Adam calls Blake an 'idiot' on 'The Voice'

TV

Craig Berman TODAY contributor

14 hours ago

NBC

Adam Levine and Blake Shelton had a bit of a tiff on "The Voice."

Blake Shelton often comes across as a laid-back dude who stopped by ?The Voice? stage on a lark and is just hangin? out, listening to music and trading insults with friends before going home to drink some beers on his porch. But as Tuesday night showed, even he can lose his cool when he finally gets bored with the back-and-forth barbs.

It all started when "The Voice" coaches were trying to say nice things about C. Perkins to give him a faint bit of hope to cling to in the final moments before Usher kicked him off the show. Blake asked him what the ?C? stood for.

Adam Levine responded, ?It?s C because it sounds cool, man. It?s like if your name was B, you?d be so much cooler than Blake. ?I?m B. Shelton. What?s up?? ?

The audience laughed, and Adam pressed on. ?Maybe you should try that. You need to try something.?

?Kiss my (expletive), Adam,? Blake retorted. And the crowd ?Ooooooooooohed.?

?That?s a lot of smart talk for a guy whose initials are B.S.,? Adam shot back once the noise subsided.

Host Carson Daly put an end to that spat by interrupting. ?We?re wondering who won that knockout round,? he said, killing the moment but reminding everyone that, you know, two actual singers were onstage awaiting their verdict, and maybe everyone should move things along so ?Grimm? could start on time.

Related: It's good to be a stolen woman on 'The Voice'

It seemed like a random thing for Blake to get snippy about, but that wasn?t the first or only dig Adam sent his way Tuesday as the country star and Usher conducted their knockout rounds and selected their singers for the live shows. Adam had earlier called Blake an "idiot" for sending Luke Edgemon home instead of Holly Tucker.

?He?s a whole unique thing. He?s original. He?s different,? Adam said of Luke.

Sure, but the hopeful decided to sing ?Teenage Dream? and sounded too much like a lounge singer. And ? more to the point ? Luke?s not a country singer.

Blake is. So are Holly, Danielle Bradbery, Justin Rivers and The Swon Brothers, the four acts Blake is bringing to the next round. Sensing a theme here? Much like ?Adam?s Angels,? the four women who advanced on Mr. Levine?s team Monday night, Blake clearly had a vision of what he wanted his team to look like, and that?s what he?ll take into next week?s live shows.

Usher went in the opposite direction. With Michelle Chaumel, Cathia, Vedo and Josiah Hawley, he?s got a little bit of everything on his squad. Michelle is super entertaining and has the whole nerd-power thing going for her. Vedo?s a quality R&B performer. Cathia, who Usher stole from Shakira, has a big voice in two languages. And Josiah ... well, he?s a good-looking dude who can sing a little bit, and those kind of folks have been known to do well in singing competitions.

We?ll see how Usher and fellow newcomer Shakira fare once the voters start having a say.

Source: http://www.today.com/entertainment/blake-shelton-adam-levine-feud-voice-6C9692841

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SV Angel Team Counters Chamath Palihapitiya's Startup Skepticism: ?Innovation Is Not Dead'

Michael Arrington began moderating a panel at Disrupt NY today with Ron Conway, David Lee, and Brian Pokorny of SV Angel by noting that he was "pissed off" by investor Chamath Palipitiya's comments on Monday that startup quality is at an "all time low." "I don't agree," Lee said, explaining that he thinks the ideas in the last 12-18 months have been bigger and bolder than those before them.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/QCiSpPX1dH8/

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Maybe supervolcano not to blame for our near-extinction

NASA / GSFC / MITI / ERSDAC / JAROS, and the U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

About 70,000 years ago, the Toba supervolcano erupted in what is now Indonesia. After the eruption, the ground collapsed and left behind a depression called a caldera, which is not filled by Lake Toba and volcanic domes that have emerged in the
time since, as seen in this set of images taken Jan. 28, 2006, by NASA's Terra satellite and then stitched together.

By Charles Q. Choi
LiveScience

A supervolcanic eruption thought to have?driven humanity extinct may not have endangered the species after all, a new investigation suggests.

Supervolcanoes?are capable of eruptions dwarfing anything ever seen in recorded history, expelling thousands of times more magma and ash than even a Mount St. Helens or Pinatubo. A supervolcanic eruption could wreak as much havoc as the impact of a mile-wide asteroid by blotting out the sun with ash, reflecting its rays and cooling the Earth ? a phenomenon called a "volcanic winter." A dozen or so supervolcanoes exist today, some of them lying at the bottom of the sea.

The largest supervolcano eruption of the past 2.5 million years was a series of explosions of Mount Tobaon the Indonesian island of Sumatra about 75,000 years ago. Researchers say Toba spewed out a staggering 700 cubic miles (2,800 cubic kilometers) of magma, equivalent in mass to more than 19 million Empire State Buildings. By comparison, the infamous blast from the volcanic Indonesian island of Krakatoa in 1883, one of the largest eruptions in recorded history, released about 3 cubic miles (12 cubic km) of magma.

About the same time the eruption took place, the number of modern humans apparently dropped cataclysmically, as shown by genetic research. People today evolved from the few thousand survivors of whatever befell humans in Africa at the time. The giant plume of ash from Toba stretched from the South China Sea to the Arabian Sea, and in the past investigators proposed the resulting volcanic winter might have caused this die-off. [Countdown: History's Most Destructive Volcanoes]

However, recently scientists have suggested that Toba did not sway the course of human history as much as previously thought. For instance, prehistoric artifacts discovered in India and dating from after the eruption hinted that people coped fairly well with any effects of the eruption.

Now researchers have found that the evidence shows Toba didn't actually cause a volcanic winter in East Africa where humans dwelled.

"We have been able to show that the largest volcanic eruption of the last 2 million years did not significantly alter the climate of East Africa," said researcher Christine Lane, a geologist at the University of Oxford.

Ash in Africa
Lane and her colleagues examined ash from Toba recovered from mud extracted from two sites at the bottom of Lake Malawi, the second largest lake in the East African Rift Valley.

"We first started looking for the Toba ash a few years back, but it's a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack, so it took a while," Lane told OurAmazingPlanet. "Between myself and my co-author Ben Chorn, we systematically processed every centimeter of sediment between 24 to 46 meters (78 to 150 feet) depth in the central basin core. The layer is so small that if we leave any gaps in our search, we could miss it completely."

Their analysis discovered that a thin layer of ash in this sediment about 90 feet (27 m) below the lake floor was from the last of the Toba eruptions, known as Youngest Toba Tuff.

"The Toba super-eruption dispersed huge volumes of ash across much of the Indian Ocean, Indian Peninsula and South China Sea," Lane said. "We have discovered the layer of volcanic ash was carried about twice the distance as previously thought, over more than 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles)."

The amount of ash found in the Malawi sediment core (a cylindrical log of sediment drilled from the ground), was more than the scientists expected to find.

"I was surprised to find so much ash in the Lake Malawi record," Lane added. "The ash is very tiny, composed of shards of volcanic glass smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Nevertheless, in a lot of records I have worked on previously, even within just a few hundreds of miles of an eruption center, we sometimes only find less than 100 shards of glass within a gram of sediment. In Malawi, we have thousands of shards of glass per gram, which really shows how voluminous the Youngest Toba Tuff was."

Quick recovery
If the area had seen dramatic cooling because of all the ash spewed into the atmosphere, living matter near the lake surface would likely have died off, significantly altering the composition of the lake's mud. However, when the researchers investigated algae and other organic matter from the layer that contained the ash from Toba, they saw no evidence of a significant temperature drop in East Africa. Apparently, "the environment very quickly recovered from any atmospheric disturbance that may have occurred," Lane said.

But these results, detailed online April 29 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, don't mean that super-eruptions aren't as big a risk to Earth's denizens as previously suggested.

"It is important to realize that every volcanic eruption is different and the Youngest Toba Tuff provides only one example," Lane said. "The impact of an eruption depends not just on the amount of ash erupted, but also the composition and volume of aerosols, how high in the atmosphere the ash is injected and the meteorological conditions at the time."

As for what might explain the near-extinction humanity apparently once experienced, perhaps another kind of catastrophe, such as disease, hit the species. It may also be possible that such a disaster never happened in the first place ? genetic research suggests modern humans descend from a single population of a few thousand survivors of a calamity, but another possible explanation is that modern humans descend from a few groups that left Africa at different times.

Future research will analyze what effects Toba may or may not have had on other lakes in East Africa.

"Whilst from this we can hypothesize that the global climatic impact was not as dramatic as some have suggested, we will need to find similarly high-resolution records of past climate from other regions that also contain Youngest Toba Tuff in order to definitively test this," Lane said.

Follow OurAmazingPlanet?@OAPlanet, Facebook?and Google+.Original article at LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/653377/s/2b5260f1/l/0Lscience0Bnbcnews0N0C0Inews0C20A130C0A40C290C179738840Emaybe0Esupervolcano0Enot0Eto0Eblame0Efor0Eour0Enear0Eextinction0Dlite/story01.htm

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Join the Engadget HD Podcast live on Ustream at 8:30PM ET

It's Monday, and you know what that means; another Engadget HD Podcast. We hope you will join us live when the Engadget HD podcast starts recording at 8:30PM. If you'll be joining us, be sure to go ahead and get ready by reviewing the list of topics after the break, then you'll be ready to participate in the live chat.

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Acer Aspire V5 11.6-inch notebook leaked with $450 price tag, unexpected AMD Temash chip

While AMD announced its new Temash APU (alongside others) at this year's CES, the only device we've seen sporting it was an intriguing reference hybrid that made the rounds at the show. Now, details of an Acer Aspire V5 notebook have emerged, indicating the company is preparing its first Temash-powered device for general consumption. Acer already has a trio of Aspire V5 models with Intel Core processors and NVIDIA handling the graphics, but a half-complete product page for an unannounced V5-122P-0643 swaps those components out for AMD's wares. Formally called the AMD A6-1450, the Temash APU combines a quad-core 1GHz processor -- or 1.4GHz in "Turbo" state -- with a Radeon HD 8280 GPU. When put into tablets, it has an unusually low, sub-5W power envelope that allows for passive cooling. While we don't know exactly what wattage this Acer notebook will have, the presence of Temash should bode well for battery life. Head past the break for more details.

Filed under: Laptops, AMD, Acer

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Syrian prime minister survives Damascus bombing

By Dominic Evans

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syria's prime minister survived a bomb attack on his convoy in Damascus on Monday, as rebels struck in the heart of President Bashar al-Assad's capital.

Six people were killed in the blast, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Previous rebel attacks on government targets included a December bombing which wounded Assad's interior minister.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the bombing, which he described as a "terrorist attack."

As prime minister, Wael al-Halki wields little power but the attack highlighted the rebels' growing ability to target symbols of Assad's authority in a civil war that, according to the U.N., has cost more than 70,000 lives.

Assad picked Halki in August to replace Riyadh Hijab, who defected and escaped to neighboring Jordan just weeks after a bombing killed four of the president's top security advisers.

Monday's blast shook the Mezze district soon after 9 a.m. (2.00 a.m. EDT), sending thick black smoke into the sky. The Observatory said one man accompanying Halki was killed as well as five passers-by.

State television showed firemen hosing down the charred and mangled remains of a car. Close by was a large white bus, its windows blown out and its seats gutted by fire. Glass and debris were scattered across several lanes of a main road.

"Dr. Wael al-Halki is well and not hurt at all," state television said.

It later broadcast footage of Halki, who appeared composed and unruffled, chairing what it said was an economic committee.

In comments released by the state news agency SANA but not shown on television, Halki was quoted as condemning the attack as a sign of "bankruptcy and failure of the terrorist groups", a reference to the rebels battling to overthrow Assad.

Mezze is part of a shrinking "Square of Security" in central Damascus, where many government and military institutions are based and where senior officials live.

Sheltered for nearly two years from the destruction ravaging much of the rest of Syria, it has been sucked into violence as rebel forces based to the east of the capital launch mortar attacks and carry out bombings in the center.

CHEMICAL WEAPONS

Assad has lost control of large areas of northern and eastern Syria, faces a growing challenge in the southern province of Deraa, and is battling rebels in many cities.

But his forces have been waging powerful ground offensives, backed by artillery and air strikes, against rebel-held territory around the capital and near the central city of Homs which links Damascus to the heartland of Assad's minority Alawite sect in the mountains overlooking the Mediterranean.

As part of that counter-offensive, Assad's forces probably used chemical weapons, the United States and Britain have said.

However, the trans-Atlantic allies, whose 2003 invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein was based in part on flawed intelligence about an Iraqi program of weapons of mass destruction, have been cautious in their accusations.

Ban said on Monday that investigators have been gathering and analyzing available information on alleged chemical attacks in Syria, but full access to the war-torn country is essential for a "credible and comprehensive inquiry.

Assad's government has refused to give the U.N. inspection team the kind of unfettered access inside Syria that Ban is demanding. As a result, the team has yet to deploy to Syria.

A Western diplomat said British officials had shown the head of the U.N. inspection team, Ake Sellstrom of Sweden, evidence on which London based its assertion that there was "limited but growing" evidence of chemical weapons use - possibly the nerve agent sarin - by Syrian troops.

But Sellstrom found the evidence inconclusive, said the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity.

President Barack Obama repeated U.S. concerns about Syrian chemical weapons in a phone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, the White House said, adding that the two leaders agreed to stay in contact.

The United States is trying to determine the facts around alleged Syrian use of chemical weapons. Last week U.S. officials said they had "varying degrees of confidence" that such weapons were used in Syria, which if proven with certainty could trigger unspecified U.S. action against the Syrian government.

Despite congressional pressure to do more to help the rebels, the U.S. president has made clear he is in no rush to intervene on the basis of preliminary evidence.

A U.N. team of experts has been waiting to travel to Syria to gather field evidence, but has yet to win agreement from Syrian authorities who want it to investigate only government accusations of chemical weapon use by rebels in Aleppo province.

Russia, which has criticized Western and Gulf Arab support for the anti-Assad fighters, said that attempts by Western countries to expand the U.N. inquiry to cover rebel accusations of Syrian government use of chemicals in Homs and Damascus mounted to a pretext to intervene in the civil war.

The U.N. said in February that around 70,000 people had been killed in Syria's conflict. Since then activists have reported daily death tolls of between 100 and 200.

Five million people have fled their homes, including 1.4 million refugees in nearby countries, and financial losses are estimated at many tens of billions of dollars.

The Beirut-based U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia estimates that 400,000 houses have been completely destroyed, 300,000 partially destroyed and a further half million have suffered some kind of structural damage.

(Additional reporting by Thomas Grove in Moscow and Michelle Nichols and Louis Charbonneau in New York; Editing by Alistair Lyon, Robin Pomeroy and Paul Simao)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/syrian-prime-minister-survives-bomb-attack-tv-072735283.html

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David Brooks: Health care chaos ahead | Wichita Eagle

It was always going to be difficult to implement Obamacare, but even fervent supporters of the law admit that things are going worse than expected.

Implementation got off to a bad start because the Obama administration didn?t want to release unpopular rules before the election. Regulators have been working hard but are clearly overwhelmed, trying to write rules that influence the entire health care sector ? an economic unit roughly the size of France. Republicans in Congress have made things much more difficult by refusing to provide enough money for implementation.

By now, everybody involved seems to be in a state of anxiety. Insurance companies are trying to put out new products, but they don?t know what federal parameters they have to meet. Small businesses are angry because the provisions that benefited them have been put on the back burner. Health care systems are highly frustrated. They can?t plan without a road map. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., one of the authors of the law, says he sees a ?huge train wreck? coming.

I?ve been talking with a bipartisan bunch of health care experts, trying to get a sense of exactly how bad things are. In my conversations with this extremely well-informed group of providers, academics and former government officials, I?d say there is a minority, including some supporters of the law, who think the whole situation is a complete disaster. They predict Obamacare will collapse and do serious damage to the underlying health system.

But the clear majority, including some of the law?s opponents, believe that we?re probably in for a few years of shambolic messiness, during which time everybody will scramble and adjust, and eventually we will settle down to a new normal.

What nobody can predict is how health care chaos will interact with the political system. There?s a good chance Republicans will be able to use unhappiness with what is already an unpopular law to win back the Senate in 2014. Controlling both houses of Congress, they will be in a good position to alter, though not repeal, the program.

The law?s biggest defenders will then become insurance companies and health care corporations. Having spent billions of dollars adapting to the new system, they are not going to want to see it repealed or replaced.

The experts talk about the problems that lie ahead in cascades. First, there is what you might call the structural cascade. Everything is turning out to be more complicated than originally envisioned. The Supreme Court decision made the Medicaid piece more complicated. The decision by many states not to set up exchanges made the exchange piece more complicated. The lines of accountability between, for example, state and federally run exchanges have grown byzantine and unclear.

A law that was very confusing has become mind-boggling. That could lead people to freeze up. Insurance companies will hesitate before venturing into state exchanges, thereby limiting competition and choice. Americans are just going to be overwhelmed and befuddled. Many are just going to stay away, even if they are eligible for benefits.

Then there is the technical cascade. At some point, people are going to sit at computers and enroll. If the data process looks like some 1990s glitchmonster, if information doesn?t flow freely, then the public opinion hit will be catastrophic.

Then there is the cost cascade. Nearly everybody not in the employ of the administration agrees this law does not solve the cost problem, and many of the recent regulatory decisions will send costs higher. A study in California found that premiums could increase an average of 20 percent for people not covered by federal subsidies. A study by the Society of Actuaries found that by 2017 costs could rise 32 percent for insurers covering people in the individual exchanges, and as high as 80 percent in states like Ohio.

Then there is the adverse selection cascade. Under the law, young healthy people subsidize poorer, sicker and older people. But the young may decide en masse that it is completely irrational for them to get health insurance that subsidizes others while they are healthy. They?ll be better off paying the fines, if those are even enforced, and opting out. Without premiums from the young, everybody else?s costs go up even higher.

Then there is the provider concentration cascade. The law further incentivizes a trend underway: the consolidation of hospitals, doctors? practices and other providers. That also boosts prices.

Overall, it seems likely that in some form or another Obamacare is here to stay. But the turmoil around it could dominate politics for another election cycle, and the changes after that ? to finally control costs, to fix the mind-boggling complexities and the unintended consequences ? will never end.

Regulatory regimes can be simple and dumb or complex and sprawling. When you build complex, it takes a while to work through the consequences.

David Brooks writes for the New York Times.

Source: http://www.kansas.com/2013/04/30/2782789/david-brooks-health-care-chaos.html

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