The Liberating Embrace Of Uncertainty
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2012/05/15/152745489/the-liberating-embrace-of-uncertainty?sc=tw
The only constant is change. It's the most basic fact of human existence. Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same. We feel it with each breath. From birth to the unknown moment of our passing, we ride a river of change. And yet, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we exhaust ourselves in an endless search for solidity. We hunger for something that lasts, some idea or principle that rises above time and change. We hunger for certainty. That is a big problem. It might even be THE problem.

Kodak Had a Secret Nuclear Reactor Loaded With Enriched Uranium Hidden In a Basement
http://gizmodo.com/5909961/kodak-had-a-secret-weapons+grade-nuclear-reactor-hidden-in-a-basement
Kodak may be going under, but apparently they could have started their own nuclear war if they wanted, just six years ago. Down in a basement in Rochester, NY, they had a nuclear reactor loaded with 3.5 pounds of enriched uranium--the same kind they use in atomic warheads. But why did Kodak have a hidden nuclear reactor loaded with weapons-grade uranium? And how did they get permission to own it, let alone install it in a basement in the middle of a densely populated city?

Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/
This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

I don't always agree with Scalzi (in general, I mean), but he writes a good piece.

How to harden your smartphone against stalkers--iPhone edition
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/how-to-harden-your-smartphone-against-stalkers-iphone-edition/4/
Stalkers: sometimes they're coming from inside your phone.

DIY Tesla gun is real and very dangerous
http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/13/3017796/diy-tesla-gun-rob-flickenger
Author and self-described "mad scientist" Rob Flickenger has accomplished what we only wish actual 19th-century scientists had done: make a steampunk lightning rifle. His Tesla gun, inspired by graphic novel The Five Fists of Science, is essentially a hand-held spark gap Tesla coil powered by an 18V drill battery. When fired, it produces anywhere from 8 to 24 inches of lightning and 100,000 volts of electricity.

My Raspberry Pi Thinks It's a Mainframe!
http://www.designspark.com/content/my-raspberry-pi-thinks-its-mainframe
Could a Raspberry Pi replace the IBM 4381? Well, it turns out that just as it's possible to use a Pi to emulate a ZX Spectrum, one can be used to emulate a somewhat larger mainframe computer.

I am now tempted to download that VM OS emulator, for old times' sake.

Reset Firefox -- easily fix most problems
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems
Over time Firefox can develop problems like slowness, crashing, unwanted toolbars and more. Troubleshooting and fixing these issues can be difficult and time consuming. The Reset Firefox feature can fix many issues by restoring Firefox to its factory default state while saving your essential information. The reset feature works by creating a new profile folder for you...

London cafes: the surprising history of London's lost coffeehouses
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/uk/london/9153317/London-cafes-the-surprising-history-of-Londons-lost-coffeehouses.html
Centuries ago, London cafes were politically provocative, intellectually charged dens frequented by eminent scholars and louche libertines. London historian Dr Matthew Green recounts some unexpected tales.

'The stroke had turned me gay'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17703018
Following a stroke, Chris Birch's personality and sexuality altered dramatically. Now he is trying to rediscover who he is and why these changes may have happened.

Banned from Kickstarter for Being a Stalking Victim
http://rachelmarone.com/banned-from-kickstarter-for-being-a-stalking-victim/
I am being told that I cannot crowdfund because I am a stalking victim. Daniella is sending out the message that if you are being stalked you are unwelcome on Kickstarter. I have decided to go public with this story despite how this will put my reputation on the line. What has happened to me is unjust and should not be the way that Kickstarter operates. We all deserve the right to crowdfund no matter what our circumstances happen to be.

Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses all
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/man-whose-wmd-lies-led-to-100000-deaths-confesses-all-7606236.html
Defector tells how US officials 'sexed up' his fictions to make the case for 2003 invasion

Greeks apologise with huge horse
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/international/greeks-apologise-with-huge-horse-2012051527146
THE nation of Greece said sorry to the European Union with a present of an enormous wooden horse. A gift tag attached to the horse, which is surprisingly light for its size and has small holes along the length of its body, suggested that it should be placed in the bank’s vaults overnight to avoid it being targeted by thieves.

North Korean Press Bus Takes a Wrong Turn, Opening Another Crack in the Hermit Kingdom
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/north-korean-press-bus-takes-a-wrong-turn-opening-another-crack-in-the-hermit-kingdom/255955/
When the driver veered off the planned route, he gave the world a rare glimpse into North Korean daily life and took a small chip out of the country's amazing -- and maybe unsustainable -- seclusion.

The Rejection Generator Project
http://stoneslidecorrective.com/?page_id=441
The Rejection Generator rejects writers before an editor looks at a submission. Inspired by psychological research showing that after people experience pain they are less afraid of it in the future, The Rejection Generator helps writers take the pain out of rejection.

‘Hug The Monster’: Why So Many Climate Scientists Have Stopped Downplaying the Climate Threat
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/05/07/478984/hug-the-monster-why-so-many-climate-scientists-have-stopped-downplaying-the-climate-threat/
The piece helps dispel the myth that climate scientists have long been overhyping climate impacts -- when everyone who actually follows climate science and talks to any significant number of climate scientists knows that the reverse is true.

'Universal' cancer vaccine developed
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9191848/Universal-cancer-vaccine-developed.html
A vaccine that can train cancer patients' own bodies to seek out and destroy tumour cells has been developed by scientists.

Closer to using aspirin for cancer prevention
http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2012/04/10/closer-to-using-aspirin-for-cancer-prevention/?hpt=hp_bn12
A new report in the journal Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology suggests that we could be inching closer to using aspirin as part of clinical guidelines in cancer prevention.

CIA’s Secret Fear: High-Tech Border Checks Will Blow Spies’ Cover
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/04/cia-spies-biometric-tech/all/1
The increasing deployment of iris scanners and biometric passports at worldwide airports, hotels and business headquarters, designed to catch terrorists and criminals, are playing havoc with operations that require CIA spies to travel under false identities.

Welcome to LEAP!
http://www.leap.cc/
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition is an international organization of criminal justice professionals who bear personal witness to the wasteful futility and harms of our current drug policies. Our experience on the front lines of the "war on drugs" has led us to call for a repeal of prohibition and its replacement with a tight system of legalized regulation, which will effectively cripple the violent cartels and street dealers who control the current illegal market.

Finding Goatse: The Mystery Man Behind the Most Disturbing Internet Meme in History [Article is Work-Safe]
http://gawker.com/5899787/finding-goatse-the-mystery-man-behind-the-most-disturbing-internet-meme-in-history
Sometime in the late 20th century a naked man bent over, spread his ass and took a picture. Eventually that picture, known as Goatse, became one of the most venerable memes in internet history. Who is this man, and how did his ass take over the internet?

Carbon nanotubes: The weird world of 'remote Joule heating'
http://phys.org/news/2012-04-carbon-nanotubes-weird-world-remote.html
A team of University of Maryland scientists have discovered that when electric current is run through carbon nanotubes, objects nearby heat up while the nanotubes themselves stay cool, like a toaster that burns bread without getting hot. Understanding this completely unexpected new phenomenon could lead to new ways of building computer processors that can run at higher speeds without overheating.

D'oh! Groening Reveals The Location Of 'Real' Springfield
http://news.opb.org/article/doh-groening-reveals-location-real-springfield/?google_editors_picks=true
Portland native Matt Groening confirms what Oregonians have long suspected, that The Simpsons' Springfield is the one here at home.

How the Greatest Prankster in Political History Messed With Richard Nixon
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/117763
Democratic prankster Dick Tuck began tormenting Richard Nixon in California in 1950, after he became a mole in Nixon’s successful Senate campaign...

Have 1,000 people died after being found "fit for work"?
http://fullfact.org/articles/fit_for_work_ESA_deaths_Mail-14399
The Government's Work Capability Assessments (WCA) - used to judge an Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) claimant's eligibility for the benefit - has proved controversial since it was introduced in 2008, with campaigners arguing that it judges potential claimants too harshly...

London’s lost rivers: the hidden history of the city’s buried waterways
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/uk/london/9197314/Londons-lost-rivers-the-hidden-history-of-the-citys-buried-waterways.html
Tom Bolton reveals the surprising stories behind the little-known rivers that still surge beneath the streets of London.

and Gravy-wrestling model suffers horrific facial injuries after being hit with monkey wrench when she interrupted a friend having sex
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2126006/Gravy-wrestling-model-hit-face-monkey-wrench-finding-friend-having-sex-sofa.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Really? You think I can follow a headline that with anything?

Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/can-you-call-a-9-year-old-a-psychopath.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Over the last six years, Michael’s parents have taken him to eight different therapists and received a proliferating number of diagnoses. "We’ve had so many people tell us so many different things," Anne said... Then last spring, the psychologist treating Michael referred his parents to Dan Waschbusch, a researcher at Florida International University. Following a battery of evaluations, Anne and Miguel were presented with another possible diagnosis: their son Michael might be a psychopath.

Physicists Succeed in Making ‘Impossible’ Gamma-Ray Lens
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/gamma-ray-lens/
Theory says that gamma rays, being even more energetic than x-rays, ought to bypass orbiting electrons altogether; materials should not bend them at all and the refractive index for gamma rays should be almost equal to one. Yet this is not what a team of physicists has discovered...

Paging Dr Banner... Paging Dr Banner...

Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla
An ode to the father of the electric age.

Radioactive man? Milford resident pulled over by state police
http://www.ctpost.com/default/article/Radioactive-man-Milford-resident-pulled-over-by-3549631.php
Mike Apatow was driving to an appointment for work when a state police car appeared suddenly and signaled for him to pull over... earlier that day, Apatow had a nuclear stress test. In the test, a small amount of a radioactive material is injected into the veins... Though the amount of radioactive material used in the test is relatively low -- equal to a few X-rays or a diagnostic CT scan -- it was enough to set off a radioactivity detector in the state police car.

Women are better than men
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2012/05/women_are_better_than_men.html
Women are nicer than men. There are exceptions. Most people of both sexes are probably fairly nice, given the nature of their upbringing and opportunities. But in terms of their lifelong natures, women are kinder, more empathetic, more generous. And the sooner more of them take positions of power, the better our chances as a species.

Fantasy Philately: Collecting Stamps from Tatooine and Alderaan?
http://postalmuseumblog.si.edu/2012/05/fantasy-philately-collecting-stamps-from-tatooine-and-alderaan.html
"Cinderella" stamps are so called because, just like the fairy-tale character who was not invited to the ball, Cinderella stamps are normally left out of the stamp catalog. What they lack in postal validity they make up in the fun of fantasy.

I have a fair collection of Anhk-Morpork Postal Service stamps, myself.

Greek Democracy 2012: The Best Thing in Weeks
http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/460514.html
As the old saying goes, if you owe your bank a hundred dollars, and you can't pay, you're in a lot of trouble. But if you owe your bank a hundred million dollars, and you can't pay, your bank is in a lot of trouble.

Argentina : Greece :: Citibank : Deutsche Bank :: 1987 : 2012?
http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/460585.html
One by one, starting with Mexico and ending with (if memory serves) Argentina, governments came to power that just flat-out said: send the CIA if you want, send the Marines if you want, they won't be able to install a government, any kind of a government, no matter how repressive, that can actually seize those assets. It can't be done. There just aren't enough assets to seize, and the people just aren't standing for it. We default. We're screwed? Fine, but so are you... I wonder if there's anybody left at Deutshe Bank that lived through those years, and realizes the parallels?

The $144,146,165 Button
http://notes.unwieldy.net/post/22958656041/the-144-146-165-button
In 2007, NYC forced cab drivers to begin taking credit cards, which involved installing a touch screen system for payment...

Plastic-Eating Fungi Found in the Amazon May Solve World’s Waste Problem
http://mashable.com/2012/03/07/plastic-eating-fungi/
A group of students and professors from Yale University have found a fungi in the Amazon rainforest that can degrade and utilize the common plastic polyurethane (PUR).

DOOOOOOOOOOMED!!!

Aboriginals say asylum seekers are welcome
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/aboriginals-say-asylum-seekers-are-welcome/story-e6frf7jx-1226354432248
AN Aboriginal group says asylum seekers detained at Sydney's Villawood Detention Centre are welcome in Australia. The Treaty Republic's Robbie Thorpe says two Tamil detainees will be given "Original Nation Passports" at the detention centre on Monday afternoon as a symbolic welcome to the country.

120 Giants Found Living With 86-Year-Old Man
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/05/11/152350238/120-giants-found-living-with-86-year-old-man
I don't know what kind of nerve, ferocity and stubbornness got 86-year-old Brendon Grimshaw to buy an island in the Indian Ocean, replant it with 16,000 trees, grasses and then lure a bunch of giant tortoises -- big galumphing ones and itty-bitty ones -- to live with him (one gets born in his bedroom)...

Negro_Napoleon shows 45 reasons why he doesn't trust the government
http://www.reddit.com/tb/sf3iy
Most of These are incidents that happened 30 years ago... These are all wikipedia sites...and this is the information they're LETTING you have. Imagine all the shit you have NO CLUE about...


The captive ABC and the tyranny of balance: ‘Balance’ and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
http://www.independentaustralia.net/2012/business/media-2/the-captive-abc-and-the-tyranny-of-balance/
According to Peter Johnstone, this show represents a sickness in the heart of the ABC -- created by the tyranny of balance, and the public broadcaster’s capture by right-wing think tanks.

When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed
http://www.theweek.co.uk/us/46535/when-half-million-americans-died-and-nobody-noticed
Was the US drug Vioxx responsible for far more deaths than has been acknowledged so far?

Facebook’s New Con: Pay To Have Your Posts Seen
http://socialfixer.com/blog/2012/04/23/facebooks-new-con-pay-to-have-your-posts-seen/
Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm hides your posts from 84% of your Page’s fans. Now Facebook wants you to pay for ads to make those posts visible. Welcome to Facebook’s new con. "If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold."

German Police Used Only 85 Bullets Against People in 2011
http://news.yahoo.com/german-police-used-only-85-bullets-against-people-155155175.html
According to Germany's Der Spiegel, German police shot only 85 bullets in all of 2011, a stark reminder that not every country is as gun-crazy as the U.S. of A. ...most of those shots weren't even aimed at people... Meanwhile, in the U.S., where the population is little less than four times the size of Germany's, well, we can get to 85 in just one sitting, thank you very much...

The equality paradox
http://flipchartfairytales.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/the-equality-paradox/
The right won the economic conflict and the left won the culture wars.

17 Images That Will Ruin Your Childhood
http://www.cracked.com/article_19001_17-images-that-will-ruin-your-childhood.html
...it's good to go back and look at our childhood icons through adult eyes. OK, maybe "good" isn't the word for it ...

Movie Review: The Avengers
http://tacit.livejournal.com/378947.html

18-month-old baby pulled from flight, parents interviewed by TSA
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/18-month-old-baby-pulled-flight-parents-interviewed-175521187.html
...the parents say they believe the incident began because they are both of Middle Eastern descent and because the wife wears a hijab, a traditional headscarf.

Dekalb County Police: it's within policy for our officers to kick pregnant women in the stomach
http://boingboing.net/2012/05/10/dekalb-county-police-its-wi.html
When Dekalb County, Ga., police officer Jerad Wheeler tased her brother, Raven Dozie started crying and demanding to know why. Wheeler kicked the heavily-pregnant woman in the stomach. While he is now under criminal investigation, his superiors on the force squelched an internal affairs complaint and explicitly approve of his conduct. ...Wheeler was accused of twisting a 53 year-old woman's arm in 2011. This January, he shot a family's chained dog after showing up at the wrong home on a call.

When same-sex marriage was a Christian Rite
http://christianity-revealed.com/cr/files/whensamesexmarriagewasachristianrite.html
Contrary to myth, Christianity's concept of marriage has not been set in stone since the days of Christ, but has constantly evolved as a concept and ritual.

The Myth About Marriage
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/may/09/marriage-myth/
Why do some people who would recognize gay civil unions oppose gay marriage? Certain religious groups want to deny gays the sacredeness of what they take to be a sacrament. But marriage is no sacrament.

Disney World Offers Star Wars Fans 'Carbon Freeze Me' 3D Printed Figurines
http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/1363-Disney-World-Offers-Star-Wars-Fans-Carbon-Freeze-Me-3D-Printed-Figurines.html
Like a scene straight out of Cory Doctorow's Makers, Disney World is offering visitors to be 3D scanned and 3D printed in a Hans Solo style figurine as part of their Star Wars Weekends..

athletic body diversity reference for artists
http://ninamatsumoto.wordpress.com/2010/12/18/athletic-body-diversity-reference-for-artists/
This is a photoshoot of various Olympic-level athletes by Howard Schartz and Beverly Ornstein titled "The Athlete". Like many others I tend to fall into the trap of drawing the same body type over and over for athletic characters. This photoshoot serves as awesome reference reminding us artists that strong bodies come in all kinds of shapes and sizes...

Pretty in Pink
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/04/red_genitalia_study_testing_the_sexually_salient_hypothesis.html
What does the color of our genitals have to do with evolution?

Doctor says he's found the actual G spot
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-g-spot-20120425,0,5021807.story
Small clusters of erectile tissue deep within the vaginal wall are the trigger for enhancing female orgasm, the physician says. Skeptics say it's not so simple.

WHAT THE HELL IS IT? Turtle from Outer Space
http://ufologist.blogspot.com.au/2005/02/what-hell-is-it-turtle-from-outer.html
"She doesn't have any statuary or lawn ornaments and no pets in her home. The picture I sent you is what she got back from the photo developers."

Facebook running test for highlighted posts
http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/6904136/Facebook-running-pay-test-for-highlighted-posts
Facebook is considering charging its members US$2 to "highlight" important posts so they are more visible on the social networking site.

Uncatchable
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201205/george-wright-fugitive-capture-story
George Wright, America's most elusive fugitive, ran for forty years

Meet Caitlin "Meathook" Kelley, A 9-Year-Old MMA Fighter Who Can Kick You Into Next Week
http://www.themarysue.com/caitlin-kelley-mma-girl/
I want her to rule the world and kick ass all the way to the top.

Cracking The Credit Card Code
http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/credit-card-code-01202011/
...how many of you know what those numbers really mean? Contrary to what you may think, they aren’t random. Those 16 digits are there for a reason and, knowing a few simple rules, you could actually learn a lot about a credit card just from its number. This infographic shows you how to crack that code.

Can I Trust Those Evil Pharmamancers With My Life?
http://cathshaffer.livejournal.com/203188.html
I have a background in science (biochemistry), have worked in the pharmaceutical industry, and am currently reporting on the industry full time. At the same time, I live in a very liberal college town where hippy lifestyles and alternative medicine are very popular... Quite often, directly or indirectly, people seek my opinion on these issues. It can be difficult for me because I have mixed feelings. I recognize that medicine and science have real limits, and that the practice of medicine is just as fallible as the human being in the white coat. Medical science can’t fix everything that’s wrong with you, and sometimes it will make things worse. At the same time, I don’t agree that the pharma industry is an evil industrial complex pushing poisons on us purely for profit. I’ve been inside it too much to buy into that.

Aussie Delicacy Vegemite Loses Some of Its Savory Appeal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304451104577391960304859318.html
Yeasty Spread Is Acquired Taste, but Kids Today Are a Hard Sell; Edgers and Streakers

Path Dependence and the Stupidity of LED Light Bulbs
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27841/?p1=blogs
Why are we cramming 21st century technology into a socket designed by Edison?

Malware Installed on Travelers' Laptops Through Software Updates on Hotel Internet Connections
http://www.ic3.gov/media/2012/120508.aspx
Recent analysis from the FBI and other government agencies demonstrates that malicious actors are targeting travelers abroad through pop-up windows while establishing an Internet connection in their hotel rooms.

Computer Scientists Show What Makes Movie Lines Memorable
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120508220011.htm
The study suggests that memorable lines use familiar sentence structure but incorporate distinctive words or phrases, and they make general statements that could apply elsewhere.

Wild West Edinburgh, Morningside
http://www.edinburghspotlight.com/2010/06/review-wild-west-edinburgh-morningside/
Hidden in a street in Morningside, lies Edinburgh’s Wild West. It was built in 1995/6 by Michael Faulkner as part of the ambience of the sales area for a furniture business, which specialised in Southwestern style...

The Second Android Coming of Philip K. Dick
http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/5/1/the-second-android-coming-of-philip-k-dick
And while I’ll never get to chat with the real Philip K. Dick, I doubt I’m the only head who’d kill to have an hour-long conversation with his double. Or triple, rather. It’s close enough. Maybe, even, it’s closer: the android is a person that PKD himself could only speculate about being. More human than human.

The Mark 2 went rogue and escaped, so they've built a Mark 3. (Good article, apart from the trite "Dick was also famously unhinged" bullshit--he came through the fire many times, proving he was exactly the opposite.)

Polyamory and the Elephant in the Room
http://tacit.livejournal.com/378670.html
Yes, a new relationship really is potentially a threat to the existing relationship, no matter how poly-skilled the folks involved may be.

George Lucas Does Something Likeable For a Change: Revenge on Rich Neighbors
http://www.movies.com/movie-news/george-lucas-grady-ranch/7883
George Lucas' rich neighbors don't want him building a movie studio in their backyard. His response is the best thing he's done in years.

It Would Be Remarkable if Steve Rogers and Tony Stark Did Get Along
http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/460219.html
Consider this difference in their upbringing: Steve "Captain America" Rogers is a trailing-edge "GI Generation" American. He grew up during the Hoover administration, during the triple-disaster of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression and the rise of global fascism, and Herbert Hoover and his conservative pro-business pro-wealthy supporters insisted that there was nothing that the federal government could or should do about it, we were just going to have to accept our suffering and hope that things get better. And it was liberal anti-business anti-wealthy FDR who was the first politician of his lifetime to stand up and say that there was something the government could do to save kids like Steve Rogers, the New Deal, and he did those things, and the economy turned around. The movie incarnation of Tony "Iron Man" Stark is a Gen-Xer.

5 Bad Ideas for Dealing With Bullies You Learned in Movies
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-bad-ideas-dealing-with-bullies-you-learned-in-movies/
When I was in school, we just kind of had to deal with it as best we could, any advice coming from sitcoms and movies about nerds overcoming jocks by recording their girlfriends naked in the bathroom. I didn't realize until I was all grown up that the sitcom words of wisdom weren't all that reliable. Advice like...

Not-quite-so elementary, my dear electron
http://www.nature.com/news/not-quite-so-elementary-my-dear-electron-1.10471
Fundamental particle ‘splits’ into quasiparticles, including the new ‘orbiton’.

5 Baffling Discoveries That Prove History Books Are Wrong
http://www.cracked.com/article_19769_5-baffling-discoveries-that-prove-history-books-are-wrong.html
A generation of students found out the hard way that archaeology isn't anywhere near as much fun as Indiana Jones made it look. Still, experts in the field do have their exciting, and even shocking, days at the office. Mainly, these occur when they discover baffling artifacts that are half a planet away from where they should be, proving that a whole lot of what we thought about history was dead wrong.

Pioneer Anomaly Solved!
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003459/
With the latest piece of the puzzle just published in a scientific journal, a solar system mystery that has perplexed people for more than 20 years has been solved

It was the Pentiums, all along.

Real Snail Mail
http://www.realsnailmail.net/
The moment you click 'send' your message travels at the speed of light to our server where it awaits collection by a real live snail. Yes, that's right we're not called real snail mail for nothing! When time is worth taking RSM is the service for you.

Japan shuts off nuclear power as thousands celebrate
http://news.ca.msn.com/top-stories/japan-shuts-off-nuclear-power-as-thousands-celebrate
Thousands of Japanese marched to celebrate the switching off of the last of their nation's 50 nuclear reactors Saturday, waving banners shaped as giant fish that have become a potent anti-nuclear symbol. Japan was without electricity from nuclear power for the first time in four decades when the reactor at Tomari nuclear plant on the northern island of Hokkaido went offline for mandatory routine maintenance.

Fox News guest laments ‘mistake’ of letting women vote
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/05/07/fox-news-contributor-laments-mistake-of-letting-women-vote/
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a tea party activist that’s appeared several times on Fox News, and founder of an organization where Sean Hannity serves as an advisory board member, said in a sermon recently published to YouTube that America’s greatest mistake was allowing women the right to vote, adding that back in "the good old days, men knew that women are crazy and they knew how to deal with them."

Bouncers In the UK Are Asking to See Facebook Profiles Before Letting People in Nightclubs
http://www.themarysue.com/uk-nightclub-bouncers-facebook/
Here is an obnoxious new development in the Facebook privacy debate: Some of our friends across the pond might find themselves denied access to nightclubs in the UK -- because they denied a bouncer access to their Facebook profile. No, really. The BBC reports that bouncers are asking people to log into their accounts on their phones outside of nightclubs to see if their profile names match their drivers license.

LaserSaber brings 'Star Wars' swordplay to life
http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/5/3001551/wicked-lasers-lasersaber-lightsaber-star-wars
In honor of this year's Star Wars Day, Wicked Lasers has released the LaserSaber -- a $100 "blade" that brings George Lucas' vision closer to reality. The company's lightsaber is comprised of a 32-inch polycarbonate wand and aircraft-grade aluminum hilt that attaches directly to the cap of its Spyder 3 series of green and blue lasers.

"We can't send email more than 500 miles"
http://kottke.org/12/05/we-cant-send-email-more-than-500-miles
"We're having a problem sending email out of the department..."

The frequent fliers who flew too much
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-0506-golden-ticket-20120506,0,3094073,full.story
Many years after selling lifetime passes for unlimited first-class travel, American Airlines began scrutinizing the costs -- and the customers.

The lessons I learnt from my iPhone mugging
http://blogs.channel4.com/benjamin-cohen-on-technology/the-lessons-i-learnt-from-my-iphone-mugging/3658
Yesterday, I had one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life when I was mugged at knife point in broad daylight just metres from my front door. But I learnt a lot about how I could have allowed the police to better respond to a crime like this, and the actions that I needed to take to ensure my data was safe.

I am a statistician and I buy lottery tickets
http://simplexify.net/blog/2012/5/6/i-am-a-statistician-and-i-buy-lottery-tickets.html
hen my friends hear me say that I’m buying a lottery ticket for a big draw I often get the comment, "but aren’t you a statistician?". The implication is that only people who are ignorant of probability would play the lottery. I’ve also heard the belief that the lottery is a tax on poor people. I have a different view, that buying lottery tickets is perfectly rational for me.

New Kansas abortion bill lets doctors lie to patients, withhold cancer treatment
http://boingboing.net/2012/05/06/new-kansas-abortion-bill-lets.html
The Kansas House of Reps passed one of the most draconian and awful abortion bills imaginable last week. Among other things, it allows doctors to lie to their patients to keep them from getting abortions, even if the mother's health demands it, and mandates that doctors lie about health risks from abortion. It also allows doctors and pharmacists to withhold cancer treatment from pregnant women if they believe it might harm the foetus's health.

New York City’s Hidden Subway Station
http://www.travelettes.net/new-york-city%E2%80%99s-hidden-subway-station/
Deep in the belly of New York’s subway system, a beautiful untouched station resides that has been forgotten for years with only a limited few knowing of its existence. Stunning decoration with tall tiled arches, brass fixtures and skylights run across the entire curve of the station, almost a miniature imitation of Grand Central Station...

Amanda Hocking, the writer who made millions by self-publishing online
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/12/amanda-hocking-self-publishing
A couple of years ago, Amanda Hocking needed to raise a few hundred dollars so, in desperation, made her unpublished novel available on the Kindle. She has since sold over 1.5m books and, in the process, changed publishing forever

"Why I break DRM on e-books": A publishing exec speaks out
http://paidcontent.org/2012/04/24/breaking-drm-publishing-exec/
I don’t think Exec is the only person in the publishing industry breaking DRM on e-books they buy…and those who aren’t doing so already might want to give it a try, if only to see what readers go through.

Is the Book Cover Dead?
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/helloworld/27783/?p1=blogs
It sure doesn't look good. Thanks, technology.

From Kerouac To Rand, 'Harmful' Reads For Writers
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/19/150973750/from-kerouac-to-rand-harmful-reads-for-writers
"their readable styles look so easy that they might seduce a young writer into imitating them."

Color-coded text reveals the foreign origins of your words
http://io9.com/5906307/color+coded-text-reveals-the-foreign-origins-of-your-words
Looking to better understand the role of foreign words in his day-to-day use of the English language, Kinde whipped up a program that would allow him to actually see precisely that..

The Atlas of True Names
http://www.kalimedia.com/Atlas_of_True_Names.html
The Atlas of True Names reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today's maps of the World, Europe, the British Isles and the United States.

The Foreign-Language Effect
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/04/18/0956797611432178
Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases

Ancient language controls crime rings
http://www.krqe.com/dpp/news/crime/ancient-language-controls-crime-rings
Some gang members serving prison sentences are using an ancient language to try to keep control of their criminal organizations on the outside as corrections officers work fast to crack the code... the inmates are sending out messages written in Nahuatl, a 1,400-year-old Aztec language.

Was Beethoven Black? Was His African Heritage Whitewashed?
http://open.salon.com/blog/ronp01/2009/09/27/the_african_heritage_of_ludwig_van_beethoven
...the true identity of Ludwig van Beethoven, long considered Europe’s greatest classical music composer. Said directly, Beethoven was a black man. Specifically, his mother was a Moor, that group of Muslim Northern Africans who conquered parts of Europe--making Spain their capital--for some 800 years.

John Cleese vs The Sun
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/john-cleese-vs-sun.html
In 1982, British tabloid The Sun reported that filming on Monty Python's The Meaning of Life had been marred by an incident...

Judge will rule if tattoo is allowable evidence in murder trial
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/04/27/chrishaun-mcdonald-trial/
A man who was killed outside a Minneapolis bar last summer had a tattoo of a swastika on his chest. At a hearing today, the attorney for a transgender woman accused of fatally stabbing Dean Schmitz said the tattoo is relevant to next week's murder trial of Chrishaun McDonald because it symbolizes Schmitz' hatred of people who are different.

Why the Super Mario Movie Sucked
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/04/generation-xbox-super-mario-movie/
Miyamoto and various Nintendo employees flew in from Japan to see how their bestselling franchise looked the big screen. Polite to a fault, Miyamoto has yet to comment candidly on Hollywood’s bastardisation of his most iconic creation.

Rookwood Necropolis
http://www.nikilynnevins.com/rookwood-necropolis/
Rookwood cemetery (formally, a necropolis) is the largest cemetery in the Southern hemisphere- and conveniently located in Lidcombe. It’s overseen by a tangle of faith representatives, and includes victoriana gardens, modern burial grounds and a cremation area. More interesting to me, though, are the older areas of the cemetery slowly being reclaimed by native plants and creatures: a gentle reminder we are lucky to be remembered well in this life, much less the next.

Christian Group Shows Up To Chicago Gay Pride Holding Apologetic Signs
http://www.practikel.com/2012/01/27/christian-group-shows-up-to-chicago-gay-pride-holding-apologetic-signs/
This is an amazing photo that captured the moment a gay man hugged a member of a Christian group, that came to Gay Pride to apologize for the way the church has treated homosexuals.

Tax rates are at historic lows
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/04/19/tax-rates-are-at-historic-lows/
Thus we have one of the stranger aspects of American politics just now: Millions of citizens angry with President Obama for raising their taxes despite the fact that he actually lowered them.

List of proxies
http://about.piratereverse.info/proxy/list.html
If your ISP has blocked The Pirate Bay you can use any of the following sites to access it.

Evolution seen in 'synthetic DNA'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17769529
Researchers have succeeded in mimicking the chemistry of life in synthetic versions of DNA and RNA molecules.

Black London firefighter beaten, tazed and charged for offering assistance to cops had his complaint buried
http://boingboing.net/2012/04/19/black-london-firefighter-beate.html
London's Metropolitan police are at the centre of another set of awful racism allegations, the tenth in three weeks...

A web of privilege supports this so-called meritocracy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/06/leveson-murdoch-cameron-brooks-privilege
Class privilege, and the power it confers, is often conveniently misunderstood by its beneficiaries as the product of their own genius rather than generations of advantage, stoutly defended and faithfully bequeathed.

When Law Isn't Enough to Stop Protest, NYPD Sexually Assaults and Tortures #OWS. NYT Yawns.
http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/459920.html
That's what it's come to: police in America's largest city using a policy of widespread sexual assault and widespread torture isn't even news-worthy any more.

Why do we photoshop people?
http://maureenjohnsonbooks.tumblr.com/post/22357168035/why-do-we-photoshop-people
A heavily photoshopped ad shows dissatisfaction with the way people are. When you look through any glossy mag, or at any commercial or ad, KNOW THAT THAT IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE YOU. Know that it’s a game. Step back, and don’t worry.

Microsoft ejects DVD playback from Windows 8: Netflix and licensing killed the video star
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/04/windows_media_dvd_playback_dead/
Digital media playback in Windows 8 has fallen casualty to the savage economics of the PC industry and changing tastes in consumer viewing. We knew Windows Media Center would be sold at extra cost in Windows 8, but Microsoft now says you won’t be able to play DVDs on Windows Media Player in Windows 8.

Quiet Hands
http://juststimming.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/quiet-hands/
Let me be extremely fucking clear: if you grab my hands, if you grab the hands of a developmentally disabled person, if you teach quiet hands, if you work on eliminating "autistic symptoms" and "self-stimulatory behaviors," if you take away our voice, if you... if you... if you...

Golcar man has both legs amputated, applies for disability benefit & gets asked: 'So, how far can you walk?'
http://www.examiner.co.uk/news/local-west-yorkshire-news/2012/05/02/is-a-man-with-no-legs-disabled-department-of-work-and-pensions-officials-can-t-decide-86081-30880601/
A MAN who has had both legs amputated is struggling to survive financially -- because bureaucrats are still deciding if he is disabled.

Reminds me of the Howard Govt's desire to put Downs Syndrome folk through traumatic yearly assessments, just in case they were "getting better".

Welfare groups attack plan to cut parental benefits
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-04/parenting-cuts-could-hurt-single-parents-prospects/3992540
Welfare groups say the Federal Government's plans to cut parental benefits will not help single parents get a job. The Government is planning to wind back income support for unemployed parents once their children are at school....

Reddit’s "What Secret Could Ruin Your Life if It Came Out?" Thread Is a Harrowing Descent Into the Darkest Reaches of the Human Soul
http://slacktory.com/2012/05/reddit-what-secret-could-ruin-your-life-if-it-came-out-thread/
A recent AskReddit thread titled Throwaway time! What’s your secret that could literally ruin your life if it came out? got people creating temporary accounts, then confessing their deepest, darkest secrets. The results ranged from creepy-but-cute, to fascinating, to horrifying. I hope to walk you through that gigantic thread, because there were so many weird confessions...

Fake Kickstarter project 'Mythic' uncovered by internet users, forced to shut down
http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/30/2990064/fake-kickstarter-project-mythic-forced-to-shut-down
The project had raised almost $5,000 of its $80,000 goal before users from a number of different online communities noticed several problems: the artwork had been cribbed from outside sources, the photos of the company's purported offices had been lifted from another site, and even the game's poster art was a mash-up. After being called out, the creators of the campaign cancelled it, and have since been methodically deleting the game's Facebook profile and website. Ironically, the campaign page itself is still accessible...

Blond hair evolved separately in Europe and the South Pacific
http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-blond-hair-gene-solomon-islands-20120503,0,2418895.story
Though the indigenous people of the Solomon Islands all have dark skin, about 5% to 10% also have naturally blond hair -- and a new study finds that the genetic quirk responsible for this is different from the one that produces blond hair in people of European ancestry.

Zombie-ant parasitic fungus kept in check by hyperparasitic fungus: Ant colonies are protected against brain-manipulating parasitic fungi by another fungus
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/neurophilosophy/2012/may/03/zombie-ant-parasitic-fungus
Cordyceps can decimate entire ant colonies, but some colonies can keep an infestation at bay and survive for long periods of time. It turns out that the zombie-ant fungus is itself parasitized by another fungus, which limits its ability to reproduce and prevents it from overwhelming the colony. This microbial defence system allows the two species to stably co-exist and ensures the long-term survival of the colony despite a high rate of infection.

Look, Kitten, I Am Too A Feminist! Fauxminism and Men
http://lawsonry.com/2011/891.html
So how do you tell if a man you are conversing with (or perhaps know, love, and/or are friends with) is, in fact, a fauxminist? Long story short -- if you are a feminist that is predisposed to baking, don’t be so willing to hand over the cookies to any man who claims the label. The best way to determine whether or not a man is actually dedicated to social justice and equality is to press him on it.

Hair! (Not the Musical)
http://vagendamag.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/hair-not-musical.html
(Also, edited down at The Guardian)
I stopped shaving. Legs, pits, bits -- I ceased cultivation and let them revert to a state of nature... I stopped shaving because there’s way too much pressure on people to conform to stupid arbitrary gendered bullshit... But enough proselytising. I do hereby jump down off the soap box, and will spend the rest of this article answering, in an approximate order of the frequency they are asked, the questions people commonly proffer when they see my prodigious manes of untamed womanhood.

Equal Under The Law?
http://www.cheryl-morgan.com/?p=13724
One of the supposed cornerstones of democracies is that we are all equal under the law. Rich people, of course, always have means of avoiding consequences, but once you end up in front of The Beak (that’s a judge, non-UK readers) you expect to be treated fairly. Well, some of you do... You’ve doubtless all heard of the case of Trayvon Martin who was gunned down in Florida earlier this year... As a comparison, consider the case of trans woman CeCe McDonald... You might ask why she chose to defend herself. Wasn’t that a little unwise? Well, here’s what happens to trans people who don’t defend themselves...

Wealthy Americans queue up to surrender US passports in Bern
http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-05-03/news/31558940_1_tax-evasion-bradley-birkenfeld-passports
Rich Americans renouncing US citizenship rose sevenfold since UBS AG whistle-blower Bradley Birkenfeld triggered a crackdown on tax evasion four years ago. About 1,780 expatriates gave up their nationality at US embassies last year, up from 235 in 2008... The US, the only nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that taxes citizens wherever they reside, is searching for tax cheats in offshore centers...

Student abandoned in DEA holding cell drank own urine to survive
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/05/01/student-abandoned-in-dea-holding-cell-drank-own-urine-to-survive/
"They never came back, ignored all my cries and I still don’t know what happened," he said. "I’m not sure how they could forget me." After five days, a DEA worker heard noises coming from the holding cell and discovered him. Chong was taken to the hospital, where he spent three days in the intensive care unit. The DEA has not apologized to Chong. He has not been charged with any crime.

Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor
http://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-responds-with-wit-and-humor
There is nothing better than a Slashdot interview with someone who not only reads and understands Slashdot but can out-troll the trolls. Admittedly, the questions you asked Neal Stephenson were great in their own right, but his answers... Wow! let's just say that this guy shows how it's done...

Do Kids Care If Their Robot Friend Gets Stuffed Into a Closet?
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/do-kids-care-if-their-robot-friend-gets-stuffed-into-a-closet
While it seems clear that children won't have much trouble developing substantive relationships with humanoid robots, at least if (or when) they become as social as a teleoperated Robovie, it's less clear to what extent these robots will be treated as tools, and to what extend they'll be treated as living things, if not like humans, than at least like animals...

Android Ported to C#
http://blog.xamarin.com/2012/05/01/android-in-c-sharp/
...we have been offering C# to Android developers as a high-performance, low-battery consuming alternative to Java...

The Invention of Jaywalking
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/1837/
"If you ask people today what a street is for, they will say cars. That’s practically the opposite of what they would have said 100 years ago."

They stole the streets, and we forgot it even happened.

What the Secret Service could learn from drunken sailors
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-the-secret-service-could-learn-from-drunken-sailors/2012/04/26/gIQAz0kzjT_story.html
What happened in Cartagena, Colombia, with the Secret Service seems unsavory to me, but not for the reasons you might think. I make no judgments about men spending a night with escorts...

Descriptive Camera, 2012
http://mattrichardson.com/Descriptive-Camera/
The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera--point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene...

Edison's Revenge: The Rise of DC Power
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/40023/?p1=BI
In a world of more electronics and solar energy, there's less and less need for AC power.

A Complete Guide to ‘Hipster Racism’
http://jezebel.com/5905291/a-complete-guide-to-hipster-racism
There's been a lot of talk these last couple of weeks about "hipster racism" or "ironic racism"--or, as I like to call it, racism.

Evaluating the First Drug to Show Improvement in Subtype of Autism
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120424154314.htm
In an important test of one of the first drugs to target core symptoms of autism, researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine are undertaking a pilot clinical trial to evaluate insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) in children who have SHANK3 deficiency (also known as 22q13 Deletion Syndrome or Phelan-McDermid Syndrome), a known cause of autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Um...

Photos Find Fictional Fun in Amateur Space Program
http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/04/photos-find-fictional-fun-in-amateur-space-program/
In 1964, a Zambian grade-school science teacher single-handedly, and unilaterally, created a space program for his country...

People On Welfare Less Likely To Do Drugs Than Those With Jobs
http://www.care2.com/causes/people-on-welfare-less-likely-to-do-drugs-than-those-with-jobs.html
We’ve learned a lot of really important things since Florida started drug testing those who applied for welfare benefits... hardly any recipients were actually doing drugs.

Personhood Theory: A Primer
http://tacit.livejournal.com/376881.html
To quote from one of my favorite George Carlin skits: "Now, if you think you do have rights, one last assignment for you. Next time you're at the computer, get on the Internet, go to Wikipedia. When you get to Wikipedia, in the search field for Wikipedia, I want you to type in "Japanese Americans 1942, and you'll find out all about your precious fuckin' rights, okay? ...Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most, their government took 'em away. And rights aren't rights if someone can take 'em away. They're privileges. That's all we've ever had in this country, a bill of temporary privileges."

Quantum decision affects results of measurements taken earlier in time
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/04/decision-to-entangle-effects-results-of-measurements-taken-beforehand.ars
The picture certainly looks like future events influence the past, a view any right-minded physicist would reject...

Talking pineapple question on state exam stumps ... everyone!
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/talking-pineapple-question-state-exam-stumps-article-1.1064657
Students, teachers, principals - no one has any idea what the deal is

I don't understand. Seems perfectly simple to me.

Facebook’s New Con: Pay To Have Your Posts Seen
http://socialfixer.com/blog/2012/04/23/facebooks-new-con-pay-to-have-your-posts-seen/
fb_dollarFacebook’s EdgeRank algorithm hides your posts from 84% of your Page’s fans. Now Facebook wants you to pay for ads to make those posts visible. Welcome to Facebook’s new con.

Historic Photos From the NYC Municipal Archives
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/04/historic-photos-from-the-nyc-municipal-archives/100286/
The New York City Municipal Archives just released a database of over 870,000 photos from its collection of more than 2.2 million images of New York throughout the 20th century. Their subjects include daily life, construction, crime, city business, aerial photographs, and more. I spent hours lost in these amazing photos, and gathered this group together to give you just a glimpse of what's been made available from this remarkable collection.

A Conversation With John Slattery
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/interrogation/2012/04/john_slattery_interview_mad_men_s_roger_sterling_and_his_acid_trip_.single.html
Last night’s episode of Mad Men was called "Far Away Places," and perhaps no one traveled as far as Roger Sterling, the veteran ad man who, along with wife Jane, took his first LSD trip. Slate spoke with John Slattery, who portrays Sterling, this morning.

The Dawn of Haiku - How a volunteer crew brought a crack OS back
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2012.6189574
It was the summer of 2001, and computer programmer Michael Phipps had a problem: His favorite operating system, BeOS, was about to go extinct. Having an emotional attachment to a piece of software may strike you as odd, but to Phipps and many others (including me), BeOS deserved it. It ran amazingly fast on the hardware of its day; it had a clean, intuitive user interface; and it offered a rich, fun, and modern programming environment. In short, we found it vastly superior to every other computer operating system available. But the company that had created BeOS couldn't cut it in the marketplace, and its assets, including BeOS, were being sold to a competitor...

How Much Gold Is Game of Thrones Worth?
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/03/game_of_thrones_how_hbo_and_showtime_make_money_despite_low_ratings_.single.html
How does HBO make money on expensive shows only 3 million people watch?

First Person: Breaking the chains of religious tradition
http://www.religionnews.com/culture/gender-and-sexuality/First-Person-Breaking-the-chains-of-religious-tradition
Where I come from, girls are married off as teenagers to men they barely know and are expected to spend their lives caring for their husband and children. They are required to cover their hair and nearly every inch of their skin, and to remain behind a curtain at parties and religious events. Where I come from, if a woman wants to feel her hair blow in the wind or wear jeans or attend college, the courts have the authority to take her children away from her. Where I come from, you might be surprised to learn, is the United States. Specifically, New York and then New Jersey, in the Orthodox Jewish community.

Olympics 2012: A Bruce Schneier Moment
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/04/olympics-2012-a-bruce-schneier.html
The Ministry of Defence is considering placing surface-to-air missiles on residential flats during the Olympics... If one of those things is ever fired, either in anger or by accident, it'll shower white-hot supersonic shrapnel across the extremely crowded residential heart of a city... Olympic security is out of control and irrational... Oh, and incidentally it would be illegal for me to say this if I happened to live in London or my blog was hosted in England--the enabling laws for the Olympics override our basic civil rights

Why is there a dead bird on Tonto's head? Johnny Depp explains
http://blastr.com/2012/04/why-does-tonto-have-a-dea.php
Talking to Entertainment Weekly, the actor opened up about the controversial look he sports in the upcoming film, how he developed it, and what actually inspired him to go all "Look-I-got-a-dead-bird-on-my-head."

Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun: Hen. A country tries to banish gender.
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/04/hen_sweden_s_new_gender_neutral_pronoun_causes_controversy_.html
...for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral.

The Skippy Girls
http://www.nikilynnevins.com/skippy-girls/
The skippy girls are in the Redfern/Waterloo area. Their origins- about 2002, as best I can determine- began as a project to cover tags in the area, but the individual panels have been repainted several times. I’m not sure I’m convinced this is "a part of the modern folklore of the Gadigal people," but it is a pleasant lot of graffiti art.

My old Jeffreys piece
http://rozk.livejournal.com/446556.html
I am reposting my famous Sheila Jeffreys piece to prove that it takes more than the idiotic Dave the Squirrel using the wrong pronoun, or Gallus Mag claiming I don't care about violence to other women, or someone posting my photo on a hate site, to scare me.

Dear daughter...
http://www.murverse.com/2012/04/15/dear-daughter/
So they hate you. But fuck ‘em. Because you are a force of nature, a powerhouse of emotion and talent and stubbornness and potential. You’re worth a billion of them...

Not Everybody Wants to Have Sex
http://jezebel.com/5899524/sex-can-be-kind-of-boring-but-we-never-talk-about-that-part
It has been estimated that about 1% of the population are asexual meaning they feel no interest in sex, or little to no sexual attraction. But asexuality has also become an orientation, and really, a movement.

Life Without Sex: The Third Phase of the Asexuality Movement
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/life-without-sex-the-third-phase-of-the-asexuality-movement/254880/
Now that he's raised awareness of his lifestyle, David Jay, founder of AVEN, is working to change mainstream beliefs about sex drives.

For anyone who only sees gender and sex in black and white
http://forgetpolitics.tumblr.com/post/20790680440/for-anyone-who-only-sees-gender-and-sex-in-black
...here’s proof that nature is just as fluid with representations of gender and sex as we are.

A Highly Intelligent Woman Speaks Out
http://practicalfreespirit.com/2012/04/12/a-highly-intelligent-woman-speaks-out/
...let me explain something to those of you who haven’t thought about such things. High-IQ women often do not present in the same way as high-IQ men. That doesn’t mean they’re not just as smart; they just behave differently, in ways that are not typically identified with high intelligence.

Your Vagina Isn’t Just Too Big, Too Floppy, and Too Hairy--It’s Also Too Brown
http://jezebel.com/5900928/your-vagina-isnt-just-too-big-too-floppy-and-too-hairyits-also-too-brown
Good news, ladies! Society has discovered another new thing that's wrong with you, which means another opportunity for you to make yourself more attractive for your man.

The Old Feminists Were Right
http://provoketive.com/2012/03/16/the-old-feminists-were-right/
I’m sorry I didn’t pay attention. I’m sorry that I rested on what you had done instead of being vigilant. I’m sorry that I allowed black and white thinking about complicated issues cloud my ability to see how women were being devalued. I’m sorry that I ignored inequality in the church and in society.

Sometimes, When "All the Facts are In," It's Worse: The UC-Davis Pepper-Spray Report
http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/459368.html
This is not better than the initial media reports. This is worse. This is an epic textbook in official-violence failure.

More on "the Pepper Spraying Cop:" Why WERE the Cops There?
http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/459671.html
Student Affairs, the Vice Chancellor, the consulting firm who ran the investigation, and all of us who are appalled by this, we all have "a pre-9/11 mentality." Since the Bush administration, "coddling" protesters (and by "coddling protesters" what I mean is "obeying the law" and "following good standard procedures") is just not what "real Americans" (and by "real Americans" I mean "people with authoritarian personality and social dominance orientation") do.

Obama: 'Drug legalisation not the answer to drug war'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-17716926
President Obama said the answer to the increasing power of drug cartels in the hemisphere was to encourage societies with strong economics, rule of law, and a sound law enforcement infrastructure.

Because that's worked so far, and legalization hasn't worked every damned place it's been tried. NO, WAIT.

We should demand politicians reconsider 'war on drugs'
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3943922.html
In a properly functioning democracy public policy is informed by rational discussion and through the input of those with expertise in the area. As a community we should demand that our political representatives cast aside their fears and prejudices so that Australia is able to formulate policies on drugs which deliver the best outcomes in terms of public health.

Can alcohol make men smarter? Study suggests yes
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-57413201-10391704/can-alcohol-make-men-smarter-study-suggests-yes/
Although some people believe that alcohol can inhibit your normal thinking processes, the study from the University of Illinois showed that the additional drinks allowed for more innovative answers that, in the end, equaled more correct answers on a brain teaser test.

Free ranging approach to obeying code
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/free-ranging-approach-to-obeying-code-20120414-1x0js.html
Tens of thousands of free-range eggs being sold in Melbourne supermarkets come from chickens ''roaming'' in a space smaller than a doormat, the industry has admitted. And one in three eggs comes from a farm that breaches the industry's own new definition of what is considered free range.

Teen God squad Culture Shifters' miracle cure claims
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/kids-claim-miracle-cures/story-e6freon6-1226326699456
Children as young as 13 claim they have instantly healed hundreds of people using the miracle powers of Jesus on Queensland streets.

Oracle thinks you can copyright a programming language, Google disagrees
http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/13/2944440/google-oracle-lawsuit-programming-language-copyright
Oracle's case against Google has evolved primarily into a copyright infringement suit over the past several months, and with the full trial scheduled to begin this coming Monday, the court is making an effort to get down to the nuts and bolts of copyright law.

Silly Putty for Potholes
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/04/silly-putty-for-potholes.html
So-called non-Newtonian fluids are the stars of high school science demonstrations. Now, a group of college students has figured out a new use for the strange stuff: filler for potholes.

Airplane Lavatory Self-Portraits, in the Flemish Style
http://www.neatorama.com/2012/04/10/airplane-lavatory-self-portraits-in-the-flemish-style/
What do you do on long flights? Read a book or watch the inflight movie? Not Nina Katchadourian! The artist made self-portraits of herself in the lavatory, posing in the styles of the Old Masters, by using toilet papers and towels...

London mysteries: winged beasts on the tube
http://now-here-this.timeout.com/2012/04/12/london-mysteries-winged-beasts-on-the-tube/
Each week we solve one of London’s great mysteries (as submitted by you, the reader). This week Tom Dodd from Shoreditch asks: ‘is it true that the London Underground has its own species of mosquito?’

What Recruiters Look At During The 6 Seconds They Spend On Your Resume
http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-recruiters-look-at-during-the-6-seconds-they-spend-on-your-resume-2012-4
The study used a scientific technique called "eye tracking" on 30 professional recruiters and examined their eye movements during a 10-week period to "record and analyze where and how long someone focuses when digesting a piece of information or completing a task." In the short time that they spend with your resume, the study showed recruiters will look at your name, current title and company, current position start and end dates, previous title and company, previous position start and end dates, and education.

Philmo Phlegm's Cut-out and Keep Guide to British Newspapers
http://philmophlegm.livejournal.com/235261.html
Something that foreigners often find difficult when reading British stories is not knowing the editorial stances of British newspapers. British newspapers seem to be more opinionated than many foreign newspapers, and if you don't know where that paper is coming from, you'll find it hard to deal with any bias.

US sues Apple, publishers over e-book pricing
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-04-12/us-sues-apple2c-publishers-yield-on-e-book-pricing/3944840
The United States government is suing technology giant Apple and five major book publishers for allegedly colluding to fix the prices of e-books.

Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! Why We Still Need Publishers
http://andrewhickey.info/2012/04/14/why-we-still-need-publishers/
...the net result of the loss of publishers would be the loss of writers as a professional class. We’d have a few bazillionaires, because the Browns and Rowlings would be keeping 70-85% of their money, a handful of people like Dean Wesley Smith who manage to be fast enough to get an absolute ton of product on the market, a few peiople like me who find a comfortable niche or two and maybe manage to scratch a living, and a whole load of amateurs writing in their spare time with minimal or no editing. What you wouldn’t have is the vast swathe of stuff in the middle, all the mid-list writers who manage to earn a steady living from writing one or two good books a year.

What Amazon's ebook strategy means
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/04/understanding-amazons-strategy.html
...the peculiar evil genius of Amazon is that Amazon seems to be trying to simultaneously establish a wholesale monopsony and a retail monopoly in the ebook sector. Amazon has the potential to be like that predatory big box retailer on a global scale. And it's well on the way to doing so in the ebook sector.

German Border Threat: Cheap Books
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/arts/24book.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2
If you want proof that a cultural divide separates Europe and America, the book business is a place to start. In the United States chain stores have largely run neighborhood bookshops out of business. Here in Germany, there are big and small bookstores seemingly on every block. Germany’s book culture is sustained by an age-old practice requiring all bookstores, including German online booksellers, to sell books at fixed prices. Save for old, used or damaged books, discounting in Germany is illegal.

The Sound of One Shoe Dropping
http://scrivenerserror.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/c411x.html
The DOJ has pulled the trigger and filed an antitrust lawsuit regarding e-book pricing against Apple and a number of major New York-based commercial trade publishers. It's about bloody time... and the suit means both much less and much more than it's being spun as.

A Message from John Sargent
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/04/a-message-from-john-sargent
We have been in discussions with the Department of Justice for months. It is always better if possible to settle these matters before a case is brought. But the terms the DOJ demanded were too onerous. After careful consideration, we came to the conclusion that the terms could have allowed Amazon to recover the monopoly position it had been building before our switch to the agency model

The Mystery of the Flying Laptop
http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/travel/the-mystery-of-the-flying-laptop.html
There must be a reason the laptop is singled out as the bad boy of electronics at the airport.

There is: the TSA is full of shit.

A Weapon of Mass Instruction!
http://www.instructables.com/id/A-Weapon-of-Mass-Instruction/
Over 50 years ago, I saw a pencil leaning against the front porch of a house near my grandmother's. I was enthralled with the scale of the pencil...

Is My Teen Weird? 20 Terrifying New Youth Trends
http://christwire.org/2012/04/is-my-teen-weird-20-terrifying-new-youth-trends/
Our young people are bombarded with so many dangerous cultural messages today that it’s difficult to know exactly what’s going on in their lives. For Christian parents, the challenge is particularly acute because so many kids are simply ignorant about Biblical teaching and the incredible responsibility of American patriotism. Instead, they are recklessly influenced by the liberal media to believe so many myths that fundamentally undermine their chances for a productive, happy, faithful and morally respectable adult life...

Fairy tales: The Anti-Grimm
http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/04/fairy-tales
What modern mother hasn’t cringed at the pink and passive fairy tale princesses served up to her impressionable girl? ...they are rooted in a tenacious and remarkably unaltered cultural tradition, the fairy tales first published two centuries ago by the Brothers Grimm. Numerous studies in recent decades have found the 19th century social world they portray so unremittingly sexist that some leading folklorists warn against reading them to children at all. This is why the discovery of a huge new trove of unedited German fairy tales is nothing short of a revelation. What they reveal, in abrupt contrast to the Brothers Grimm, is an equal-opportunity world where the brave and clever children are as likely to be girls as boys, and the vulnerable, exploited youths are not just princesses, but princes.

When the cops subpoena your Facebook information, here's what Facebook sends the cops
http://blog.thephoenix.com/blogs/phlog/archive/2012/04/06/when-police-subpoena-your-facebook-information-heres-what-facebook-sends-cops.aspx
As far as we can tell, nobody's ever seen what one of these looks like -- and we're hoping the social media, law, and privacy experts out there can glean insight from it.

There aren’t any security reasons to introduce secret courts
http://liberalconspiracy.org/2012/04/05/there-arent-any-security-reasons-to-introduce-secret-courts/
To abandon a centuries-old tradition of open justice solely to placate a foreign spy agency would be bad enough. But it seems now that even this flimsiest of justifications no longer stands up.

The psychology of morality: Time to be honest
http://www.economist.com/node/21551447
The conclusion, therefore, at least in the matter of cheating at dice, is that sin is indeed original. Without time for reflection, people will default to the mode labelled "cheat". Given such time, however, they will often do the right thing. If you want someone to be honest, then, do not press him too hard for an immediate decision.

Why One of the World's Leading Peace Advocates Threatened to Punch Me in the Face
http://www.alternet.org/world/154807/why_one_of_the_world%27s_leading_peace_advocates_threatened_to_punch_me_in_the_face?page=entire
Gareth Evans, a former attorney-general and foreign minister in Australia, threatened me because I raised the issue of his support for the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia.

A Message From A Republican Meteorologist On Climate Change
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/03/29/454476/a-message-from-a-republican-meteorologist-on-climate-change/
Acknowledging Climate Change Doesn’t Make You A Liberal

9 Lies Republicans Tell About Women's Bodies
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/27/republican-lies-womens-bodies_n_1374027.html
...plenty of real lies remain in the debate over women's health. Some are promoted by Republican lawmakers as they push legislation that limits reproductive rights, and others come from GOP presidential candidates and their surrogates.

I hereby (fictionally) resign
http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-hereby-resign
My ability to select the best candidates for our positions has been irreparably compromised by looking into their private lives.

I don't hire unlucky people
http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-dont-hire-unlucky-people
"I have hundreds of resumés, how do I whittle them down to a handful of calls and a few interviews?"

Those two links are damned fine reading. The second should be required for anyone in HR.

Olympics 'policy' not to pay musicians
http://www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=4290
The organisers of the London Olympics have been happy to hand huge amounts of public money to multinational companies but are refusing to pay the musicians they are employing to perform at the Games, Corporate Watch can reveal.

Harry Potter and the 800 lb Gorilla
http://gilibarhillel.wordpress.com/2012/03/28/hpwb/
Warner Bros. You are nothing but nasty, litiginous bullies and you should be ashamed of yourselves. And J.K.Rowling, if you ever read this: I wonder if you realize how much hurt and humiliation resides in the hearts of many of the wonderful, creative people whose translations made your words available to hundreds of millions of children across the globe. After a decade of linked work a thank you would have been nice, but we’d settle for an end to the continuing insults to our dignity.

Meat industry says 'butt cancer' billboard near Marlins Park hits below belt
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/meat-industry-says-butt-cancer-billboard-near-marlins-2284121.html
Nothing goes with baseball like a hot dog --and that’s a frightening thing. At least it is to a group called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which has erected an over-the-top billboard west of Marlins Park that says, in effect: Frankly, you oughta be eating something healthier.

Amazon: £7bn sales, no UK corporation tax
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/04/amazon-british-operation-corporation-tax
Online retailer's British operation owned by company in Luxembourg which receives all payments for books, DVDs and other goods

No Need to Hack Phones -- We Stitch Ourselves up
http://thecollectivereview.com/anna-blundy/no-need-to-hack-phones-we-stitch-ourselves-up.html
You don’t need to hack people’s phones to degrade and humiliate them in the press -- The Daily Mail gets us to do it ourselves.

Russia developing a gun that turns people into zombies (seriously)
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/russia-developing-gun-turns-people-zombies-seriously-232522297.html
Russian President Vladmir Putin confirmed that his country is working on the creation of an electromagnetic gun that attacks its target's central nervous system, putting them in what we hope is a temporary, zombie-like state.

Obviously, they are jealous of USAnia's Fox News.

Why Can't Humans and Hideous Pod People Work Together at this Real Estate Company?
http://paulbibeau.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/why-cant-humans-and-hideous-pod-people.html
Hi everybody. Now that I've survived that attempt with the hairspray and the lighter and you know I am impervious to fire, I thought we should clear things up. First, to state the obvious and just get it out there: Yes, I am not really Frank...

Gods as Topological Invariants
http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.6902
We show that the number of gods in a universe must equal the Euler characteristics of its underlying manifold. By incorporating the classical cosmological argument for creation, this result builds a bridge between theology and physics and makes theism a testable hypothesis. Theological implications are profound since the theorem gives us new insights in the topological structure of heavens and hells. Recent astronomical observations can not reject theism, but data are slightly in favor of atheism.

Love Hotels and Unicode
http://www.reigndesign.com/blog/love-hotels-and-unicode/
On Sunday 28 October I attended Shanghai Barcamp 9... Barcamps are "unconferences", meaning anyone can show up without registering, and give a talk on a geeky topic of their choice. Here's my talk from the event, on love hotels and Unicode.

In praise of... text files and protocols
http://blog.jgc.org/2012/04/in-praise-of-text-files-and-protocols.html
I wonder how much of the success of the Internet can be put down to the decision to use text-based protocols for almost everything that people will need to implement. And how much we owe the early writes of the RFCs in deciding that text was best.

A Whip to Beat Us With
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/51292-cory-doctorow-a-whip-to-beat-us-with.html
For too long, publishers have been worrying about the wrong thing, chasing pie-in-the-sky DRM that has never worked at stopping piracy, and will never work. In the process, they’ve fashioned a scourge for their own industry—a multimillion-dollar liability that their customers will have to absorb in order for publishers to get back any leverage at the bargaining table. And every book you allow a tech company to sell with DRM only increases that liability.

Home is wear the art is: hermit crab moves into Lego shell
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/apr/02/hermit-crab-lego-shell-legoland
Harry the hermit crab stands out more than most after Legoland staff make him a protective shell of multicoloured bricks

Yes, Samantha Brick Is Obnoxious, But the Daily Mail Is Trolling Us All
http://jezebel.com/5898848/yes-samantha-brick-is-obnoxious-but-the-daily-mail-is-trolling-us-all
By giving Samantha Brick miles of rope and an extremely public tree, the Daily Mail is trying to trollify us all. It's a little peek behind the curtain at how the media deliberately pits women against women for fun and profit. Fuck that. Ladies, let's stop biting.

(Actually, I suspect she's an actor...)

Alan Lomax's Massive Archive Goes Online
http://research.culturalequity.org/home-audio.jsp
The Sound Recordings catalog comprises over 17,400 digital audio files, beginning with Lomax’s first recordings onto (newly invented) tape in 1946 and tracing his career into the 1990s... Not a single piece of recorded sound in Lomax’s audio archive has been omitted: meaning that microphone checks, partial performances, and false starts are also included.

25 Years of IBM’s OS/2: The Strange Days and Surprising Afterlife of a Legendary Operating System
http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the-birth-death-and-afterlife-of-a-legendary-operating-system/
Big Blue's next-generation operating system was supposed to change everything. It didn't. But it's also never quite gone away...

A bitl like COBOL... (a bit of Microsoft-being-Very-Evil hstory in there, too)

"True Bromance?" No. I Don't Think So.
http://flinthart.livejournal.com/165210.html?style=mine
I had an interesting experience a while back. I cannot recall the details of the context, but a friend of mine used the word 'bromance' to lightly characterise a relationship between a couple of males...

I Wish This Was an April Fool Joke
http://kevin-standlee.livejournal.com/1116037.html?style=mine
"US asserts authority to Stop travel from non-US countries to any North American country" Get this? You can't fly from the UK to, say, Toronto for this year's World Fantasy Convention without the permission of the US government, even though you're never going to set foot on US soil, and even if your flight isn't crossing US airspace. And you won't know if you've been granted that permission until you try to board your flight, and if you're denied boarding, it's your own problem and there's no recourse.

At 11th Hour, Georgia Passes "Women as Livestock" Bill
http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2012/03/31/at-11th-hour-georgia-passes-women-as-livestock-bill/
After an emotional 14-hour workday that included fist-fights between lobbyists and a walk-out by women Democrats, the Georgia House passed a Senate-approved bill Thursday night that criminalizes abortion after 20 weeks. The bill, which does not contain rape or incest exemptions, is expected to receive a signature from Republican Gov. Nathan Deal.

I wonder what would happen if every single woman in the state of Georgia voted with their feet...? Do you think there'd be manacles?

The Exoneration of Bennett Barbour
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2012/03/bennett_barbour_exonerated_of_rape_in_virginia_how_the_state_is_botching_the_dna_retesting_and_notification_of_old_cases.single.html
Virginia knows it has DNA evidence that may prove the innocence of dozens of men convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Men just like Barbour. So why won’t the state say who they are?

Flexible Thought Vs. the Big Mouth in the Sky: The Science Delusion By Rupert Sheldrake
http://www.acceler8or.com/2012/03/2902/
I’m up to the tits with this whole God vs. Science thing...

The Fireplace Delusion
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-fireplace-delusion
On a cold night, most people consider a well-tended fire to be one of the more wholesome pleasures that humanity has produced.... I am sorry to say that if you feel this way about a wood fire, you are not only wrong but dangerously misguided.

France's autism treatment 'shame'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17583123
In many countries, the standard way of treating autistic children is with behavioural therapy - stimulating and rewarding them to develop the skills they need to function in society - but France still puts its faith in psychoanalysis. And an increasing number of parents are now demanding change.

Why I hate the myth of the suffering artist
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/apr/02/myth-of-the-suffering-artist?CMP=twt_fd
It is absurd and insulting to assume artists are assisted by despair or hunger in a way that, say, plumbers are not

Copying Is Not Theft
http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/04/02/copying-is-not-theft/
That’s not to say that record companies and movie studios are not hurt by online piracy. But ...they’re really not hurt in the same way that victims of theft typically are. If a thief steals your car, he has it, and you don’t. But if someone illegally downloads your song, he has it -- but so do you.

Programmable 'smart sand' can assume any shape
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/emergingtech/programmable-smart-sand-can-assume-any-shape/3222
MIT researchers are developing small magnetic cubes that can communicate with each other to auto-duplicate objects in a "sand box" using a subtractive production algorithm.

How to stay alive while being black
http://oddclausen.blogsome.com/2012/03/28/how-to-stay-alive-while-being-black/
Many black families have been forced into uncomfortable but necessary conversations since the Feb. 26 killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. His death and the release of the uncharged shooter, George Zimmerman, have reminded many of how vulnerable we still are. The icy cold wind of racism has crept into our homes... Young black boys have been reminded that they are walking targets for hate.

Q: Will CERN awaken the Elder Gods?
http://www.askamathematician.com/2012/04/q-will-cern-awaken-the-elder-gods/
Physicist: At the risk of over-simplifying the situation; yes, absolutely.

In cancer science, many 'discoveries' don't hold up
http://news.yahoo.com/cancer-science-many-discoveries-dont-hold-174216262.html
A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that many basic studies on cancer -- a high proportion of them from university labs -- are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future.

Is "Game of Thrones" too white?
http://entertainment.salon.com/2012/04/01/is_game_of_thrones_too_white/singleton/
Fantasy fiction might have racial problems, but they're just a reflection of America's broader battles

Historian uncovers Australia's censored books
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-03-23/historian-uncovers-australias-censored-books/3908234
A literary historian has uncovered thousands of banned books buried seven storeys underground in the National Archives of Australia building in Sydney.

Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome Dead at Syfy
http://au.tv.ign.com/articles/122/1221327p1.html
After an unauthorized trailer got BSG fans pumped this morning, Syfy nixes the Cylon War prequel series.

Which Search Engine's Users Are The Most Racist?
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/which-search-engines-users-are-the-most-racist
Google or Bing? Bing or Google? Which search engine has the biggest problem with, you know, them? Let's have a good old-fashioned race (search) war! ...The most racist searchers, with six clear wins, are [REDACTED] users. Congratulations, you win! Just kidding: nobody does.

Are Cancer Stem Cells Ready for Prime Time?
http://the-scientist.com/2012/04/01/are-cancer-stem-cells-ready-for-prime-time/
A flood of new discoveries has refined our definition of cancer stem cells. Now it’s up to human clinical trials to test if they can make a difference in patients.

Anyone want to see a linkfrenzy this evening? (apart from Andrew Ducker, who's prolly seen them all already, given that's where so many of mine come from ;}P> )

Anna Brown: 29-year-old Black Woman Dies in Jail After Being Dragged By Police Out of Hospital
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/03/30/anna-brown-29-year-old-black-woman-dies-in-jail-after-being-dragged-by-police-out-of-hospital/
Just in case the past three weeks of the Trayvon Martin affair hasn’t demonstrated exactly how invaluable black lives are to some people, Anna Brown should cement the notion. She was profiled, deemed to be a drug seeker, and cast aside as if she were irrelevant; dragged away from life-saving care to her death on a cold floor in jail, in the same way that the Sanford Police Department left Trayvon Martin face down in the grass while they tried to figure out how to absolve George Zimmerman of blame.

Polish PM Reveals that US Tortured at Black Sites in his Country
http://www.juancole.com/2012/04/polish-pm-reveals-that-us-tortured-at-black-sites-in-his-country.html
Poland had only escaped the grip of the Soviet Union in 1989, and so its democracy was a fledgling one. For the Bush administration to seduce its high officials into committing torture risked permanently marring its politics and undermining that democracy.

The shape of things to wear: scientists identify how women's figures have changed in 50 years
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-shape-of-things-to-wear-scientists-identify-how-womens-figures-have-changed-in-50-years-516259.html
The research found that although only 8 per cent of women now had the sort of hourglass figure flaunted by curvaceous 1950s film stars such as Sophia Loren, designers and manufacturers continued to make clothes to fit a slim-line version of that figure.

Global Warming Close to Becoming Irreversible
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=global-warming-close-to-becoming-ir
The world is close to reaching tipping points that will make it irreversibly hotter, making this decade critical in efforts to contain global warming, scientists warned on Monday.

Why power generators are terrified of solar
http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/03/27/why-generators-are-terrified-of-solar/
Here is a pair of graphs that demonstrate most vividly the merit order effect and the impact that solar is having on electricity prices in Germany; and why utilities there and elsewhere are desperate to try to rein in the growth of solar PV in Europe. It may also explain why Australian generators are fighting so hard against the extension of feed-in tariffs in this country.

The Banality Of Angry
http://exple.tive.org/blarg/?p=3015
I asked some people on the intuberwebs about good iOS games for kids, and I was a little surprised to see Angry Birds come up. I’ve played through it; it bothered me quite a bit, and my knee-jerk reaction to the claim that it’s a kids game was scowling incomprehension... It’s not a bad game, not at all. But the fact that it’s addictive and fun and that we keep playing as it gets darker and meaner (both morally and graphically, as day turns to night later in the game) without questioning or apparently even noticing it says something real and maybe important about us.

Glad I never caught the Angry Birds Express now..

One Drug to Shrink All Tumors
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/03/one-drug-to-shrink-all-tumors.html
A single drug can shrink or cure human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver, and prostate tumors that have been transplanted into mice, researchers have found. The treatment, an antibody that blocks a "do not eat" signal normally displayed on tumor cells, coaxes the immune system to destroy the cancer cells...

Tory MP complains of Gurkhas "sitting" and "wandering" in his town
http://liberalconspiracy.org/2012/03/26/tory-mp-complains-of-nepalese-gurkhas-sitting/
The Tory MP is of course talking about Nepalese Gurkhas who risked their life for this country in the Army. And he’s complaining about them taking up all the park benches?

Another young, unarmed Black man shot to death in Atlanta, Georgia last night.
http://dank-potion.tumblr.com/post/19971212733/another-young-unarmed-black-man-shot-to-death-in
So how many more slain Brown bodies do you people need to see before you stop considering all these seemingly similar murders "isolated incidents"?

Basic Facts on Clothing and Murder for American Bigots
http://www.juancole.com/2012/03/basic-facts-on-clothing-and-murder-for-american-bigots.html
...all this emphasis on clothing as a motive for murder is just a smokescreen for sidestepping the real issue, which is that bigots shouldn’t be allowed to have hand guns.

Expelled for a tweeted syntactic observation
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3864
Indiana's News Center reports that a student, Austin Carroll, has been expelled from Garrett High School for posting this tweet on his own Twitter account (...) The school says he posted from a school computer; he says he did it from home and it's none of their business. What saddens me is that Austin was making a linguistic observation, and it's basically almost true. This may be a budding linguist, and he's been kicked out of his high school for a syntactic observation.

The Backstory to "Stand Your Ground"
http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/458861.html
On February 26th, (entirely self-proclaimed) "neighborhood watch captain" George Zimmerman of Sanford, Florida spotted a lone black teenager walking in the rain, and concluded, on no other evidence, that this was the only plausible suspect in a recent string of neighborhood burglaries...

Summit Entertainment Claims To Own The Date November 20, 2009; Issues Takedown On Art Created On That Day
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120319/12192218160/summit-entertainment-claims-to-own-date-november-20-2009-issues-takedown-art-created-that-day.shtml
Summit Entertainment, the movie studio behind the Twilight films, is no stranger to ridiculous-to-insane overreaches of intellectual property law... Summit has no legitimate claim here. At all. And yet it took the artwork down anyway, because that's the kind of IP abusers they are. Either way, the company has such a long and consistent history of abusing intellectual property law, isn't there a point at which we just say that the company no longer deserves any such power? If you regularly abuse monopoly privileges, shouldn't they be taken away?

The injustice of minimum alcohol pricing
http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/liberty-justice/the-injustice-of-minimum-alcohol-pricing
The "evidence-based" arguments made for minimum alcohol pricing are, in fact, based on distortion and bad science. The policy is paternalistic, indiscriminate, and only hits people who are frugal or on lower incomes. Slippery slope arguments are common, for good reason. But they’re especially appropriate here.

I think now is a good place to remind you, gentle reader, that links are here because I thought them interesting, not because I agree with what's being said.

The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute
http://dxdoi.org/10.1136/bmj.331.7531.1498
Objectives To determine the overall rate of loss of workplace teaspoons and whether attrition and displacement are correlated with the relative value of the teaspoons or type of tearoom.
Main outcome measures Incidence of teaspoon loss per 100 teaspoon years and teaspoon half life.

Bronx Zoo offers chance to name hissing cockroach for Valentine's Day
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/01/24/bronx-zoo-offers-chance-to-name-hissing-cockroach-for-valentines-day-20587772/
If your beloved really bugs you, if he or she creeps up on you, if it seems like they've been around forever - what better Valentine's gift than giving their name to a Madagascar hissing cockroach?

Me, I think that's awesome.

To the EU: How not to hold a consultation
http://mmmullen.wordpress.com/2012/03/22/consultation_101_for_the_eu/
Increasingly, "email us your thoughts and ideas" is being used by those who don’t really want those thoughts and ideas but want to say they have asked, so participation will continue to shrink as others are warmer to the idea of encouraging a conversation.

Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane: The Story So Far (March 1993 - March 2012)
http://slovobooks.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/neil-gaiman-and-todd-mcfarlane-story-so.html
On the 27th of January, 2012, Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane finally settled their long-running legal dispute over Gaiman's share of various Spawn properties. And when I say ‘long-running,’ this is very nearly an enormous understatement...

Liberating America's secret, for-pay laws
http://boingboing.net/2012/03/19/liberating-americas-secret.html
This morning, I found a an enormous, 30Lb box waiting for me at my post-office box. Affixed to it was a sticker warning me that by accepting this box into my possession, I was making myself liable for nearly $11 million in damages. The box was full of paper, and printed on the paper were US laws -- laws that no one is allowed to publish or distribute without permission...

How the government plans to create a system of closed, secret justice
http://liberalconspiracy.org/2012/03/22/how-the-government-plans-to-create-a-system-of-closed-secret-justice/
Imagine a Britain in which vast swathes of Government activity have withdrawn into the shadows. From the Ministry of Defence to the Home Office, any attempt to hold politicians or bureaucrats to account for their failures or wrongdoing becomes near-impossible. A secret court system, closed to the view of the public and the press, and skewed hopelessly in favour of the Government, stands between the citizen and the state. For the soldier injured as a result of shoddy equipment, for the victim of rendition and torture, or for the citizens failed by those parts of the state which are meant to keep them safe, the ways of legal redress are shut.

"1984": Not suppose to be an instruction manual.

Copyright stagnation
http://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.co.nz/2012/03/copyright-stagnation.html?m=1
Paul Heald demonstrated the effect of the stagnant US copyright wall in seminar at Canterbury last week. Heald dug through some Amazon stats to see what happens to books as they come out of copyright. Here's the rather stunning graph.

Police face racism scandal after black man records abuse
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/mar/30/police-racism-black-man-abuse
Crown Prosecution Service reviews decision not to charge officers heard boasting of strangling 21-year-old black man

Harms of Post-9/11 Airline Security
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/03/harms_of_post-9.html
In this final statement, I promised to discuss the broader societal harms of post-9/11 airport security. This loss of trust--in both airport security and counterterrorism policies in general--is the first harm. The humiliation, the dehumanisation and the privacy violations are also harms. Additionally, there’s actual physical harm. The current TSA measures create an even greater harm: loss of liberty. Increased fear is the final harm, and its effects are both emotional and physical.

White Until Proven Black: Imagining Race in Hunger Games
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/03/hunger-games-and-trayvon-martin.html?mobify=0&intcid=full-site-mobile
The young man, whom I’ll call Adam, had been tracking a disturbing trend among Hunger Games enthusiasts: readers who could not believe--or accept--that Rue and Thresh, two of the most prominent and beloved characters in the book, were black, had been posting vulgar racial remarks...

Payback Is a Bitch for Abortion Clinic Protestors, Thanks to a Brilliant Landlord
http://jezebel.com/5897699/brilliant-abortion-clinic-landlord-teaches-protesters-that-payback-is-a-bitch
...he knows a little something about dealing patiently with anti-abortion protesters. But when they started calling him at home at all hours and harassing his family, he got fed up and came up with a very clever solution: Do unto others as they have been doing unto you...

A Woman's Story
http://raganwald.posterous.com/a-womans-story
The men were amazed. To their credit, once they became convinced that she hadn’t faked her results, they knew she would be a great hire...

Who is the Route 29 Batman? This guy.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/rosenwald-md/post/who-is-the-route-29-batman-this-guy/2012/03/28/gIQA8nPjgS_blog.html
Police pulled a man over on Route 29 in Silver Spring last week because of a problem with his plates. This would not ordinarily make international news, but the car was a black Lamborghini, the license plate was the Batman symbol, and the driver was Batman, dressed head-to-toe in full superhero regalia.

Lightning and lightning bugs.
http://torrain.livejournal.com/474625.html?style=mine
Why isn't there a word that defines what gender you're attracted to, but doesn't do so in relation to you?

Female dummy makes her mark on male-dominated crash tests
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/female-dummy-makes-her-mark-on-male-dominated-crash-tests/2012/03/07/gIQANBLjaS_story.html
Consumer advocates say the female dummy’s subpar performance in some top-selling vehicles reveals a need to better study women and smaller people in collisions. Until recently, only male dummies were used during more than three decades of government testing

I find the title of that piece interesting, given the subject matter is the increased risk of death which women face.

The Death of the Book by Ursula K. Le Guin who is Awesome.
http://blog.bookviewcafe.com/2012/03/26/the-death-of-the-book/
...it’s hard for me to see how the death of the book is to result from the overwhelming prevalence of a technology that makes reading a more invaluable skill than it ever was...

A Skull of Books
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/03/a-skull-of-books/
I just spotted this... Incarnate (Three Degrees of Certainty II) is nearly perfect rendering of a human skull from a thick stack of outdated computer manuals...

Mountains of Books Become Mountains
http://www.visualnews.com/2011/12/22/mountains-of-books-become-mountains/
I thought I’d seen every type of book carving imaginable, until I ran across these jaw dropping creations ...

I shall keep whining about the awful way that ebooks are sold until they fix it*.
http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/2685150.html?style=mine
Someone had a link to a cheap offer on The Hunger Games ebooks... So I followed the link, which told me that I couldn't use that site, as I am not American. So I went to the UK Kobo-run site, which did not have the same offer. So I went to the Google books site, which did not have them at all. At which point I decided they did not want my money, or they would not tease me so.

Forget Your Past: Buzludzha, Bulgaria
http://humanplanet.com/timothyallen/2012/02/buzludzha-buzludja-bulgaria/
.. Over the years I’ve visited my fair share of abandoned buildings. If Blofeld was a real person... he would definitely live here...

Deadly explosion at Antarctic base
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-02-26/two-missing-after-fire-at-brazil-antarctica-base/3853108
Two people have been killed in an explosion at a Brazilian research base in Antarctica... A third sailor was also injured in the blast. A navy statement released after the blast said military personnel were trying to bring the fire under control...

Uh oh... THING'S OUT FOR SUMMER!

New Google tool lets you PROBE YOURSELF
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/29/google_account_activity_tool/
'I had no idea what a pervert I was until now'

Origami-Inspired Paper Sensor Could Test for Malaria and HIV for Less than 10 Cents, Report Chemists
http://www.utexas.edu/news/2012/03/08/origami_malaria_hiv/
One-dimensional paper sensors, such as those used in pregnancy tests, are already common but have limitations. The folded, 3-D sensors, developed by Crooks and doctoral student Hong Liu, can test for more substances in a smaller surface area and provide results for more complex tests.

Johnny Depp as Cultural Appropriation Jack Sparrow...I mean Tonto.
http://nativeappropriations.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/johnny-depp-as-cultural-appropriation.html
He looks like they just took the Captain Jack Sparrow costume and removed the pirate hat, put a bird on it, and added some menacing facepaint.Or wait, they already did that...

5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women
http://www.cracked.com/article_19785_5-ways-modern-men-are-trained-to-hate-women.html
We can put you under a burqa, we can force you out of the workplace -- it won't matter. You're still all we think about, and that gives you power over us. And we resent you for it.

Now you know, you've not got any excuse to keep doing it.

And Types Of Extremists.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/extremists

Also, I want that t-shirt.

Pay the TSA $100 and bypass airport security
http://www.geek.com/articles/news/pay-the-tsa-100-and-bypass-airport-security-20120315/
...the TSA will gladly accept a one-off payment of $100 from you to bypass security checks almost completely. The program is called Precheck, and will allow an individual to just walk through a metal detector before boarding a plane.

The Forgotten History of Gay Marriage
http://www.care2.com/causes/the-forgotten-history-of-gay-marriage.html
Republicans and other opponents of gay marriage often speak of marriage as being a 2,000 year old tradition (or even older). Quite apart from the fact that the definition of marriage has changed from when it was a business transaction, usually between men, there is ample evidence that within just Christian tradition, it has changed from the point where same-sex relationships were not just tolerated but celebrated.

The Abominable Shellfish: Why some Christians hate gays but love bacon
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2004/07/16/the-abominable-shellfish/
In our fondness for Easter ham, we Christians have fervently clung to the surface-level meaning of Peter's vision. But we haven't been as enthusiastic about embracing the larger, more important lesson God was teaching him there on the rooftop. When the "unclean" outsiders knock on our doors, we don't like inviting them in.

This Explains a Lot
http://boingboing.net/2012/03/15/this-explains-a-lot.html

Why We Have to Go Back to a 40-Hour Work Week to Keep Our Sanity
http://www.alternet.org/visions/154518/why_we_have_to_go_back_to_a_40-hour_work_week_to_keep_our_sanity/?page=entire
One hundred fifty years of research proves that shorter work hours actually raise productivity and profits -- and overtime destroys them. So why do we still do this?

Lloyd Shepherd: My parley with ebook pirates
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/16/lloyd-shepherd-ebook-pirates-mobilism
When the author of The English Monster found a request to pirate his novel circulating on discussion board Mobilism, he decided to respond himself -- and was surprised by the results

The 5 Craziest War Stories (All Happened on the Same Ship)
http://www.cracked.com/article_19637_the-5-craziest-war-stories-all-happened-same-ship.html?ya
...the WWII destroyer USS William D. Porter was easily the stupidest ship ever launched. If ships were people, this one would be the kid who ate paste off a stick. And then almost killed the president by accident. So when we say that this ship's service played out in exactly the way it would if it had been a hastily scripted Adam Sandler comedy, we're not exaggerating...

Actual News Headlines Vs. Fox News Headlines
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/actual-news-headlines-vs-fox-news-headlines
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/more-fox-news-headlines-vs-actual-news-headlines
Fox News cited each of these "actual news headlines" as their "source." Fair and balanced. Yup.

How Not to Attract Tourists
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/opinion/the-unwelcome-mat.html?_r=2
Whatever foreigners think of the American experiment, though, it’s unlikely the experience of crossing our border has made them think better of it. Americans may be surprised by the conclusions of a 2006 survey by the U.S. Travel Association, which found that foreign travelers were more afraid of United States immigration officials than of terrorism or crime. They rated America’s borders by far the least welcoming in the world. Two-thirds feared being detained for "minor mistakes or misstatements."

The Himalayas and nearby peaks have lost no ice in past 10 years, study shows
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/08/glaciers-mountains
Meltwater from Asia's peaks is much less than previously estimated, but lead scientist says the loss of ice caps and glaciers around the world remains a serious concern

Single molecule's electric charges seen in first image
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17156036
Researchers have shown off the first images of the "charge distribution" in a single molecule, showing an intricate dance of electrons at tiny scales.

Breaking Good: how to synthesize Pseudoephedrine (Sudafed) From N-Methylamphetamine (crystal meth)
http://boingboing.net/2012/02/27/scientific-paper-of-the-day-h.html
A response by annoyed Sudafed users to the onerous demands by pharmacies for ID and tracking, due to the fact that this helpful and common over-the-counter drug can be used to manufacture crystal meth.

The Most Common Cooking Mistakes
http://www.cookinglight.com/cooking-101/techniques/cooking-questions-tips-00400000064986/print-index.html
Learn how to avoid these common mistakes for success every time

Fundamental Law of High Speed Flying Maneuverability Discovered
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27651/?p1=blogs
The discovery of an ultimate speed limit for birds flying through forest clutter could help shape the design of future autonomous aerial vehicles.

Botanists finally ditch Latin and paper, enter 21st century
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/culturing-science/2011/12/28/botanists-finally-ditch-latin-and-paper-enter-21st-century/
Even after discovering and confirming a new species of plant, which is trying enough itself, botanists have to submit a description in Latin -- even if they had never studied the language before -- and ensure that said description is published in a journal printed on real paper. That is until New Years Day 2012, when new rules passed at the International Botanical Congress...

If a Bird Chirps in Your YouTube Video, Are You Committing Copyright Infringement?
http://gizmodo.com/5888955/if-a-bird-chirps-in-your-youtube-video-are-you-committing-copyright-infringement
A harmless British hippie shot a video about something boring like making a salad from wild greens, and then uploaded it to YouTube. Shortly after, he was informed by YouTube that he was infringing on the copyrights of Rumblefish. The problem is, there's no music in the clip. At all.

Nano Ink 'Tattoo' Could Monitor Diabetes
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/02/12/diabetes-tattoo.html
Controlling your diabetes could make you look tough. A special tattoo ink that changes color based on glucose levels inside the skin is under development

Examining His Own Body, Stanford Geneticist Stops Diabetes in Its Tracks
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/03/examining-his-own-body-stanford-.html?ref=hp
Michael Snyder has taken "know thyself" to the next level--and helped heal thyself. Over a 14-month period, the molecular geneticist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, analyzed his blood 20 different times...

Concealed shoes: Australian settlers and an old superstition
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16801512
Items of clothing found concealed in Australian buildings tell the story of a battle waged by early settlers with the evil spirits they feared were lying in wait in their unfamiliar surroundings...

Can The Human Brain See Quantum Images?
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27609/?p1=blogs
Nobody knows whether humans can access exotic images based on quantum entanglement. Now one physicist has designed an experiment to find out

Unlimited human eggs 'potential' for fertility treatment
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17152413
It may be possible to one day create an "unlimited" supply of human eggs to aid fertility treatment, US doctors say. Researchers have shown it is possible to find stem cells in adult women which spontaneously produced new eggs in the laboratory.

Colonialism in Africa helped launch the HIV epidemic a century ago
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/colonialism-in-africa-helped-launch-the-hiv-epidemic-a-century-ago/2012/02/21/gIQAyJ9aeR_story_3.html
Without "The Scramble for Africa," it’s hard to see how HIV could have made it out of southeastern Cameroon to eventually kill tens of millions of people, according to a new book by Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin.

39 amazing Steampunk computer mods
http://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/39-amazing-steampunk-computer-mods-200834
We've trailed the far corners of the internet to find Steampunk's finest modded PCs, laptops, Macs and various computer peripherals including keyboards, monitors, headphones and mice.

How piracy built the U.S. publishing industry
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57386069-261/how-piracy-built-the-u.s-publishing-industry/
Americans were once enthusiastic pirates. The company that eventually became HarperCollins made a fortune pirating the work of Charles Dickens and other British authors. For decades, the U.S. government turned a blind eye to the pirating of intellectual property--and the practice helped some of the country's largest book publishers make their fortunes...

Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign Registrar on behalf of US Authorities
http://blog2.easydns.org/2012/02/29/verisign-seizes-com-domain-registered-via-foreign-registrar-on-behalf-of-us-authorities/
"The indictment focuses on the movement of funds outside the U.S." and that you can't just "flout US law" by not being in the US.

ED: Pax Amerikana

Key Techdirt SOPA/PIPA Post Censored By Bogus DMCA Takedown Notice
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120223/15102217856/key-techdirt-sopapipa-post-censored-bogus-dmca-takedown-notice.shtml
We've talked a lot about how copyright law and the DMCA can be abused to take down legitimate, non-infringing content, interfering with one's free speech rights. And we're always brushed off by copyright maximalists, who insist that any complaints about taking down legitimate speech are overblown. So isn't it interesting that we've just discovered that our own key anti-SOPA blog post and discussion... have been blocked thanks to a bogus DMCA takedown?

10 Things Conservatives Don’t Want You To Know About Ronald Reagan
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/02/05/142288/reagan-centennial/?mobile=nc
Tomorrow will mark the 100th anniversary of President Reagan’s birth, and all week, conservatives have been trying to outdo each others’ remembrances of the great conservative icon... But Reagan was not the man conservatives claim he was. Reagan regularly strayed from conservative dogma -- he raised taxes eleven times as president while tripling the deficit -- and he often ended up on the wrong side of history, like when he vetoed an Anti-Apartheid bill. ThinkProgress has compiled a list of the top 10 things conservatives rarely mention when talking about President Reagan...

Detect if visitors are logged into Twitter, Facebook or Google+
http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/blog/detect-visitor-social-networks/
The quick version: I’ve found a way to abuse the login mechanism for both Twitter and Google to detect whether a user is logged in to that service.

Astronomers find hints of life on Earth by looking at the Moon
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/02/good-news-astronomers-have-found-life-on-earth-using-polarized-light.ars
A test run for inferring the presence of life on other planets would be to confirm the existence of life on Earth, using only astronomical measurements of some sort. A new study attempts just that with an unusual source of light: Earthshine, or light from Earth reflected back to us by the Moon.

Nicole Kidman as the world's first reported woman with surgically corrected Harry Benjamin Syndrome [wikipedia]
http://www.shb-info.org/kidmanelbe.html
The 41-year-old Aussie actress has signed on to play the world’s first reported woman with Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS), married to Uma Thurman. She will play Lili Elbe, a woman artist who underwent groundbreaking surgery to correct her HBS in 1931, The Hollywood Reporter said.

Coding tricks of game developers
http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-developers.html
If you've got any real world programming experience then no doubt at some point you've had to resort to some quick and dirty fix to get a problem solved or a feature implemented while a deadline loomed large. Game developers often experience a horrific "crunch" (also known as a "death march"), which happens in the last few months of a project leading up to the game's release date. Failing to meet the deadline can often mean the project gets cancelled or even worse, you lose your job. So what sort of tricks do they use while they're under the pump, doing 12+ hour per day for weeks on end?

How to Build a Speech-Jamming Gun
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27620/
Japanese researchers build a gun capable of stopping speakers in mid-sentence.

ED: STFUG

Against Big Bird, The Gods Themselves Contend In Vain
http://scott-lynch.livejournal.com/269876.html
I was a hard-core Sesame Street viewer from about 1979 to 1984 ..for many years, I carried around a vague but emotionally vivid recollection of a Sesame Street episode in which Big Bird and Snuffleupagus had witnessed the the passage of a soul to the ancient Egyptian afterlife, complete with the weighing of the human heart against a feather. I shit you not. For all those years, I just assumed that I was nuts... Not long ago, I was trading Sesame Street memories with that girl I like, and I determined to Google-fu my way to the truth...

Project Barcelona to see BBC open archive for downloads
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17368514
BBC director general Mark Thompson has announced proposals allowing viewers to permanently download copies of their favourite shows from the archives.

Twitter's tales of sexism
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/12/twitters-tales-of-sexism?cat=world&type=article
On International Women's Day last week, Linda Grant tweeted her thoughts about why feminism still matters. Thousands of shocking responses -- from women and men -- proved her point

He Doesn't Deserve Your Validation: Putting The Fake Orgasm Out of Business
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yashar-hedayat/he-doesnt-deserve-your-va_b_1027190.html
It's great to be a man in our society. The perks seem to be endless. Everything is built with the intention of accommodating our needs. It's fantastic, really. We men are constantly validated. And the bedroom is one place where we receive consistent validation. I'm talking about women faking orgasms and giving us the sense that we're the greatest lovers that have ever lived. What a terrific arrangement for men...

He's our Slumdog Millionaire
http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2012/03/10/308081_tasmania-news.html
FROM begging in the slums of India to becoming a successful Hobart businessman, Saroo Brierley's life has taken some unexpected twists...

Shady scientists head up mission to clone woolly mammoths
http://io9.com/5892894/why-is-a-scientific-fraud-helping-spearhead-the-mission-to-clone-a-woolly-mammoth
When Russian and Japanese scientists announced last December that they had recovered bone marrow that would enable them to clone a woolly mammoth within five years, a lot of people called their 2017 deadline unrealistic. Now, Russian scientists have teamed up with South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation -- a non profit organization widely recognized as a leader in animal cloning technologies -- in an effort to expedite the cloning process. There's just one problem: the man in charge of the Foundation is a scientific fraud.

Cloning and resurrecting the mammoth? Not so fast
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/03/cloning-and-resurrecting-the-mammoth-not-so-fast.ars
Two teams of researchers have apparently gone on record as saying they plan on cloning the mammoth. In 2008, when the mammoth genome was announced in the journal Nature, we took at look at that possibility, and concluded it wouldn't work. Given the recent press attention, we thought we'd rerun an updated version of the relevant section from our original report.

How Not To Sell Software in 2012
http://al3x.net/2012/02/29/how-not-to-sell-software-in-2012.html
...if a given software package or service isn’t free/open, it should be as easy as humanly possible to try it, pay for it, and start using it in production. If it isn’t easy to get started with your product, I’m going to find another vendor...

When Cultural Identity Is Denied
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/arts/10iht-melikian10.html?_r=2
When the Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia were inaugurated at the Metropolitan Museum in November, few visitors were ungracious enough to ask why the book published on the occasion is titled "Masterpieces From the Department of Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art." ...In Arabic, the term Islam literally means "surrendering/committing oneself to God," and only humans can be Muslims, not objects. The Western rewriting of cultural and artistic reality extends far beyond simple rebranding...

Before the Pacific: finding the lost islands of a Pangea-era ocean
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/03/before-the-pacific-putting-ancient-islands-back-on-the-map.ars
Back when Pangaea was the big continent on campus, a vast ocean called the Panthalassa covered the rest of the planet. With such an incredible area, it should come as no surprise that the expanse was not featureless. The rock record around the Pacific contains evidence of ancient volcanic arcs...

Spread the Word: Theft is Theft
http://chrishanel.tumblr.com/post/19196576643/spread-the-word-theft-is-theft
Do you support webcomics? Take this one question survey: Do you take the RSS feed of over 90 webcomics, rip the images, put them in your Android app, and then put your own advertisements next to them in order to make money?

Humans are a lot less violent than we think
http://io9.com/5892616/humans-are-a-lot-less-violent-than-we-think
While everyone's always waxing like Lord Tennyson about nature being "red in tooth and claw," neuroscience and psychology are quietly telling us that we may be innately nicer than we think. Sure, we're not cuddly little bunny rabbits, but many lines of evidence over the past few decades have pointed toward some distinctly physical underpinning of basic morality and aversion to violence, implying that humans (and probably many other animals, too) have a strong built-in "try-not-to-punch-that-dude" mechanism.

(ED: Previously.)

Kripke resigns as report alleges that he faked results of thought experiments
http://fauxphilnews.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/kripke-resigns-after-allegations-of-academic-fraud/
Saul Kripke resigned yesterday from his position as Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center.  While similar allegations have been circulating in unpublished form for years, a team of philosophers from Oxford University has just released a damning report claiming that they were systematically unable to reproduce the results of thought experiments reported by Kripke in his groundbreaking Naming and Necessity.

The "Raiders" Story Conference (10 Screenwriting Lessons)
http://mysterymanonfilm.blogspot.com.au/2009/03/raiders-story-conference.html
There is a link now available to download the 125-page transcript (in the form of a .pdf document) of the original 1978 story conference between Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan for a little film called Raiders of the Lost Ark. ...there were about 10 Screenwriting Lessons I took away from this experience and thought they might be worth sharing.

[Trigger warning] Indiana Jones is a child rapist
http://milenapopova.eu/2012/03/trigger-warning-indiana-jones-is-a-child-rapist.html
So here's the challenge, Messrs Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan. Either disprove the authenticity of the document. Or stand up, explain yourselves and apologise. Explain to young girls that you don't think they are promiscuous sluts asking to be raped just by existing; explain to young boys and grown men alike what consent means. Explain that you were wrong. Until one of those two things happens, Indiana Jones remains a child rapist.

3D-Printer with Nano-Precision
http://www.tuwien.ac.at/en/news/news_detail/article/7444/
Ultra-high-resolution 3D Printer Breaks Speed-Records at Vienna University of Technology.

Solar panel made with ion cannon is cheap enough to challenge fossil fuels
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/122231-solar-panels-made-with-ion-cannon-are-cheap-enough-to-challenge-fossil-fuels
Twin Creeks, a solar power startup that emerged from hiding today, has developed a way of creating photovoltaic cells that are half the price of today’s cheapest cells, and thus within reach of challenging the fossil fuel hegemony.

The Wisdom of the Ailing
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/2012/03/pre_existing_conditions_the_real_reason_insurers_won_t_cover_people_who_are_already_sick_.single.html
The real reason health insurers won’t cover people with pre-existing conditions. ...not only are sick people a lot more expensive to care for, but they also know a lot more about what their cost of care is likely to be in the future. And it’s this inside information that makes the market for covering pre-existing conditions break down.

Doubts growing among MPs over plans for secret justice as chilling reality of system is revealed for first time
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2114186/Doubts-growing-MPs-plans-secret-justice-chilling-reality-revealed-time.html
A barrister who's worked in secret courts since 2003 describes a twisted system of justice worthy of Kafka...

New type of extra-chromosomal DNA discovered
http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-extra-chromosomal-dna.html
A team of scientists from the University of Virginia and University of North Carolina in the US have discovered a previously unidentified type of small circular DNA molecule occurring outside the chromosomes in mouse and human cells. The circular DNA is 200-400 base pairs in length and consists of non-repeating sequences. The new type of extra-chromosomal circular DNA (eccDNA) has been dubbed microDNA. Unlike other forms of eccDNA, in microDNA the sequences of base pairs are non-repetitive and are usually found associated with particular genes. This suggests they may be produced by micro-deletions of small sections of the chromosomal DNA.

The last time we redefined what it means to be human
http://io9.com/5892387/the-last-time-we-redefined-what-it-means-to-be-human
Over the past decade, you may have noticed more and more articles referring to "hominins" rather than "hominids." Just why are Homo sapiens and her ancestors now called hominins? The answer isn't just semantic -- it has to do with a revolution in the way evolutionary biologists perceive humans' place in the tree of life. First, let's be clear. Scientists today call humans and our ancestors hominins. They call humans, chimps, orangutans and gorillas hominids. But hominids used to be a humans-only thing. Why are we letting apes into our human clubhouse?

Touching Portraits of Aging Farm Animals
http://iwww.featureshoot.com/2012/02/touching-portraits-of-aging-farm-animals/
These images are from her series, Elderly Animals, which she began after spending a year caring for her mother who has Alzheimer’s disease. Instead of photographing her family, she found an outlet for her experience in a series of portraits of aging farm animals. Her luminous photographs are a moving expression of empathy, but also a celebration of life.

Google to Announce Venture With Belgian Museum
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/technology/google-to-announce-venture-with-belgian-museum.html?emc=eta1
Google, which organizes the world’s information digitally, is linking up with a precursor that aimed to do something similar, on paper. It plans to announce Tuesday that it is forming a partnership with a museum in Mons, Belgium, dedicated to a long-ago venture to compile and index knowledge in a giant, library-style card catalog with millions of entries -- an analog-era equivalent of a search engine or Wikipedia.

ED: I'm sure I've linked to the Mundaneum before here on Linkfrenzy, but damned if I can find it right now.

Davy Jones
http://mindlessones.com/2012/03/01/davy-jones/
This photo is from what I think was the last ever photocall the Monkees did, on what I think was Davy Jones’ last visit to his hometown of Manchester. I was about three feet away at the time.
At the show that night, Davy Jones made a joke that he made every night of that tour -- "I used to be a heartthrob, now I’m a coronary".

ED: David Bowie was his fault, you know.

Vortex radio waves could boost wireless capacity "infinitely"
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/120803-vortex-radio-waves-could-boost-wireless-capacity-infinitely
After four years of incredulity and not-so-gentle mocking, Bo Thide of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics and a team in Italy have finally proven that it’s possible to simultaneously transmit multiple radio channels over exactly the same wireless frequency. In theory, according to Thide, we could potentially transmit an "infinite number" of TV, radio, WiFi, and cellular channels at the same time over the same frequency, blasting apart our highly congested wireless spectrum.

Body Clocks May Hold Key for Treatment of Bipolar Disorder
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120313103922.htm
Scientists have gained insight into why lithium salts are effective at treating bipolar disorder in what could lead to more targeted therapies with fewer side-effects.

Depression: An Evolutionary Byproduct of Immune System?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120301103756.htm
Depression is common enough -- afflicting one in ten adults in the United States -- that it seems the possibility of depression must be "hard-wired" into our brains. A pair of psychiatrists addresses this puzzle in a different way, tying together depression and resistance to infection. They propose that genetic variations that promote depression arose during evolution because they helped our ancestors fight infection...

Scientists shocked to find antibiotics alleviate symptoms of schizophrenia
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientists-shocked-to-find-antibiotics-alleviate-symptoms-of-schizophrenia-7469121.html
Chance discovery of link between acne drug and psychosis may unlock secrets of mental illness... Professor Sir Robin Murray, chair of the Schizophrenia Commission said: "Infection or inflammation might be involved in a minority of people with acute psychosis and minocycline might counter this. In depression inflammatory markers go up and in Alzheimer's too."

The lifespan of a falsehood
http://shouldersofgiantmidgets.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/lifespan-of-falsehood.html
I was snookered the other day. I'm not sure how I feel about that. It was a little thing. Maybe it was a little thing. Maybe it was the tip of something, sticking out.

Sign language 'turned into text' by Aberdeen scientists
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-17297489
Technology aimed at translating sign language into text is being developed by Aberdeen scientists.

Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. Using Trademark Law To Prevent The Use Of Public Domain Stories
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120228/18543417906/edgar-rice-burroughs-inc-using-trademark-law-to-prevent-use-public-domain-stories.shtml
The public domain is meant to be a source of free culture for all the world to enjoy, mix and derive other works from. Unfortunately, there are many people and organizations in the world that wish to block the use of public domain material. Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. (ERB) is one such organization...

Getting older makes us happier, because we give up on our dreams
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9137481/Getting-older-makes-us-happier-because-we-give-up-on-our-dreams.html
Contrary to popular beliefs about grumpy old men and women, people grow happier as they get older, research shows.

Mister Gaiman ...what do you think is the best way to seduce a writer?
http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/18932682858/as-requested-by-too-many-people-making-the-last-post
In my experience, writers tend to be really good at the inside of their own heads and imaginary people, and a lot less good at the stuff going on outside, which means that quite often if you flirt with us we will completely fail to notice, leaving everybody involved slightly uncomfortable and more than slightly unlaid.

Bizarre Hybrid Deep-Sea Creatures Discovered
http://news.discovery.com/animals/deep-sea-creatures-vents-120307.html
Two extreme seafloor conditions in a deep sea site have fostered strange animals.

Gas-filled aspirin is a potent anti-cancer drug
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21543-gasfilled-aspirin-is-a-potent-anticancer-drug.html [Gcache]
Loading aspirin with gas dramatically boosts its cancer-fighting ability and might even blunt the harmful side effects of taking aspirin every day...

Council bans daughter contact over child images
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-17274848
A man who informed police when he found child abuse images on his computer has not been allowed to be alone with his daughter for four months.

Govt. agencies, colleges demand applicants' Facebook passwords
http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/06/10585353-govt-agencies-colleges-demand-applicants-facebook-passwords
in Maryland, job seekers applying to the state's Department of Corrections have been asked during interviews to log into their accounts and let an interviewer watch while the potential employee clicks through wall posts, friends, photos and anything else that might be found behind the privacy wall...

Five hundred new fairytales discovered in Germany
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/05/five-hundred-fairytales-discovered-germany
Collection of fairytales gathered by historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth had been locked away in an archive in Regensburg for over 150 years

Why It’s Awesome That Female Lawmakers Are Penning ‘Joke’ Amendments In Response To Anti-Abortion Bills
http://thegloss.com/sex-and-dating/why-its-awesome-that-female-legislators-are-writing-hilarious-legislation-in-response-to-anti-abortion-bills-493/
First in Virginia, then in Oklahoma, then in Georgia, female senators have responded to anti-abortion bills by offering up amendments that would affect men’s reproductive health decisions, in a kind of political tit-for-tat.... state Senator Janet Howell (D- Fairfax) formally suggested that men should be required to get a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before they could obtain medicine for erectile dysfunction... Johnson proposed that the only place men should be allowed to ejaculate is into vaginas, and that if their sp*nk lands anywhere else, ever, it should be considered "an action against an unborn child."

The Reference is Lost: Stuff From Old Cartoons That Made Sense at the Time
http://www.adultswim.com/blog/gobbledegook/stuff-from-old-cartoons-that-made-sense-at-the-time.html
These classic Looney Tunes were released in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s for an adult audience. The result: old cartoons are frequently stocked with jokes and references mystifying to adult cartoon lovers in 2012. Here are five of the more bizarre, dated cartoon references explained

Sex and the modern girl: Are we witnessing a new age of female sexual assertiveness?
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/men-women/sex-and-the-modern-girl-are-we-witnessing-a-new-age-of-female-sexual-assertiveness-1727304.html
For the first hour or two, you might even forget the reason why you're here. Apart from a couple of topless young women, who could be escapees from a frisky college party, the vibe is low-key -- a bit of dancing, a little flirtatious banter, but not much more. And then, like something from a vampire movie, at 1am almost to the second, this subdued affair transforms surprisingly quickly into a full-blown orgy.

The 40 most insane search suggestions ever seen on Google.
http://www.happyplace.com/3979/the-most-insane-search-suggestions-ever-seen-on-google
We probably shouldn't be surprised by anything people Google at this point, considering we all rely on it for everything short of brushing our teeth for us. But these search suggestions are almost as insane as using Bing.

Want To Become A Pirate? Go To MIT
http://www.science20.com/cool-links/want_become_pirate_go_mit-87744
....colleges have gotten silly about some of the options they offer ...but MIT at least has one that sounds cool: piracy. Unofficially, for at least 20 years any MIT student who completes courses in pistol, archery, sailing, and fencing is considered a pirate. More recently it became official. As of this school year, the physical education department is formally conferring pirate status on students...

Why I Pirate - An Open Letter To Content Creators
https://www.insightcommunity.com/step2/311/why-i-pirate-an-open-letter-to-content-creators
I am a dissatisfied customer who may never buy from you again unless you get your act together... This post isn't my attempt at a debate. You won't hear any mention of theft versus copying, exposure versus lost sales or right versus wrong. All I want to do is give you real-life insight from the file-sharing world. I want to hold your hand and show you how I decide what to buy and what my motivation is to pirate...

DON'T MAKE ME STEAL: Digital Media Consumption Manifesto
http://www.dontmakemesteal.com/en/

Religious TV host Pat Robertson wants pot legalised
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17303859
Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson has expressed support for the legalisation of marijuana in the US, citing failure in the nation's war on drugs.

The big bad pig and the three little wolves
http://minnesattva.livejournal.com/754884.html
It's not "you can't say it" but "if you do, you are an asshole." That's the consequence of your actions. You're willing to expend thousands of words just to argue that you should be allowed unthinkingly to say a couple of words. I bet you could expend that effort in eradicating "bitch" from your vocabulary and have it done by Tuesday. But in choosing to use that energy on arguing... you do kinda seem like an asshole...

Scientists Claim Brain Memory Code Cracked
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120309103701.htm
Despite a century of research, memory encoding in the brain has remained mysterious. Neuronal synaptic connection strengths are involved, but synaptic components are short-lived while memories last lifetimes. This suggests synaptic information is encoded and hard-wired at a deeper, finer-grained molecular scale.

A Dutch Angel’s Cellphone Number Is in Demand
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/world/europe/a-dutch-churchs-angel-is-in-demand.html
High on the cathedral in this trim Dutch town, amid a phalanx of stone statues of local noblemen, crusaders, saints and angels, one figure stands out. Smiling faintly, with lowered eyelids, one of the angels wears jeans, has a laptop bag slung over one shoulder and is chatting on a cellphone. The angel gets about 30 calls a day on the phone...

Cuddly Cthulhu: how HP Lovecraft's dark materials turned soft
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/mar/07/cuddly-cthulhu-hp-lovecraft-merchandising
The Lovecraft merchandising machine has transformed the horror writer's muck-encrusted god, Cthulhu, into fluffy toys and after-dinner mints. Whatever next?

230% efficient LEDs seem to violate first law of thermodynamics
http://dvice.com/archives/2012/03/230-efficient-l.php
Physicists hellbent on destroying the universe have come up with a tiny LED that produces 69 picowatts of light while using just 30 picowatts of power. That's an efficiency of above 100%, which should be impossible, but isn't...

133 Yokai Statues on Mizuki Shigeru Road
http://en.gigazine.net/news/20081230_youkai_bronze/
There are 133 bronze statues of GeGeGe no Kitaro and other yokai (Japanese folklore creatures, both evil and friendly) on Mizuki Shigeru Road, Skaiminato, Tottori. We found them all!

Defense Lawyer Objects to Testimony of Genie Expert
http://www.loweringthebar.net/2012/02/defense-lawyer-objects-to-genie-expert.html
...in 2010 a Saudi defense lawyer demanded that a genie be summoned to testify in open court if the state intended to use its testimony against his client. The lawyer was concerned by the court's willingness to hear instead from a genie expert who said he had talked to the genie and would provide a report...

The Portal 2 that never was
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-03-08-the-portal-2-that-never-was
Warning! Portal 2 spoilers below. Valve's Chet Faliszek and Eric Wolpaw have revealed many paths that Portal 2 didn't take at a very entertaining post-mortem at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco...

$1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog -- How Anyone Can Get Anything Past The Scanners
http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/1b-of-nude-body-scanners-made-worthless-by-blog-how-anyone-can-get-anything-past-the-tsas-nude-body-scanners/
This video is here to demonstrate that the TSA’s insistence that the nude body scanner program is effective and necessary is nothing but a fraud, just like their claims that the program is safe (radiation what?) and non-invasive (nude pictures who?). The scanners are now effectively worthless, as anyone can beat them with virtually no effort.

At Chechnya Polling Station, Votes for Putin Exceed the Rolls
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/world/europe/fraudulent-votes-for-putin-abound-in-chechnya.html?_r=3
The final tally: Putin, 1,482 votes; Gennady A. Zyuganov, the Communist Party leader, one vote. This result was in itself statistically improbable. But even more difficult for the teachers who had been drafted onto the electoral commission to explain was the turnout: there were only 1,389 people registered in the precinct, meaning that the turnout was 107 percent.

Gordon Ramsay’s Porn Dwarf Double Eaten by Badger
http://gawker.com/5839596/gordon-ramsays-porn-dwarf-double-eaten-by-badger
U.K. tabloid Sunday Sport recently introduced the world to Percy Foster, a 35-year-old dwarf porn star whose career was just beginning to catch fire. It was all because an observant production assistant on the set of Hi-Ho Hi-Ho, It's Up Your Arse We Go had noticed how much Foster looked like celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. But just as Foster was set to join the rarefied ranks of celebrity lookalike dwarf porn stars, tragedy struck: The body of the 3' 6" performer has been discovered in a badger's den, partially eaten...

What Gemma Jones’ Telegraph Refugee Story Was Really Saying: A Translation
http://mike-stuchbery.com/2012/02/17/what-gemma-jones-telegraph-refugee-story-was-really-saying-a-translation/
If you are scared of Brown People and think it is unfair they are being treated like human beings, vote #1 Liberal Party of Australia! If you hate Australia, and think that Brown People are human, vote Australian Labor Party.

Leaked docs: Heartland Institute think tank pays climate contrarians very well (updated)
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/02/leaked-docs-heartland-institute-think-tank-pays-climate-contrarians-very-well.ars
Yesterday, a series of documents that allegedly originated form the Heartland were leaked to a prominent climate blog. The documents reveal that most of the funding for its climate activities come from a small range of very generous donors, and that big plans are afoot for 2012. If the Heartland has its way, it will fund the launch of a new website by meteorologist and climate skeptic Anthony Watts, and prepare a school curriculum intended to keep teachers from addressing climate science...

Falkland Islands: What are the competing claims?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17045169
Nearly three decades after the Falklands War, tensions between the UK and Argentina have resurfaced. The UK insists the Falkland Islands are rightfully the UK's. The Argentine government maintains the islands, which it calls Las Malvinas, belong to it. But what are the details of each side's legal, historical and geographical claims for ownership?

They Made A Video Game About Slavery, And It’s Actually Good
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/02/they-made-a-video-game-about-slavery-and-its-actually-good/
For the last couple of days, I’ve been playing *Mission U.S.*, an educational video game that allows players to assume the role of a young slave named Lucy who escapes from a Kentucky plantation in 1848. It’s not only an engaging video game, it’s a harrowing, illuminating look at the realities of life as an American slave... While it is indeed an educational game, it’s also an engaging, well-designed and fascinating one.

"Responsibility to Protect" in Civil War Zones
http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/457798.html
I continue to be convinced that, when it comes to anything even vaguely connected to war, military affairs, or coercive diplomacy, the most important fact of history is the ferocious bipartisan determination to prove Donald Rumsfeld right and Colin Powell wrong, no matter how often Colin Powell's predictions end up being the ones vindicated by the facts.

Hitman Scam
http://www.snopes.com/crime/fraud/hitman.asp
Scam:   Con artists present themselves as "hitmen" already hired by others to kill you, then extort payment to not carry out the contract.

Fiery Demise For A Titan Of Nature
http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/01/17/011712-news-historic-tree-fire-1-3/
Florida's 3,500-year-old bald cypress burns down in freaky eruption... Known as “The Senator,” or simply “The Big Tree,” the hollowed-out majestic timber, standing at 118 feet tall, ignited before dawn...

UFO Found In Baltic Sea?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/30/ufo-found-in-baltic-sea-update_n_1241646.html
A team of shipwreck hunters that found a strange circular object on the floor of the Baltic Sea in 2011 now says they have discovered visual evidence of a second "disc-like shape" some 200 meters from the original find...

ED: What I find fascinating about this story is that the disc shapes are about the same size as a Haunebu Vril Disc, the rumoured Nazi Flying Saucer which featues in the new Iron Sky movie...

Congressional Birth Control Hearing Involves Exactly Zero People Who Have a Uterus
http://jezebel.com/5885672/congressional-birth-control-hearing-involves-exactly-zero-people-who-have-a-uterus
Today on Capitol Hill, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform assembled a panel to discuss the birth control mandate in President Obama's Affordable Care Act. Specifically, whether or not requiring insurers to cover birth control violates religious freedom of people who don't believe in science. The committee, chaired by a male, consisted of eight men who felt personally persecuted by the requirement. And that's about the least depressing aspect of the whole circus.

Why You Need Domain Knowledge
http://blog.markwshead.com/1148/design-problem/
I don’t know the story of the gun, but I do know that you shouldn’t need to point the barrel toward your face to read a gauge...

Physicists Predict The Existence of Time Crystals
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27583/
If crystals exist in spatial dimensions, then they ought to exist in the dimension of time too, says Nobel prize-winning physicist

Comic Thinks. Ideas, Not Characters.
http://polrua.livejournal.com/255773.html
In the current kerfuffle over 'Before Watchmen', I'm hearing the same stupid strawman argument over and over again, and I'm getting sick of explaining why it's a load of old horse-shit. So once again, LJ becomes my storage depot for rants that I'd rather cut-and-paste than spend an hour churning over again...

100 years of the war on drugs
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16681673
The first international drug treaty was signed a century ago this week. So what was the war on drugs like in 1912?

David Cameron knows the drug laws aren't working; his failure to change them is simple cowardice
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100137480/david-cameron-knows-the-drug-laws-arent-working-his-failure-to-change-them-is-simple-cowardice/
Pretend you're a Home Office minister. One of your neighbours employs a radical public health policy and, 10 years later, has seen huge improvements in all the relevant health outcomes. The evidence for the efficacy of that health policy is widespread; the British Medical Journal and World Health Organisation have both issued major pieces of research, along with one of the leading journals in the field, which say that in general the policy has positive effects. Further, the proposed policy is significantly cheaper than the existing one. What do you do? Well, obviously, if the policy is the decriminalisation of drug use, then you reject it out of hand.

This is Why I Oppose the MPAA
http://www.reddit.com/r/SOPA/comments/pq8ra/this_is_why_i_oppose_the_mpaa
I was contacted directly by the lead of the studio’s legal team, who explained my situation to me very clearly. He told me that I was technically in my legal right to use Isaac Asimov’s material. However, if I chose to proceed, they would file multiple lawsuits totaling over 2 million dollars against me. In the end, I might win, but it would take hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees just to fight it, but would cost them nothing more than the salaries they already pay their lawyers. It would be 10 years before any type of verdict could be levied..

Anglo-Scottish talks over Antarctica
http://www.scottishtimes.org/anglo_scottish_talks_over_antarctica
Ministers from both Scottish and UK Governments are locked in negotiations relating to who controls legal rights over Antarctica after it emerged that UK rights in the continent were devolved to Scotland by accident.

The BBC censors the word "Palestine"
http://www.arabist.net/blog/2012/2/1/the-bbc-censors-the-word-palestine.html
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has spent eight months trying to find out why the decision was made to censor the lyrics of a freestyle performance by the rapper, Mic Righteous. Appearing on the Charlie Sloth show in February 2011, he sang: ‘I can scream Free Palestine for my beliefs’. BBC producers replaced the word ‘Palestine’ with the sound of breaking glass, and the censored performance was repeated in April on the same show. Amena Saleem, of PSC, said: ‘In its correspondence with us, the BBC said the word Palestine isn’t offensive, but ‘implying that it is not free is the contentious issue’...

Humans helped wipe out African rainforest
http://www.tgdaily.com/sustainability-features/61409-humans-helped-wipe-out-african-rainforest
The widespread disappearance of rainforest in central Africa 3,000 years ago may have been caused by human activity. A team of French researchers believes that as Bantu famers spread out across the region, they created corridors of savanna that eventually spread to create the grasslands of today.

Neanderthal Demise Due to Many Influences, Including Cultural Changes
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120207100143.htm
"While they disappeared as a distinctive form of humanity, they live on in our genes. What we do in this study is propose one model of how this could have happened and show that behavioral decisions were probably instrumental in this process." The researchers suggest it's time to study variation and diversity among individuals rather than classify them into types or species.

What if there were another advanced species?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46076176/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.Tx_7myOvXqc
Would we break bread with our brainy cohabitants or be locked in battle?

These Are the Earliest Human Paintings Ever
http://cryptozoologynews.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/these-are-earliest-human-paintings-ever.html
According to new dating tests, these are the first paintings ever made by humans. They are seals painted more than 42,000 years ago, located in the Cave of Nerja, in Málaga, Spain. And they may change our ideas about humanity's evolution... all the available scientific data shows that these pictures could only have been made by Homo Neanderthalensis instead of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, something completely unthinkable until this finding...

Entire genome of Denisovan decoded from finger bone
http://www.phenomenica.com/2012/02/entire-genome-of-denisovan-decoded-from.html
German anthropologists have decoded the entire genome sequence of a Denisovan, representative of the extinct Asian group related to Neanderthals, from a finger bone fossil, a study reveals.

How widespread is Denisovan ancestry today?
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/denisova/skoglund-jakobsson-2011-south-china.html
Last month, David Reich and colleagues reported on estimates of Denisovan ancestry for island and mainland Asian populations. Their most memorable conclusion was that they could find no substantial sign of Denisovan ancestry anywhere on the Asian mainland, or indeed on any island that had ever been connected by land to Asia...

What If All the Cats in the World Suddenly Died?
http://news.yahoo.com/cats-world-suddenly-died-145802016.html
Perhaps you're a cat lover. Perhaps you abhor the lazy critters. ...Cats, beloved or otherwise, don't radiate the message that they're indispensable, hard-working members of the household, or the world. But, in fact, they're just playing it cool (as usual). Experts say that if all the world's cats suddenly died, things would quickly go to hell in a handbasket.

http://curiositycounts.com/post/17488184364/while-time-readers-in-the-rest-of-the-world-get-a
While TIME readers in the rest of the world get a serious profile of a key figure in the Euro crisis, Americans get a cover story about animal friendships -- the latest in American news distortion.

The Real Risks of Glitter Bombing
http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2012/02/10/The_Real_Risks_of_Glitter_Bombing/
Glitter bombing started as a seemingly innocuous, if tongue-in-cheek, form of protest. Gay rights activists would just walk up to a Republican presidential candidate, throw a handful of glitter, sometimes shout a message, then walk away. Not so anymore. ...Former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who is a Fox News host, was among the first to call for criminal prosecution of glitter bombers. He claimed glitter bombing a form of assault.

The Ultimate Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace 3D FAQ
http://deathstarpr.com/2012/02/the-ultimate-star-wars-episode-i-the-phantom-menace-3d-faq/
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is being re-released in cinemas in 3D this week and to celebrate, the PR Team has decided to answer every question that’s ever been asked about it. Even the questions you didn’t know you wanted to ask.

When the bias of our blinders changes the Bible
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/01/27/when-the-bias-of-our-blinders-changes-the-bible/
Junias is a character in some translations of the Bible. More specifically, he’s a character invented by translators and inserted into the Bible. He’s a made-up person with a made-up name. Junias never existed. And Junias’ name never existed. But despite that, you can read the non-existent name of this non-existent person right there in the Bible -- provided you have the right Bible. Or, rather, provided you have the wrong one.

What I’ve Learned About Smart People.
http://tmac721.tumblr.com/post/17500383225/what-ive-learned-about-smart-people
Not only do smart people ask questions when they don’t understand something, but they also ask questions when the world thinks it understands something. ...Smart people don’t take claims at face value, and smart people don’t rest until they find an explanation they’re comfortable accepting and understanding.

Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1986299 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1986299
...we do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent, and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy.

Can a court order stop a torrent file?
http://www.technollama.co.uk/?p=4960
I’ve just finished reading the fascinating case of AMP v Persons Unknown [2011] EWHC 3454 (TCC) via the IP Osgoode blog. This is a BitTorrent case with a twist, as it is NOT a copyright case...

The Pirate Bay now lets you download physical objects
http://gigaom.com/2012/01/23/pirate-bay-physibles/
Other file sharing sites may be shutting down in the aftermath of the MegaUpload raid, but the Pirate Bay is expanding instead. The site announced Monday that users can now download physical objects as well -- sort of, anyway. The Pirate Bay introduced a new content category called "Physibles" that’s being used to trade digital designs that can be used with 3-D printers to recreate physical objects.

ED: NOW YOU CAN DOWNLOAD A CAR!!!

Emerging movement encourages sheriffs to act as shield against federal tyranny
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_19946455
The person who will "stand tall against federal tyranny," even if it means armed resistance, according to organizers, is the county sheriff. The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association's inaugural convention was designed to be the national coming-out for this idea and the start of an educational movement that its founder hopes will sweep the country. Its sponsors included the John Birch Society, the Gun Owners of America and the Front Sight Firearms Training Institute.

The lady vanishes: Invisible Wife Syndrome
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/aug/28/invisible-wife-syndrome-celebrity-relationships
When her husband shot to TV fame, Gia Milinovich became 'Mrs Brian Cox'. So what does it feel like to suffer from Invisible Wife Syndrome?

ED: Warning, the comments are full'o'fail. As you'd expect.

Rapunzel number helps scientists quantify ponytails
http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre81918v-us-hair-rapunzel/
British scientists said on Friday that a "Rapunzel Number" may have helped them to crack a problem that has perplexed humanity since Leonardo da Vinci pondered it 500 years ago.

Ghost Rider, Walking Dead, and The Comics Industry's Spartacus Moment (Op-ed)
http://geek-news.mtv.com/2012/02/10/ghost-rider-created-by-gary-friedrich/
In a bit of news unfortunately timed with the upcoming release of the new Ghost Rider movie, it seems that ol' flame-head's creator, Gary Friedrich, has been given a $17,000 "bill" by Marvel Entertainment's lawyers.... Friedrich is also being told not to go around publicly and say he is the creator of Ghost Rider "for financial gain."

The Pirate Bay Shows Futility of Domain and DNS Blocks
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-shows-futility-of-domain-and-dns-blocks-120109/
In October 2011, a court in Finland ordered local ISP Elisa to block The Pirate Bay to stop copyright infringement among its subscribers. Today, the blockade -- which covers many domains and IP addresses -- took effect, but behind the scenes there is an effort to unblock the site and render the court order useless. Meanwhile there is already collateral damage -- the court order has succeeded in blocking a domain linking to Electronic Frontier Finland.

Busted: the politics of cleavage and a glance
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/busted-the-politics-of-cleavage-and-a-glance-20120211-1sy7e.html
Increasingly, women feel they are entitled to dress however they like but take offence when the 'wrong' man has a look, writes Bettina Arndt.

Conservatives suggest defeating birth control by calling it 'abortion.' No, really.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/10/1063663/-Conservatives-suggest-defeating-birth-control-by-calling-it-abortion-No-nbsp-really
At CPAC, some top conservative minds (stay with me here) got together to try to decide how to defeat the previously not terribly controversial law mandating insurance cover contraception. Their conclusion? Conservatives should just lie about it...

About my 'spilled semen' amendment to Oklahoma's Personhood bill
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/09/spilled-semen-amendment-oklahoma-personhood-bill?fb_source=ticker&fb_action_ids=10150532909481345&fb_action_types=news.reads
I took this stand because I'm sick of the hypocrisy of Republican lawmakers who want to police women's reproductive health

Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto200805
Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics--ruthless legal battles against small farmers--is its decades-long history of toxic contamination.

Island Cats from Fukuoka Japan
http://lovemeow.com/2012/02/island-cats-from-fukuoka-japan/
When there are fishermen on an island in Japan, they always seem to have a group of loyal feline followers...

Ebook Formats, DRM and You -- A Guide for the Perplexed
http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/ebooks-formats-drm-and-you-%E2%80%94-a-guide-for-the-perplexed/
None of the developers and maintainers of these tools or this site are in favour of ebooks being ‘pirated’. We expect people to use these tools only to gain full access to ebooks they have bought themselves.

Babies and Kittens Venn Diagram
http://noiseandsignal.lyris.org/2012/02/babies-and-kittens-venn-diagram.html
I was at brunch the other day with some friends and their cute little baby. We're all cat lovers so the subject of kittens naturally arose and a discussion of similarities and differences. There's a lot to say about this--some of it unpleasant and sticky-- but here's the gist of the conversation...

Traveling Light in a Time of Digital Thievery
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/technology/electronic-security-a-worry-in-an-age-of-digital-espionage.html?_r=1
What might have once sounded like the behavior of a paranoid is now standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies, research groups and companies that do business in China and Russia... "If a company has significant intellectual property that the Chinese and Russians are interested in, and you go over there with mobile devices, your devices will get penetrated"...

Iran Shut Down Gmail , Google , Yahoo and sites using "Https" Protocol
http://kabirnews.com/iran-shut-down-gmail-google-yahoo-and-sites-using-https-protocol/202/
At the same time nobody can even use banking websites in Iran because all of them using "Https" to encode the sensetive data...

The Monster of Glamis
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2012/02/the-monster-of-glamis/
That awful secret was once the talk of Europe. From perhaps the 1840s until 1905, the Earl’s ancestral seat at Glamis Castle, in the Scottish lowlands, was home to a "mystery of mysteries"--an enigma that involved a hidden room, a secret passage, solemn initiations, scandal, and shadowy figures glimpsed by night on castle battlements. The conundrum engaged two generations of high society until, soon after 1900, the secret itself was lost...

Siblings from India don't expect to marry due to 'werewolf syndrome'
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/werewolf_curse_ja39KCXDRrjK45Qlqk9ODL#ixzz1m1KBDLYN
These three sisters in India have dreams of getting married, but are caught in a nightmare -- each is cursed with an extremely rare genetic disorder sometimes called "werewolf syndrome." There are only a few hundred cases in the world of hypertrichosis universalis, which results in excessive hair over the body and for which there is yet no cure...

UK sight-loss charity sues BMI
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/27/rnib_sues_bmi/
The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) has taken the unusual step of suing BMI after the airline failed to make changes to its website to make it accessible to blind and partially sighted people...

Gillard and Abbott were never really threatened by Aboriginal protestors
http://www.independentaustralia.net/2012/politics/gillard-and-abbott-were-never-really-threatened-by-aboriginal-protestors/
The official account portrays Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott as being attacked by violent Aboriginal demonstrators today in Canberra. Present at the demonstrations was John Passant -- who paints a rather different picture of events.

Why Arabic is Terrific
http://idlewords.com/2011/08/why_arabic_is_terrific.htm
...don't fall for the bait and switch with Chinese or Japanese! They might tempt you with an exotic writing system, but after a few months you find out that the underlying language is pretty vanilla, and meanwhile there is a stack of three thousand flash cards standing in between you and the ability to skim a newspaper. Arabic, on the other hand, twists healthy minds in twelve ways:..

Do the weather forecasters quoted by the Daily Mail actually exist?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2012/jan/26/weather-forecasters-daily-mail
Just who are the mysterious women who produced Positive Weather Solutions' forecasts and appeared in Mail articles?

Why McDonald's In France Doesn't Feel Like Fast Food
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/01/24/145698222/why-mcdonalds-in-france-doesnt-feel-like-fast-food?ps=cprs
Naturally, the U.S. is its no. 1 market, but guess who is no. 2? You got it: France... McDonald's is such a success in the land of Michelin three-star restaurants because it has adapted to French eating habits and tastes... Ithere used to be a few Burger Kings in Paris, but McDonald's closest competitor went belly up years ago. ...they tried to transplant the total American dining experience to France, without taking into consideration French preferences... McDonald's, meanwhile, offers all kinds of Frenchified dishes...

Miracle material graphene can distil booze, says study
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16747208
Membranes based on the "miracle material" graphene can be used to distil alcohol, according to a new study in Science journal... They have shown that the membrane blocks the passage of several gases and liquids, but lets water through...

Life Among the Pirates
http://www.granta.com/Archive/Granta-109-Work/Life-Among-the-Pirates/1
In March of last year, the director of the Peruvian offices of the international publisher Planeta, got an urgent call from Madrid. Paulo Coelho’s people were upset. It seems the Brazilian writer’s latest novel, The Winner Stands Alone, had been seen on the streets of Lima in an unauthorized edition. Rosales was taken aback. Coelho is a steady bestseller in Peru (and everywhere) and any new title by him is certain to be pirated almost immediately upon publication, but this one wasn’t scheduled to be released until July. The Peruvian book pirates hadn’t commissioned their own translation. Instead, they had infiltrated Planeta in Spain and stolen the official translation before it was complete.