World Clock

As time wasting distractions go, this one isn't bad.

My Next Hobby

I read this and thought, "This is going to be me when I retire!"

Marshall Pappert admits that he has been a pain to government officials…

While he expected to get a fight, or to be told off, or even ignored, Pappert says he never expected to get arrested.

Every week, he sends a handful of letters to government officials, complaining about a neighbor who lives across Union Street in Bridgeville.

But then I read,

The neighbor is Silhol Builders Supply, a manufacturer of ready-mix concrete

and thought, "oh, damn. He probably has legitimate complaints."

(via)

I-Lawsuit

The interesting recent history of i-Robot, makers of the Roomba(tm) and of life-saving millitary bomb sniffers. I thought this was interesting and it underlines an important political fact, it's the cover-up, not the crime.

Five People Killed By Their Own Inventions

He discovered that adding tetra-ethyl lead to gasoline prevented internal combustion engines from “knocking”. However, this also released huge amounts of lead into the atmosphere, causing health problems and massive pollution. After people at the GM plants started hallucinating and dying of lead poisoning, though, Midgley was assigned to develop a non-toxic refrigerant for household appliance. So, he discovered dichlorodifluoromethane (please don’t ask me to pronounce that), AKA Freon. Turns out that Freon is a chlorinated fluorocarbon, which is insanely bad for the ozone layer

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FTR, I have left extremely explicit instructions for the executor of my will. The 2 important ones are:
1) a tank of helium must be available for the eulogies
2) my tombstone must read,

"That Should Have Worked"

The Noodle Incident

This came up in conversation yesterday, so I had to look up the strip.

McCain

Some actual email with some friends (I've reverse the order to make it readable):


From: Yacov Smirnoff Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 11:14 PM
To: (friends of a like mind)
Subject: McCain in WSJ opinion pages

I read this in the airport today. The words that came readily to mind included: duty, honor, valor, selfless acts of courage, selfless acts of compassion. This is the guy we should have had 8 years ago.https://mail.microsoft.com/OWA/redir.aspx?C=624b758540264cdab48d9031dbf92461&URL=http%3a%2f%2fonline.wsj.com%2farticle%2fSB120951606847454685.html If only the article hadn't been written by the sith lord.



me
Sent:Thursday, May 01, 2008 6:15 AM
To: (friends of a like mind)


Normally, I just dismiss anything by Karl Rove as lies and this smacks of dog-whistle religious politics. In this case though I suspect the facts are largely true, or at least as true as Karl Rove can deal with without bursting into fire.

And I agree that in 2000 McCain certainly would have made a better president than Bush and maybe Gore.

But, as I agrue with my son who is a strident McCain supporter, while it's a terrible thing that McCain was tortured, if that's all that's require to be president, Gitmo would be a future president factory. McCain has yet to close the deal with me,although I still think he can. I'm still not sure who he is today. If the man he was in 2000 is still in there, ready to break free, he could very well get my vote. OTOH, if the dems nominate Hillary and McCain continues doing things like skirting his own campaign finance law, or mixing up the Sunni and the Shia, then I might very well sit this one out.

Top 10 Astronomy Images of 2006

I'm a little late to the party, but these are amazing.

New! From the People that Brought You Shoeless Lines at the Airport

Pretty much the last humiliation before they just go for body cavity searches.

How Far Away is the Moon?

To put that into perspective, if you were to line up hamburgers end to end from the Earth to the moon, and then you were to eat those hamburgers, you would be fucking sick of hamburgers.

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