flickering pictures

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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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. The L.A.-based [...]

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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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A company called BioArts International has started selling clones of long-lost pets under the slogan “What if you could be best friends again?”, and wants your beloved Mr. Tinkles to be next. From the press release: BioArts International announced today that they have delivered the world’s first commercially cloned dog, a 10-week old Labrador named [...]

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Last September, a 22-year-old Women’s Studies major going by the pseudonym “Natalie Dylan” decided to sell her virginity to the highest bidder, sparking all sorts of debate about morality, sexuality and capitalism. As of yesterday, the bidding was up to $3.8 million. You read that right. From The Daily Beast: They say you should value [...]

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Population of Washington, D.C.: 572,059 Number of people attending Obama’s inauguration: 2,000,000+ Wow. Update: The Toronto Star created a word cloud from Obama’s acceptance speech, and it turns out he didn’t use the word “evildoer” a single time. Image via New York Times.

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The quote of the day comes from Republican National Committee chairman Mike Duncan, who’s leading the GOP’s charge into social media: “We have to do it in the Facebook, with the Twittering, the different technology that young people are using today.” Is it just me, or does the phrase “do it in the Facebook” sound [...]

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Throughout the rebel armies and refugee camps of the world, Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s name has come to symbolize struggle against oppression, and his face just might be the most recognizable on the planet. The fact that Che advocated nuking New York and brutally slaughtered his own men on the slightest suspicion of disloyalty, and that [...]

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Nathan over at FlowingData has stumbled upon yet another neat-o tool that’s as unscientific as it is fun to play with: StateStats is like Google Insights but on a state level. Type in a search term and get Google search levels with correlations to certain “metrics” like obesity or support for Obama. Since he’s a [...]

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The presidential pardon has got to be one of the strangest traditions in Washington. How exactly is justice served when an outgoing president hands out clean slates to a dozen or so convicted criminals, just because he’s a few weeks away from retirement? Why should a president have the power to bypass the courts and [...]

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