Breaking News

Uncategorized

When stars are viewed on a human timescale, they appear to never change

During one of my recent night sky tours, an elderly guest gazed into the sky and asked if the stars ever move. He said the constellations look the same now as when he was a child, and he was convinced that nothing in the heavens ever changes. It was an excellent observation but one that didn’t consider an important fact: Human time scales are considerably different than cosmic time scales. Even the healthiest of humans will live at most about a century, and during our lives, we measure time in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades. The cosmos, on the other ...

Legacy Lore Podcast highlights genealogy stories

The recent conference of the National Genealogical Society, held in Fort Wayne, Indiana, just a block away from the Allen County Public Library’s Genealogy Center, the world’s second-largest genealogy library. In the changed post-pandemic world of genealogy events, this NGS is what counts for a large gathering of more than a thousand people (There’s still the massive RootsTech conference annually in Salt Lake City, but that’s as much about entertainment as it is about genealogy). The conference had great sessions, some live and others prerecorded, and most of the sessions are ...

Managing online medical portals

Dear Heloise: There was a reader who was having difficulty keeping track of the different patient portals for each of her doctors when she wanted to email them or check an appointment or a test result. She indicated that she knew how to use the portals once she navigated to the appropriate one for each doctor; it was just that she had doctors who used different portals, and it was hard to remember which portal to go to for each doctor. Here’s my hint that works great every single time: Log on to your computer and go to the desktop where all your icons are located. Right-click and ...

Items from Aesthetic Movement more ornate than Arts & Crafts

The rallying cry of the Aesthetic Movement was “art for art’s sake.” Born in the mid-1800s in Britain, the movement was a response to the Industrial Revolution and the perceived ugliness and loss of craftsmanship that was the price for increased production and convenience. There was considerable overlap with the Arts and Crafts movement; William Morris is considered a proponent of both. Like Arts and Crafts, the Aesthetic Movement drew inspiration from the past (for example, the pre-Raphaelite painters) and from foreign influences, like Japanese art. Both movements also ...

Trump announces $700M in support for coal industry

President Donald Trump is again seeking to boost the struggling U.S. coal industry, announcing a plan Thursday to spend nearly $700 million to support coal-fired power plants and coal exports. Trump said the administration will use authority under a Cold War-era national defense law to support 13 coal plants across the country and help build coal plants in Alaska and West Virginia — the first new U.S. coal plants since 2013. The money will also help restart a shuttered coal-fired power plant in Maryland and support construction of a long-delayed coal export terminal in Oakland, ...

Top Court affirms telecom regulation

The Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration Thursday in upholding the power of federal regulators to enforce data privacy laws on telecommunications companies. The 8-1 decision preserved one of the Federal Communications Commission’s key tools, though the companies also won a concession from the Republican administration that could shift the regulatory landscape. The appeal from telecommunications giants Verizon and AT&T challenged a combined $100 million in penalties imposed after the agency determined that the companies had failed to safeguard customer location ...