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Featured Term (selected at random):GILEAD 1. father of the valiant Jephthah (Judges 11:1), who led the Israelites in their victorious wars against the Ammonites and Ephraimites; 2. part of the territory given by Moses to Gad as his inheritance when the country was apportioned among Israel's tribes. It was a grain-producing region in the Jordan valley between the Yarmuk and Arnon rivers (Joshua 13:24-25). All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

Does U.S. President Obama have a foreign policy or should we call it a "dangerous farcical policy." Is he even control of the White House? By now, most people have heard the story of how, "11 Secret Service agents" and "as many as 10 U.S. military personnel," hired prostitutes, drank alcohol, and possibly used illicit drugs -- all in "security preparation" for the president to attend the Summit of the Americas in Columbia. Besides the security debacle, Obama's diplomatic effort, "wasn't exactly smooth sailing." But there's a subtle clincher to Obama's ridiculous Columbia trip which belies his true incompetency, a...

Well take just Texas for example. Superimpose Texas over Europe and even Adolph Hitler would have an inferiority complex... Now Texas is pretty big. But let's take Alaska all by itself and superimpose it on the lower 48. Line up the North Slope of Alaska with Minnesota and you end up with Juneau down in the Carolinas and the Aleutians run clear to the coast of Southern California! Well I just thought this was pretty darn impressive.

A fine new report from the Public Policy Institute of California updates what we know about the state's political geography. For decades, the political divide in California was between the Democratic north and the Republican south. But in recent times, analysts have talked about a blue Democratic coast vs. the red Republican inland. PPIC's new report concludes that the coast vs. inland explanation isn't exactly right. When you dig deeply into the numbers, the state's real political divide puts the two former rivals -- Los Angeles County and the Bay Area -- on one side of the partisan divide, and...

COMMENTARY | Proving again that one cannot make a dumb statement if one is a liberal Democrat, President Barack Obama recently had a news conference in Hawaii in which he suggested the 50th state of the union was "here in Asia." Obama has, from time to time, fractured his geography. In a speech in Iowa last year he referred to Europe as a country. Obama once referred to the 57 states of the Union he had visited at a campaign stop in Oregon. The media, when it notes them at all, tends to pass on the president's alternate geography without...

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, tucked away in the northwest corner of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, won the title of "Good Morning America's" Most Beautiful Place in America. Tens of thousands of viewers voted online for this Michigan park, which is one of the nation's best-kept secrets. The hidden gem boasts 64 miles of beaches along Lake Michigan, two islands, 26 inland lakes, more than 50,000 acres of land, and the monumental sand dunes from which it gets its name. In June, "GMA" set out in search of the most beautiful places in America. Viewers nominated their favorite places online, sending...

The late musician John Denver’s love of wilderness is driving an effort to name a peak on a prominent western Colorado mountain after him. But as it turns out, the peak’s location in a wilderness area poses a Rocky-Mountain-high obstacle to the undertaking’s success. Littleton resident J.P. McDaniel’s effort to get the eastern of the twin summits of Mount Sopris south of Carbondale named for Denver, who moved to the Aspen area as a young man, has drawn widespread media and online attention in recent weeks. The buzz has boosted McDaniel’s petition drive signatures by a couple thousand. It also...

UCLA students nearly predicted bin Laden's location May 4th, 2011 @ 7:29am By ksl.com SALT LAKE CITY -- A 2009 study by geography students at UCLA correctly predicted many things about where Osama bin Laden would be hiding. They worked on a class project and came up with a model to predict bin Laden's location. The students concluded: •He would not be living in a cold cave; instead he would be living in a city less then 200 miles away from Tora Bora, his last known location. •He would be living in a home with high ceilings and electricity. It...

Forget about Tokyo. Anyone having traveled from Paris through Belgium, the Netherlands and the Ruhr District in Germany (like I have) wouldn't be impressed by a small, rural Far-East Asian settlement like that. However, this part of the World isn't the only candidate to the title. Some experts would say the largest "cityscape" found on Earth is the Eastern Seaboard Conurbation of the United States of America extending from Maine down to Florida, housing around 110 million inhabitants. Personally, I've only visited the southern part of it (Fla.) and although there is plenty of farmland between cities like Miami and...

Found this rock formation on Google Maps that looks like a cat, and thought it was interesting. The letter 'N' also appears to be carved into the rock just to the left of the "cat." Another interesting land formation in the same area is the "hand of God glacier." http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3426890 Both of these land features are near Quttinirpaaq National Park, Baffin, NU, Canada

Children are to be taught about homosexuality in maths, geography and science lessons as part of a Government-backed drive to "celebrate the gay community". Lesson plans have been drawn up for pupils as young as four, in a scheme funded with a £35,000 grant from an education quango, the Training and Development Agency for Schools. The initiative will be officially launched next month at the start of "LGBT History Month" – an initiative to encourage teaching about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual issues. The lesson plans, spread across the curriculum, will be offered to all schools, which can choose whether...

What the world looks like in stereotypes

I confess--I had never heard the phrase "the Queen of the Sciences" until a few months ago. Even when I read it, it made no sense. They seemed to be talking about geography. What was all this??? Apparently, the wise and scholarly had much more respect for geography a thousand years ago than we do now. Once you start thinking about this decline--from Queen to corpse--you gain new insight into how radical (in the worst sense) our Education Establishment is. These people never saw a fact they didn't want to drop overboard in a deep part of the ocean. So...

State testmakers played favorites when quizzing high-schoolers on world religions -- giving Islam and Buddhism the kid-gloves treatment while socking it to Christianity, critics say. Teachers complain that the reading selections from the Regents exam in global history and geography given last week featured glowing passages pertaining to Muslim society but much more critical essay excerpts on the subject of Christianity. "There should have been a little balance in there," said one Brooklyn teacher who administered the exam but did not want to be identified. "To me, this was offensive because it's just so inappropriate and the timing of it...

The discussion on Book of Mormon geography was getting heated. Scholars gathered in Provo, Utah, to discuss their theories about where the events described in the Book of Mormon took place. Some placed the Nephite capital city Zarahemla in Mesoamerica, others in South America. Others argued for a setting in the American heartland. The president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints attended the two-day Book of Mormon convention. Although he found the discussion interesting, he was obviously concerned that people were getting a little too worked up about their geographic theories. He decided to intervene. The Book...

It has been more than half a century since the last big shift in thinking about Book of Mormon geography. Judging from the commotion in the blogosphere and on rival theorists' Web sites, a dramatically different -- and disputed -- theory is gaining traction among some of the LDS faithful. The theory, popularized by Rod Meldrum and Bruce H. Porter in the past three years, suggests that Book of Mormon events took place in the heartland of the United States, east of the Mississippi River from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. They have popularized the idea at...

Found an awesome geography game. Starts off easy and then gets harder at each level. You get credit for being close but need a minimum to advance to next round. Give it a try and post you score. My final score: 386,069 Final level: 10 Travel IQ:112

Migration: Geographies In Conflict by Aaron M. Renn 11/23/2009 It's an interesting puzzle. The “cool cities”, the ones that are supposedly doing the best, the ones with the hottest downtowns, the biggest buzz, leading-edge new companies, smart shops, swank restaurants and hip hotels – the ones that are supposed to be magnets for talent – are often among those with the highest levels of net domestic outmigration. New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Miami and Chicago – all were big losers in the 2000s. Seattle, Denver, and Minneapolis more or less broke even. Portland is the only proverbially...

Year after year surveys reveal that only 37 percent of young Americans know where Iraq is and a large minority cannot locate the Pacific Ocean on a map. Like clockwork, commentators then write how horrible it is that America is so geographically illiterate. While it is true that geographic ignorance is a big problem, these commentators do geography no favors. Geography has long been thought of as merely the memorization of places. This is how it is taught by many schools. The notion that geography is just a memory game and not a science led some of the nation’s finest...

This animated map provides a striking visual of employment trends over the last business cycle using net change in jobs from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on a rolling 12-month basis. We used this approach to provide the smoothest possible visual depiction of ongoing employment dynamics at the MSA level. By animating the data, the map highlights a number of concurrent trends leading up to the nation’s present economic crisis. The graphic highlights the 100 largest metropolitan areas so that regional trends can be more easily identified.

I came across some interesting Book of Mormon geography theories. Some of which I was familiar with and a few that were new to me. I found them interesting to read through. I’m sure there are more theories out there, but here are a few for you to read through. I’ve included links for more information on each theory on the titles of the theory. Mesoamerica Theory 1: Isthmus of Tehuantepec As you can see in this map, this theory is the one in which people believe the main location for the Book of Mormon is in Central America and...

Hideous monsters devouring ships? Old map symbols, correctly showing storm fronts & dangerous currents I’ve always been fond of maps, from those antique ones showing sea serpents and hideous monsters devouring ships in the vast expanses of the ocean, to those showing what the world looked like in the distant, and not so distant, past. Maps have, of course, been with us in one form or another, for a long time. Jerusalem is in the center - from "Itinerarium Sacrae Scipturae", by Heinrich Bunting, 1545-1606 Here’s a world map according to Posidonius, from around 150-130 B.C. - Ptolemy's version of...

NATO's new map game has horrible geography. China owns chunks of Pakistan and several countries are underwater. I hope their planning maps are better.

Green Schools, Greener Students by: Malcolm A. Kline, May 05, 2009 There’s been a rush to make public schools environmentally friendly lately, so much so that polls show that students are afraid that the earth is going to melt before they make it to the prom. “Green schools reduce toxins while increasing attendance, lowering illness rates and raising test scores,” said Sean Miller, Director of Education at Earth Day Network. “Students fare much better with green schools and so does the planet.” Meanwhile, actual knowledge of how the world works continues to disappear among public school students, so much so...

  In Search of Book of Mormon Geography The Book of Mormon is supposed to be a history of real people living in a real place. For the first 150 years of Mormonism's existence, everyone thought it was a story about a people who left the Middle East and came to South or Central America, and who fought wars clear up into New York state where their history was hidden in a hillside, inscribed on gold plates. Joseph Smith, in 1830, translated those plates, he said, by "the gift and power of God," into 1611 English from "Reformed Egyptian...

How was it that a German priest writing in Latin and living in a French city far from the coast became the first person to tell the world that a vast ocean lay to the west of the American continents? That is one of the bigger mysteries in the history of the Renaissance. But it is not the only one involving Martin Waldseemueller, a map-making cleric whose own story is sufficiently obscure that his birth and death dates aren't known for certain. Waldseemueller appears to have also known something about the contours of South America's west coast years before Vasco...

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain (Ariz.) told a campaign audience that charges he has a bad temper make him angry. “In fact, I had to deck one of my senate colleagues for calling me ‘Senator Hothead,’” McCain announced. “For me, fighting for this country and my beliefs isn’t just a figure-of-speech.” McCain argued that he is “the perfect candidate for those bitter Americans who cling to guns and religion and have antipathy toward those who hate our country.” Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) called McCain’s remarks “a vindication of my plan to rejuvenate America by sweeping aside the angry...

Quote: "It is wonderful to be back in Oregon," Obama said. "Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii, I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to visit, but my staff would not justify it."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The only surviving copy of the 500-year-old map that first used the name America goes on permanent display this month at the Library of Congress, but even as it prepares for its debut, the 1507 Waldseemuller map remains a puzzle for researchers. Why did the mapmaker name the territory America and then change his mind later? How was he able to draw South America so accurately? Why did he put a huge ocean west of America years before European explorers discovered the Pacific?... ... Although the map conceals many mysteries, one thing is clear: it represents a...

Everyone is having a good belly laugh at the expense of Lauren Caitlin Upton, the contestant in the Miss Teen USA pageant who imploded in a painful display of verbal and intellectual chaos in response to question about geographically challenged Americans. Lauren Caitlin Upton of Lexington, S.C., shown in this undated modeling photo. The 18-year-old has become national sensation after her gramatically challenged response to a question at the Miss Teen USA pageant in Pasadena, Calif., Aug. 24, 2007 (photo courtesy Locke Management) While everyone is fixated on the answer, no one has taken time to respond to the question...

The Miss Teen USA pageant contestant who became a YouTube sensation after butchering a question about why many Americans cannot find the U.S. on a world map says she was overwhelmed by her national television appearance and chalks up the experience to being “human.”

A Swansea University historian hopes to discover more about an ancient discipline which may have provided "the GPS system" of its day, 500 years ago. Dr Adam Mosley will study cosmography, a subject believed to combine geography, history and astronomy. He will also try to find out how it died out in around the 17th Century. The lecturer wants to discover more about its study and how strong its links were with the seafarers' art of navigating by the stars. The subject became popular around 500 years ago but died out and part of Dr Mosley's work will be to...

Science Daily — Although the discrepancy is not large, it is significant: Geodesists from the University of Bonn have remeasured the size of the Earth in a long lasting international cooperation project. The blue planet is accordingly some millimeters smaller than up to now assumed. The results are important, for example, to be able to demonstrate a climate contingent rise in sea level. View of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon. (Credit: Image courtesy of NASA/Johnson Space Center) The system of measurement used by the Bonn Geodesists is invisible. It consists of radiowaves...

With calm determination, 14-year-old Caitlin Snaring snared a title on Wednesday that only one other girl in geographic history has held: She won the National Geographic Bee.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Although the Global Positioning System has made meridians obsolete in mapmaking, a group of geographers used the GPS to mark the exact spot where the old prime meridian of Italy passed through the Vatican. Standing at the end of a technologically guaranteed straight line of flower pots, the geographers and Vatican officials dedicated a plaque marking the spot in the Vatican Gardens Feb. 23. A prime meridian is an arbitrarily determined line running around the globe from north to south; it is used to determine longitude as well as time zones. Although an international agreement was...

Map of NCAAF I-A Team Fan Areas Important: this map is highly inaccurate and should be understood only as a demonstration, and not as any kind of reliable data yet. It is based on only a few thousands of votes spread across all teams, across the country. Areas with virtually no data are shown in gray, and many boundaries are still expected to change their shape drastically. A map with more accurate boundaries will gradually emerge as the number of votes reaches the upper tens of thousands. Within the colored area associated with each team, more fans support that team...

Dave's in a sorry state BY DAVE BARRY (This classic Dave Barry column was originally published on Aug. 1, 1999.) Most Americans are pitifully ignorant of geography. This was clearly demonstrated recently when the Gallup Organization sent its pollsters to Chicago to ask randomly selected residents if they could name at least three of the six major continents. The results were shocking: Most of the pollsters never found Chicago at all; of those who did, all but one fell into the Chicago River. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident of American geographical ignorance. Just last month, the major U.S....

Liberals fly their colors, by Mike Rosen It was two years ago that North High School was the center of controversy over a foreign flag. A Mexican flag was given equal prominence with an American flag in a permanent wall display in the school lobby and in a social studies classroom. The teacher who hung the Mexican flag in his classroom said he wanted his students to feel welcome. This was a nice sentiment, but a direct violation of Colorado law. Although North High is almost 85 percent Hispanic, this is still an American school in the United States, funded...

July 07, 2006, 7:46 a.m. Failure of IntelligenceIf stupid hurt, we’d all be in a world of pain. Well, ow. By Denis Boyles Surely, after Christmas, the July 4th weekend must be the Internet equivalent of August in Paris. Nobody’s around but us tourists. So you may have missed the results of a poll published in the Daily Telegraph last weekend showing “Most Britons see America as a cruel, vulgar, arrogant society, riven by class and racism, crime-ridden, obsessed with money and led by an incompetent hypocrite.� Such is the fury of an ex-, I suppose, but it’s good...

The powerful earthquake that hit Indonesia was just the latest display of violent seismic activity on the archipelago, which stretches across one of the most unstable parts of the Earth's surface. The country's position on the planet's crust means it will continue to experience such catastrophes, just as it has done for the past 50 million years or so, according to seismologists. "The problem with Indonesia is that you have an area of intense seismic activity coinciding with a very densely populated part of the world," said Gary Gibson, professor of seismology at the RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. "It...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- After more than three years of combat and nearly 2,400 U.S. military deaths in Iraq, nearly two-thirds of Americans aged 18 to 24 still cannot find Iraq on a map, a study released Tuesday showed. The study found that less than six months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, 33 percent could not point out Louisiana on a U.S. map.

Governor Bill Owens of Colorado has cut through the cant about "free speech" and come to the defense of a 16-year-old high school student who tape-recorded his geography teacher using class time to rant against President Bush and compare him to Hitler. The teacher's lawyer talks about First Amendment rights to free speech but free speech has never meant speech free of consequences. Even aside from laws against libel or extortion, you can insult your boss or your spouse only at your own risk. Unfortunately, there is much confusion about both free speech and academic freedom. At too many schools...

School District to Taxpayers and Parents: Up Yours ..... and the Homeschooling Movement Gets a Yet Another Shot in the Arm: Here is yet another reason for parents to homeschool their children if at all possible (By the way, the story is hopelessly slanted -- The lecture was objectively biased; plus, the primary issue here is teaching the subject matter, and secondarily the political indoctrination Jay Bennish engaged in while not doing his job): Bennish to teach again Punishment not revealed; teacher returns MondayAn Aurora social studies teacher accused of giving a biased lecture that sparked national debate over academic...

Article Launched: 3/10/2006 01:43 PM Controversial teacher keeps job By DenverPost.com A Cherry Creek social studies teacher will not lose his job, after a student went public with a tape recording of controversial comments the teacher had made in class. Superintendent Monte C. Moses said Jay Bennish will be reinstated to his job at Overland High School, and will be teaching on Monday. At a news conference this afternoon, Moses said Bennish doesn't deserve to be praised, nor does he deserve to be fired. "Jay Bennish has promise as a teacher, but his practice and deportment need growth and refinement,"...

One of the biggest problems confronting higher education is the fact that most students entering colleges and universities lack basic social science skills and knowledge. In a recent survey of college students in Buffalo, for example, almost half did not know who George Pataki is. Eighty percent had no idea, correct or incorrect, as to what communism is. Nearly the same number of students couldn’t define capitalism. For whatever reason, social science education in America has collapsed at the high school level. For a democracy that relies on an informed electorate, such ignorance is toxic.

Graphic shown today on ESPN during World Baseball Classic had a list of the number of players from foreign countries, including the country of... Puerto Rico. What...did they forget the country of New Mexico? :)

LONDON, July 10 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – A U.S. author has launched a blistering attack on U.S. president George W. Bush’s war on terror, a U.K. newspaper reported Wednesday. In his latest book titled Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So Hated, Gore Vidal raised several question marks, U.K. daily newspaper the Daily Mirror reported. The outspoken 76-year-old said the U.S. provoked the September 11 attacks with its own military intervention in countries around the world, the paper said. Staunch democrat Vidal, a former White House aide to John F. Kennedy, insisted the U.S. should...

When and where on earth can you see the longest sunrise? And how long can you see it? Stumped? Well, then, sample another. What would you see from the moon more often: the sun or the earth? A five-member team of 14-to-17-year olds will hone their skills over the next 10 days to unravel a few more secrets that the skies hold. Their aim: to win as many medals as possible at the International Astronomy Olympiad that kicks off in Beijing on October 25. It will not be an easy task — they will be up against competition from over...

A few weeks ago, the web world was captivated by the stunning images produced by Google Earth, an interactive 3D model of the globe. The ground detail is a montage of satellite images, which means you can zoom in to very, very high detail. In some cities this is complemented by 3D models of individual buildings. And because it would be crazy not to, it can also be overlaid with road maps to give you directions from A to B. If you insist, it will even fly the route for you. It is certainly a far cry from the online...

Young members of the United States' geographic competition team, Karan Takhar, left, Andrew Wojtanik, center, and Jesse Weinberg, right, stand on the stage after winning the 7th National Geographic World Championship in Budapest, Hungary. A team of three American school students has won the National Geographic World Championship in Budapest, Hungary Thursday. The team from Russia came in second and Canada was third. Looking relieved three teenagers of the United States received the golden medals in an Olympic style ceremony at the end of the National Geographic World Championship in the Palace of the Arts in Budapest. They received them...