April 2011
112 posts
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The Monkeys You Ordered: 4/26/11
themonkeysyouordered:
Overruled.
I think this is the hardest I’ve ever laughed at a The Monkeys You Ordered post.
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DNA tests link Southern leprosy cases to armadillo →
With some genetic sleuthing, scientists have fingered a likely culprit in the spread of leprosy in the southern United States: the nine-banded armadillo.
DNA tests show a match in the leprosy strain between some patients and these prehistoric-looking critters — a connection scientists had suspected but until now couldn’t pin down.
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Armadillos are one of the very few mammals that harbor...
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Founder of Bose donates stock to MIT →
Dr. Amar Bose ’51, Bose Corporation’s Founder, has given to MIT the majority of the stock of Bose Corporation in the form of non-voting shares.
MIT will receive annual cash dividends on those shares when dividends are paid by Bose Corporation; those cash dividends will be used by MIT to sustain and advance MIT’s education and research mission.
Magnanimous.
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William Shakespeare Presents Terminator the Second →
Terminator the Second is a project to recreate Terminator 2: Judgment Day as a play, with all dialog taken from Shakespeare works.
Did a spit take? Good, so did I.
Is this what it sounds like?
If it sounds like the story of a boy and his cyborg protector on the run from a soulless, shape-shifting assassin made of liquid metal, adapted for stage and told exclusively in the words of William...
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UX Myth #32: Success happens overnight →
Great post by Zoltán Gócza at UX Myths about how many “overnight successes” weren’t really overnight successes, actually taking years before being truly popular.
The fact is that it takes many years to be an overnight success even for internet entrepreneurs. Years of hard work learning and experimenting and many failures along the way. And sometimes pursuing a project almost...
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Experts: California Prop 8 judge's sexual... →
Remember California’s Prop 8? Somehow it’s been two and a half years since the state’s voters passed a constitutional amendment defining marriage as only being between a man and a woman. That proposition was overturned in 2010, and that decision is currently under appeal.
The judge in that case, Vaughn Walker, retired in February. During a farewell meeting earlier this month, he...
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Photographers recall Chernobyl's first days →
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster will be Tuesday the 26th. Anna Melnichuk of the Associated Press wrote a piece today about the photographers who first went to the site after the event.
Wearing a lead protective suit and placing his cameras in lead boxes, photographer Igor Kostin made a terrifying and unauthorized trip to the Chernobyl danger zone just a few days after a...
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Michael Chabon on "The Phantom Tollbooth" →
Michael Chabon:
To this day when I happen to write those or any other of the words that I remember having first seen in The Phantom Tollbooth, I get a tiny thrill of nostalgia and affection for the wonderful book, and for its author, and for myself when young, and for the world I then lived in.
It is truly difficult to sum up how I feel1 about this wonderful book and its equally wonderful...
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Jan Brewer vetoes birther, campus gun bills →
You may have heard that the governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, vetoed two bills on Monday. One of them would have required people running for President of the United States to prove U.S. citizenship to be on the state’s ballot. Hoorah and all that.
What you may not have heard, and what I certainly didn’t hear, is that there were more ways than just a birth certificate to prove...
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Marathon great Grete Waitz dies at 57 from cancer →
Grete Waitz, a Norwegian long-distance runner who won the New York City Marathon nine times, died on Tuesday of cancer.
A former Oslo schoolteacher, Waitz won her first New York City Marathon in 1978, setting a world best in 2 hours, 32 minutes, 30 seconds in her first attempt at running the distance. She went on to win eight more times, with her last victory coming in 1988.
She won the London...
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The MLB Dodgers
First, some background from Jon Weisman:
Marking an extraordinary and unprecedented moment in the history of the Dodgers, the office of Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig has announced he will appoint a representative to take over day-to-day operations of the franchise. Frank McCourt seemingly has had the keys to the kingdom taken away, with Dodger employees answering to a...
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For the First Time Ever, No Pulitzer Prize for... →
The Pulitzer Prize jury that reviewed the Breaking News Reporting category recommended three finalists to the Pulitzer Board. But for the first time ever, no entry won the category that recognizes local coverage of breaking news events.
This is the ninety-fifth year of the Pulitzer Prizes, and the first in which the one for breaking news reporting wasn’t awarded.
Of all of the Pulitzer...
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US suspends controller for watching movie on duty →
An air traffic controller has been suspended for watching a movie when he was supposed to be monitoring aircraft, deepening the Federal Aviation Administration’s embarrassment following at least five cases of controllers sleeping on the job.
In the latest incident, the controller was watching a movie on a DVD player early Sunday morning while on duty at a regional radar center near...
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Hand-washing rule cut out of Nevada patient safety... →
Here’s Frank X. Mullen of the Reno Gazette-Journal reporting on why you probably want to avoid receiving medical care in the state of Nevada for the foreseeable future:
A provision that would require health care workers to wash their hands when they move between patients has been cut out of a patient safety bill, an omission opposed by advocates for patients and the elderly.
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Assembly...
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Exclusive Footage From Inside Samsung's HQ →
Hey, it turns out this is how they churn out those Apple ripoffs all day long.
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11 ALIVE...NEED SMALL BOAT...KENNEDY →
On August 2nd of 1943, whilst serving as commander of the PT-109 during World War II, John F. Kennedy and crew were rammed by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri; their boat instantly halved by the impact and two of the crew killed. Six days later, stranded in the Solomon Islands with his fellow survivors, Kennedy carved the following message into a coconut shell and handed it to Biuku Gasa and Eroni...
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"Perform This Way" Cleared by Lady Gaga →
Weird Al:
Apparently the fact that she didn’t approve it was news to Lady Gaga herself!
Gaga’s manager has now admitted that he never forwarded my parody to Gaga – she had no idea at all. Even though we assumed that Gaga herself was the one making the decision (because, well, that’s what we were TOLD), he apparently made the decision completely on his own.
He’s sorry.
And Gaga...
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The Gaga Saga →
So Weird Al’s got a new album coming out:
I wrote and recorded what I thought was going to be the first single off of my new album: a parody of “Born This Way” by Lady Gaga called “Perform This Way.” But after hearing it, Lady Gaga decided not to give me permission to release the song, so… it won’t be coming out commercially anytime in the near future. Sorry.
Al gives a whole...
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Pfc. Manning to be transferred to Army prison →
Bradley Manning is that guy who we arrested on charge of being the source of the U.S. diplomatic cables leaked to WikiLeaks last year. So we locked him up in solitary, no biggie.
Manning was held in maximum security at the Marine Corps brig Quantico, Va., for more than eight months where he spent 23 hours a day and ate all his meals in an isolated cell, was permitted no contact with other...
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Bodies in streets after Nigeria election riots →
So Nigeria just had a presidential election. The mostly-Christian south voted for the incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan, while the mostly-Muslim north voted for challenger Muhammadu Buhari. Jonathan won, and then all hell broke loose.
Hundreds have been injured and thousands displaced by violence across the mostly-Muslim north after President Goodluck Jonathan won weekend elections. His rival,...
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"Not what you want to see on the fetal monitor... →
Oh dear.
(Don’t worry, it’s funny.)
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Earthbound message style for Adium →
Like Earthbound? Use Adium? Of course you do.
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David Perry on the ZX Spectrum Port of Gladiator →
David Perry is a pretty cool guy. He’s a game developer and he founded Shiny Entertainment, makers of some neat games like Earthworm Jim and MDK.
Early in his career, he worked on the ZX Spectrum port of Taito’s arcade game Gladiator. The port, Great Gurianos, was released in 1987. In 2004, a member of the World of Spectrum Forums, zeropolis79, posted an interview he conducted with...
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Hawaii passes transgender employment protections →
The Hawaii Senate approved a bill, previously passed by the House, to ban discrimination based on gender identity and expression in the workplace.
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Discrimination against transgender individuals is already illegal in Hawaii for housing, public accommodations and employment, but the ban on employment discrimination has only been established by rulings of the Civil Rights Commission and has not...
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Why was only one controller in the Reno tower? →
Remember how in March there was this big foofaraw because a few airplanes making late-night landings at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport had to do so unassisted because the sole air traffic controller manning the tower had fallen asleep? And how the FAA bumped up those shifts to have two controllers so that one could cover the other?
It turns out that a few days later, the FAA instituted...
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snopes.com: The Great Stork Derby →
Claim: A wealthy Toronto lawyer bequeathed his estate to whichever woman gave birth to the most babies in the ten-year period following his death.
TRUE
How, but, why, who would, I, this can’t
All the rest and residue of my property wheresoever situate I give, devise and bequeath unto my Executors and Trustees named below in Trust to convert into money as they deem advisable and invest...
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Why Taxes Are Annoying →
Matt Yglesias:
Indeed, in the age of cheap computing power there’s no reason the brackets couldn’t be replaced by infinitesimal increments. What’s complicated is the definition of taxable income, thanks to our predilection for adding deductions to the code and thank to the unfortunate habit of conducting too much social policy via tax credits instead of straightforward agency spending.
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Modern Drummer Interview with James Gadson... →
The drummer in the previously-linked video of “Ain’t No Sunshine” is James Gadson. He’s had quite a recording career, working with folks like Bill Withers, Paul McCartney, and Beck. (He was not the drummer on the album version of “Ain’t No Sunshine,” though. That was Jim Keltner.)
Modern Drummer magazine published an interview with him in the September...
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Planets Could Orbit Singularities Inside Black... →
A researcher at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow published a paper on arXiv on Monday studying orbits inside the event horizon of a black hole. We all know that black holes are supermassive objects in space with so much gravitational force that not even light can escape once it gets too close, right? Well, not being able to escape doesn’t mean...
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Why hasn't Obama gotten results liberals like? →
Glenn Greenwald:
When has Obama ever done any of that? When does he offer stirring, impassioned defenses of the Democrats’ vision on anything, or attempt to transform (rather than dutifully follow) how Americans think about anything? It’s not that he lacks the ability to do that. Americans responded to him as an inspirational figure and his skills of oratory are as effective as any...
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This is every dating profile on Earth →
My pal Jeremy Mendonsa:
I’m shy at first, but once you get to know me, you can’t get me to shut up! I just got out of a long-term, standard-setting relationship that you’ll have to live up to within the first five seconds of us meeting.
Hilarious.
