flickering pictures

For the last little while, vacation time, jet lag and three weeks worth of e-mail/voice mail have joined their sinister forces to create a great sucking whirlpool of unproductiveness and exhaustion — one that pulled my desire to post down to the deepest darkest abysses of the undersea. As of today, I’ve returned home, […]

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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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Sorry for the spotty posing lately — it’s been a crazy busy time work-wise, but for some reason I just can’t stop grinning. I must like my job or something.
Now that you’re paying $60 to gas up your Civic, I thought you might like to know where a good chunk of your gas money […]

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In the winter of 1914, German and British soldiers spent Christmas Eve in the trenches, wading through mud, supplies and the corpses of their fallen friends. Their main activity was dodging the bullets from the enemy bunkers that were sometimes just 60 yards away.
To raise their sinking morale, both armies’ governments sent their troops […]

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There’s something just beautiful about this. And something creepy…
ASIMO can run, speak, climb stairs, serve coffee, navigate through crowds of people, link up to computer networks, deliver weather reports and recognize faces, speech and environments. He works as a receptionist at Honda’s offices in Saitama, Japan.
In case you’re interested, ASIMO is taking some […]

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That beast up there is Tokyo’s subway map (click the map for a larger image), and it scares the bejeesus out of me. According to Infoplease, it provides 2.6 billion rides each year, and is over 281km long.
Tokyo’s subway is by no means the longest though — the Beijing network, pictured below, is set […]

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I see a lot of neat stuff on the Web, but this really hit me.
The brilliant gang at Mental Floss somehow discovered an anonymous beta site featuring 6,000 scanned polaroids — one taken each day from March 31, 1979 to October 25, 1997. Some impressive detective work by the Mental Floss crew turned up […]

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