Do not kiss a sneezing pig

SARS, avian flu, swine flu ... each virus outbreak raises the question: What can be done? A compelling answer from virus hunter Nathan Wolfe, who's outwitting the next pandemic by staying two steps ahead: discovering new, deadly viruses where they first emerge -- passing from animals to humans among poor subsistence hunters in Africa -- and stopping them before they claim millions of lives.

love bacon. Am I at risk?
Go ahead and have that BLT. It's not a problem. You can't get swine flu from eating pork. You'd have to have close contact with a living, breathing, infected pig to get this virus -- or rather, in order to have contracted the original pig virus. The interesting and important thing about this "pig flu" is that it's now spreading from human to human. It's become a human virus.
So people should take the usual precautions: Stay away from individuals who are sick. Wash your hands frequently. And the less you touch your face, nose and eyes, the better.

We've created a "perfect storm" for viruses. And we'll continue to see -- as we have in the past few years -- a whole range of new animal diseases as outbreaks in human populations. But we have to stop being surprised by them. Right now, global public health is like cardiology in the '50s -- just waiting for the heart attack, without understanding why they occur or the many ways to monitor for them, detect them early and ultimately prevent them. Swine flu is not an anomaly. We know that swine flu -- like the vast majority of new outbreaks -- comes from animals. We should be monitoring those animals and the humans that come into contact with them, so we can catch these viruses early, before they infect major cities and spread throughout the world.(read more...)

Ein Hod Memories

Isaac Button: The Potter

"The old country potters did not think of themselves as artists. But there is a purity and an honesty in their work that is sometimes missing from more refined contemporary studio ceramics."

The founders of British 20th century studio pottery - Bernard Leach, Michael Cardew and the Japanese Shoji Hamada - sought out the few remaining English country potters and copied their techniques. But their debt to them is often overlooked and English country pottery remains largely undiscovered. There are fewer than a dozen collectors, few textbooks and no national collection. By contrast, the Japanese prize our country pottery, as do American folk art enthusiasts.
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Bernard on the Wheel

Bernard Leach is, without a doubt, the best known and most prominent of British studio potters. Born in Hong Kong, he was taken almost immediately to Japan by his grandparents. He came to England ...
Bernard Leach is, without a doubt, the best known and most prominent of British studio potters.
Born in Hong Kong, he was taken almost immediately to Japan by his grandparents.
He came to England at the age of ten for schooling.
In 1909 he returned to Japan to teach etching which he had himself learnt from Frank Brangwyn.
After ten years of life in the East - both Japan and China - he met Hamada.
The following year they both came to England and set up the Leach Pottery at St Ives.
The years between the wars were hard for Leach; he spent much time re-building kilns, experimenting with materials, travelling - but not achieving much critical or financial success.
It was not until after the Second World War, and the publication of his first book, A Potters' Book, that he became widely recognised as a master in his field.
He continued to pot until 1972, but did not stop his ceaseless travelling.
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London held an exhibition - The Art of Bernard Leach - in 1977, and in 1979 he died.

Ein Hod on Youtube

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you've got to pay you dues to your past and your future

Forget about the hybrid auto -- Shai Agassi says it's electric cars or bust if we want to impact emissions. His company, Better Place, has a radical plan to take entire countries oil-free by 2020.

This was at a time in my life when I was at SAP and asked to be president if I should want it. While I was considering this, I was invited to join the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders where they asked us all to come up with a project or a vision for how we want make the world better by 2020. I took it really seriously. I began to think, "What do I do best? What are my passions? And where do these meet to create economic interest?" Basically, I was using Jim Collins' theory from "Good to Great."
My passions were an intersection between peace in the Middle East and climate change. I know how to understand a technology problem, break it into its components and solve it. I also knew I couldn't make peace solely through technological inventions. So, I started digging and found that Israel signed a peace treaty with the United Arab Emirates after the country had diversified their economy, instead of being solely oil-based. This diversification had brought about modernization. I realized that if you land the price of oil, countries will diversify their economies and as a result, modernize.
When I started this, I asked "How would a country operate without oil?" So, I began thinking from scale. I looked at biofuels, and they don't scale. I looked at hydrogen, and discovered that it's actually a wasteful process and not clean. Then I got to electric vehicles. I wrote a white paper on it, expecting that this would become a project for government.

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Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day

As far as i know, nobody on this photo survived Riga's Ghetto

Tijuana Bibles (not Kosher for Pesach)

What are Tijuana Bibles? They have nothing to do with Mexico, and they're certainly not godly -- although the people who collect the 700 or so TBs that remain in existence might be called fanatics. They're little underground comic books that were illegally published during the '30s, '40s and '50s, filled with cartoons of famous characters of the day -- from Cary Grant to Rita Hayworth, from Gandhi to Betty Boop -- fucking their bloomers off.


They were the original "dirty comic books," sold in barber shops and schoolyards, passed from one sweaty hand to the next.
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A lot of Bibles are HERE
The introduction to "Tijuana Bibles:
Art and Wit in America's Forbidden Funnies, 1930s-1950s"
BY ART SPIEGELMAN