The powerful earthquake that smashed buildings, cracked roads and twisted rail lines around the New Zealand city of Christchurch also ripped a new fault line in the Earth's surface, a geologist has said. At least 500 buildings, including 90 in the downtown area, have been designated as destroyed by the 7.1-magnitude quake that struck at 4:35 a.m. September 3 near the South Island city of 400,000 people. Most other buildings sustained only minor damage. See images at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100905/ap_on_re_as/as_new_zealand_earthquake
2010 significant earthquakes http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqinthenews/

BOOK ADDICTS by Martha Esbin (a cinquain with five eight-syllable lines.)
Book addicts fear having no books,
take extra books on trips in case
they run out, store books on the floor,
have books in each room of the house,
make up reading lists for themselves.

Win an Academy Award and you’re likely to live longer than had you been a runner-up.
Interview for medical school on a rainy day, and your chances of being selected could fall. Such are some of the surprising findings of Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier, a physician-researcher and perhaps the leading debunker of preconceived notions in the medical world. Academy Award winners live an average of three years longer than the runners-up. A potential explanation for the longevity of Academy Award winners could be an added measure of scrutiny, a public expectation of healthier living. In the Canadian Medical Association Journal in December, Dr. Redelmeier examined University of Toronto medical school admission interview reports from 2004 to 2009. After correlating the interview scores with weather archives, he determined that candidates who interviewed on foul-weather days received ratings lower than candidates who visited on sunny days. In many cases, the difference was significant enough to influence acceptance. Dr. Redelmeier was the first to study cellphones and automobile crashes. A paper he published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1997 concluded that talking on a cellphone while driving was as dangerous as driving while intoxicated. His collaborator, Robert Tibshirani, a statistician at Stanford University, said the paper “is likely to dwarf all of my other work in statistics, in terms of its direct impact on public health.” In preparation for a recent interview in his modest office in the sprawling hospital complex, Dr. Redelmeier had written on an index card some of his homespun philosophies. “Life is a marathon, not a sprint,” he read, adding, “A great deal of mischief occurs when people are in a rush.” Another Redelmeier philosophical pearl is “Do not get trapped into prior thoughts. It’s perfectly O.K. to change your mind as you learn more.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/science/31profile.html

There are hundreds of sign languages. Wherever there are communities of deaf people, you'll find them communicating with a unique vocabulary and grammar. Even within a single country, you can encounter regional variations and dialects -- like any spoken language, you're bound to find people in different regions who communicate the same concept in different ways. It may seem strange to those who don't speak sign language, but countries that share a common spoken language do not necessarily share a common sign language. American Sign Language (ASL or Ameslan) and British Sign Language (BSL) evolved independently of one another, so it would be very difficult, or even impossible, for an American deaf person to communicate with an English deaf person. However, many of the signs in ASL were adapted from French Sign Language (LSF). So a speaker of ASL in France could potentially communicate clearly with deaf people there, even though the spoken languages are completely different.
http://people.howstuffworks.com/sign-language.htm

Why B-Schools Have an Edifice Complex
Yale School of Management is planning a glittering $180 million structure designed by Lord Norman Foster, who built London’s “Gherkin” tower. The new building, scheduled to open in 2013, will help the school keep pace with its rivals, said Dean Sharon Oster. “You can’t be in a dump if everyone else is in a spectacular building,” Oster said. “The better the experience people have, the better they feel about the place, the more likely it will be that they would support it at some point,” said Robert Dolan, dean of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, in Ann Arbor, which opened a 270,000-square feet (25,084 square meter), $145 million building in 2009. Since the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania opened its 324,000-square foot, $140 million Jon M. Huntsman Hall in 2002, rival business schools have scrambled to keep up. The University of Chicago opened its $125 million Harper Center in 2004, while Michigan’s building debuted last year. Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Business, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will open new facilities this year, and Stanford Graduate School of Business, near Palo Alto, California, will follow in 2011.
Along with Yale, Columbia Business School in New York and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, in Evanston, Illinois, are also planning new buildings.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-25/harvard-business-school-drives-yale-and-mit-s-edifice-complex.html

Each morning sees some task begun, each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done, has earned a night's repose.
The Village Blacksmith by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) American poet