Colombian Rebels Embrace New Technology
Tucked inside a small room in a downtown apartment building, an illiterate but mechanically trained rebel operates a remote control device.
Two miles away, a car without a driver slowly creeps along a shadowy street, a camera guiding it to the site where it will blow up with the click of a button.
I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag
Well, come on America, it's time to defend,
Uncle Sam needs your help again.
He's got himself in another big jam
With his former partner, Mister Saddam.
So turn off Survivor, watch the News at Ten
You'll see it all on CNN
[via wood's lot]
Recipes for bioterror: censoring science - on the quandry of publishing information important for research when it might also be useful to evildoers.
Several months before 11 September, Australian scientists published a paper describing how they had unintentionally created a "supervirus" that, instead of sterilising mice as intended, killed every last one. Could this information help someone to create a human supervirus in the same way?
[via vigilant.tv]
WMFU's Kenny G devoted 3 hours on Christmas day to a partial rendition of Eric Satie's Vexations, a 18 hour repetitive piece reported to induce hallucinations and amnesia in its performers.
To play this motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.
[via Scribbler]
Elsevier's Vanishing Act: on a risk of electronic publishing compared to the print form: articles cannot be removed from a print journal. [via Booknotes]
New World of Iron Rain: on the work by Dimitar Sasselov and team involving the transit technique of locating planets around distant stars and and a new planet found by that method, OGLE-TR-56b. The Jupiter-sized planet orbits star OGLE-TR-56 every 29 hours. The atmosphere there is such that the weather might well include rain of liquid iron.
See also:
- A New Transiting Extrasolar Giant Planet
- The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment
- The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia
[via A Voyage to Arcturus]
Slow down, stop even, and listen to the world around you. [via The Excitement Machine]
Mike Ward, PopMatters film critic, lists the Top Ten Conspiracy Theories of 2002
Following are the ten most alarming theories about September 11, the "war on terror," and the future of the world. Feel free to accept them as gospel, study them as symptoms of a traumatized culture, or scoff at them as anti-American propaganda: I'm only the messenger. Personally, though, at this point the only person I hold above suspicion in the matter of September 11 is that poor kid with the goat.
-- Mike Ward
[via American Samizdat]
Michael Drout has published a previously unknown Tolkien book, Beowulf and the Critics, which he discovered in the Bodleian Library while researching a 1936 lecture by Tolkien on the subject. [via blogdex]
