Bliss

Euphoria is the name of the default machine wallpaper of Microsoft's Windows XP working framework. It is a picture of a moving green slope and a blue sky with cumulus and cirrus mists. The scene portrayed is in the Los Carneros American Viticultural Area of Sonoma County, California, United States.

Previous National Geographic photographic artist Charles O'rear, an inhabitant of the adjacent Napa Valley, took the photograph on film with a medium-group Polaroid while on his approach to visit his sweetheart in 1996. While it was broadly accepted later that the picture was digitally controled or even made with programming, for example, Adobe Photoshop, O'rear says it never was. He sold it to Corbis for utilization as a stock photograph. A few years after the fact, Microsoft engineers picked a digitized adaptation of the picture and authorized it from O'rear.

Through the one decade from now it has been asserted to be the most seen photo on the planet amid that time. Since it was taken, the scene in it has changed, with grapevines planted on the slope and field in the closer view, making O'rear's picture difficult to copy for now. That has not halted different picture takers from attempting, and some of their endeavors have been incorporated in workmanship shows.

The Gay Bomb. Defused.

If there's any doubt left about the complete and utter stupidity among idealogically-driven conservatives in our country, then the following should drive it home. A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.

Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsequently rejected, building the so-called "Gay Bomb."Edward Hammond, of Berkeley's Sunshine Project, had used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the proposal from the Air Force's Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.

As part of a military effort to develop non-lethal weapons, the proposal suggested, "One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior."The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon."The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soldiers to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistably attractive to one another," Hammond said after reviewing the documents.

Blog

A blog (a portmanteau of the term web log) is a discussion or information site published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries ("posts") typically displayed in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first. Until 2009 blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often were themed on a single subject. More recently "multi-author blogs" (MABs) have developed, with posts written by large numbers of authors and professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, interest groups and similar institutions account for an increasing proportion of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into societal newstreams. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users. (Previously, a knowledge of such technologies as HTML and FTP had been required to publish content on the Web.)
Although not a must, most good quality blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via GUI widgets on the blogs, and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. In that sense, blogging can be seen as a form of social networking. Indeed, bloggers do not only produce content to post on their blogs but also build social relations with their readers and other bloggers.

Many blogs provide commentary on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries; yet still others function more as online brand advertising of a particular individual or company. In education blogs can be used as instructional resources. These blogs are referred to as an Edublog. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (art blogs), photographs (photoblogs), videos (video blogs or "vlogs"), music (MP3 blogs), and audio (podcasts). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.

Ceratostigma

Ceratostigma (pronounced /ˌsɛrətɵˈstɪɡmə/, from the Greek Κερατόστιγμα), or Leadwort, Plumbago, is a genus of eight species of flowering plants in the family Plumbaginaceae, native to warm temperate to tropical regions of Africa and Asia. Common names are shared with the genus Plumbago.

They are herbaceous plants, subshrubs, or small shrubs growing to 0.3–1 m (0.98–3.3 ft) tall. The leaves are spirally arranged, simple, 1-9 cm long, usually with a hairy margin. Some of the species are evergreen, others deciduous. The flowers are produced in a compact inflorescence, each flower with a five-lobed corolla; flower colour varies from pale to dark blue to red-purple. The fruit is a small bristly capsule containing a single seed.