A fascinating article about a fascinating place. If you have Google Earth installed, enter ‘Gobekli Tepe, Turkey’ to check it out from the air.

For the old Kurdish shepherd, it was just another burning hot day in the rolling plains of eastern Turkey. Following his flock over the arid hillsides, he passed the single mulberry tree, which the locals regarded as ‘sacred’. The bells on his sheep tinkled in the stillness. Then he spotted something. Crouching down, he brushed away the dust, and exposed a strange, large, oblong stone.

The man looked left and right: there were similar stone rectangles, peeping from the sands. Calling his dog to heel, the shepherd resolved to inform someone of his finds when he got back to the village. Maybe the stones were important.
[…]
To date, 45 of these stones have been dug out – they are arranged in circles from five to ten yards across – but there are indications that much more is to come. Geomagnetic surveys imply that there are hundreds more standing stones, just waiting to be excavated.

So far, so remarkable. If Gobekli Tepe was simply this, it would already be a dazzling site – a Turkish Stonehenge. But several unique factors lift Gobekli Tepe into the archaeological stratosphere – and the realms of the fantastical.

The first is its staggering age. Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old.

That means it was built around 10,000BC. By comparison, Stonehenge was built in 3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC.

Gobekli is thus the oldest such site in the world, by a mind-numbing margin. It is so old that it predates settled human life. It is pre-pottery, pre-writing, pre-everything. Gobekli hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past.

Paul Harvey receives the Presidential Medal Of Freedom

And now, the rest of the story…

Paul Harvey, the news commentator and talk-radio pioneer whose staccato style made him one of the nation’s most familiar voices, died Saturday in Arizona, according to ABC Radio Networks. He was 90.

Harvey had been forced off the air for several months in 2001 because of a virus that weakened a vocal cord. But he returned to work in Chicago and was still active as he passed his 90th birthday. His death comes less than a year after that of his wife and longtime producer, Lynne.

“My father and mother created from thin air what one day became radio and television news,” Paul Harvey Jr. said in a statement. “So in the past year, an industry has lost its godparents and today millions have lost a friend.”

At the peak of his career, Harvey reached more than 24 million listeners on more than 1,200 radio stations and charged $30,000 to give a speech. His syndicated column was carried by 300 newspapers.

In 1976, Harvey began broadcasting his anecdotal descriptions of the lives of famous people. “The Rest of the Story” started chronologically, with the person’s identity revealed at the end. The stories were an attempt to capture “the heartbeats behind the headlines.”

In 2000, at age 82, he signed a new 10-year contract with ABC Radio Networks. This listener will certainly miss him greatly.

Found by Mike Westerfield.

I can assure you, this will not be what it looks like.

Hearst developing its own e-reader, for periodicals – CNET News — Apparently the company is not losing ENOUGH money with the SF Chronicle and the Seattle P-I, so it has decided to get into the miserable e-book business. Hopefully, for the sake of Hearst Co., this will just be a private label deal that will not affect the bottom line. Somehow, though, I suspect they will still lose money with this turkey.

Hearst, one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, announced on Friday that it has developed an electronic reader for newspapers and magazines, the way Amazon.com’s new Kindle does for books.

The news, first reported by Fortune magazine, is really significant, as Hearst owns about 16 daily and 49 weekly newspapers, and has a strong influence on hundreds of magazines. Examples of those include the San Francisco Chronicle, Oprah Winfrey’s O, and Cosmopolitan.

It’s unclear if the device Hearst has been working on has anything to do with the eReader that Plastic Logic unveiled recently, but its principle seems the same. It’s a handheld device used to read digital content, much like the Kindle. The main difference would be that Hearst’s e-reader has a much larger size to accommodate the format of newspapers and magazines.

It’s also speculated that Hearst’s e-reader is going to be physically flexible and even foldable. The first version would come in black and white, with a later model coming in color and even with video playback capability.

You are going to have to eventually deal with this 13-year-old kid. He’s now a best-selling author. He’s a “conservative” here explaining its meaning. When you run into a “Conservative” ask him/her why, if it’s all about individual rights and the principles of personal responsibility, exactly why is every Conservative up in arms over California’s proposal to legalize marijuana. Does it make any sense when benchmarked against these conservative principals?

Found by Micah Phillips.