VIDEO Exit, Keith Olbermann, leaving MSNBC, "Countdown" Last Show Friday

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Keith Olbermann leaving MSNBC, ends "Countdown"

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 Jan 21, 2011

NEW YORK (AP) -- Keith Olbermann is leaving MSNBC and has announced that Friday's "Countdown" show will be his last.
MSNBC issued a statement Friday that it had ended its contract with the controversial host, with no further explanation. Olbermann hosted the network's top-rated show, but his combative liberal opinions often made him a target of critics.
Olbermann did not explain why he was leaving.

"MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC's success and we wish him well in his future endeavors," the network said.

A spokesman said Phil Griffin, MSNBC's president, would not comment on Olbermann's exit. Spokesman Jeremy Gaines would say only that the acquisition of NBC Universal by Comcast, which received regulatory approval this week, had nothing to do with the decision.

Olbermann was suspended without pay from the network for two days in November for donating to three Democratic candidates, which violated NBC News' policy on political donations. Olbermann complained that he was being punished for mistakenly violating an inconsistently applied rule that he had known nothing about.

The host apologized to fans - but not to the network.

Olbermann, before leaving the show with a final signature toss of his script toward the camera, thanked his audience for sticking with him and read a James Thurber poem.

"This may be the only television program where the host was much more in awe of the audience than vice versa," he said.

He thanked a series of people, including the late Tim Russert, but pointedly not Griffin or NBC News President Steve Capus.

Olbermann's prime-time show is the network's top-rated. His evolution from a humorous look at the day's headlines into a pointedly liberal show in the last half of George W. Bush's administration led MSNBC to largely shift the tone of the network in his direction, with the hiring of Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell in primetime.
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UPDATE Mall Texting is Hazardous Girl Tumbles Falls Into Fountain, Pennsylvania WEB VIRAL VIDEO Now she wants to sue

Texting fountain lady's problems bigger than YouTube fame

By Helen A.S. Popkin

UPDATE: As Stacy Stutz, some lady I know from Facebook, just said: "It's all fun and games until it goes viral on YouTube" ... and you cry about it on TV and hint at launching a lawsuit, and the Streisand effect kicks in.
"In the hours that followed Cathy Cruz Marrero's appearance on 'Good Morning America' today to talk about the fall and its aftermath, she was in court for a status hearing on charges of five felony counts, including theft by deception and receiving stolen property," reports ABC News.
Turns out Marrero's been out on $7,500 bail since 2009, after being charged with running up more than $5,000 in purchases on a co-worker's credit card. No wonder she had a lawyer handy.  
Marrero's next court date is April 21, and she's facing about six months of house arrest and electronic monitoring, according to the Reading Eagle. So all y'all talking about how if she just shut up and went on with her life, nobody would know it was her in the fountain —maybe six people recognized her — are more right than you realized. While it's unknown how many people knew about her theft charges, we all sure know about it now.
READ MORE

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The latest "viral video" from Pennsylvania shows a woman texting in a mall then tripping into a fountain. 
On Jan. 20th a news report states that she wants to sue the people who posted the YouTube video because  she feels humiliated!!!
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If you ever need to provide proof that texting on your phone is distracting, then use the video above. This girl is walking through a mall while either reading or typing a message. She's so involved that she doesn't notice the fountain behind the low wall she is approaching.


The inevitable happens and the girl ends up in the fountain. Her phone? We suspect it needs replacing, or if she's lucky it will dry out and continue to work.


The whole incident was picked up on security cameras from multiple angles. There is clearly a wall in front of her that on any normal walk would be seen by everyone, but the use of a phone shuts just about everything else out including peripheral vision.


While it's funny to watch her fall into the fountain, this is a very clear example of why texting while driving is being banned in a lot of places. Your attention is focused on the phone and nothing else, and that's why accidents a lot worse then getting wet happen.
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FACEBOOK Blocks Roger Ebert's Blog for 'Abusive Content' for Showing New Prosthetic Jaw

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One of the photos of Roger Ebert featured in his blog post "Leading with my chin."___________________________________________________________________________

Facebook calls Roger Ebert's blog 'abusive content'

By Helen A.S. Popkin technolog.msnbc.msn.com

Roger Ebert, movie critic, cancer survivor and undeniable king of the Twitter bon mot, publically debuted his new prosthetic jaw on a blog post Facebook blocked as "abusive content."
Ebert, who returns to TV Friday with the premiere of his PBS show, "Ebert Presents at the Movies," lost his jaw in 2006 during his battle with thyroid cancer. "After surgery, I studiously avoided looking at myself in a mirror," Ebert writes in the blog post, though he has been candid about his radically changed appearance, most famously appearing last year on the cover of Esquire magazine.
Titled "Leading with my chin," the Jan. 19 blog post details Ebert’s two–year journey with David J. Reisberg, a specialist in facial reconstruction, in the development of the jaw prosthetic. The post includes images, though none of a medically graphic nature.
In a note introducing the blog post, as well as its absence, Ebert writes on his Facebook page:

In which I receive a great deal of help in making the best of things. My new blog entry has been idiotically blocked by Facebook for "abusive content." You can read it here: http://j.mp/dVM9Iw

According to Facebook’s Help section, the social network identifies the following types of behavior as abusive:

• Feature overuse: There are limits to restrict the rate at which you can use features on the site. Overusing features is not allowed because it may make other people feel annoyed or unsafe.
• Unwanted contact: Our systems detect when friend requests you send to others are being ignored at a high rate and volume. Using Facebook to contact many people you don't know is not allowed because it may make them feel threatened, harassed, or unsafe.

 . Click Here to Read More.

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New Headset XWave Device Controls iPhone, iPad with Brainwaves ?

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January 14, 2011 2:36 PM

New Device Controls iPhone, iPad with Brainwaves?

Posted by Joshua Norman cbsnews.com
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A screenshot from the PLX Devices website of the XWave brainwave-detecting headset for mobile devices.

(Credit: PLX Devices)

Apparently the revolution that was touch screens on mobile phones was not enough for some hardware developers.
The device maker PLX Devices is now offering a headset called XWave that "can sense and detect human brainwaves, interpret them and connect it to everyday technology," according to promotional material on their website.
PLX Devices founder and CEO Paul Lowchareonkul told the U.K. Daily Mail that it was only a matter of time before products like the XWave entered the mainstream.
"The human brain is the most powerful, complex thing in the universe, and for the first time, we're able to harness its amazing power and connect it to everyday technology," Lowchareonkul said. "With the development of 3rd party apps, the potential for innovation is limitless."
Thus far, PLX is only offering apps that interact with the XWave for Apple mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
The device itself looks like an ordinary headset for telephone operators, and its website claims that XWave is perfectly safe because it only "listens" to brainwaves and "does not transmit or send any signals."
As of this report, there are four apps available that interact with the XWave, which retails for about $100. They include a basic set-up app; an app that allows you to "upload your song list and sync your brainwaves with any song in your library"; a "Tug of Mind" app; and a meditation app.
. Click Here to Read More.

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The XWave allows you to harness the power of your mind in a new and revolutionary way. By safely detecting your brain's rhythm through a small sensor gently placed on the skin of your forehead. XWave gives you a window into your mind. Backed by medical science and patents, the XWave senses your attention and meditation levels. You'll be able to control, and float objects in video games by simply thinking about it, or train your mind to focus and relax on command. Purchase the XWave headset by clicking the Buy Now button and download the XWave free app from the Apple App store and unlock the power of your mind. XWave connects to any iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. www.plxwave.com
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NFC, AFC, Championship Game VIDEO PICKS ESPN

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ESPN - NFL Championship Game Picks

Steve Savard and Randy Karraker discuss Nick Punto, the NFC, and AFC

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01/17/2010 - ESPN NFL Analysts Eric Allen and Derrick Brooks join SportsCenter to pick their winner of the AFC and NFC Championship games.
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MoDOT Warns Drivers of Black Ice on Missouri Roads All Weekend

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Salt is no match for the amount of snow that fell.
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How Astronomy and Religion Connect - Reverence for the Heavens Part 1

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Is this what our own Milky Way Galaxy looks like from far away? Similar in size and design to our home galaxy, spiral galaxy NGC 3370 is about 100 million light-years away, toward the constellation Leo.
NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)
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Reverence for the Heavens: How Astronomy and Religion Intersect

Leslie Mullen, Astrobiology Magazine

Date: 20 January 2011__________________________________________________________________________________

This article is Part One of Two in a series on the connection between the cosmos and spirituality.
CLICK HERE for PART 2

Our sun is just one small point of light in the swirl of suns that shape the disk of the Milky Way.

The galaxy's hundreds of billions of stars are strewn so widely apart, it would take a spaceship traveling at the speed of light one hundred thousand years to travel the distance. The starry wheel of the galaxy turns around a massive black hole, a point of infinite density with gravity so complete that not even light can escape.

The structure and scale of our galaxy is astonishing. But ours is just one among hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe.

Little wonder, then, that the contemplation of the cosmos can evoke the same emotions as religious awe and reverence. According to Father Paul Pavel Gabor, an astronomer for the Vatican Observatory, this is not always a positive experience. Just as some may experience fear and trembling when contemplating God and Heaven, there are those who become similarly overwhelmed when confronted with the astronomical proportions of the heavens.

"They find it quite awe-inspiring, but in the wrong way," Gabor notes. "When I show people pictures of the local cluster of galaxies, just to give them a sense of the scale of things, the reaction quite often is, "Oh dear. I'm completely insignificant, and I'm uncomfortable about this whole universe thing."

In Gabor's view, one way to counter this despair is to have faith in a higher power, to believe in a God that created the universe as a gesture of love.

"Faith tells you that the universe is not something to intimidate you, but it is something given to you as a gift, by somebody who wants to give you something nice, something pretty," he says. "So looking at those astronomy pictures, you can either feel that the glass is half full, and believe that you're really being given something here, or you can feel the glass is half empty and this is just frightening and you want to hide in your little rabbit hole somewhere."

Whether you are terrified or thrilled by the grandeur of the universe, there is no disputing its elemental nature: it is the source of us all. As Carl Sagan once said, "We are made of star stuff." The chemical elements that shape the breadth of creation also form our galaxy, our planet and even the cells of our bodies. Exploring the cosmos therefore is one way to get close to a "grand creator." This notion is reflected in the final lines of John Gillespie Magee Jr.'s poem "High Flight," which President Reagan read at the memorial service for the astronauts killed in the 1986 Challenger space shuttle tragedy:

with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

The Great Architect

Science, and particularly geometry and astronomy/astrology, was linked directly to the divine for most medieval scholars. The compass in this 13th century manuscript is a symbol of God's act of creation.
Credit: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

The term "cosmos" means "ordered world." For most of recorded history, humans have believed that God created the ordered universe out of chaos. This belief is still shared by a majority of people around the world today, but aspects of that faith have changed as our scientific knowledge of the cosmos has grown. For instance, Gabor's colleague, Vatican astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno, says that while many people believe God created the universe, they think its very enormity makes it impossible for God to take any personal note of us. This mote of dust we call planet Earth is insignificantly tiny in comparison to the smallest of stars, and each of our lives lasts for the briefest of cosmic moments.
"Some people will refuse to believe because they still haven't grasped what kind of God we're talking about, a God that is so "other" that it is possible," says Consolmagno.
This philosophical notion of a God for whom all things are possible, and who is beyond our basic human capacity of understanding, finds an echo in the still mysterious nature of the universe. For instance, most of the universe is currently attributed to the obscure categories "dark energy" and "dark matter." Writing in Scientific American, the astrophysicist David Cline noted those terms are really just expressions of our ignorance.

Another area of scientific ignorance is the time before the Big Bang. What, if anything, happened before the universe began its current outward expansion? The Roman Catholic priest Georges Lemaître originally proposed the idea that the universe expanded from an initial point (which he called 'the primeval atom'), and the Catholic Church supported the Big Bang theory even before most cosmologists did. This "day without yesterday" was seen as being consistent with the creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) as described in the Book of Genesis.

According to a recent Reuter's news report, Pope Benedict XVI saidthat "God's mind was behind complex scientific theories such as the Big Bang." The Pope did not cite the Big Bang specifically, but spoke more generally about the creation of the universe:

"The universe is not the result of chance, as some would like to believe. In contemplating it, we are invited to read for ourselves something quite profound: the wisdom of the Creator, the inexhaustible imagination of God, his infinite love for us. We should not let ourselves be limited by the concept of theories that only arrive at a certain point and which -- if you look closely -- are not set up as rivals of faith, but don't manage to explain the ultimate sense of reality. In the beauty of the world, in its mystery, in its grandness and in its rationality how can we not read the eternal rationality, and how can we do nothing less than to be taken by hand as it leads us to the ultimate unique God, creator of heaven and earth."

In another talk given at a different time, Pope Benedict said that one way to gain a better understanding of the universe is through mathematics:

"[Galileo] was convinced that God has given us two books, the book of Sacred Scripture and the book of Nature. And the language of Nature -- this was his conviction -- was mathematics, so it is the language of God, a language of the Creator. The surprising thing is that this invention of our human intellect is truly key to understanding Nature, that Nature is truly structured in a mathematical way, and that our mathematics, invented by our human mind, is truly the instrument for working with Nature, to put it at our service, to use it through technology."

Consolmagno says that some wonder whether mathematics was invented by man to describe Nature, or whether we discovered the mathematical properties that were built into Nature by a higher power.

"Maybe it's a little bit of both," he says. "The thing that always astonishes me, beyond the fact that the universe is mathematical, the universe makes sense. The mathematics is beautiful. When a student grasps what Maxwell's equations tell them, there's this leap of joy that's as great as looking at the sunset that Maxwell's equations can explain. Why it should work at all is something no philosopher has been able to figure out."

In Part Two of this article, the Vatican astronomers contend that many of the historical stories of the Church persecuting people for their scientific beliefs are inaccurate. 
. Click Here to Read PART 2.

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From Galileo to Aliens - How Astronomy and Religion Connect - Reverence for the Heavens Part 2

__________________________________________________________________________________ Galileo explaining lunar topography to two cardinals. Painting by Jean Leon Huens.
Jean Leon Huens
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Religion & Astronomy: From Galileo to Aliens

Leslie Mullen, Astrobiology Magazine

Date: 21 January 2011. Click Here to Read PART 1.

One of the most famous examples of the clash between religion and science is the trial of Galileo Galilei. Galileo supported Copernicus' view that the Earth orbited the sun, a "heliocentric" theory which the church declared contrary to Scripture. Galileo was warned to abandon his support for this theory and instead embrace the traditional "geocentric" notion that the Earth was an unmovable point around which the universe revolved.
Instead, in 1632 Galileo published "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems." The book was structured as a conversation between Salviati, a heliocentric philosopher, Simplicio, a geocentric philosopher, and Sagredo, a neutral layman. Pope Urban VIII had actually given Galileo permission to write the book as long as he didn't promote one viewpoint over the other. However, Salviati forcefully argued Galileo's beliefs, while Simplicio was often ridiculed as a fool.
An often-repeated view about the furor which followed the publication of Galileo's book is that the pope was insulted by having his words expressed by Simplicio. Not only was the character made to look ridiculous, but the name itself likely was a double entendre for "simple-minded" (simplice in Italian). However, Vatican astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno disputes this analysis.
 Click Here to Finish PART 2
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MTV PORN: Parents Television Council Calls for Fed Investigation Into 'SKINS'

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Parents Television Council Calls for Federal Investigation Into MTV's Skins

  1/20/2011 by Lindsay Powers

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The group is also urging people to contact the show's sponsor, Taco Bell, in protest.

One day after it was reported Viacom executives ordered producers to tone down its racy teen drama, the Parents Television Council has announced it's urging the Department of Justice and U.S. Senate and House Judiciary Committees to open an investigation.
"In addition to the sexual content on the show involving cast members as young as 15, PTC counted 42 depictions and references to drugs and alcohol in the premiere episode," the group wrote in a letter to the government organizations.
"It is clear that Viacom has knowingly produced material that may well be in violation of [several anti-child pornography laws]," added the PTC, which earlier called the show "the most dangerous program ever for children."
The group is also urging a boycott of Taco Bell, one of the show's sponsors.
The New York Times reported that a number of executives met on Tuesday over concerns the show could violate pornography laws.
While MTV did not confirm that, a rep for the network said, "Skins is a show that addresses real-world issues confronting teens in a frank way.. Click Here to Read More.

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Taco Bell Pulls Ads From 'Skins' Over Racy Content: MyFoxDC.com

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French House Untouched Sealed for 100 years Owner's Last Wishes Now Open

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The French house untouched for 100 years

By Hugh Schofield BBC News, Moulins __________________________________________________________________________________
18 January 2011

A late 19th Century town-house in central France that was sealed up for more than 100 years has finally been opened to the public in accordance with its owner's last wishes.

Louis Mantin was an aesthete and gentleman of leisure who bequeathed his opulent home to the town of Moulins on condition that a century later it be a museum.

After he died in 1905, the mansion was closed up and fell into dilapidation. Now thanks to a 3.5m euro ($4.7m; £2.9m) refit funded by local authorities, it has been returned to its original pristine state.

The result is a remarkable time-capsule, combining rich fin-de-siecle furnishings, archaeological curios, skulls and other Masonic paraphernalia, a collection of stuffed birds, as well as the latest domestic gadgets such as electricity and a flushing loo.
Life of pleasure

Born in Moulins in 1851, Mantin had an undistinguished career as a civil servant, but at the age of 42, he inherited a fortune from his father and thenceforth dedicated his life to pleasure, science and the arts.

First of all he had his mansion constructed in the centre of Moulins on the site of a former palace of the dukes of Bourbon, the local rulers who were heirs to the French and Spanish royal houses.

Then he decorated the house with imported tapestries, paintings and porcelain.

He commissioned sculptures and wood-carvings, and on the top floor installed his personal museum of Egyptian relics, Neolithic oil-lamps, prehistoric flints and medieval locks and keys.

Mantin only had a few years to indulge his aesthetic fantasies. Knowing that his death was approaching, he made a will in which he made sure his treasured house would be saved.

"In the will, he says that he wants the people of Moulins in 100 years time to be able to see what was the life of a cultured gentleman of his day," said assistant curator Maud Leyoudec.

"A bachelor with no children, he was obsessed with death and the passage of time. It was his way of becoming eternal."

Some confusion surrounds the exact terms of the will.

According to local people, Mantin specifically said that the house should be locked up for a century and then opened up to the public.

However the truth is less sensational, if only slightly.

In fact, Mantin stipulated simply that in 100 years time the mansion should be a museum. He said nothing about what should happen in between.
Collective memory

The fact that the house was totally abandoned was thus not a predetermined condition - it was just what actually took place.

"The house was gradually forgotten by the world. But not by the people of Moulins," said Mantin's great-niece Isabelle de Chavagnac.
. Click Here to Read More and See Video.

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