flickering pictures

Islamic literature is full of references to “jinn” — spirit beings, both good and evil, that can move objects, cause misfortune or even possess people. Tom A. Peter at the fledgling Global Post has put together an interesting (if slightly fluffy) piece on a Jordanian exorcist who runs a hopping business casting Regan MacNeil-type […]

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So you’re an advertising exec at Burger King. In these tough economic times, you reason, Burger King needs a children’s commercial that will grab attention and boost sales. Kids, you know, like Spongebob Squarepants. They also like rap. And lord knows, they totally dig a nice big bedonkadonk. There’s really […]

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The New Scientist has put together a neat-o graphic detailing how many years we can sustain our current consumption of lead, zinc, aluminum and other metals. If they’re right, we’ll run out of chromium, copper, antimony, zinc, uranium, tin, tantalum, silver, platinum, lead, indium and gold within the next 42 years, with huge implications […]

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So there’s this guy with a broken foot in New York who has been hobbling around town on crutches, and who’s fed up with perfectly healthy people who refuse to give up subway seats reserved for people with limited mobility. He’s so fed up, in fact, that he started taking their pictures and posting […]

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Each day, delivered fresh to my inbox at work, I and a million other people get a word-of-the-day from Anu Garg himself, the Indian émigré to Seattle whose Wordsmith site created a bit of a sensation back in 2003, when these things were still novel.
Today’s word was too neat not to share — particularly in […]

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Yes, it’s a rock. But a lot of people want it. Here’s why.
The creatively named island of Rockall sits just northwest of Ireland and south of Iceland in the Atlantic Ocean, and unless you to listen to BBC shipping forecasts, it’s a safe bet you’ve never heard of it. At about 83 […]

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Bruce Branit of Back Alley Films and branit|vfx has put together this stunning short film highlighting the awesome power of CG. In it, a man creates a holographic world to be with his comatose sweetheart — the story is touching, but the real jewel here is the jaw-dropping beauty of it all…
The branit|vfx site […]

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The Vatican has rejected yet another potential U.S. ambassador — Caroline Kennedy this time — because even though she’s Catholic, she isn’t anti-abortion. And as if to drive home the point, the Vatican chose Easter to express its outrage at Washington’s “calculated insult to the Holy See.”
Washington’s previous nominee, a former lawyer for Reagan […]

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It’s a sign of time times — the economy’s in the toilet, America lost 694,000 jobs in March, and a three-bedroom bungalow in Detroit will set you back a cool $500. The natural response to all this? A reality show, of course.
And no, Donald Trump isn’t in it.
Proving yet again that America will […]

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The constant hijackings off the Somali coast aren’t really news — or rather, they’re news that everyone else is already reporting, and I don’t usually go into that sort of thing here.
But every time I hear about one of these hijackings, I wonder why people keep sailing their tankers and transport ships into the most […]

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