A Haiku
“Our iPhones sail past
the poor and starving, yet still
we blame the pirates.”
I thought that was tragic and beautiful.
Originally here. I found it here.
Electing corpses
Voters in the small northeastern Missouri town of Winfield re-elected their mayor for a fourth term on Tuesday, about a month after his death.
Ballots had already been printed and absentee voting had already begun when Harry Stonebraker died of a heart attack at age 69 on March 11. He won easily in Tuesday’s general election with 206 votes, or 90 percent. Alderman Bernie Panther got the other 23 votes.
Andrew, did you hear about this? (More where this came from.)
Birdhouse
Best promotion viddy ever.
I have been using Birdhouse since this morning and I already see this as an essential iPhone twitter app.
wolf and pig
Free Cuba
President Barack Obama directed his administration Monday to allow unlimited travel and money transfers by Cuban Americans to family in Cuba, and to take other steps to ease U.S. restrictions on the island, a senior administration official told The Associated Press.
Awesome. I’ve always wanted to go there. (Wait, is the travel only for Cuban Americans?)
fuck the duggars
Josh, the eldest of Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar’s 18 kids, announced Monday that he and new bride Anna were about to start their own brood. The couple, who’s been married since September, said Anna Duggar is due Oct. 18.
He said he and his new wife are frequently asked whether they’ll have a large family.
“We have committed leaving that area up to God as far as our family size,” he said.
Social Security of the future
Here are the features in detail:
- Thanks to the thumbprint reader, only the owner of the card is able to activate it.
- The material of the Color E Ink display scanner is thin film used in electronic displays.
- Buttons allow the user to select between Social Security, driver’s license, and passport information.
- The sturdy yet light aluminum body will last much longer than a typical plastic card.
- The water-resistant cover keeps the card shiny and protects it from the elements.
As conceptualized by frog design. (Thanks, Quips)
the edge of space
The edge of space has been newly confirmed at 73 miles above the earth.
A lot remains very fuzzy, however, as the boundary is surrounded by a host of misconceptions and confusing, conflicting definitions. For starters, astronauts can say they’ve been to space after only passing the 50-mile (80-kilometer) mark.
Meanwhile the boundary recognized by many in the space industry is also a somewhat arbitrary 62 miles (100 kilometers). Scientist Theodore von Kármán long ago calculated that at this altitude the atmosphere is so thin that it’s negligible, and conventional aircraft can no longer function because they can’t go fast enough to get any kind of aerodynamic lift. This 62-mile boundary is accepted by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI), which sets aeronautical standards.
NASA’s mission control uses 76 miles (122 kilometers) as their re-entry altitude because that’s where the shuttle switches from steering with thrusters to maneuvering with air surfaces, NASA states. Others point out that the “Now Entering Space” sign should be posted way out at 13 million miles (21 million kilometers) because that’s the boundary where Earth’s gravity is no longer dominant.
ASL Matchbooks
narco-juniors
As the old wave of Mexican drug lords passes, they are being replaced by sons and daughters.
“They’re harder to identify because they don’t look like typical drug traffickers,” he said. “You can’t detect them by saying ‘Oh look, he has a big truck with wide tires and automatic weapons, gold chains, snakeskin boots and a big belt buckle and dark glasses.’”
the secrets of bird flight
When birds, bats or bugs make a turn, all they have to do is start flapping their wings normally again and they straighten right out.
That came as a surprise to researchers who thought turning and stopping took more steps.
Lead researcher Tyson L. Hedrick of the University of North Carolina compared it to sitting at a desk chair and turning left. It’s a three-step process, launch the turn by pushing with one foot, turn, then stop by pushing with the other.
It’s a simpler, one-step process for flying animals, he explained in a telephone interview, launch a turn and then simply flap normally to end it and fly away.
The findings are reported in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.
“We didn’t expect things to fall out this neatly,” he said, particularly since the process is the same for animals of all sizes from the fruit fly to the bat to the cockatoo.
“It’s sort of unusual” to find a general rule to cover six orders of magnitude in size, he said.
the state of the spam
The level of spam has declined to 97% of the internet’s email.
Alternate statistics show the total spam level at lower — one source pegs it at a mere 81 percent of mail traffic (a figure which seems awfully low) — and also notes that even with the taking down of McColo and other spammer ISPs, spam traffic will inevitably rise again to “normal” levels.
mobile home, Stephanie Bellanger, Amaury Watine, François Gustin & David Dethoor
Strunk and White
Geoffrey K. Pullum thinks the little book contains 50 years of stupid grammar advice:
There are many other cases of Strunk and White’s being in conflict with readily verifiable facts about English. Consider the claim that a sentence should not begin with “however” in its connective adverb sense (“when the meaning is ‘nevertheless’”).
Searching for “however” at the beginnings of sentences and “however” elsewhere reveals that good authors alternate between placing the adverb first and placing it after the subject. The ratios vary. Mark Liberman, of the University of Pennsylvania, checked half a dozen of Mark Twain’s books and found roughly seven instances of “however” at the beginning of a sentence for each three placed after the subject, whereas in five selected books by Henry James, the ratio was one to 15. In Dracula I found a ratio of about one to five. The evidence cannot possibly support a claim that “however” at the beginning of a sentence should be eschewed. Strunk and White are just wrong about the facts of English syntax.
The copy editor’s old bugaboo about not using “which” to introduce a restrictive relative clause is also an instance of failure to look at the evidence. Elements as revised by White endorses that rule. But 19th-century authors whose prose was never forced through a 20th-century prescriptive copy-editing mill generally alternated between “which” and “that.” (There seems to be a subtle distinction in meaning related to whether new information is being introduced.) There was never a period in the history of English when “which” at the beginning of a restrictive relative clause was an error.
the belly of the beast
(via marginal revolution)
Weekly Picture 147
Drawing on Red Table, Mae’s Preschool, Austin, TX, 4.7.2009
Easter Biscuits
For India, bacon grease on the pan
some pictures Amy took of the farm
Come Again?
Cindy has been after me for weeks to post a picture of this place.
My Easter Comeuppance
So for two or three days I trash-talk Easter, and what happens on Easter Eve?
I’m driving along a two-lane country road in Wisconsin and I rear-end the pick-up truck that has stopped on account of the fellow ahead who has slowed down and turned left into the driveway of his roadside house.
That I was both driving and emailing may have come into play, but I cannot discount all those things I said on the phone and posted on clusterflock. Nor laughing aloud at the fiberglass statue of Jesus outside the Knights of Columbus hall because Jesus had both arms raised in a menacing King Kong-like fashion.
But I can’t say that I repent me my words nor deeds.
Easter Aspirations at Bald Knob Cross
“I’ve discovered something that’s a candy item. It’s actually kind of an immaculate confection. There’s a cross on one side, there’s a bible inscription on the other. You put it in your mouth and when it’s gone you can get up and leave.”
Tom Waits – Chocolate Jesus
Tweenbot
Kacie Kinzer of the Tisch School of the Arts has a wonderful social experiment, the Tweenbot.
Disney’s Self-Plagiarism
It’s either complete disdain for their consumers/the creative process or it’s an absolutely brilliant business strategy — either way I feel betrayed.
via This Is Probably An Interesting Blog
brotherly love
A Philadelphia broadcast of the Pope’s Good Friday Mass was inadvertently interrupted by a thirty-second ad for Girl’s Gone Wild.
Alexander says the problem affected the network’s entire local area, but only one person called to complain.
Topshop girl
I hear Topshop is coming to America.
