They seem small, insignificant, surreal. Guess what? That's exactly how we look to them. Here's our pale blue dot, from Saturn. You might have to squint.

The above image was released today by NASA; it was taken by the Cassini spacecraft, some 900 million miles from home. It's as stark a reminder as any of our place in the solar system, just one small star in someone else's sky.

It's also a rare find; it's very difficult to capture pictures of the Earth from this distance because we're so relatively close to the Sun.

Pointing sensitive detectors in direct view of that much brightness doesn't result in much of an image As NASA explains, this view came during an opportune moment, when Saturn had slipped behind the sun and shielded the view.

Want to feel even smaller? Here's the Earth next to the moon, also from Cassini.

An interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of “Infidel” • “From the perspective of the Arab leaders, reaching a two-state solution is to betray God. If you want peace and not merely a process, you must make peace with the people. The negotiators themselves are of no importance.”

There is something dignified in the quiet, determined manner of Ayaan Hirsi Ali as she rises from the audience and walks towards the podium to deliver her lecture. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s intricate history starts in Somalia, where she was born to a Muslim family. At the age of five she underwent female genital mutilation. By her teens she was a devout Muslim. In her early twenties, upon learning of plans for an undesirable arranged marriage, she made her way to Holland, where she applied for asylum. Hirsi Ali studied at Leiden University and began publishing critical articles about Islam, the condition of the Muslim woman, and so forth.

By all accounts, Shai Agassi, the founder and original CEO of Better Place, Israel's bankrupt electric car company, is an extremely charismatic man. His charm had politicians, venture capitalists, celebrities and non-automotive industry reporters slobbering over him. Everyone wanted to get their picture taken with the man who would transform Israel's auto industry into the first electric powered industry in the world and transform the start-up nation into the transportation hothouse for the world.

Agassi's vision was simple and easy to understand.

By 2020, half of Israel's cars would be battery powered electric cars supplied by his company, Better Place. We would replace our internal combustion engines, powered by oil produced by our worst enemies, with batteries produced by Better Place. Better Place would overcome the technological deficits of batteries that are only capable of powering a car for short distances by building battery changing stations throughout the country. Instead of filling up our tanks with gas, we would replace our battery.

And our enemies would go bankrupt.

Ship's cook Okene, 29, was on board the Jascon-4 tugboat when it capsized on May 26 due to heavy Atlantic ocean swells about 32 kilometres off the coast of Nigeria, while stabilising an oil tanker filling up at a Chevron platform.

The fish came in and began eating the bodies. I could hear the sound. It was horror.

Israeli intelligence intercepted communications between Egypt’s Nasser and Jordan’s King Hussein whereby the two, almost comically, tried to coordinate their storylines. Naturally, once the Israelis published the scheming exchanges, the full thrust of Arab mendacity came to fore.


The Six-Day War was actually a continuation of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. Israel decidedly won that war as well where the odds against her – 50 million versus 650,000 – were even more staggering than in 1967. Despite their overwhelming superiority in tanks, aircraft and artillery, the Arabs could not “save Palestine,” a phrase commonly employed by Arabs when talking to Western audiences in an effort to couch genocide (against Jews) in more palatable terms.

Though not quite a reality yet, this scenario isn’t too far off. In addition to dissolvable electronics, scientists have now built a biodegradable remote-controlled, power-harvesting circuit, described May 17 in Advanced Materials, and are already testing absorbable thermal electronics in rodents.

This biocompatible remote-controlled circuit is an important step toward building dissolvable electronics that could function as “electroceuticals,” devices that perform therapeutic roles and then disappear. Such roles could include stimulating nerve and bone growth, helping heal wounds, delivering drugs, or acting as antibiotics.

“In each case, the device needs to function only for a timeframe set by a healing process. As such, the ideal scenario is for the device to simply disappear afterward,” said John Rogers, a mechanical engineer at the University of Illinois. Last year, Rogers described the development of a water-soluble, silicon-based circuit that completely dissolves in water; earlier this year, his team produced tiny LEDs that can be injected into the brain.

The remote-controlled circuits are fashioned on super-thin silk and are responsive to radio frequencies. The team builds the capacitors, inductors, and resistors using water-soluble and biocompatible materials: silicon nanomembranes, which work as semiconductors; magnesium, which already plays an important role in biological systems; silicon dioxide or magnesium oxide as insulators; and silk, for the substrate upon which the circuits are crafted.

Though the boy naturally became completely dependent on others, his parents abandoned him and the Palestinian government refused to pay for his medical care. So, he now lives at Safra Children’s Hospital, in the Israeli city of Ramat Gan, where doctors began treating him when he was just an infant.

Mohammed spends his days undergoing treatment, getting around in a tiny wheelchair and learning how to use prosthetic limbs – and is cared for by his 55-year-old grandfather, Hamouda. The Israeli doctors have reportedly grown quite attached to the boy, and fundraise to cover the cost of his care, and which also allows him and his grandfather to live in the pediatric ward.


In 2012, Israeli authorities approved 91.5 percent of Palestinian applications from Gaza to receive medical care in Israel, a year in which a total of 219,469 Palestinian patients received treatment in Israeli hospitals - a number which includes over 20,000 children.

Here’s a list of the top ten things to eliminate from your vocabulary now. I’ve also included alternatives so that you can replace these habitual statements with phrases that will actually encourage intrinsic motivation and emotional connection.

“Good job!”

The biggest problem with this statement is that it’s often said repeatedly and for things a child hasn’t really put any effort into. This teaches children that anything is a “good job” when mom and dad say so (and only when mom and dad say so).

Instead try, “You really tried hard on that!” By focusing on a child’s effort, we’re teaching her that the effort is more important than the results. This teaches children to be more persistent when they’re attempting a difficult task and to see failure as just another step toward success.

“Good boy (or girl)!”

This statement, while said with good intentions, actually has the opposite effect you’re hoping for. Most parents say this as a way to boost a child’s self-esteem. Unfortunately, it has quite a different effect. When children hear “good girl!” after performing a task you’ve asked them for, they assume that they’re only “good” because they’ve done what you’ve asked. That sets up a scenario in which children can become afraid of losing their status as a “good kid” and their motivation to cooperate becomes all about receiving the positive feedback they’re hoping for.

Instead, try “I appreciate it so much when you cooperate!” This gives children real information about what you’re wanting and how their behavior impacts your experience. You can even take your feelings out of it entirely and say something like, “I saw you share your toy with your friend.” This allows your child to decide for himself whether sharing is “good” and lets him choose to repeat the action from his internal motivation, rather than doing it just to please you.

“What a beautiful picture!”

The picture caught the attention of international media, as initially it was thought that he was distancing himself from women in accordance with strict rules of gender segregation in public.

The New York Daily News later explained that the man was a Kohen, a descendant of the Jewish priests who presided over the Temple, and as the aircraft flew over a cemetery he covered himself in a plastic bag so he could remain pure. Under Jewish law, Kohanim are banned from going near cemeteries.
The Kohen, formerly a secular Jew who embraced Orthodox Judaism and asked to remain anonymous, told Ynet of his long service in the Israel Defense Forces, where he held sensitive posts. In 1983, as a show of appreciation, the Air Force commander gave him the "opportunity to study in a yeshiva at the expense of the Air Force, which paid my salary for the two and a half years I studied in the yeshiva."

After his studies, he returned to the army for 10 more years – "an unprecedented move in the Air Force," he says

The photo was the subject of public criticism and was shared and condemned on social networks.

Rabbi Yosef Brook, head of the Netivot Olam Yeshiva and the passenger's rabbi, criticized the media coverage of the photo and the public reaction to it, saying: "I am convinced that none of those who reacted is at (the Kohen's) personal or intellectual level."

Rabbi: Critics are primitives
Rabbi Brook, who heads a haredi yeshiva which is home to newly religious Jews, says that the passenger is a unique personality he has known for more than two decades, and that the halachic move was misunderstood by the critics, who he refers to as "primitives".

"I have known him for 25 years now. He is a retired lieutenant colonel who served in senior and classified positions in the Israel Air Force," the rabbi told Ynet.

"Before Passover he flew to Israel, and because of a change in the flight he found out that he would be flying over a cemetery. He consulted a rabbi, who ruled that although the plane was a closed place, there was impurity over the cemetery and in order to deal with it – he must reach a situation of a 'container with a lid fastened on it.'"

People who often say they’re "too busy" or "crazy busy" sound like buzzing busy signals. And when you start sounding like an appliance, it makes it hard to connect with you. My reaction to your busy signal is much like that of Mindy Kaling, who sees stress as non-conversation:
Likewise, going on about how busy you are isn’t conversation and doesn’t lead anywhere — except making your conversation partner bored, or worse, peeved. People who act super busy send the same message, making time spent with them never feel quite whole. Interestingly, I find that most people who are legitimately occupied — with their work, or family, or art, or what-have-you — rarely play the “too busy” card, or go out of their way to make time for meaningful connection exactly because they’ve been busy.

The Meaning Behind “Busy”

When you go on to other people, or to yourself, about being so busy, you’re often engaging in doublespeak. Let’s dig a little deeper to translate what you actually mean when you get in the habit of saying or acting like you’re too busy:

I matter. Being busy means I’m needed and significant in this great big universe. Though going around literally telling people, “I matter!” and expecting some sort of substantive conversation to result would be really weird, I’ll just say “I’m busy!” instead.

I am super-important. Doling out complaints and explanations about being too busy is the express line to a mini-ego trip. It’s going beyond “I matter” to “I matter… more than you” despite the fact that nobody ever wants to hear this.

I’m giving you an easy excuse. This is one of the easiest outs for stuff I don’t want to do. Alternatively, I’ve spent a lot of time being distracted or stuck, but this excuse allows me to feel OK with it.

I’m afraid. I keep relentlessly busy because I suffer from FOMO, or fear of missing out. I’m scared that I don’t matter, that I’m not important, that I’m not needed, so I’m going to spend my time on distracting stuff that doesn’t really matter, that’s not all that important, where I’m not actually needed.

I feel guilty. There’s fulfilling, meaningful stuff that I actually do want to do but I can rationalise it away instead of confronting challenges or changing direction. Alternatively, I think being busy is such a valuable quality that I’ll overbook myself to the point where I feel guilty for not getting to everything or for spending time on anything that doesn’t fit into a limited definition of “productive.”

The worship of busy-ness as such a virtue is where the trouble begins, providing the foundation to its indiscriminate use as a front or an excuse. It’s easy, even enticing, to neglect the importance of filling our time with meaning, thinking instead that we’ll be content with merely filling our time. We self-impose these measures of self-worth by looking at quantity instead of quality of activity.

Break Free

In the children’s book (that every adult should read), The Phantom Tollbooth, the protagonist Milo comes across the frightening, faceless Terrible Trivium, a “demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort, and monster of habit.” Milo and his friends fall under his spell, agreeing to perform busy-work like moving a huge pile of sand from one place to another, grain by grain, using a tweezer. The Terrible Trivium’s explanation for this terrible fate?
What a scary thought! So if you find yourself feeling frazzled, habitually explaining away things with a busy status, it’s probably time to slow down and pay attention to the important, difficult stuff. Examine what is keeping you so busy compared to what you really should and want to be doing.

Here are a couple ways to start:

Track yo’ self. In the quest to better connect your attention and action, do an attention audit. Track your time using a tool like Harvest or a time log spreadsheet. Break down how you spend time on the computer with RescueTime. Or see how you answer the questions of “What did you get done today?” and “What did you pay attention to today?” over time using iDoneThis.

Change your language. We like this tip from Laura Vanderkam. Instead of putting things in terms of time and activity, frame them in terms of priority:
Another thing you can do is once you have a clearer handle of your priorities and how you want to spend your energy, change your definition of “productivity” to encompass those things.

Press pause. Not only do we need to rest and renew, we also have to slow down and pause to acknowledge our feelings, celebrate our accomplishments, and gain some insight. Brené Brown explains how people stay busy out of habit and fear. She recommends letting go of “exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth” and allowing us to explore what matters:
Do less and feel more joy. The opposite of the fear of missing out, as Anil Dash so beautifully wrote, is the joy of missing out. Pay attention to what’s in front of you, and you’ll gain control and find joy.
Feel more joy. Learn how to do less. Stop spreading yourself so thin by saying “no” more, by saying “no” to being busy, and by meaning “yes” more fully.