Super Bowl ads spark controversy for HomeAway and Groupon
The pitch for HomeAway.com touts the benefits of renting a home on a trip vs. staying in a hotel room. During the ad, a baby (played by a doll) is accidentally slammed against a glass wall in a cramped, simulated hotel room in a lab setting. Though the infant was clearly not real and labeled "test baby," the ad has been slammed by those who think showing child abuse -- even simulated -- for entertainment is irresponsible. The story quoted a HomeAway press release that said: "We used the test baby scene to create a 'Super Bowl-worthy' moment that breaks through the clutter of so many ads. While everyone loves babies and wouldn't want to see a real infant get mistakenly flung into the air, we hope viewers will get a good laugh from our test baby's unfortunate flight. The comic situation is used to highlight the fact that families, particularly those with children, could use a little extra space when traveling." However, today I was taken aback to receive an email HomeAway, inviting me to go to its website and play the ad, or plug in various endings, including one in which the test baby smashes through the glass wall and is decapitated. The social network-powered discount buying service Groupon has been slammed for its irreverent take on the political struggle in Tibet. The 30-second spot, directed by Christopher Guest of Best in Show and This is Spinal Tap, starts with visuals of snow-capped mountains, smiling girls in ethnic dress and Lhasa's Potala Palace as actor Timothy Hutton intones, "the people of Tibet are in trouble." But it ends with Hutton sitting in a Himalayan restaurant in Chicago, enjoying an "amazing fish curry" thanks to a 50% discount through Groupon. "The juxtaposition of this somber aspect of the Tibetan issue with Tibetan ability to make 'amazing fish curry' in a way trivializes the experience of the Tibetan people.
http://travel.usatoday.com/destinations/dispatches/post/2011/02/homeaways-smushed-baby-super-bowl-ad-creates-controversy/141996/1

James Buchanan Eads was born, May 23, 1820, in Lawrenceburg, Indiana and died March 8, 1887, in Nassau, Bahamas. Eads was an engineer known for the Eads Bridge, a triple-arch steel bridge over the Mississippi River that connects East St. Louis, Illinois to St.. Louis, Missouri. Eads also worked to create a channel into New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico that would be navigable year round by means of jetties. Eads mother named him after her cousin, Congressman and later President James Buchanan. His early life was spent moving among larger cities while his father pursued many failed business ventures. By the time Eads was a teenager he lived in St. Louis and had lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky. His education initially came from reading the books of his first employer, a dry-goods merchant in St. Louis. As a young adult he signed on as the purser of a steamboat. While working on the Mississippi Eads noticed the great loss of goods that came from the many riverboat wrecks. The Mississippi River was a dangerous place to navigate, filled as it was with debris called snags. Eads, at the age of 22, decided that he could devise a means to salvage steamboat accidents. He invented a boat equipped with a diving bell that allowed him to walk on the river bottom. He called his boat a submarine, although only the diving bell was submersible. His invention proved successful as Eads recovered cargoes from the river bottom. During the twelve years he operated his salvage boat he made a fortune. He took his earnings and settled down to establish a glass manufacturing plant in the West, but was ruined by the Mexican War. Returning to the salvage business Eads steadily improved his innovation and built more salvage boats. Aware that control of the country's river systems would important to both sides in the Civil War, Eads proposed the U.S. government invest in the development of steam-powered, ironclad warships. Eads made his proposal before the war, but his idea was coolly received. When he was awarded a contract, he employed upwards of 4,000 men to build the U.S. ironclad armada that would prove decisive in Union efforts against Forts Henry and Donelson, at Memphis, Island No. 10, Vicksburg, and Mobile Bay. In a remarkable feat Eads turned out his first ironclad 45 days after he began production. The ironclad idea would be adopted by the Confederacy and both sides would improve on Eads' idea throughout the war. After the war Eads found a new project, the spanning of the Mississippi with a suitable bridge to carry everything from people to trains. The self-trained engineer proposed a triple-arch design fabricated from steel. Each span was roughly 500 hundred feet and rested on piers resting on bedrock some 100 feet beneath the river bottom. The building of the arches involved steel supplied by Andrew Carnegie's steel works. Eads required that the 18 inch diameter hollow tubes conform to a test strength of 60,000 pounds. Many times during construction steel was returned to be re-rolled so that it might meet Eads' exacting standards. Keeping the shipping lanes open was necessary during construction, so Eads designed a cantilever system to support the unjoined arches. A system of pulleys stretched over the piers and supported the arches. Eads was also innovative in that he employed a threaded iron plug to close the arches. He allowed five inches on each arch to be used for threading the plug and closing the distance between the arches. The Eads Bridge was the largest of its kind and quickly became world renowned. The Eads Bridge opened in 1874, but little time passed before Eads found his next project, creating a year-round navigation channel for the city of New Orleans. Employing a system of jetties Eads allowed the river's natural flow to carve a permanent channel by 1879. Other projects he embarked on included promoting a ship-carrying railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in Mexico, as a more efficient alternative to the Panama Canal, and various installations and docks in places as diverse as Mexico, England, and Canada. http://www.museum.state.il.us/RiverWeb/landings/Ambot/TECH/TECH20.htm
When Eads was finished, he had created the largest steel structure in the world, and his work ushered in the age of the great steel bridges.
The Wall Street Journal February 5, 2011

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies from some 100 countries, one from each country. ISO is a non-governmental organization established in 1947. The mission of ISO is to promote the development of standardization and related activities in the world with a view to facilitating the international exchange of goods and services, and to developing cooperation in the spheres of intellectual, scientific, technological and economic activity. ISO's work results in international agreements which are published as International Standards. Shouldn't the acronym be " IOS " ? Yes, if it were an acronym - which it is not. In fact, "ISO" is a word, derived from the Greek isos, meaning "equal ", which is the root of the prefix " iso-" that occurs in a host of terms, such as " isometric " (of equal measure or dimensions - Shorter Oxford English Dictionary) and " isonomy " (equality of laws, or of people before the law - ibid.). From "equal" to "standard", the line of thinking that led to the choice of "ISO" as the name of the organization is easy to follow. http://trace.wisc.edu/docs/taacmtg_sep96/iso.htm

More than 1000 great buildings from around the world and across history are listed and illustrated at: http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/ In addition to buildings, you will find Statue of Library, Stourhead Garden, Great Wall of China and Stonehenge.

I searched rhythmic isometric expecting to find something on music. Instead I found an interesting page with exaamples of isometric, heterometric, normative, quantitative and variable poems from RAID:
Restrictions, Adaptations, Innovations and Derivations The Poets' Reference and Skill Building Site. http://raid.layliturgy.org/?p=3577

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York. Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, p. 135 Thanks, Beth.

The original sense of the word haywire was 'light baling wire, as used for binding hay'. Haywire was used, especially in logging camps, to refer to any substandard thing, or a poorly equipped outfit. The use probably combines two ideas: the use of haywire for makeshift repairs, thus signifying any broken-down or defective thing, and, less prominently, the use of haywire in place of a heavier wire, thus suggesting cheapness and low quality. A slightly different sense than 'substandard' is 'out of order, proper condition, or control; ruined'. Used of people, this itself has the subsense 'mentally deranged; crazy'. Though the word haywire in the literal sense 'light baling wire' is first recorded in 1917, the expression haywire outfit 'poorly equipped logging company' is found in 1905, suggesting that the literal haywire is older still, but unrecorded in print or undiscovered by lexicographers until later.
http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19980721