January 2012
52 posts
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Review: Drive (2011)
Saw Drive a while back. It’s a tough film to process after only one viewing. The film’s sparse dialogue is unusual for a what is, plot-wise, a cookie-cutter heist movie; though that’s not to say Drive will bore you. If anything, it’s a film that demands your attention — it certainly commanded mine.
Here’s a fine example of how Drive pulls this off: During...
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Lost Charles Darwin fossils rediscovered in... →
BBC News:
Dr [Howard] Falcon-Lang, who is based in the department of earth sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London, spotted some drawers in a cabinet marked “unregistered fossil plants”.
“Inside the drawer were hundreds of beautiful glass slides made by polishing fossil plants into thin translucent sheets,” Dr Falcon-Lang explained.
“This process allows...
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Former Fall River dentist pleads guilty to using... →
Alli Knothe for The Boston Globe’s Metro Desk:
A former Fall River dentist has pleaded guilty to charges that involved substituting paper clips for stainless steel posts while performing root canals, the attorney general’s office said.
Michael Clair, 53, of Maryland, allegedly billed Medicaid for the cost of the stainless steel posts he didn’t use and is facing Medicaid fraud...
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President Tyler’s grandchildren still alive →
Eric Pfeiffer, writing on Yahoo! News’s The Sideshow blog:
John Tyler was born in 1790. He became the 10th president of the United States in 1841 after William Henry Harrison died in office. Tyler fathered Lyon Gardiner Tyler in 1853, at age 63. Then, at the age of 71, Lyon Gardiner Tyler fathered Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. in 1924 and four years later at age 75, Harrison Ruffin Tyler....
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The date of Ice Cube's "Good Day" determined... →
Today was a good day.
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Felicity Aston skis solo across Antarctica →
Michael Warren for the Associated Press:
British adventurer Felicity Aston became the first woman to ski alone across Antarctica on Monday, hauling two sledges around crevasses and over mountains into nearly constant headwinds, past the South Pole and onward to the coastal ice shelf, persevering for 59 days in near-total solitude.
She made it to her destination ahead of schedule, using nothing...
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In Police Training, a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims →
Michael Powell reporting for The New York Times:
Ominous music plays as images appear on the screen: Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, executed children lie covered by sheets and a doctored photograph shows an Islamic flag flying over the White House.
“This is the true agenda of much of Islam in America,” a narrator intones. “A strategy to...
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Supreme Court Privacy Ruling Is About More Than... →
Glenn Harlan Reynolds for Popular Mechanics on a recent excellent Supreme Court decision:
Can police attach a GPS tracker to your car, or is that an invasion of your privacy? On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court, in United States v. Jones, ruled unanimously that doing so is a search, meaning that it must pass muster under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This ruling may put a crimp in...
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Botanists agree to loosen Latin’s grip →
Adrian Higgins, Washington Post:
For at least 400 years, botanists across the globe have relied on Latin as their lingua franca, but the ardor has cooled. Scientists say plants will keep their double-barreled Latin names, but they have decided to drop the requirement that new species be described in the classical language. Instead, they have agreed to allow botanists to use English (other...
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Gwinnett teacher who resigned apologizes for... →
D. Aileen Dodd, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
A Gwinnett schools investigation found former Beaver Ridge Elementary School teacher Luis Rivera was the author of a third-grade homework assignment that used slave beatings to teach math concepts.
In a statement to school officials obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Thursday, Rivera, a teacher at the school since August 2008,...
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Multicellular Life Evolves in Laboratory →
Brandon Keim, Wired:
In the new study, researchers led by [Michael Travisano of the University of Minnesota] and William Ratcliff grew brewer’s yeast, a common single-celled organism, in flasks of nutrient-rich broth.
Once per day they shook the flasks, removed yeast that most rapidly settled to the bottom, and used it to start new cultures. Free-floating yeast were left behind, while yeast...
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Cruise Captain Says He 'Tripped' Into Lifeboat,... →
Hopefully by now you’ve heard about the Costa Concordia, a luxury cruise ship that ran aground off the Italian coast. If not, Wikipedia has a decent roundup.
The captain, Francesco Schettino, has come under fire for allegedly taking the ship off course to get closer to the coast, causing the wreck, as well as abandoning the ship before the passengers were evacuated. His excuse for the...
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Rhode Island florists refuse to deliver flowers... →
Freedom from Religion Foundation:
The Freedom From Religion Foundation discovered the shocking extent of petty and vindictive community reactions against 16 year old litigant Jessica Ahlquist when it attempted earlier this week to order a dozen roses to be delivered to the victorious state/church plaintiff in Cranson, R.I. FFRF is in the process of filing a complaint about one of the floral...
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