Racists now in need of a new set of jokes
If your heritage is non-African, you are part Neanderthal, according to a new study in the July issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution. Discovery News has been reporting on human/Neanderthal interbreeding for some time now, so this latest research confirms earlier findings.
Dear Clusterflock
How do we feel about people who order bacon on a veggie burger.
Related: Is turkey bacon bacon?
How One Man Hacked His Way Into the Slot-Machine Industry
A small time Latvian businessman becomes an international slot-machine counterfeiter:
Rodolfo Rodriguez Cabrera didn’t set out to mastermind a global counterfeiting ring. All he wanted was to earn a decent living doing what he loves most: tinkering with electronics. That’s why he started his own slot-machine repair company in Riga, Latvia. Just to make a little cash while playing with circuit boards.
Born and raised in Camagüey, Cuba, Cabrera always had an affinity for technical pursuits. Once, after winning a student essay contest in 1976, he was given a personal audience with Fidel Castro. When the dictator asked the 10-year-old what he wanted to be when he grew up, Cabrera confidently replied, “An architectural engineer.”
Quote out of Context
“I am really sad because this is sad, and this means there’s nothing to look forward to. Nothing.”
photo out of context
Quote out of context
I stopped being so amenable once my kid starting talking, because I was explaining shit all the time now. “Daddy, why is the sky blue?” “Daddy, how do fish swim?” “Daddy, where shall I keep my secret fears of the world, and tend to them like my private garden?”
the first synthetically engineered windpipe transplant
A 36-year-old man who had tracheal cancer has received a new lab-made windpipe seeded with his own stem cells in a procedure in Sweden they call the first successful attempt of its kind, officials said Thursday.
On the sadness of life
From my dear friend, Reese Belew:
So much of life, even at its best, is sad. The gap between imagined potential and reality is the quotient generating its sum of sadness.
Tim Carmody’s back at Wired
Greetings, People of Wired! I’ve been asked to write a short post (re)introducing myself to Wired News readers as the newest staff writer covering the technology and media beat here at Epicenter.
Some keen-eyed Wired.com readers might recognize my byline from last fall, when I wrote for our hardware vertical, Gadget Lab. There among the wall-to-wall smartphone and tablet coverage, I regularly drove Wired’s editors slightly batty by writing early and often about e-readers and the publishing industry, game consoles and television programming, materials science and R&D, the DIY hardware hacking community, or long thinkpieces about the future of media.
I wrapped a big rubber band around all this stuff, calling it “the tweed beat” — but really, it was just everything that bubbled up from (but wouldn’t stay in) the gadget news box. It was great fun and good work, but I knew I would regularly hear from our east coast editor, John Abell: “Good story, Tim — but you know, it should probably really be in Epicenter.”
This summer, when he was looking for another writer, John paid me an enormous compliment, saying he was looking for “a Tim Carmody type” who could cover a broad swath of tech news and offer smart angles and idea-driven commentary. “Wait,” I thought when I heard this: “I’m a Tim Carmody type!”
Congratulations, Tim!
it’s good to be the guy behind the guy
Laurence R. Gesquiere, a research associate in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, and colleagues report in the journal Science that in five troops of wild baboons in Kenya studied over nine years, alpha males showed very high stress levels, as high as those of the lowest-ranking males.
The stress, they suggested, was probably because of the demands of fighting off challengers and guarding access to fertile females. Beta males, who fought less and had considerably less mate guarding to do, had much lower stress levels. They had fewer mating opportunities than the alphas, but they did get some mating in, more than any lower-ranking males. After all, when the alpha gets in another baboon bar fight, who’s going to take the girl home?
(via the browser)
dear clusterflock
Forgive me if this question has been asked before. Do you have any preferences for how your life is memorialized and celebrated after you’re gone?
That’s a lot of points
To mark the resignation of Sir Paul Stephenson as head of the Metropolitan Police, the London Times used a record-breaking 164-point bold headline:
via Ben Schott and Jon Hill.
I Am Cuba (Soy Cuba) – Funeral
Top Posts
headline of the day, II
Woman’s truck rammed because attacker thought she looked like Casey Anthony
headline of the day
Girl, 12, crashes truck, takes out town’s power
Photo Out of Context
thought for a character at 3 am
Oddly confident, clinically obese, surprisingly effeminate, ladies’ man.
from the comments
When I think back on those times the image that comes to me is the first views from the air of the Jones compound with the litter of bodies all about it, spilling off walkways, in heaps at the edges of buildings…. Later, when I saw the produced accounts and assembled footage of the history of the cult and its end, I tried to conjure in my mind the mental landscape of the place. How could so many mistakes converge so gradually as spell doom for many people? Memory took me back to a time in the ’60s when, in my mid teens, I lived on the street for a few months on Sunset Strip in LA. The hopes and fears of desperate people make them ripe for a bleak harvest. The radical individualism that sent people to a life on the streets was no match for hunger and pain and a constant bland sense of inescapable anonymity, and the hard swing back to conformity for the sake of survival lacked the benefit, in most cases, of historical perspective or critical thinking. I remember, among those people in LA, just how close everybody was to a sense of the miraculous: suddenly word would get out that 2,000 donuts had been donated to The Digger’s Creative Arts Society over near Hollywood & Vine, and the limping and shambling in that direction would begin. Also, vague news of drug busts in the works and headed for us added a tang of fear to the air, with many quick glances passing between people, and everybody watching for some sign that a rush for exit was about to begin.
Everything is written by the survivors, riding somehow above great tides of loss. Does anybody learn anything in time for it to help them? Perhaps not so often as we think we do.
from the comments
I was working in the UPI Birmingham bureau, in Alabama, where the teletypes were pounding out the news from Jonestown. Reams of copy clacked from machines accompanied by bells signaling the urgency of the words on the paper. I couldn’t stop reading or saying “Oh my God oh my God!”
Then later, a year later, Iranian crowds were outside the U.S. Embassy screaming death to us all. I kept telling people LOOK AT THIS, this is not going to end well. But it was before the advent of the 24-hour news cycle and nobody was paying too much attention. Until they stormed the embassy.
I had a unique vantage point. The news was wild back then. But on some nights, it was so very quiet. And I would sit after my shift, going through old yellowed files in that bureau for many hours. Suddenly it would be 4 a.m., Sunday, and I would be surprised to find folders in my hands marked Bull Connor, Birmingham church bombing, Edmund Pettus Bridge Selma. I had been there.
two days in Los Angeles
from the spam
And he in truth purchased me breakfast as a result of I found it for him.
Cults
Grace and I just returned this week from vacationing in Michigan and visiting family. While we were back, religion was brought up often, as Bible-Belters are wont to do in such an environment. In one of the more interesting conversations I had with my mother-in-law, I wondered aloud to her whether the belief systems of modern cults were really so far fetched, compared to their more established Abrahamic counterparts. One has to wonder whether those reading the centuries-diluted accounts of Jim Jones a thousand years from now wouldn’t wonder whether he was, indeed, more than a man after all.
Does anyone remember the Jonestown massacre? I’d really like to understand how the collective American psyche grappled with that experience.
(Video: “Go Outside,” Cults)
headline of the day, II
Denver Newspaper Hires Professional Pot Critic
