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Friday, May 17, 2013

Texas grandfather survives massive tornado

Ethan Jones (center) and family friend German Hernandez help clear out Bill Jones' destroyed home on Thursday.??

CLEBURNE, Texas?Living in ?Tornado Alley,? 77-year-old Bill Jones has heard the blare of civil defense warning sirens more times than he can count. But on Wednesday night it was the mighty oak trees in his yard that finally persuaded him to take cover.

?They were swirling every which way,? Jones said of the 40-year-old trees. ?We knew it was pretty serious the way the wind was blowing.?

The hallway where the Jones family escaped the twister. (Jason Sickles/Yahoo News)

Jones, his wife, Nadine, and their daughter and son-in-law hurried into an interior hallway, slamming a door shut in the nick of time.

?We saw the chimney come crashing down through the ceiling,? Jones said.

For a harrowing 20 minutes, they hunkered down in the 3-by-5-foot space where family photos on the wall kept watch over them.

?My wife was praying pretty loud,? Jones said. ?We were all scared.?

Outside the hallway, their home of 41 years was being butchered by what many residents and storm spotters described as a milewide twister.

?When I first saw it, my heart almost stopped,? storm chaser Mike Casey told Yahoo News.

At least 10 tornadoes touched down across North Texas on Wednesday evening. In Cleburne, where scores of homes were damaged but no lives lost, forecasters said early reports had the tornado packing winds of 136 to 165 mph.

[Photos: See images from the Texas tornado outbreak]

Casey and a fellow storm chaser were behind a thunderstorm that had already spawned a deadly twister in nearby Granbury when a flash of lightning revealed the dark beast in front of them.

?We were freaking out a little bit,? he said.

So were Jones? grandsons, who live two miles away and feared the twister was headed for Jones' home.

?We tried calling him and couldn?t get him on the phone,? said Ty Jones, 19. ?We could see the actual funnel. It was huge.?

Bill Jones, a retired loan officer, didn?t need to see it to know what was happening.

?The boards were rattling,? he said. ?You could hear everything crackling and falling apart.?

The tornado wrecked the family's home of 41 years. (Jason Sickles/Yahoo News)

He and his family emerged from the hallway unscathed, but they found the roof gone and nearly every window in the red-brick home blown away. The trees that had warned him of the tragedy to come were toppled like toothpicks.

Jones is insured, but he doubts the house in which he and Nadine raised two children can be saved.

?We?ve done a lot of living here,? he said, at times fighting back tears. ?It?s the worst thing that?s ever happened to me.?

Many of their possessions and family heirlooms now litter the house. Wading through his den, Jones picks up a soggy book cover and then puts it back down.

?I don?t even know where to start,? he said.

But his family did. With the help of friends, his grandsons spent Thursday morning hauling away the chimney bricks which came close to claiming their grandfather?s life.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/texas-grandfather-describes-surviving-massive-tornado-202913001.html

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7 ?Smart? Credit Card Tips That Aren't | Connecticut Consumer ...

There?s a lot of advice floating around out there about how to manage your credit cards and other debts to maximize your credit score.

The trouble is, not all this wisdom is created equal, and some tips intended to help your credit can actually have the opposite effect.

Here are seven supposedly ?smart? tips we?ve heard bandied about recently that generally ought to ignored.

Story by Martha White for Time.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

The Decision To Delay Divorce: 3 Ways Couples ... - Psych Central

Should You Delay Divorce? 3 Ways Couples Put It Off This guest article from YourTango was written by Abby Rodman.

A therapist I know once suggested that staying?married?is a choice you make on a daily basis.

She said that every morning when you wake up and look over at your snoring spouse, you?re?deciding ? on some level ? to?stay married?one more day. This isn?t a psyche-challenging exercise if you?re in a good, or good enough, marriage. It?s an autopilot decision you don?t even know you?ve made.

But if you?re wondering daily whether you?re?in the right marriage, this decision becomes a gut-wrenching task that occupies?every?waking thought.

You?re consumed with the realization that your marriage is on the low end of the proverbial marital satisfaction spectrum. All the more confusing is that you may find yourself moving up and down that spectrum like a zipline gone haywire. One day the marriage seems almost tolerable, the next you?re fantasizing about running out for milk and never coming back.

You know you?re unhappy in your marriage when you?re always wondering whether or not you?re happy. Happily married people aren?t asking themselves if they?re happy. They just are. And admitting to yourself that you?re unhappy in your relationship is not going to top your list of life?s great moments. The realization that you have to end your marriage is painful and the timing never feels right. Between your kids? soccer schedules, your full-time job, your sick mother-in-law, your niece?s upcoming wedding, your partner?s perpetual underemployment and your second mortgage, there?s always some excuse to delay the inevitable.

In my psychotherapy practice, clients often ask me when they?ll be completely sure that it?s time for a?divorce. I tell them that only they can answer that.?I also tell them that ready-to-divorce folks often describe a feeling of desperation that engulfs them in a way they?ve never experienced before. ?I felt like if I?didn?t get out, I was going to die,? clients say. Their lives start to feel more like death.

Recently, a client told me she wanted to wait until she was sure she?d have no regrets about her decision whatsoever. I told her that?s impossible. Why? Because it?s impossible to hurt the people important to you and not have some lingering doubt about your decision. It?s impossible to assign your kids the designation of being ?from a broken home? and not have some lasting sadness.

But here?s the reality: that doesn?t mean your decision to?divorce?is wrong. And although it?s imperative to take your time making this decision, folks often get mired in time-wasting efforts that do nothing but delay the inevitable. In fact, there are three things people do routinely that keep them imprisoned in pre-divorce misery. If deciding to divorce is taking you much longer than you think is healthy or necessary, ask yourself these questions:

1. Are you trying to convince your spouse that your perspective of the marriage is the ?right? one?

Your marriage has a unique story and the two people in it have very different versions to tell. In unhappy unions, these versions are often very different. If you?re expending a lot of energy trying to convince your spouse that your story of the marriage is the right version, do both of you a favor and stop. He doesn?t see it your way and he isn?t going to. Rehashing the story of when your marriage went wrong isn?t useful, it?s painful and destructive. And, in reality, there?s truth in both of your stories. It?s like when police interview witnesses of a violent crime and no one can agree on what color shirt the perpetrator was wearing. It?s all about perspective. Just agree to disagree.

2. Are you trying to convince your spouse that staying in the marriage (or leaving it) is the best decision?

Often when?couples?are considering divorce, one partner wants to leave and the other wants to hang in there and try to make it work. If you have a partner who adamantly wants out, there?s little chance you?re going to convince him otherwise. You can pull out all the stops trying to change his mind but at some point, you have to accept his decision and?find a way to move on. You?re also not going to convince your partner that divorce is for the best when he?s sure that it will destroy his life. That?s what usually makes divorce so contentious. You each want a vastly different outcome. So don?t wait for your spouse to give you the green light; you?re not going to get it.

3. Are you trying to get your spouse to singularly take the blame for the demise of the marriage?

If you?re endlessly passing the baton of blame back and forth, you?re wasting precious time. You?ve both played a role in the disintegration of the marriage. In the end, does it really matter who shoulders the blame? Instead, work on creating a post-divorce financial plan and focus on helping your kids through the transition. No?family?court judge has the time or resources to consider how he didn?t come to your father?s funeral or that you sexted with the pool boy at the country club. Don?t whittle away your energy trying to convince yourself or others whose fault all of this is. No-fault divorce laws exist for a reason.

Ultimately, the decision to divorce can only come from you. No therapist in the world can, or should, tell you if or when it?s the right choice for you. What I can offer you, though, is this:?it?s time to divorce when you have tried everything to keep your marriage together and nothing has worked. It?s time to divorce when divorcing is perpetually on the table as a possibility: happily married people don?t talk about divorcing. It?s time when you can?t imagine the rest of your life with this person, when he makes your life into sadness with no end in sight. It?s time when, yes, your life starts to feel more like death.

More divorce advice from YourTango:

Contributed by YourTango.com, an online magazine dedicated to love, life and relationships. From dating to marriage, parenting to empty-nest, relationship challenges to relationship success, YourTango is at the center of the conversations that are closest to our over 7 million readers' hearts. With daily contributions from our Experts, we have a little something for everyone looking to create healthier lives. We're excited to offer our contributions to the PsychCentral community, and invite you to visit us on YourTango.com.

Like this author?
Catch up on other posts by YourTango Experts (or subscribe to their feed).

????Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 12 May 2013
????Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.

APA Reference
Experts, Y. (2013). Should You Delay Divorce? 3 Ways Couples Put It Off. Psych Central. Retrieved on May 16, 2013, from http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/05/15/should-you-delay-divorce-3-ways-couples-put-it-off/

Source: http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/05/15/should-you-delay-divorce-3-ways-couples-put-it-off/

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How Einstein's theory of special relativity helped find a new planet

To find the planet, astronomers used Einstein's theory as it pertains to the intensity of a beam of light. The method could add more exoplanets to a growing list, no 'wobble' or 'transit' required.

By Pete Spotts,?Staff writer / May 14, 2013

Kepler space telescope is designed to search for Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy. The telescope has been in space since 2009, but scientists keep finding new ways to use it ? even using special relativity ? to find extra-solar planets.

Courtesy of NASA / AP

Enlarge

With a little help from Einstein's theory of special relativity, astronomers have discovered a planet orbiting a star some 2,000 light-years away using a new approach that was barely a gleam in its proposers' eyes a decade ago.

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The planet is a bit larger and about twice as massive as Jupiter. It orbits its sun-like star once every 1.5 days. The team making the discovery estimates the planet's temperature at a searing 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit.

On one level, such "hot Jupiters" are a dime a dozen these days. Because they are massive and close to their host stars, they are the easiest planets to spot with virtually every planet-hunting technique astronomers have used to date.

What sets this discovery apart, however, is that the planet is the first to have been found through a process that in some ways could simplify planet hunting, researchers say. Its effectiveness is limited to big planets orbiting close to their stars, the team reporting the discovery acknowledges.

But it also holds out the hope of finding such planets when the parent stars may be too faint for other, currently used techniques. This opens the possibility of adding many more extra-solar planets to a catalog that now tops 800 of them.

No need to hunt for the wobble a planet's gravity imparts to its star's spectrum. No need to wait for a planet to pass in front of its star, known as a transit.

Instead, the team looked for a combination of three relatively small effects that wax and wane throughout a planet's orbit around a star. This delivers a different signal to a planet-hunting device like NASA's Kepler spacecraft than the eclipsing planet, or transit method, delivers, notes David Latham, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a member of the team discovering the planet.

"The transits last just a short time, just a couple of hours," Dr. Latham writes in an e-mail. But the effects the team tracked "rise and fall continuously through the entire orbital period of the planet, roughly 36 hours, so it?s not hard to distinguish these phenomena."

And it can detect planets that don't transit their stars.

The approach was conceived 10 years ago by Harvard University astrophysicist Avi Loeb and Scott Gaudi, now an assistant professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University in Columbus, who took a cue from Albert Einstein.

One prediction of Einstein's theory of special relativity is that when an object is moving at a pace close to the speed of light, any light it emits appears more intense along the object's line of motion, forming a beam. To an observer watching the object approach, the light looks brighter than it would if the object were stationary.

The effect is most pronounced in powerful astronomical events such as gamma-ray bursts, in which matter emitting the gamma rays is accelerated to 99.9 percent of the speed of light, Dr. Loeb explains.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/s7W_P2kW5VE/How-Einstein-s-theory-of-special-relativity-helped-find-a-new-planet

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Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Billy Crystal Enters Winter's Discontent

Source: Columbia Pictures
May 13, 2013

Billy Crystal is attached to star in the upcoming comedy Winters Discontent as a widower who moves into a reputed active adult community in hopes of reinvigorating his sex life. Frank Oz will direct the comedy. The announcement was jointly made today by Doug Belgrad, president of Columbia Pictures, and Steve Bersch, president of Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions, Atlas Charles Roven, and Sierra/Affinitys CEO Nick Meyer.

Written by Paul Fruchbom, Winters Discontent was featured on Hollywoods The Black List, famously comprised of highly anticipated screenplays.

Commenting on the announcement, Roven said, Were thrilled by the way this project is coming together. We are big believers in the humor and the emotion in this story and we think that Frank and Billy have a terrific take on the material that will connect with audiences everywhere.

The film will be produced by Atlas Entertainment with Charles Roven and Alex Gartner serving as producers. Executive producers are Nick Meyer, Marc Schaberg, Kelly McCormick and Jake Kurily. Sam Dickerman is overseeing the project for Columbia Pictures.

Sony Pictures will distribute the film domestically and has also acquired rights in select international territories. Sierra Pictures will finance the film and Sierra/Affinity will handle additional foreign sales on the title in Cannes.

(Photo Credit: WENN.com)

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1927462/news/1927462/

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Mum and dad dinosaurs shared the work

May 15, 2013 ? A study into the brooding behaviour of birds has revealed their dinosaur ancestors shared the load when it came to incubation of eggs.

Research into the incubation behaviour of birds suggests the type of parental care carried out by their long extinct ancestors.

The study aimed to test the hypothesis that data from extant birds could be used to predict the incubation behaviour of Theropods, the group of carnivorous dinosaurs from which birds descended.

The paper, out today in Biology Letters, was co-authored by Dr Charles Deeming and Dr Marcello Ruta from the University of Lincoln's School of Life Sciences and Dr Geoff Birchard from George Mason University, Virginia.

By taking into account factors known to affect egg and clutch size in living bird species, the authors -- who started their investigation last summer at the University of Lincoln's Riseholme campus -- found that shared incubation was the ancestral incubation behaviour. Previously it had been claimed that only male Theropod dinosaurs incubated the eggs.

Dr Deeming said: "In 2009 a study in the journal Science suggested that it was males of the small carnivorous dinosaurs Troodon and Oviraptor that incubated their eggs. Irrespective of whether you accept the idea of Theropod dinosaurs sitting on eggs like birds or not, the analysis raised some concerns that we wanted to address. We decided to repeat the study with a larger data set and a better understanding of bird biology because other palaeontologists were starting to use the original results in Science in order to predict the incubation behaviour of other dinosaur species. Our analysis of the relationship between female body mass and clutch mass was interesting in its own right but also showed that it was not possible to conclude anything about incubation in extinct distant relatives of the birds."

Palaeobiologist Dr Ruta was involved in mapping the parental behaviour in modern birds on to an evolutionary tree.

Dr Ruta said: "As always in any study involving fossils, knowledge of extant organisms helps us make inferences about fossils. Fossils have a unique role in shaping our knowledge of the Tree of Life and the dynamics of evolutionary processes. However, as is the case with our study, data from living organisms may augment and refine the potential of fossil studies and may shift existing notions of the biology and behaviour of long extinct creatures."

Dr Birchard added: "The previous study was carried out to infer the type of parental care in dinosaurs that are closely related to birds. That study proposed that paternal care was present in these dinosaurs and this form of care was the ancestral condition for birds. Our new analysis based on three times as many species as in the previous study indicates that parental care cannot be inferred from simple analyses of the relationship of body size to shape, anatomy, physiologyand behaviour. Such analyses ought to take into account factors such as shared evolutionary history and maturity at hatching. However, our data does suggest that the dinosaurs used in the previous study were likely to be quite mature at birth."

The project has helped in understanding the factors affecting the evolution of incubation in birds. More importantly it is hoped that the new analysis will assist palaeontologists in their interpretation of future finds of dinosaur reproduction in the fossil record.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/C4VlUKoqrpI/130514213109.htm

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Google intros Android Studio, an IDE for building apps

On stage at I/O today, Google just announced Android Studio, an integrated development environment for building apps. Based on IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition, this new environment works as a WYSIWYG for creating applications, essentially, letting you make changes and get a preview in real time, boosting productivity and making it easier to build nice-looking apps with a bit less effort. There's a wide variety of emulators for previewing apps, so even if you don't have a particular device on hand, you can still make sure everything's working as intended. Also on display today was a new development console, offering up optimization tips, revenue graphs, beta-tester control and usage metrics pulled from analytics. All of these features will make things easier to manage for developers, giving them more time to create more polished apps that work well on a variety of Android devices.

Gallery: Google I/O 2013: Android Studio and Google Play metrics