance and coordination.
However, scientists are divided on what caused them to revert to quadrupedalism (walking on all fours).
The method of locomotion used by the Turkish children and by our closest relatives chimpanzees and gorillas, differs in a crucial way, said Professor Humphrey.
While gorillas and chimpanzees walk on their knuckles, the Turkish siblings put their weight on the wrists, lifting their fingers off the ground.
Tool use
"What's significant about that is that chimpanzees ruin their fingers walking like that," Professor Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist, told the BBC News website.

"These kids have kept their fingers very agile, for example, the girls in the family can do crochet and embroidery."
He added that calluses pictured on the hands of one family member demonstrated that the behaviour was not a hoax.
Professor Humphrey said this could be the way that humankind's direct ancestors walked.
Hands which have kept the fingers dextrous would also have been able to manipulate tools, a key development which influenced the evolution of the human body and intelligence.
"I think it's possible that what we are seeing in this family is something that does correspond to a time when we didn't walk like chimpanzees but was an important step between coming down from the trees and becoming fully bipedal," the LSE researcher said.

'Infant walking'

Professor Humphrey thinks that the brain abnormality simply caused the siblings to rediscover a form of locomotion used by our ancestors.
"Because of the peculiar circumstances they were in, they kept walking as infants," he said.
But a team led by Stefan Mundlos of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Germany, thinks that the genetic abnormality which causes the children's unusual gait may have played a more fundamental role in evolution.
Professor Mundlos has located the gene on chromosome 17 and speculates that a gene important in the transition to bipedalism may have been knocked out in the children.
Producer on the documentary Jemima Harrison said the programme's producers were moved by the family's "tremendous warmth and humanity".

A laptop for every Libyan pupil

This is interesting.

Libya has reached an agreement with an American nonprofit group to provide inexpensive laptop computers for all of the nation's 1.2 million schoolchildren.

With the project scheduled to be completed by June 2008, Libya could become the first nation in which all school-age children are connected to the Internet through educational computers, Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop per Child project, told the The New York Times on Wednesday.

The $250 million deal, reached on Tuesday, would provide the nation with 1.2 million computers, a server in each school, a team of technical advisers, satellite internet service and other infrastructure.

The One Laptop per Child project, which has the support of the United Nations Development Programme, aims to provide laptops to school-aged children worldwide for about $100 each. It has reached tentative purchase agreements with Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria and Thailand.

read more

I want a laptop tooo :'(. But not like the green one above, it's ugly! :p

Train Turned to Public Library

On your way to Zahleh,The Bride of Beqaa Valley, you can't but stop to take a look at the public library of Saadnayel(a small village in Beqaa valley) that was established in a very unique and original way.

The library, that makes heads turn, is in fact nothing but an old rusty train that was fixed up, painted, located at the center of the village and turned into a beautiful cultural center where people meet and read.

Take a look.

yeah, that's my car. I had to cross to the other side of the street to take this picture.

wait! I found more pictures online.

World Press Photo of the Year

Reuters photographer Finbarr O’Reilly has been announced winner of the prestigious World Press Photo of the Year 2005 for his picture of a mother and child during the Niger famine. The picture also won 2nd prize in the People in the News Singles category. 4,448 professional photographers from 122 countries entered 83,044 images in the premier annual international competition in press photography. Mohamed Azakir also won 1st Prize in the Spot News Singles category for his picture of the car bomb explosion which killed Lebanon's former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri in Beirut.

Tulips

The Tale of the Tulip. A famous legend from Turkish lore tells of a handsome prince named Farhad who was stricken with love for the fair maid, Shirin. One day he heard that she had been killed, and in his grief, mounted his favorite horse and galloped over a cliff to his death. It is said that from each droplet of his bloom, a scarlet tulip sprang up, making the flower an historic symbol of perfect love.
During the glory of the Ottoman Empire, the Sultans celebrated the tulip, and the flowers became part of the trappings of wealth and power. One famous story tells of a Sultan who spent too much on a tulip festival which ultimately led to him “losing his head.” So well before the Dutch began their love affair with tulips, they were widely celebrated in their native lands. Today, the tulip is still the national flower of Turkey.

The Tulip goes to Europe. During the 1500’s, Europeans became plant explorers, and began recording their findings. Beautiful botanical drawings of tulips began appearing in Europe, so beautiful, in fact, that they gained wide notice. One botanical rendering in particular, called Tulipa bononiensis, became very famous. Others showed the “flamed” tulips that were very exotic to the Europeans, and interest in these "new flowers" continued to grow. These were the multicolored blooms that today are called “Rembrandt” tulips, even though the famous Dutch painter never painted flowers. Other great Dutch painters did.
The main flow of the tulip story in Holland actually begins with a botanist named Carolus Clusius, working at the University of Leiden. He had worked in Prague and Vienna, mostly with medicinal herbs. But in 1593, he was appointed “Hortulanus”, the contemporary title for head botanist, at the University of Leiden’s now famous “Hortus”, the first botanical garden in Western Europe. However, his “tulip connection” actually began during his earlier projects in Vienna. There, Clusius had met a man called De Busbecq who was the ambassador to the court of the Sultan Suleiman in Constantinople, the seat of the Ottoman Empire. DeBusbecq gave Clusius some tulip bulbs from Central Asia, and he brought those bulbs with him to Holland. The rest, literally, is history.
Clusius was mostly interested in the tulip’s scientific importance, probably hoping to find medicinal uses for the bulbs. However, since people in Holland had seen the famous drawings, some became more interested in the flowers as money-makers for the developing ornamental floral trade. Clusius fueled the fire by being very secretive and protective with his bulbs, and after awhile, the public was so determined to have the tulips that some were even stolen from his gardens. This was the beginning of the famous “Tulipomania.”
Tulipomania. The famous rise and fall of the “great tulip craze.” Once a few bulbs got beyond the protective grasp of Clusius, they were considered very precious rarities. As a trade in the bulbs began, the prices began to rise. Through the early 1600’s the prices skyrocked as an actual trading market developed. As the hybrids became more and more glamorous, the limited supply of certain bulbs became highly prized by the rich, who ultimately, were willing to pay almost any price. By 1624, one tulip type, with only 12 bulbs available, was selling for 3000 guilders per bulb, the equivalent ot about $1500 today. (Imagine..and you can have a very similar “Rembrandt” tulip bulb now for about 50 cents!) Just a short time later, one famous sale is recorded for a single bulb going for the equivalent of $2250 plus a horse and carriage! It was an incredible bubble, and it was about to burst.
During the 1630s, the frenzy continued as notarized bills of sale were being issued for bulbs, fraud and speculation were rampant, and what always happens with financial “bubbles” happened. The crash came in 1637. Many rich traders became paupers overnight, and the prices finally settled at a much more practical level. Of course, all this did not reduce the real demand, the love of the sheer beauty of the flowers. So ever since those days, the enterprising Dutch have built one of the best organized production and export businesses in the world. Today, over nine billion flower bulbs are produced each year in Holland, and about 7 billion of them are exported, for an export value of three quarters of a billion dollars. According to the Netherlands Flower Bulb Information Center, the USA is the biggest importer of Dutch bulbs, and in a recent year, $130,000,000 worth of Dutch bulbs (at wholesale) were imported.