flickering pictures

Not that you were wondering, but the best-selling eyepatches at Eyepatches.com apparently include the Hello Kitty model, a camouflage one for stealthy folk, and something called “rhinestone butterflies” for the Dame Edna in you. For the festive among you, there’s also a nice selection of 53 holiday-themed models.

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They totally should have given it to him.

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A creepy-sounding outfit called the Fertility Institutes is offering parents the controversial chance to screen for blond-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned babies, and lots of people aren’t happy about it. For a fee, the Institutes promise to let you choose your baby’s features through “pre-implantation genetic diagnosis” — sort of implying that ugliness needs diagnosing. […]

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This year marks the 40th anniversary of the six-second drum loop that forever changed the face of modern music. Plucked from the middle of “Amen Brother,” a 1969 B-side version of the Winstons’ Grammy-winning “Color Him Father,” those six seconds shaped drum and bass, hip hop, jungle, and a huge chunk of the music […]

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Yeah, sorry about that headline.
From the Telegraph:

A sewage treatment facility in Nagano prefecture, north-west of Tokyo, has reported a yield of gold extracted from sludge to rival production levels at some of the best mines in the world.
Tens of thousands of pounds worth of gold has been found at the Suwa treatment facility in the […]

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It’s only sleeping.
A few days ago, B sent me a link to an excellent article by Stephanie Nolen, a Canadian Globe and Mail reporter who — in my opinion at least — does some of the finest journalism out there, and has for years. She opened the Globe’s South Africa bureau back in 2003, […]

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This would be hilarious if it weren’t so terrifying.
The BBC reports:

HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant were badly damaged in the crash in heavy seas earlier this month.
[…] The submarines are equipped with sonar to detect other vessels nearby but our correspondent said it be might the case that the anti-sonar devices, meant to hide […]

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IBM has patented an armoured body suit that actually DODGES FREAKING BULLETS. Or at least it will, if it ever gets built.
For you geekier readers out there, here’s an excerpt from the patent explaining how this is supposed to work, via the United States Patent and Trademark Office:

A method of protecting a target from […]

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There are lots of folks out there who sharpen two images on their mom’s computer and then fancy themselves PhotoShop “artistes,” but let’s face it: most of them are crap. This guy is decidedly not crap.
Check out a montage of Li Wei’s work at 56minus1.
Thanks, Nick!

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* = may not actually happen
If someone told you that IBM and the U.S. government were building the world’s most powerful supercomputer — one that could perform a staggering 20 quadrillion calculations per second — what would you think its purpose was? If you guessed curing cancer, studying climate change or running Vista smoothly […]

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