flickering pictures

For the next three weeks I’ll be gallivanting around beautiful South Korea — hopefully with a little side trip to Japan — and doing some much-needed backpacking. I likely won’t have Internet access every day, but you can expect occasional updates on where I am and what I’m making of this gorgeous place, as […]

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Russia plans to launch the world’s first floating nuclear power plant in 2010 — a two-reactor barge the size of a football field. The idea is to sail it around the Arctic Ocean bringing electricity to isolated coastal towns, where shipping coal or other fossil fuels is inefficient and unprofitable. The ship will […]

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Kermit Scott, the inspiration behind Jim Henson’s most beloved muppet character, has died.
The real Kermit taught philosophy at Purdue and Yale before his desire to help others led him to earn a Master’s degree in counseling and launch a new career at the age of 57. He and his wife co-founded the Welfare Rights […]

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I be liking chess
Cuz chess is crazy, right there, that’s the ultimate
It’s like a great hobby right there, playing chess
The board, the pieces, the squares, the movement
You know, war, capturing, thinking, strategy
Planning, music, it’s hip-hop, and sports
It’s life, it’s reality

Those are the last lines in GZA’s “Queen’s Gambit,” a chess-inspired track written by one of […]

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Zimbabwe’s opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, announced yesterday that his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party is pulling out of the presidential run-off election, even though he won the main election held a few weeks ago. He says President Robert Mugabe’s widespread use of rape, torture, beatings and murder to intimidate opposition voters has made […]

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A California company called LS9 says it has done the impossible: come up with cheap, homegrown, renewable “carbon-negative” oil to satisfy the world’s growing fuel needs. With bug poo.
From the Times:

To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs -– very, very small ones –- so that when they feed on agricultural waste such […]

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That number shoots up to 40 per cent among teens who actually admit to having had sex. I’m not sure how the rest of them contracted their diseases, but I’m guessing public toilet seats didn’t have much to do with it.
And those figures don’t even reflect gonorrhea, warts, HIV/AIDS or other nasties that researchers […]

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Interested yet?
Having cured cancer and solved world hunger, U.S. researchers have focused their skills and public research dollars on an age-old quandary: why is James Bond sexy?
From the New Scientist:

The traits are the self-obsession of narcissism; the impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous behaviour of psychopaths; and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism. At their extreme, […]

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It’s called trepanation, and this extreme cousin to acupuncture has been around for at least 8,500 years. Though it’s recently fallen out of favour — mainly because it comes with a pretty fair chance brain damage, death, or searing agony at the very least — the practice is aimed at heightening the consciousness of […]

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British Columbians have been fishing human right feet out of the ocean since February — four of them altogether, all still in socks and running shoes and severed at the ankle. Two days ago the pattern changed when a left foot washed ashore.
No one knows who the feet belonged to, or how they ended […]

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