May 18, 2006

By Sheila Lennon / The Providence (R.I.) Journal

2:31 p.m. Thursday (Blogroll)

65 on May 24: WICN in Worcester's annual Bob Dylan Birthday Bash is live tonight at 7:30:

...Two RI based bands will come together in WICN's performance studio to celebrate the life and the music of the man. Fred Wilkes, Michele Wilson, Rich Sage and Kenny Johnson from Harmony roots rock band Five Of A Kind will join with Rick Bellaire, John Dunn and Vincent Pasternak of Providence based acoustic band Folks Together to perform the songs, and host Nick DiBiasio will read interesting facts about Bob Dylan's life and excerpts from his book "Chronicles, Vol 1."

The public radio station is at 90.5 FM and streams online.

DaVinci Code glossary: The aptly named Katherine Monk of CanWest publishes Forgotten your Fibonacci sequence? A film primer on the Montreal Gazette site.

Here's you'll find cilice, cryptex and my old favorite, the Fibonacci sequence. She doesn't quite get it, though (you can tell):

Fibonacci sequence: A progression of numbers in which the term is equal to the sum of the preceding two terms. In the book, we're given a Fibonacci sequence of 1-1-2-3-5-8-13-21, which is supposed to help our two heroes solve an important puzzle.

The number of clockwise and counterclockwise spirals in a sunflower are always two consecutive Fibonacci numbers.

More: Plants that are formed in spirals, such as pinecones, pineapples and sunflowers, illustrate Fibonacci numbers. Many plants produce new branches in quantities that are based on Fibonacci numbers.

Fibonacci numbers in flower petals:

3 Lilies

5 Buttercups, Roses

8 Delphinium

13 Marigolds

21 Black-eyed susans

34 Pyrethrum

55/89 Daisies

We're talking the structure of nature here.

Fibonacci was actually Leonard of Pisa, and in the 1200s he was watching rabbits reproduce...

Bonus: A stunningly beautiful sunflower photo.

7:47 a.m.

Google Notebook; How to play spoons; Saudi king asks newspapers not to publish photos of women

Bloggers' tool: Google Notebook is a browser extension used to "add clippings of text, images and links from web pages."

The Google Operating System blog reviews it:

After you install the extension, go to a page, select a fragment from the page that can include images, right-click and choose "Note this". You'll see a very small windows in the bottom-right corner which will stay there even if you go to another page. You can open or close the notebook from the status bar.

If you maximize the notebook, a new tab will open, but the new page will have all your notes in full size. You can edit the notes with a rich-text editor, print the notebook and even create more than one notebook. If you have more than one notebook, you can move a note from one notebook to another using drag and drop, but the experience isn't great (in Firefox, it doesn't work most of the times). Divide a note into sections to organize your notes, especially if you want to print them.

Download it here.

Kitchen instruments: How to play the spoons. Let your kids try this.

Eyes and minds: Saudis Nix Pictures of Women in Newspapers. Reuters:

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) - King Abdullah has told Saudi editors to stop publishing pictures of women as they could make young men go astray, newspapers reported Tuesday.

The king's directive, made in a meeting with local editors, caused surprise as the monarch has been regarded a quiet reformer since he took office in the ultra-conservative country last August.

In recent months, newspapers have published pictures of women - always wearing the traditional Muslim headscarf - to illustrate stories with increasing regularity. Usually the stories have had to do with women's issues. The papers have also started publishing a range of views on causes that are not generally accepted in Saudi Arabia - such as women having the right to drive and vote.

The king told editors on Monday night that publishing a woman's picture for the world to see was inappropriate.

"One must think, do they want their daughter, their sister, or their wife to appear in this way. Of course, no one would accept this," the newspaper Okaz quoted Abdullah as saying.

"The youth are driven by emotion ... and sometimes they can be lead astray. So, please, try to cut down on this," he said."

Might he instead have said, "Please, try to see women as people"?

Western newspapers have for some time tried to include women and people of color in more news stories as part of covering the entire society. With such opposite and contradictory values, can there ever be understanding and detente with the Arab world?

Note: Crooks and Liars, a source of the Al Gore SNL video and others, is down today. algore.org and iFilm also have the Gore clip.