Reuters: CGGVeritas wins $140 mln Qatar contract.
Green Gabbro scores a trifecta with this series of posts --
The Igneous Petrology of Ice Cream.
The Metamorphic Petrology of Ice Cream.
The Sedimentary Geology of Ice Cream.
Thomas L. Friedman, NYT: A Biblical Seven Years.
"... the first rule of holes is that when you're in one, stop digging. When you see how much modern infrastructure has been built in China since 2001, under the banner of the Olympics, and you see how much infrastructure has been postponed in America since 2001, under the banner of the war on terrorism, it's clear that the next seven years need to be devoted to nation-building in America."
Houston Chronicle: For sale downtown, one noted building.
"Built in 1921 for Exxon Mobil predecessor Humble Oil, the block-long building was redeveloped in 2003 into a Courtyard by Marriott and Residence Inn by Marriott...."
NYT: After Glory of a Lifetime, Asking 'What Now?'
"Some athletes who have reached the pinnacle of their sports in the Beijing Games have rich lives awaiting at home, budding careers, university studies, families and children.... But many others have surged to worldwide glory that will be short-lived, if intensely emotional, and they will soon be engulfed by the fog of open-ended uncertainty known as ordinary life."
LiveScience: Cooking and Cognition: How Humans Got So Smart.
"For a long time, we were pretty dumb. Humans did little but make ‘the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years,’ he said. Then, only about 150,000 years ago, a different type of spurt happened -- our big brains suddenly got smart. We started innovating. We tried different materials, such as bone, and invented many new tools, including needles for beadwork. Responding to, presumably, our first abstract thoughts, we started creating art and maybe even religion."
TG Daily: Surprise, surprise -- U.S. broadband is slow.
"A file that takes four minutes to download in South Korea would take nearly an hour and a half to download in the U.S. using the average bandwidth. Japanese users leaves U.S. users behind with an eye-popping 63.60 Mb/s download link. This means that Japanese can download an entire movie in just two minutes, as opposed to two hours or more here in the U.S." ...
"While providers such as Time Warner Cable, AT&T or Comcast are trying to squeeze more customers in their antiquated networks and are more focused on topics such as speed throttling rather than improving their infrastructure, other nations are slowly but surely running away with greater bandwidths that are likely to enable new services and new business opportunities."
Funny or Die: Paris Hilton Responds to the McCain Ad.
"I'm Paris Hilton and I approved this ad because I think it's totally hot."
Houston Chronicle: A Main Street eyesore.
"Sears' unsightly fortifications hide a gorgeous Art Deco building, a store that, in its day, marked the height of luxury. In 1939, when the Main Street Sears opened, Main at Wheeler seemed a world away from downtown, where all of Houston's other major depart-ment stores clustered. To lure shoppers away from their accustomed haunts, the chain created a store that the Houston Chronicle called ‘one of the finest in the South or Southwest.’"
Boston Globe: Large Hadron Collider nearly ready.
"The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27 kilometer (17 mile) long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, is nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests."
> You need to look at the pictures to envision how large this enterprise is.
