May 2009
98 posts
Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a... →
I wouldn’t mind slapping my dad with his permission. I really don’t care about drinking from someone else’s glass, but I do wash my hands and judge those who don’t.
Politically speaking, what does this make me?
And guess what: “Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart,” Professor Haidt says.
— From London.
Darwinius Masillae: Cool Name, but Not All That. ... →
Carl Zimmer, prominent science journalist, called two experts to ask them what they thought of the fossilized primate that was revealed to the world last week.
Sure, the little beast is lovely, they said. And the media circus? Perfectly orchestrated. Well done.
Now, is it the long-awaited ”missing link?” Hardly, they argue. One of them even called her “vanilla,” gasp.
To make matters even more...
Unconsciousness Faked To Make Anesthesiologist... →
And speaking of the devil…
— From London.
Comedians have yet to figure out how to mock... →
Except, of course, for The Onion.
Conservative satirists would love to toss some kryptonite at him, but he is a slippery target. His race makes some cautious, for a start. And anti-Obama jokes on the internet are pathetic. Most sound bitter rather than witty. For example: “Why did Barack Obama cross the road? Answer: To help the other side.”
— In The Economist, from London.
“Australia: it’s like Canada in a thong.”
– David Sedaris, tonight at the Roundhouse.
“Musical crushes only placate you, they merely tell you what you want to hear, in...”
– Laura Barton, in The Guardian. Retrieved from my Bag of Nice Old Things and dusted, just for you.
— From London.
Are Earth-like planets next door? →
Two rival scientific teams are locked in a high-stakes race to discover other earth-like worlds - and forever change our own.
Don’t miss the gorgeous slideshow.
For my dear friend PY, who, for as long as I’ve known him (11 years and counting), has lived with his head in the stars, reading and daydreaming about exoplanets (and, on a sidenote, to whom I owe my first encounter with Carl...
“To read with your lungs and diaphragm, with your tongue and lips, is very...”
– Verlyn Klinkenborg, in the NYTimes.
— From London.
Someone very close to me is entering his fourth day in the hospital because of something that resembles Erysipelas, a skin infection which, if not caught on time, can cause terrible complications, such as blood poisoning, septic shock, necrosis… In short, really bad stuff you never want to have to go through.
Thankfully, his doctors excluded MRSA, even though they don’t know what the culprit is...
Best Blog Ever: Abstract City. Click on this. I'm... →
Christoph Niemann on the fall of the Berlin Wall. And while you’re at it, check out the whole thing.
— From London.
“There were works on the ceiling, under the bed! Under the bed! Under the bed,...”
– Herb and Dorothy - A film by Megumi Sasaki
A documentary about a postal clerk and a librarian who collected art. Trailer (Thanks to the Chhib).
— From London.
WatchOh mah gawd, look who was just tawkin’ bout anti-matter! The man hisself!
— From London.
"Can you blow up things up with anti-matter?" →
“Well of course you can.” So technically, Dan Brown is not wrong. “But the amount that you need to blow up the Vatican would take a billion years to produce, so that’s a *minor* detail, and the amoung of money you would need for that is about 1,000 times the world’s GDP º,” says Mark Lancaster, a particle physicist at University College of London.
Ah. Then I...
"Ugly nationalist politics are popular all over...
Charlie Brooker (@charltonbrooker on Twitter) takes a stab at the British National Party (the U.K. equivalent of the French Front National, or Spain’s Franco nostalgists, to quote a couple). 1/ It’s funny, 2/ it’s actually quite moving. Feel free to replace “BNP” with the extreme/nationalist organization of your choice.
“These villagers gave their lives...
“Here is a good rule of thumb,
Too clever is dumb.”
– Ogden Nash.
— From London.
Asperger and a Marriage: Learning to Relate.
Today’s Modern Love (a weekly column I haven’t missed in three years):
“Fair enough.” Then something occurred to me. “I can help if that’s what you need.” Duh.
“That would be great. Actually, you could have picked up this room instead of sitting on the couch, pouting.”
“Right.” (“Pick up messes. Don’t pout,” I wrote in my Journal of Best Practices.)
— From London.
Great, Free and Legal.
Podcasters, broadcasters, interwebbers, anyone interested in creating audiovisual content: you probably already know about this, but I didn’t (mostly because I do none of those things). Still, as for anything that is Downloadable and Great and Free and LEGAL (YES!), I make it my duty to flag it, if only to add one more item to everyone’s List Of Reasons Why The Internet Is Awesome...
