I’ve seen plenty of complaints about Obama, so I want to take this one-year point to stand up and show a bit of support for him. I agree with most of this administration’s priorities (environment, “green” energy, health care reform, financial reform, government transparency, Afghanistan, more). I _hugely_ appreciate our President actually largely showing respect [...]
Wikihistory is a most amusing time-travel short story by Desmond Warzel, posted to the Abyss & Apex Magazine of Speculative Fiction, which I had not previously heard of, but I think I should explore it some. (The story is unrelated to wikihistory.org, which looks like it could be a really good reference.)
I saw another one of the Campaign for Real Beauty videos today, which reminded me of the first one I saw. The videos are from Dove, and I don’t want to endorse them in general, but I think they are pretty powerful and I’m quite sympathetic to the basic ideas being expressed, that our ideas of human [...]
Came across a neat video tonight about Moebius transformations. It’s pretty short, and the real cool bit (to me) is the introduction of the sphere. Found here via videosift.
via videosift.com
Came across an AFP article today (ok, a month or so ago, but apparently I didn’t hit the Publish button after writing this post) about army ants using their bodies to cover holes, so other ants can walk across on the backs of the first ants. This isn’t a bunch of ants being sacrificed to [...]
Check out this Traveler’s Phrase Book T-shirt. Basically, it’s a cotton t-shirt (comes in black, red or grey) with common symbols surrounding a question mark, so if you don’t know the language where you are traveling, you can point at items on your t-shirt to get your question across.
Symbols include things like a telephone, eating [...]
Thanks to a post on Slashdot, I discovered that Google Maps gives awesome directions from New York, NY to Paris, France.
National Geographic has online an article about Cueva de los Cristales – a cave of huge natural crystals. The crystals were exposed by mining operations which pumped water out of the cave. It sounds like the crystals will fall apart if the water is not allowed to refill. It’s unclear how long before the crystals [...]
According to an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, it’s becoming more common for terminally ill people to participate in “celebratory sendoffs”. The article talks specifically about several people in the Seattle area who went through this within the past year.
Found an AP article on Yahoo about a woman in Charleston, West Virginia who came home to find her house cleaned, but nothing taken. Eventually it was discovered that a neighbor had recently hired a cleaning service. The neighbor had a similar house number and hid their house key in a similar location – the [...]