Ok.. so I think I’m chalking my energy level up to the coffee and the workout. My next workout period is at 4pm, and then another at 8.

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Ah, it’s nice to get letters like this (Edited for privacy) –

Scott, I would like to say thank you for your help with a case on Nov 16. We requested an alert after it was reported to us that a 32 yr old female with mental problems was reported missing.

We received two calls as a result of the alerts that provided us with solid information in this case.

Ultimately the female […] was located safely, 20 miles from her home.

Thanks again

Wayne County Sheriffs Office

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Lord of the Rings Barbie and Ken!

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1172 Old Testament in Hebrew ‘Because of the Jewish prohibition on the depiction of religious images, the original text uses its letter forms which are molded into shapes, to produce a decorative effect.’ (larger image)

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DR. John Gray – the best-selling author of “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” – isn’t really a doctor. In fact, there’s scant evidence he ever went to college at all.

CultNews.com, the Web site operated by nationally known cult expert Rick Ross, is reporting that the one-man marketing machine has been exaggerating his credentials for years.

Gray, whose “Men Are From Mars . . .” led to several spinoff titles, has turned himself into a brand name, with a syndicated national column, appearances on TV talk shows and the lecture circuit, a chain of licensed counseling centers, a roster of accredited counselors and psychologists who have trained under him, and an enormous cult following.

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On his Web site, Gray touts himself as a certified family therapist with a Ph.D., a necessary degree for both the American Counseling Assn. and the International Assn. of Marriage and Family Counselors, to which he holds memberships.

But recent investigations into Gray’s credentials reveal that his Ph.D. is an honorary one at best. Gray’s assistant, Rosalinda Lynch, first told CultNews that her boss received his degree from Columbia Pacific University. The problem? CPU was a non-accredited correspondence university.

Lynch then said that Gray earned a second doctorate from Illinois’ Governor’s State University. A university spokesperson corrected the claim, explaining that an honorary degree was bestowed upon Gray when he delivered this year’s commencement address. What’s more, GSU doesn’t have a doctorate program.

There are discrepancies about Gray’s other educational claims as well. He had previously boasted of Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the Maharishi European Research University in Switzerland. His assistant explained to CultNews that his degrees came from the American branch of the university, which is located in Iowa.

A call to both the school’s registrar and its alumni association yielded no proof he ever attended. Gray’s office in Marin County, Calif., had no response yesterday to repeated calls.

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Scientists have found a sub-atomic particle they cannot explain using current theories of energy and matter.

The discovery was made by researchers based at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba.

Classified as X(3872), the particle was seen fleetingly in an atom smasher and has been dubbed the “mystery meson”.

The Japanese team says understanding its existence may require a change to the Standard Model, the accepted theory of the way the Universe is constructed.

An eternity

X(3872) was found among the decay products of so-called beauty mesons – sub-atomic particles that are produced in large numbers at the Tsukuba “meson factory”.

It weighs about the same as a single atom of helium and exists for only about one billionth of a trillionth of a second before it decays into other longer-lived, more familiar particles.

Although this is extremely short-lived by human standards, scientists say that a billionth of a trillionth of a second is nearly an eternity for a sub-atomic particle this heavy.

Particles smaller than the atom are grouped into families depending upon their mass, spin and electric charge.

But X(3872) is peculiar in that it does not fit easily into any known particle scheme and, as a result, has attracted a considerable amount of attention from the world’s physics community.

New pairs

Its discovery was recently confirmed by researchers at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, US, home of the Tevatron, the world’s largest atom smasher. It was the US outfit that gave X(3872) its mystery tag.

A normal meson is comprised of a quark and an antiquark held together by the “colour” force, also called the “strong” force because it is the most powerful known in nature.

The large variety of meson particles that have been found to date reflect the many different ways that these combinations can be achieved.

However, again, X(3872) does not match theoretical expectations for any conceivable quark-antiquark arrangement.

To explain it, theoretical physicists may have to modify their theory of the colour force; or make X(3872) the first example of a new type of meson, one that is made from four quarks (two quarks and two antiquarks).

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Some online geographic visualization goodies (I’ve linked to a few before)-

Powers of 10: a redo of the classic zoom-in-from-the-universe-to-an-electron photo essay, this time in Java so you can control the action and with oak DNA as a stop along the way.

Money Maps: See which parts of the country are giving money to Democrats vs. Republicans or to particular Democratic candidates, by state, 3-digit zip code or county.

The Living Earth: this oldie but goodie simulates views of the earth sliced and diced more ways than you can think of. Select views by angle, altitude, date, from satellites or the moon, centered on cities, and with various models of earth topography and weather.

Here is the earth from over My House, Rio, Vienna, and Delhi. There’s also a moon viewer.

You are Where You Live: a demo of several segmentation systems used by marketers.
Enter your zip code and learn the main market “segments” in your neighborhood. For instance, according to the PRIZM NE system, the most common segments in 33301 (Local Fort Lauderdale) are “Urban Achievers”, “Bohemian Mix”, “Upper Crust”, “Money & Brains” and “American Dreams”. If you do a search and click the link for a particular type, you’ll see a description, a cute little icon, some demographics, and examples of their consumer habits.

City Size Comparisons: a tool to generate side-by-side maps of cities at the same scale. Works mostly for American cities but also for Baghdad. I’d love to see this idea expanded to include more international cities and also cities in history — say colonial New York or Chaucer’s London or ancient Rome.

Scorecard: environmental maps, with links to custom reports by zip code for key environmental issues.
It’s interesting to see the Fort Lauderdale’s statistics.

-many thanks to Prentiss Riddle