December 2009
148 posts
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Russia may send spacecraft to knock away asteroid
“People’s lives are at stake. We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people,” Perminov said. (via Yahoo News/AP)
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So, this exists.
Fecal bacteriotherapy: is a medical treatment which involves restoration of colon homeostasis by reintroducing normal bacterial flora from stool obtained from a healthy donor.
Fixing the problem doesn’t mean voting out the feckless Democrats or the...
– Lawrence Lessig (via squashed) (via marco)
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"Actor Randy Quaid recently complained in a letter...
Karl Rove Divorce: GOP Strategist Breaks With Wife Darby
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A thought experiment on the human cost of Security...
claytoncubitt:
I’m not a mathematician, but here goes:
Richard Reid, aka the “Shoe Bomber” death toll: 0 Average number of airline passengers in the United States annually: 660 million, or 5.28 billion since Richard Reid lit his shoe on fire in December of 2001, resulting in the TSA rule that passengers take off shoes in security lines at airports. Assuming an average amount of (dead) time of...
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A Complete List of Books I Read in 2009
1. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho - A pretty decent parable.
2. The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan - This book is a must read for anyone who likes to think about stuff.
3. Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain - Wonderful book of short stories.
4. Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Francis...
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YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) - Just days after tying the knot after years of abstinence, Kevin Jonas of the pop sensation the Jonas Brothers stunned his teenaged fans by announcing that “to be honest about it, sex was not worth the wait. LINK
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Change of plans.
We’re driving to South Dakota tomorrow provided Hertz keeps his word. 7AM.
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Tell the Dept. of Justice to block the...
Despite its “monopoly-like dominance” controlling 70 to 80 percent of all concert ticket sales, Ticketmaster is unabashedly seeking to grow its empire - all to the detriment of the average fan. Ticketmaster is now trying to dampen competition by merging with Live Nation, the nation’s largest concert promoter and second largest primary ticket seller. That merger is coming under heavy fire from...
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Russian Billionaire One Step Closer To Owning Nets
– Huffington Post
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[The] beauty of a hunting and gathering economy is that it’s very flexible. If you use 80 plants and 14 animals, and you lose 10 plants and two animals, you can just shift your resources. When you commit yourself to agriculture that has very narrow environmental parameters, and your whole population is dependent on that, slight changes in the environment can have catastrophic effects -Dr....
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I hate when I think I created a new word and it...
Nightmerica
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In Zomia’s small societies, with their simple...
The Mystery of Zomia by Drake Bennett
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Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt.
– Robertson Davies (via Wikipedia “Don’t be a Fanatic”)
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