I'm Gina Smith

A great site for buying green cleaning products.

And Happy Earth Day!

Click here.

Man fatally shoots young son, thinking he was prey (CNN)

Okay. I know all the arguments for and against our constitutional rights to bear arms. But now I think guns should be illegal PRECISELY because of idiots like this one, featured in the story below.

I was on the fence with gun laws, until this awful, awful story came out today. My feelings for the mother. I hope the father goes directly to jail and does not pass go.

Click here if you can stand it.

Vampire Weekend

Looking back, I've noticed my last few posts have been kind of depressing.

But this will make you happy. Download A-Pop from a band called Vampire Weekend. The band's name sounds goth, but it's really more a combo of 80s sound and ska, plus a string quartette. It's wild and beautiful. This band rocks. Best new band I've heard in awhile. Then I saw that Spin called them best new band of the year in last month's issue.

Apparently, they were discovered via a blog.

Plane Crash Info -- a most disturbing site.

Click here for a site with plane crash cockpit recordings and transcripts. It's called Plane Crash Info. But be forewarned. If you're afraid of flying, don't even think of visiting this site. Man.

What the Internet wrought.

The last lecture. (from dying Carnegie Mellon professor)

Did you hear about the touching lecture on how to live life and achieve your childhood dreams, delivered by a dying young professor with amazing joy and candor at Carnegie Mellon. Here is Dr. Pausch's page -- which will live on surely -- and on it is the full video of his lecture. I give it my highest recommendations.

Click here.

The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 -- remembering.

Excerpt of an article from Eyewitness to History. Today is 102 years since the 1902 quake here.

Three eye witnesses described their experiences: "Of a sudden we had found ourselves staggering and reeling. It was as if the earth was slipping gently from under our feet. Then came the sickening swaying of the earth that threw us flat upon our faces. We struggled in the street. We could not get on our feet. Then it seemed as though my head were split with the roar that crashed into my ears. Big buildings were crumbling as one might crush a biscuit in one's hand. Ahead of me a great cornice crushed a man as if he were a maggot - a laborer in overalls on his way to the Union Iron Works with a dinner pail on his arm." (P. Barrett).

"When the fire caught the Windsor Hotel at Fifth and Market Streets there were three men on the roof, and it was impossible to get them down. Rather than see the crazed men fall in with the roof and be roasted alive the military officer directed his men to shoot them, which they did in the presence of 5,000 people." (Max Fast).

"The most terrible thing I saw was the futile struggle of a policeman and others to rescue a man who was pinned down in burning wreckage. The helpless man watched it in silence till the fire began burning his feet. Then he screamed and begged to be killed. The policeman took his name and address and shot him through the head." (Adolphus Busch).

Destruction in the city

Businessman Jerome B. Clark lived in Berkeley across the bay from San Francisco. He experienced a minor shake-up at his home in the early morning but this did not stop him from making his regular trip to the city. He describes what he saw as he disembarked from the ferry:

" In every direction from the ferry building flames were seething, and as I stood there, a five-story building half a block away fell with a crash, and the flames swept clear across Market Street and caught a new fireproof building recently erected. The streets in places had sunk three or four feet, in others great humps had appeared four or five feet high. The street car tracks were bent and twisted out of shape. Electric wires lay in every direction. Streets on all sides were filled with brick and mortar, buildings either completely collapsed or brick fronts had just dropped completely off. Wagons with horses hitched to them, drivers and all, lying on the streets, all dead, struck and killed by the falling bricks, these mostly the wagons of the produce dealers, who do the greater part of their work at that hour of the morning. Warehouses and large wholesale houses of all descriptions either down, or walls bulging, or else twisted, buildings moved bodily two or three feet out of line and still standing with walls all cracked.

The Call building, a twelve-story skyscraper, stood and looked all right at first glance, but had moved at the base two feet at one end out into the sidewalk, and the elevators refused to work, all the interior being just twisted out of shape. It afterward burned as I watched it.

Fires were blazing in all directions, and all of the finest and best of the office and business buildings were either burning or surrounded. They pumped water from the bay, but the fire was soon too far away from the water front to make efforts in this direction of much avail. The water mains had been broken by the earthquake, and so there was no supply for the fire engines and they were helpless. The only way out was to dynamite, and I saw some of the finest and most beautiful buildings in the city, new modern palaces, blown to atoms. First they blew up one or two buildings at a time. Finding that of no avail, they took half a block; that was no use; then they took a block; but in spite of them all the fire kept on spreading."

Panic among the survivors

As the fires gained momentum and the city's water system destroyed, survivors gathered where ever they could find water. All through the night victims huddled together in the open air as flames lit the sky. One observer found refuge in a plaza:

"The fire was going on in the district south of them, and at intervals all night exhausted fire-fighters made their way to the plaza and dropped, with the breath out of them, among the huddled people and the bundles of household goods. The soldiers, who were administering affairs with all the justice of judges and all the devotion of heroes, kept three or four buckets of water, even from the women, for these men, who kept coming all night. There was a little food, also kept by the soldiers for these emergencies, and the sergeant had in his charge one precious bottle of whisky, from which is doled out drinks to those who were utterly exhausted.

Over in a corner of the plaza a band of men and women were praying, and one fanatic, driven crazy by horror, was crying out at the top of his voice:

'The Lord sent it, the Lord!'

His hysterical crying got on the nerves of the soldiers and bade fair to start a panic among the women and children, so the sergeant went over and stopped it by force. All night they huddled together in this hell, with the fire making it bright as day on all sides; and in the morning the soldiers, using their senses again, commandeered a supply of bread from a bakery, sent out another water squad, and fed the refugees with a semblance of breakfast."

A Narrow Escape

The quake awoke G.A. Raymond as he slept in his room at the Palace Hotel. He describes his escape:

"I had $600.00 in gold under my pillow. I awoke as I was thrown out of bed. Attempting to walk, the floor shook so that I fell. I grabbed my clothing and rushed down into the office, where dozens were already congregated. Suddenly the lights went out, and every one rushed for the door.

Outside I witnessed a sight I never want to see again. It was dawn and light. I looked up. The air was filled with falling stones. People around me were crushed to death on all sides. All around the huge buildings were shaking and waving. Every moment there were reports like 100 cannons going off at one time. Then streams of fire would shoot out, and other reports followed.

I asked a man standing next to me what happened. Before he could answer a thousand bricks fell on him and he was killed. A woman threw her arms around my neck. I pushed her away and fled. All around me buildings were rocking and flames shooting. As I ran people on all sides were crying, praying and calling for help. I thought the end of the world had come.

I met a Catholic priest, and he said: 'We must get to the ferry.' He knew the way, and we rushed down Market Street. Men, women and children were crawling from the debris. Hundreds were rushing down the street and every minute people were felled by debris.

At places the streets had cracked and opened. Chasms extended in all directions. I saw a drove of cattle, wild with fright, rushing up Market Street. I crouched beside a swaying building. As they came nearer they disappeared, seeming to drop out into the earth. When the last had gone I went nearer and found they had indeed been precipitated into the earth, a wide fissure having swallowed them. I was crazy with fear and the horrible sights.

How I reached the ferry I cannot say. It was bedlam, pandemonium and hell rolled into one. There must have been 10,000 people trying to get on that boat. Men and women fought like wildcats to push their way aboard. Clothes were torn from the backs of men and women and children indiscriminately. Women fainted, and there was no water at hand with which to revive them. Men lost their reason at those awful moments. One big, strong man, beat his head against one of the iron pillars on the dock, and cried out in a loud voice: 'This fire must be put out! The city must be saved!' It was awful."

Drunk man "sleeps off" stabbing (BBC)

Yuri Lyalin, 53, took a bus home, ate breakfast and apparently slept like a baby before his spouse noticed a handle sticking out of his back. He was rushed to casualty but doctors found no vital organs damaged. Mr Lyalin shrugged the episode off but the drinking partner who stabbed him faces trial, Russian media report. "Unique and intriguing the case may be, but the accused faces a severe punishment," said Pavel Vorobyov, a deputy prosecutor in the northern city of Vologda. Mr. Lyalin, an electrician, had spent the evening drinking with a watchman at his workplace when they got into an argument, Interfax news agency reports. The morning found him waking up in the watchman's office but instead of going back to work, he decided to take the bus home. At home, Mr Lyalin had some sausage from the fridge and lay down to sleep, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper says. After a couple of hours, his wife noticed the handle sticking out of his back and called an ambulance. Viktor Belov, a surgeon who treated him, found a kitchen knife in Mr Lyalin's back but "by good fortune, it had gone through soft tissue without touching vital organs". His alleged attacker reported the crime to the police himself, Interfax adds. Mr Lyalin apparently feels fine and bears no ill-will. "We were drinking and what doesn't happen when you're drunk?" he was quoted by Komsomolskaya Pravda as saying.

More on the Large Hadron Collider. Yikes!

More on the CERN collider that some physicists say will destroy the world ... from today's LA Times. You think they'll ever release the exact date they've set to turn on this thing? Definitely something to calendar.

GENEVA -- Michelangelo L. Mangano, a respected particle physicist who helped discover the top quark in 1995, now spends most days trying to convince people that his new machine won't destroy the world.

"If it were just crackpots, we could wave them away," the physicist said in an interview at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, CERN. "But some are real physicists."

What the critics are in such a lather about is the $8-billion Large Hadron Collider, a massive assemblage of iron, steel and superconducting wire 300 feet underground in a 17-mile-long circular tunnel on the Franco-Swiss border.

The most complex piece of scientific equipment ever built, the collider will send particles crashing into each other at just a wink shy of the speed of light, generating energies more powerful than the sun.

Scientists like Mangano believe that this instrument, when it begins operating as early as this summer, will peer into a looking-glass world that could contain entrances to extra dimensions and super-massive partners of the familiar particles that make up our world. One creature that must be hiding there, the scientists say, is the Higgs particle, one of the most exotic undiscovered objects since the yeti.

Critics think the collider could also spawn a black hole that will swallow Earth.

That could be just an appetizer. Once the collider got going, according to the doomsday scenario, it could gobble up distant stars like a child popping Skittles.

Mangano, who is part of the CERN group studying the safety of the collider, doesn't deny the scant possibility that the collider could yield a mini-black hole.

By smashing protons and lead ions together at energies reaching 14 trillion electron volts, the Large Hadron Collider will dwarf the world's other atom-smashers, including the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's mighty Tevatron in Batavia, Ill.

But that energy, Mangano hastened to add, would be concentrated in a space thinner than a human hair. Any black hole would be so tiny that it wouldn't be able to get its teeth around a bit of local chevre cheese, let alone the world.

Still, if a black hole were produced at all, "that would be an extremely spectacular result," he said, a half-smile creeping across his face.

Particle physics

Deep in a dim cavern, UCLA physicist Bob Cousins scrambled onto a catwalk straddling the six-story detector known as the Compact Muon Solenoid, then darted up two flights of stairs to another catwalk, where the guts of the machine materialized out of the half-light.

It looked a little like the inside of a computer suffering from a severe case of gigantism. Plates, shields and pipes jutted everywhere. Thick knots of cable extended from the side like mounds of heavy rope on an 18th century whaling ship.

"This detector was assembled at the surface and lowered in 15 pieces," Cousins said, pointing to a wide opening above the detector that reached to the European sky high above.

The heaviest piece weighed 4 million pounds. It took 10 hours to lower the middle section. At the center of this section is a bulbous extension that makes the behemoth look like the world's biggest television picture tube. This single piece of the collider contains more iron than the Eiffel Tower.

It was all built to probe a beam of particles thinner than a blade of grass.

Decades ago, scientists figured out that atomic nuclei were made up of smaller things than protons and neutrons.

To find those pieces, 20th century physicists came up with an idea that would appeal to most 9-year-old boys with a new toy: "Let's smash it and see what happens."

Early colliders, like the 9-inch cyclotron created at UC Berkeley in 1931, sent particles down a circular drag strip and crashed them into a target to see what flew out.

Stuff white people like.

Stuff White People Like is just an extremely funny blog. Check this entry on why White People like to live in San Francisco.

Happy Birthday Isabella Malby Cowan Biringer.

You are 48 today. Be happy! I wish you wonderful friends who make you smile a lot.