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From a display at Reed College, Portland, OR. Each white flag represents six dead Iraqis since the beginning of the war, and each red flag represents a dead US serviceman. Statistics come from the Lancet survey of Iraqi mortality since 2003, published October 2006

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It was the first time Rephael, who had held a technical position in the ministry before his posting to San Salvador, had ever distinguished himself in any way, the official added.

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Looks like Apple is continuing to build awareness for the Apple iPhone. On Monday March 12th, workers at the 5th Avenue Apple Store in New York City posted a large iPhone ad on one full side of the glass structure.

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Apple may be about to equip its Mac Pro desktop with Intel four-core Xeon processors, if an inadvertent posting on the company’s UK online store is to be believed.

The Mac maker’s taken the offending entry down now, but not before a number of websites spotted it overnight. A search for ‘Mac’ yielded a number of entries, one of which mentioned the Mac Pro now with “quad-core or eight-core processing power”.

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The White House acknowledged on Sunday that presidential adviser Karl Rove served as a conduit for complaints to the Justice Department about federal prosecutors who were later fired for what critics charge were partisan political reasons.

Just to make this crystal clear, the Bush administration’s political advisor was handling complaints about US attorneys, who are the people in charge of prosecuting federal crimes. That means what crimes get prosecuted, who gets prosecuted, and who does not get prosecuted, is political. If you don’t see the hideously glaring conflict of interest and enormous potential for abuse there, then there is simply no hope for you. It’s getting clearer and clearer that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was lying under oath when he said that these firings were not politically motivated.

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Wisten jullie bijvoorbeeld dat gemiddeld 70% van de bevestigingsmails binnen 1 uur wordt geopend?

Wedden dus dat na deze “cursus” ook de bevestigings emailtjes volgekotst worden met reclame uitingen?

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Since the invention of the telescope four centuries ago, astronomers have been able to figure out the workings of the universe simply by observing the heavens and applying some math, and vice versa. Take the discovery of moons, planets, stars and galaxies, apply Newton’s laws and you have a universe that runs like clockwork. Take Einstein’s modifications of Newton, apply the discovery of an expanding universe and you get the big bang. “It’s a ridiculously simple, intentionally cartoonish picture,” Perlmutter said. “We’re just incredibly lucky that that first try has matched so well.”

But is our luck about to run out? Smoot’s and Perlmutter’s work is part of a revolution that has forced their colleagues to confront a universe wholly unlike any they have ever known, one that is made of only 4 percent of the kind of matter we have always assumed it to be — the material that makes up you and me and this magazine and all the planets and stars in our galaxy and in all 125 billion galaxies beyond. The rest — 96 percent of the universe — is … who knows?

“Dark,” cosmologists call it, in what could go down in history as the ultimate semantic surrender. This is not “dark” as in distant or invisible. This is “dark” as in unknown for now, and possibly forever.

If so, such a development would presumably not be without philosophical consequences of the civilization-altering variety. Cosmologists often refer to this possibility as “the ultimate Copernican revolution”: not only are we not at the center of anything; we’re not even made of the same stuff as most of the rest of everything. “We’re just a bit of pollution,” Lawrence M. Krauss, a theorist at Case Western Reserve, said not long ago at a public panel on cosmology in Chicago. “If you got rid of us, and all the stars and all the galaxies and all the planets and all the aliens and everybody, then the universe would be largely the same. We’re completely irrelevant.”

All well and good. Science is full of homo sapiens-humbling insights. But the trade-off for these lessons in insignificance has always been that at least now we would have a deeper — simpler — understanding of the universe. That the more we could observe, the more we would know. But what about the less we could observe? What happens to new knowledge then? It’s a question cosmologists have been asking themselves lately, and it might well be a question we’ll all be asking ourselves soon, because if they’re right, then the time has come to rethink a fundamental assumption: When we look up at the night sky, we’re seeing the universe.

Not so. Not even close.