flickering pictures

A tiny island chain, isolated and all but forgotten off the coast of Yemen, is home to one of the most fascinating and unique ecosystems on Earth. It also looks like something Lewis Carroll might have dreamed up after way, way too much absinthe. I have to go there. From the New York Times: Some [...]

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If Joe Higgs’s “There’s a Reward” doesn’t send shivers up your spine, you don’t have one. Widely regarded as the father of reggae, Higgs grew up in Kingston’s famous Trenchtown ghetto and was a major influence on a generation of reggae musicians, including some guy named Bob Marley. He died of cancer in December 1999 [...]

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They said it couldn’t be done, but physicists at McGill University in Montreal have managed to amplify laser light with less energy and cooling than ever before, which means that fibre-optic communications, among other things, could get a whole lot cheaper. From the press release: McGill University researchers have successfully amplified light with so-called “colloidal [...]

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Writing for an awesome-sounding newspaper called the Tulane Hullabaloo, Jeff Silberman has put together a fine op-ed piece on the silliness of a media culture that bombards us with violent music, TV shows and video games but gets squeamish when somebody says the word “nipple.” Here’s an excerpt: On television, for every 10,000 murders, we [...]

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James Murray, an emeritus professor at both Oxford and the University of Washington, claims that his new “Murray marriage equation” can predict the success or failure of any romantic relationship 94 per cent of the time. He breaks people into three categories — respectful Validators, brooding Conflict Avoiders and less-than-pleasant Volatiles — and after applying [...]

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