Immigrants know more than natives do

Have you ever heard that immigrants, that is naturalized citizens of the United States of America, know more about our history and system of government than we native-born and publicly-schooled citizens do? Here's your chance to fix that. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Web site has a list of questions, what they call civics flash cards, to help applicants to study for the citizenship test. See how well you do.

Camera Toss

Check out these photos I found on the FlickrBlog which were made by tossing the camera into the air, usually at night and in front of a light source. And then catching it.

Porn makes you blind

IT'S true. Pornography can make you blind. Look at a smutty picture and, according to research by Steven Most, of Yale University, and his colleagues, you will suffer from a temporary condition known as emotion-induced blindness.

Dr Most made this discovery while studying the rubbernecking effect (when people slow down to stare at a car accident). Rubbernecking represents a serious lapse of attention to the road, but he wondered if the initial reaction to such gory scenes could cause smaller lapses. The answer is, it does. What he found was that when people look at gory images—and also erotic ones—they fail to process what they see immediately afterwards. This period of blindness lasts between two-tenths and eight-tenths of a second. That is long enough for a driver transfixed by an erotic advert on a billboard to cause an accident.

Read more

The List

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's World Heritage Committee has chosen a List of sites around the world which are deserving of notice and preservation. "The World Heritage List includes 812 properties forming part of the cultural and natural heritage which the World Heritage Committee considers as having outstanding universal value.

These include 628 cultural, 160 natural and 24 mixed properties in 137 States Parties."

You can view it as the must-see list of real-life places, for the world traveler.

Gas is too cheap

Until I see sidewalks crowded with pedestrians and bicyclists and used car lots filled with SUVs that no one will buy, I will continue to believe that gas is too cheap.

Boots in space

I'm not a fan of the canceled SciFi TV show Firefly (yet), so I'm not planning to see the movie spinoff Serenity, but I can't avoid running into their hype all over the Web. Seems they're the greatest thing since Star Wars. I can't say.
However, I do have a question. Why do space travelers wear such heavy-duty footgear in space? If I were on a spaceship 24/7, I'd be in slippers, socks, or barefeet. Look at our NASA shuttle astronauts.

G

IFILM: "Grab your airsickness bag, and be sure to steer clear if you've got a fear of heights. Here, in this powerful film, a camera is dropped from an airplane at 30,000 feet. The result? Some death-defying, dramatic aerial shots like none you've ever seen!"

Alaska wants you to visit before you die

Via Adrants

The Scene on South Elm

The Scene on South Elm is a new Cinema-Music-Art-Internet cafe which just opened at 604 South Elm Street, Greensboro, NC. Check out their film schedule.