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We all have stories, as engineers, of fixing some crazy thing at the last minute right before the demo goes up. We have all encountered situations where we needed to fix something that was our fault and we needed to fix it now. This story is something that I think about in those times to remember to stay calm. No last minute fix could ever be this dramatic or important. My grandfather passed away about a week ago. At the service, I was asked to say a few words and read from his memoirs. This was my choice. RED TEAM...

Matt Bevin’s Senate Conservatives Fund fundraising webpage. ($127.2K raised so far. Goal is $200K.) Received this email from the SCF this morning: SCF endorses Matt Bevin for U.S. Senate in Kentucky. SCF Senate Update Fellow Conservatives: U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the Republican Leader, has a liberal record and he refuses to fight for our principles. It’s time to replace him with a true conservative. We have done everything possible to encourage him to stand up for our values, but he won’t listen. Mitch McConnell has cut deals with the Democrats to increase the debt limit, raise taxes, and fund...

Why should a young man listen to an old guy about the best way to become a man? Because the typical teen is not yet able to see a future past the next few months. That's not a fault of character, but the fact that teens' brains have not yet physically matured. The pre-fontal cortex (PFC) does not fully develop in most people until they're twenty-four years old. Yet, the PFC is responsible for regulating mood, attention span, impulse control, and the ability to plan ahead and understand the consequences of one's actions. In the meantime, it's up to the...

British police say they were called after a string of attacks on red-haired pupils at a school in northern England. The issue of bullying of red-haired children periodically arises in Britain, and some commentators have attributed the phenomenon to lingering anti-Celtic prejudice.

The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season is an ongoing annual cycle in tropical cyclogenesis. It is the first Atlantic hurricane season since 2002 to feature no hurricanes through the month of August. The season officially began on June 1 and will end on November 30. The first tropical cyclone of the year, Andrea, developed on June 7 in the Gulf of Mexico. This season continued a pattern of unusually early starting hurricane seasons – the first named storm of a season typically forms around July 9. Below average activity continued afterwards into October. The strongest tropical cyclone of the season thus...

As Russia prepares to mark 70 years since the Sobibor revolt, one Jewish officer finally finds his rightful place as the hero of the story. ------ Russia was set to mark Monday the 70th anniversary of a revolt at the Sobibor death camp led by a Red Army officer, the biggest and most successful prisoner escape under the Nazi regime. Ahead of the anniversary, President Vladimir Putin ordered the defense ministry to come up with a plan to "immortalise the memory of heroes who raised a revolt" at the extermination camp in occupied Poland on October 14, 1943. The order...

At a Seattle city meeting Tuesday night, Amazon presented plans for a futuristic, greenhouse-like sphere of a building in the middle of its new Seattle campus. According to the proposal, the five-story, tri-domed structure will be large enough to accommodate mature trees, allowing employees to “work and socialize in a more natural, park-like setting.” From the plans: In addition to a variety of workplace environments, the facility will incorporate dining, meeting and lounge spaces, as well as a variety of botanical zones modeled on montane ecologies found around the globe.

When this bizarre story surfaced a few years ago, it reminded us if this quote, attributed to Warren G. Harding: "I can take care of my enemies all right. But my damn friends -they're the ones that keep me walking the floors nights." NORTHERN EXPOSURE If you had to invade another country, how would you do it? Believe it or not, the United States military spent a lot of time pondering that question in the late 1920s, when it came up with a plan to invade its closest neighbor, Canada. There was certainly a precedent for the two nations battling...

-snip- In reality, Smeerenburg was usually abandoned at the end of each season, though by the 1630s, years of vicious competition led Dutch whalers to try something novel: leave a crew of volunteers to overwinter at Smeerenburg, both to be on hand to protect more expensive equipment that could be left behind, and in order to get the whaling station up and running as soon as possible the following spring. And so in 1632 seven men were left in Smeerenburg to wait out the winter. It did not go well. The Dutch volunteers quickly succumbed to the “polar night disease,”...

Israel was among those who warned Kenya's government of the high risk of an attack before the deadly assault on a Nairobi mall by Islamist terrorists, security sources have told the AFP news agency. Cabinet ministers and Kenya's army chief had received information warning of a plan to carry out a major attack, the officials told the news agency, confirming an intelligence report leaked in Kenyan newspapers.

Yehuda Doron, the former treasurer of Kibbutz Shefayim, and his wife, Katrina, were convicted Sunday of stealing about 16.5 million shekels from the kibbutz, and of a number of serious financial offenses, which were carried out between 1996 and 2002. Yehuda Doron was born in Shefayim and lived there his whole life, until he and his family were forced to leave when the embezzlement was discovered. He served in several important positions over the years, mostly in the kibbutz's financial department. According to the verdict, he enjoyed unlimited trust from the kibbutz members who believed in his ability to steer...

Last Saturday, we told you about how there's a gigantic AT-ST Walker for sale on Ebay right now. It's still there, but why sell such a masterpiece in the first place? Because your girlfriend is freakin' sick of having it around. The AT-ST's owner, Martin Fillery, explained the situation to the Daily Mail: "I think my girlfriend is starting to get a bit worried about me. I've always been a bit mad, and I love sci-fi stuff, but my spending on props is going through the roof. ...The Scout Walker is amazing, but I realised pretty quickly that it was...

Holy viral phenom! Has Roswell's caped crusader jumped the shark? In less than a month, Roswell dad-of-four Blake Wilson earned cult status thanks to Vine videos in which he wears a Bat Man mask while handing down parental edicts ("tables are for glasses, not asses") and making safety PSAs. Now that Wilson's gone from BuzzFeed listicle to fawning HuffPo feature to a guest on the Today show, one has to wonder: will this Honda Odyssey-driving suburban patriarch be the latest Atlantan to snag a reality series, or is this the end of a meteoric fifteen minutes?

When I'm not fighting crime I drive a Honda Odyssey. It gets better gas mileage.

An incident at the Bridgeport Village Regal Cinema in Portland, Oregon, involving multiple law enforcement agencies, turned out to be a comedy of errors. During the movie, "Prisoners," an elderly man stood up and urinated. It is believed he may have been drinking. The urine fell on a teenager sitting in the row in front of him. This upset a nearby woman who started yelling "Gun!" over and over. Theater patrons began running for the exits, and someone called 911, which led to "a massive response from multiple agencies." 'Investigators tell FOX 12 they quickly figured out what happened after...

Rocket: Antares Payload: Cygnus Launch date: September 18, 2013 Launch time: 10:50 a.m. EDT/7:50 a.m. PDT (1450 GMT) Launch window: 15 minutes Launch site: Pad 0A, Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, Wallops Islands, VA ISS capture: Sept 22 @ 1117 GMT ISS departure: TBD 0745 GMT (3:45 a.m. EDT) The countdown began on time to begin final preps for this morning's 10:50 a.m. EDT blastoff of the 13-story Antares rocket from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Follow activities with this countdowntimeline. The mission will be the second launch of the Orbital Sciences Antares rocket after a...

Such a “Nasty Euro Winter” Would Be Spectacular Sixth In A Row! Meteorologist Joe Bastardi in his Saturday Summary at the 7-minute mark looks at the latest NCEP NCAR global winter forecast for 2013/14. The charts point to another “brutal winter for Europe.” The forecast sees blocking and a negative NAO. Joe also tweeted that “SST analog package combined with low solar, and climate cycle (similar to early 50s) argue for nasty Euro Winter.” Joe is not alone in pointing out that weather services are looking at a brutal European winter. German meteorologist Dominik Jung tweets that a bitter cold...

For the third straight day, high temperatures in Atlanta are breaking records for how low they are. Saturday’s high was 66 degrees as against the normal high in the upper 80s. The temperatures put a chill over, “It’s kind of a freak of nature that it’s even cold – it’s August and we’re wearing jeans and coats, and it’s very weird,” said Regan Koski, event manager for Decatur’s Blues, Barbecue and Bluegrass Festival. “I’m from Atlanta, and I still can’t believe this weather. It’s crazy,” Wynn said. “I would expect this in November. Not in August. Not in Atlanta.” Thursday...

The driver, who went by the name Afroduck, was fast and proud of it, using a dashboard camera to capture his wild 26.5-mile journey around Manhattan in 24 minutes.

HUNDREDS of skiers are stuck on New Zealand's Mt. Hutt after freak weather forced its closure. A combination of drifting snow and poor visibility has been blamed. While ski area management were aware of an approaching front and poor forecast, the situation deteriorated quickly, Mt Hutt ski area manager James McKenzie said. There are 316 people trapped on the mountain.