• Terminator 3


• Bad Boys 2


• Spy Kids 3


• Legally Blonde 2


• Charlie's Angels 2


• Matrix 2


• Tomb Raider 2

A spirited discussion at San Francisco's University Club turned to the future of the new-fangled automobile. Horseless carriages were notoriously unreliable and considered to be playthings for rich adventurers - parts, services and supplies were not available except in large cities. Since railroads provided comforts and took only four days to cross the continent, why would anyone want to drive any great distance on a noisy, crude machine?

The conversation intrigued Doctor Horatio Nelson Jackson, a guest at the Club. Jackson and his wife planned to return to their Burlington, Vermont home in a few days and both had been taking automobile driving lessons while in San Francisco.

It was not in the nature of H. Nelson Jackson to resist temptation when someone offered a wager that no automobile could be driven to New York City in ninety days.

He did not have a vehicle, co-driver or road maps - only a few hours of driving experience and was supposed to start in less than five days. This was the beginning of the classic 63 day road trip adventure - all to win a $50 bet.,

• The basic paradigm of today's life, as proposed by Dr. Francis Crick (Co-inventor of the structure of DNA), depicts the information flow as the bottom panel of the figure.
  
  
  
  • DNA is the information storage molecule that is composed of genes.
  
  
  • RNA is a temporary copy of the DNA information that is made transiently as needed. There are other RNA molecules that do some important catalysis also, most importantly, the ribosome. This is the RNA-protein complex that translates the gene information in the form of RNA into protein. The 3D structure of complete ribosome is available. Although, RNA ribozymes were known to have catalytic activity, it is shocking to see that RNA carries out all the catalysis during protein synthesis, and protein components of ribosome play a mere structural role.
  
  
  • Proteins are made from RNA and have various structural and catalytic functions which include reproducing DNA.
  
  




• It is highly unlikely that it worked like this all the time, since the beginning to life, simply because it is too complicated and has too many interdependent components. Unless of course, you believe that life appeared miraculously on the 'third day'.



• Today's world probably evolved from a time when there was no DNA. RNA was the store of information and it was involved in reproducing itself and making of functional proteins (middle panel of the figure). DNA is more stable than RNA and it became a molecule of choice for long-term information storage.



• It is proposed that even simpler life existed before the RNA-protein world where RNA stored the information, replicated it self and was doing all the catalytic functions of life (top panel of the figure). But, proteins being better structured and thus, better suited for structural and functional roles evolved to do so.

Retire on $125,000

Remembering one simple compounding rule can take years of worry about retirement off your mind, provide a clear goal in your financial life, and set you on a strong course for your later years. The rule: Your money will double every seven years if it compounds at the stock market's average return of nearly 11% annualized over its lifetime.

What does this mean? In simplest terms for this discussion, it means that if you have $125,000 in retirement savings by age 40, your money could grow to $250,000 by age 47, $500,000 by age 54, and $1 million by age 61. And that's without adding any additional money after 40.

Do the math
Assuming most of us start working around age 22, we have a good 18 years to reach $125,000 in retirement money by 40. Starting at 22, you need to save $6,950 a year to reach this savings goal. By putting the maximum $3,000 in an IRA annually (and the limit will increase to $4,000 in 2005), you're already nearly half there each year.

Saving at least 10% in your company's 401(k) plan would, on average, put you at or above the $6,900 a year hurdle. (Always save as much as your company matches -- it's free money -- and consider saving at least 10% of your pre-tax income after you've contributed to an IRA each year.)

So, by contributing the limit to an IRA annually and saving 10% of the average income, by age 40 a typical person starting at 22 will save more than enough to retire a millionaire at 60, even if they stop saving at that point, which is unlikely. (And this example doesn't assume any appreciation on all those 18 years of savings. Assuming 11% annualized returns over 18 years, saving $6,950 a year becomes $420,000 by age 40. So, saving just $2,000 a year from 22 to 40 will result in having $125,000 by age 40 given 11% appreciation.)

Compounding is your friend
These examples don't account for inflation (which is very low but could change), taxes on 401(k) accounts, or the fact that the stock market could gain less than its past 80-year average.

But the examples also don't account for the fact that most of us will save well into our 40s and onward, and the money compounds as we save it. These things should largely balance each other out. The overall point here is to have a clear numerical savings goal for retirement accounts that you control, monitor, and root for.

So, where to invest the money? For most of us, low-cost index funds -- which outperform a majority of mutual funds and match the stock market's return -- are the simplest, best choice. There's a lot to be said for simplicity. It works.

seer suck er (sîrskr) n.

A light thin fabric, generally cotton or rayon, with a crinkled surface and a usually striped pattern.

[Hindi srsakar, from Persian shroshakar : shr, milk (from Middle Persian) + o, and (from Middle Persian u, from Old Persian ut) + shakar, sugar (from Sanskrit arkar, from the resemblance of its smooth and rough stripes to the smooth surface of milk and bumpy texture of sugar).]
Word History: Through its etymology, seersucker gives us a glimpse into the history of India. The word came into English from Hindi srsakar, which had been borrowed from the Persian compound shroshakar, meaning literally ?milk and sugar? but used figuratively for a striped linen garment. The Persian word shakar, ?sugar,? in turn came from Sanskrit arkar. The linguistic borrowings here reflect a broader history of cultural borrowing. In the 6th century the Persians borrowed not only the word for sugar from India but sugar itself. During and after Tamerlane's invasion of India in the late 14th century, opportunities for borrowing Persian things and words such as shroshakar were widespread, since Tamerlane incorporated Persia as well as India into his empire. It then remained for the English to borrow from an Indian language the material and its name seersucker (first recorded in 1722 in the form Sea Sucker) during the 18th century, when the East India Company and England were moving toward imperial supremacy in India.

• Yahoo! News - Six Dead in Miss. Plant Shooting Rampage


• Yahoo! News - Five Killed in Calif., Police Seek School Official

• The first one was probably the worst kind of miscommunication. A large part of building contract was given to a European company. There was a slight (and deadly) confusion about the units used in specifications of the modules. The European company used metric units (centimeters, meters, etc.) and NASA used the stupid-ass backward Imperial units (inches, feet, 5/8th, 7/16th, etc.). The spacecraft is lost in deep space instead of going towards Mars.


• The second accident was completely avoidable and due to project mismanagement to meet deadlines. Although, the airbag-bouncing-ball landing technique worked beautifully on the 'Pathfinder' mission, NASA decided to use retro-rocket landing system. During the testing of this system, they found a software glitch that misread the altitude information and turned off the rockets when it was still a few tens of feet in the air, and the prototype crashed to the ground. They repaired the bug, but, didn't have enough time to test it before implementing it on the actual probe to meet the deadline. The bug was not really fixed and the spacecraft crashed on the surface of Mars just as it did during the initial testing.

Guess who is exempt:

Politicians
Charities
Anyone you have done business within the prior 18 months.

"Hello, this is Slim Whitman thanking you for your recent purchase from any of the following gas stations, of which I am a 0.00001% shareholding owner: Exxon, Chevron, Amoco, BP, Shell, Getty, Starvin Marvins, Racetrak, JollyTime ....

I am calling today on behalf of the American Red Cross. If you purchase my Greatist Hits album today, I will personally donate a penny from each and every sale.

I would also very much appreciate your vote for County Councilman during the next election cycle. Thanks for the loopholes, sucker..."

Discovered by Edmond Halley in 1714. M13, also called the `Great globular cluster in Hercules', is one of the most prominent and best known globulars of the Northern celestial hemisphere. It was discovered by Edmond Halley in 1714, who noted that `it shows itself to the naked eye when the sky is serene and the Moon absent.' According to Charles Messier, who cataloged it on June 1, 1764, it is also reported in John Bevis' "English" Celestial Atlas.

At its distance of 25,100 light years, its angular diameter of 23' corresponds to a linear 165 light years. It contains several 100,000 stars; Timothy Ferris in his book Galaxies even says "more than a million". Towards its center, stars are about 500 times more concentrated than in the solar neighborhood. The age of M13 has been determined by Sandage as 24 billion years and by Arp as 17 billion years around 1960; Arp later (in 1962) revised his value to 14 billion years (taken from Kenneth Glyn Jones)

Discovered by Antoine Darquier de Pellepoix in 1779. The famous ring nebula M57 is often regarded as the prototype of a planetary nebula, and a showpiece in the northern hemisphere summer sky. Recent research has confirmed that it is, most probably, actually a ring (torus) of bright light-emitting material surrounding its central star, and not a spherical (or ellipsoidal) shell, thus coinciding with an early assumption by John Herschel. Viewed from this equatorial plane, it would thus more resemble the Dumbbell Nebula M27 or the Little Dumbbell Nebula M76 than its appearance we know from here: We happen to view it from near one pole.

The mass of the nebular matter has been estimated at about 0.2 solar masses, the density at about 10,000 ions per ccm (cm^3). Its chemical composition has been determined as follows: On each Fluor (Fl) atom, the Ring Nebula contains 4.25 million atoms of Hydrogene (H), 337,500 Helium (He), 2,500 Oxygene (O), 1,250 Nitrogene (N), 375 Neon (Ne), 225 Sulfur (S), 30 Argon (Ar) and 9 Chlorine (Cl) atoms. It is expanding at 20 to 30 km/s, and approaching us at 21 km/s.