March 2012
55 posts
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Pentagon Contradicts Findings On Dover →
Time to get angry, courtesy of Elisabeth Bumiller and The New York Times:
The Pentagon struggled on Wednesday to clarify confusion created by an independent report that said unidentified body parts of some victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were incinerated and dumped in a landfill. Top officials promised a full accounting to the victims’ families.
Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the chief...
February 2012
45 posts
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Concert Rage →
Bonus Alex Ross material: here’s a piece he wrote for The New Yorker in 2001 about people being obnoxious during concerts:
At the invitation of Lincoln Center, Sellars staged Bach’s Cantata No. 82, “Ich habe genug” (“I have enough”), as the death scene of a woman in a sick ward. The mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson performed in a thin hospital gown, a...
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Björk's lost Pierrot Lunaire performance →
I’ve been reading Listen to This by Alex Ross, which is pretty cool. Ross is the music critic of The New Yorker, and the book is largely a collection of his writings for the magazine, along with some updates and original material.
Mentioned in the chapter about Björk is a selection of songs from Arnold Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire that she performed for a music festival. The fansite...
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Supercolliding a PHP array →
/!\ HIGH NERD ALERT /!\
Anyway here is a fun piece about how trivial it is to craft evil keys for a PHP array. This exploit has apparently already been fixed in version 5.3.9, but that doesn’t make it less funny.
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Itagaki: Tecmo Tricked Me Into Releasing Dead Or... →
From a piece by Chris Kohler for Wired’s Game|Life blog:
As the deadline of the PlayStation 2’s launch grew closer, the company’s sales general manager approached Itagaki at his desk [about the development of the port of Dead or Alive 2].
“Can I borrow a copy of this so I can play it a little?” Itagaki remembers the manager saying.
“I said, sure, yeah, go on, and...
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Girl Scouts promote homosexuality and abortion,... →
Rene Lynch for the Los Angeles Times:
Girl Scouts are dangerous — and not just to your diet. At least that’s what Indiana lawmaker Bob Morris says. He has labeled the Girls Scouts of America a radical organization that promotes homosexuality and abortion and is out to destroy American values.
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Morris said he made his discoveries after talking to some knowledgeable constituents and...
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Shitstorm 'best English gift to German language'... →
Germany’s The Local:
Germany needed Shitstorm, according to a group of language experts who elected the word as the top English contribution to the German language last year.
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The jury said in a statement on Monday: “Shitstorm fills a gap in the German vocabulary that has become apparent through changes in the culture of public debate.”
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The Anglicism of the Year contest,...
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Western canon to be rewritten as three-volume... →
Alison Flood, The Guardian:
From The Epic of Gilgamesh to Infinite Jest via Dante, Dangerous Liaisons and Dubliners, the western canon is set to be turned into a 1,344-page, three-volume graphic novel.
The ambitious project from New York press Seven Stories is being hailed as the “graphic publishing literary event of the year”. Each of the 189 works of literature covered is being...
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Remembering India's first woman photojournalist →
Natalia Jimenez of msnbc.com wrote a nice piece for MSNBC’s PhotoBlog on Homai Vyarawalla, who is considered to be India’s first female photojournalist. The old photos accompanying it are quite good. Read it; love it.
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83 year-old woman got 3D printed mandible →
3ders.org translation of a story from the Dutch newspaper De Pers:
The University of Hasselt (Belgium) announced today that Belgian and Dutch scientists have successfully replacing a lower jaw with a 3D printed model for a 83 year-old woman. According to the researchers, It is the first custom-made implant in the world to replace an entire lower jaw.
The lower jaw of the elderly woman was badly...
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Resident Evil 'Revelaitons' misprint makes it to... →
JC Fletcher for Joystiq:
Capcom made an embarrassing printing error on the spine of the Resident Evil: Revelations box sent to reviewers — one made more embarrassing by the “revelaiton” today that it’s still on the version of the art sent to retailers in advance of Tuesday’s release.
Reader Zach shared this picture of the stock at the Prescott, AZ store, showing...
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Douglas County Assemblyman Kite wants to bring... →
One of the most contentious crimes in recent Nevada history was the murder of Brianna Denison, a young woman who was killed by serial rapist James Biela. In response to the case, a bill dubbed “Brianna’s Law,” which would require anyone arrested on suspicion of a felony (not necessarily convicted) to have their DNA sampled, was introduced in the Nevada Legislature in 2011. It...
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Ohio building with ties to Wright brothers eroding →
Lisa Cornwell for the AP:
The [Wright] brothers rented space for their first [bicycle] shop from 1892 to 1893 at the site where a vacant building now stands, according to Edward Roach, historian with the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park.
The city-owned structure — the Gem City Ice Cream Co. building — contains three exterior walls of the two-story building that housed the...
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The Composites →
What happens if you use police composite sketch software on descriptions of characters from literature? This is what happens.
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Josefina Vazquez Mota bids to become Mexico's... →
The Telegraph:
Josefina Vazquez Mota, a 51-year-old economist, became the first female presidential candidate from any of Mexico’s major parties when she convincingly won the National Action Party’s primary.
Excellent.
Mrs Vazquez Mota said that she had experienced sexism first-hand during her campaign.
“One of the hardest questions I have been asked is ‘How will you...
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"King of Carrot Flowers" →
Lori Zimmer, Inhabitat:
This new McDonald’s ad that appeared on the side of the road in California has more staying power than any regular billboard because it’s actually illegal to remove. The sign is actually the result of a seed bombing where the shape of the famous golden arches is made up of yellow California Poppies.
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Letters of Note: To My Old Master →
Letters of Note posted this amazing telling off by ex-slave Jourdon Anderson of his former master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, after the colonel requested Jourdon return to work for him:
Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we...
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As journal boycott grows, Elsevier defends its... →
Josh Fischman, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
A protest against Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific journal publisher, is rapidly gaining momentum since it began as an irate blog post at the end of January. By Tuesday evening, about 2,400 scholars had put their names to an online pledge not to publish or do any editorial work for the company’s journals,...
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Ninth Circuit rules Prop 8 is unconstitutional →
Fantastic news. Here’s Jillian Rayfield of TPM on what’s next for the legal challenge to the 2008 California ballot measure which disallowed same-sex couples from marrying:
Supporters of Prop 8 now have the chance to petition for rehearing en banc — which, if granted, would mean an eleven-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit would hear the case — or to appeal straight to the Supreme...
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Ice Cube Will Neither Confirm Nor Deny That... →
All he had to say was “Nice try.” Stone cold, dude.
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New Snub-Nosed Monkey Discovered, Eaten →
Rachel Kaufman for National Geographic News on October 27, 2010:
A new monkey species in Myanmar is so snub-nosed that rainfall is said to makes it sneeze—but that’s apparently the least of problems.
The only scientifically observed specimen (pictured above) had been killed by local hunters the time researchers found it—and was eaten soon after.
The Onion, May 18, 2005:
An...
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Treasure hunter claims to have found $3 billion... →
Clarke Canfield, the Associated Press:
A treasure hunter said Wednesday he has located the wreck of a British merchant ship that was torpedoed by a German U-boat off Cape Cod during World War II while carrying what he claims was a load of platinum bars now worth more than $3 billion.
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Treasure hunter Greg Brooks of Sub Sea Research in Gorham, Maine, announced that a wreck found sitting in 700...
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Fungi discovered in the Amazon will eat your... →
Michael J. Cohen, writing for Fast Company’s Co.Exist blog:
The common plastic is used for everything from garden hoses to shoes and truck seats. Once it gets into the trash stream, it persists for generations. Anyone alive today is assured that their old garden hoses and other polyurethane trash will still be here to greet his or her great, great grandchildren. Unless something eats...
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"Soul Train" creator Don Cornelius commits suicide →
Sad news from Lauren Keiper, Jill Serjeant, and Piya Sinha-Roy of Reuters:
Don Cornelius, creator of the iconic TV music and dance show “Soul Train” that helped introduce Americans to black pop culture, died on Wednesday after shooting himself in the head, Los Angeles officials said.
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Cornelius was born in 1936 in Chicago and as an adult, became a journalist who was active in the...
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Is there life on Venus? Not in reprocessed... →
Emily Lakdawalla writes on The Planetary Society’s blog about the possibility of life on Venus. You know shit is getting real when the second paragraph begins with this sentence: “The story is so obviously ridiculous that I would ordinarily not give it a second thought.”
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Tommy Westphall - A Multiverse Explored →
Westphallian and CrossoverMan:
Who is Tommy Westphall?
Tommy Westphall was an austistic child on the TV series St Elsewhere who, it was revealed in the closing moments of the final episode of that series, had dreamt the entire run of the show.
What’s this about his Mind?
St Elsewhere has direct connections to twelve other television series - many of them direct crossovers of character...
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Sleeping Florida man arrested in drive-thru,... →
In a world… where flaming tacos are government I.D.…
