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I find these a little bland, lacking drama. Can you put a tern or gull on your shade and maybe a child on the beach. I checked out your blog. Loved the "After the Storm" pic, also your banner pic. Your Barcelona pictures are very good and I like your wheat field pictures.

As a language purist who winces when I see the subjunctive abused or neglected, I sympathize. On the other hand, English is (arguably) the most adaptive, concise, rapidly growing language. It's sources of growth are technology, slang, and foreign influences. Some of the vulgarities of today will be the accepted or standard English of 50 years from now. Now I step off my soapbox...

Excellent album cover. Nice, clean design. If I had any suggestion to improve it, I would put the vapor behind the upper row of type, but I bet you already decided against that, right? If you could simulate it curling around the type, that would really be cool, but I can't think how you could do that.There's something I don't like about the other one. It's the pink splotches. As accents against black, they look pretty good, but floating in front of the face, etc., there's something that looks wrong about it. Just my first impressions ... I wonder if anyone else agrees?

Try this link for a satellite view of the World Trade Center site, with map superimposed, for example: https://www.google.com/maps?ll=34.036764,-9&z=1&t=h&hl=en I tried to locate "high knob, virginia" and bizarrely got a shot of coastal California. I tried again with "norton, virginia" and was able to sidle over to High Knob. Another Google service I just learned about is scholar.google.com. I ran a search on " java eclipse" and got about 3000 hits, "java beans", about 8000, "css style sheet" -- about 1800. The results come from scholarly and professional journals, which may not be freely available. For example, one link for java eclipse led me to the ACM site, where I found I had to be an ACM and SIGSOFT member to get free access, otherwise I could buy the article (after getting a free ACM web account). Oh, yeah, gotta give credit to slashdot, where I found these. Slashdot is usually the first thing I read every morning.

That does sound crazy. Some other far out but possible ways to reduce global warming are to sink carbon into the ocean floor, to increase the oceanic algae population by fertilizing the seas with trace nutrients, to create vast new carboon reserves in the form of new forests, to jettison carbon into space. The most readily accepted idea is the hydrogen economy. Hydrogen fuel cells would be much more efficient than present power sytems, letting us use less fuel to get the same economic benefit. Ditto nuclear energy.The Kyoto countries seem to be increasing carbon emissions even faster than we (the U.S.) are. I always felt Kyoto was just a way to placate the environmental movement without doing anything serious to slow down carbon emissions. To the extent that Kyoto hampers economic growth and R&D, it may be blocking progress on controlling carbon emissions.

I recently read Freakonomics by Harvard economist Steven Levitt and N.Y.Times reporter Stephen Dubner. Levitt has made a career of shattering preconceived ideas by going to the source data or just the source. Some of the topics: --the decline in US crime over the last ten/ fifteen years is largely a result of the legalization of abortion; if a woman decides on her own that she is incapable of raising a child, she is probably right. If she did raise the child, it would have a much higher than average tendency to adopt the criminal lifestyle. The decline began in the late 80s and ran completely counter to the predictions of the leading criminologists of the time, also the police chiefs, politicians, reporters, and just about every average person in America, who thought we were descending into criminal anarchy. Oh, and the "experts" all retroactively reversed their positions; too bad they can't destroy all the newspaper articles and books they wrote back then. --if you are selling a house, your real estate agent has almost no incentive to get the best deal for you. She will probably urge you to take the first offer. The language of the ad subliminally clues you into whether the agent is inviting a low ball offer. Agents use terms like granite, marble, Corian when they sell their own homes -- highly specific attractive features. "Spacious", "well maintained", etc. are words of weak praise that say bid low for this turkey. This part should be mandatory reading for everyone. Before putting trust in an agent, check what incentives the agent has to operate against you.--most drug dealers live at home with their moms and make less than the minimum wage. The money goes to a handful at the top of the pyramid, just as in any "multi-level sales organization" -- see Herbalife for a legal example.--a child in a family with a swimming pool is at 200 times greater risk of death than a child in a family with a gun in the house.If you have read the reviews in Time, etc., then you may be a little disappointed, this is a slim book, and the reviews tend to give away too many surprises.I recommend it because it's a light, fun read, it's a much-needed call for scientific thought in a field (or fields, economics and sociology) where politics and bigotry contaminate most written thought, and it's a good caution against putting your faith in your real estate agent or any other self-described expert .