February 2012
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WatchThe Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore
Incredible.
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“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still...”
– Carl Sagan
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The Secret Life of Bees || Smithsonian Magazine →
“Bees are to hives as neurons are to brains,” says Jeffrey Schall, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. Neurons use some of the same tricks honeybees use to come to decisions. A single visual neuron is like a single scout. It reports about a tiny patch of what we see, just as a scout dances for a single site. Different neurons may give us conflicting ideas about what we’re actually...
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WatchShawn Achor: The happy secret to better work
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Syrian opposition seeks to wipe the Assad name off... →
Among the first acts of victorious revolutionaries is to tear down signs bearing the names of the regimes they toppled.
In Syria, the opposition is not waiting for President Bashar al-Assad to fall.
Anti-government activists in recent weeks have used a Google crowdsourcing program, Map Maker, to rename key streets, bridges and boulevards after their revolutionary heroes, according to opposition...
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Place to Be by Nick Drake (from Pink Moon, 1972)...
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Full Civic Literacy Exam →
Are you more knowledgeable than the average citizen? The average score for all 2,508 Americans taking the following test was 49%; college educators scored 55%. Can you do better?
I scored 32 out of 33 correctly — 96.97 % (but I am so incredibly geeky about US government. You have no idea)
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Like How Your Hair Hangs? Praise the Laws of... →
Raymond E. Goldstein, a professor of complex physical systems at the University of Cambridge in England, does not have a ponytail, but he has been pondering the physics of the hairstyle for a couple of years.
He and two other physicists have been trying to determine whether the shape of a ponytail can be deduced from the properties of a single hair. After all, a head with 100,000 strands is a...
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The New French Hacker-Artist Underground || Wired →
The restoration of the Pantheon clock was carried out by [an Urban eXperiment (UX)] subgroup called Untergunther, whose members are devoted specifically to restoration. The Pantheon was a particularly resonant choice of site, since it’s where UX began, and the group had surreptitiously screened films, exhibited art, and mounted plays there. During one such event in 2005, UX cofounder...
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Myanmar’s startling changes: Pragmatic virtues ||... →
Another day, another milestone: there appears to be no let-up in the frenetic pace of Myanmar’s political transformation. In early February, for the first time in memory, the finance minister revealed details of the government budget. In a speech to parliament (of all places: the place had been considered a joke), he also divulged how much Myanmar owed in foreign debt ($11 billion). Then, a...
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Navy Moving Ahead With Railgun Devo || Defense... →
[T]he Navy is about to take one more step toward making high-powered railguns a ship-board reality. Yup, the Office of Naval Research is about to start test firing a BAE Systems-built railgun and another made by General Atomics.
Basically, railguns use a ton of electromagnetic energy to push a projectile out of a barrel made of two long rails at hypersonic speeds (up to 5,600 miles per hour)...
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Entire genome of extinct human decoded from fossil... →
In 2010, Svante Pääbo and his colleagues presented a draft version of the genome from a small fragment of a human finger bone discovered in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia. The DNA sequences showed that this individual came from a previously unknown group of extinct humans that have become known as Denisovans. Together with their sister group the Neandertals, Denisovans are the closest extinct...
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ObamaCare's Great Awakening || Wall Street Journal →
The political furor over President Obama’s birth-control mandate continues to grow, even among those for whom contraception poses no moral qualms, and one needn’t be a theologian to understand why. The country is being exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time how this will violate...
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“‘Rights’ are not those things granted by the sovereign and...”
– Mark Steyn
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The Very Last World War I Veteran Has Died || The... →
A British woman who served with the Royal Air Force for the last two months of World War I was the last known veteran of the war when she died in her sleep Saturday night. Florence Green joined the RAF at the age of 17 and died just before her 111th birthday, which would have been Feb. 19. She had been a mess steward with the air force, the BBC reported, serving in two U.K. air bases after...
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