flickering pictures

Check out this simple and fascinating primer on how to visualize ten dimensions by Rob Bryanton, author of Imagining the Tenth Dimension. Every so often — and it doesn’t happen often — I’m just really glad we have physicists.
(Apologies if this video loads slowly — Bryanton’s site got Boing-Boinged and doesn’t seem to be […]

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Much to the consternation of the poor woman who tried to teach me a British literature course in college, I never could get into Jane Austen. Still, I like to think I’ve done some growing since those years, and I think I’ve finally found an Austen novel that I can really sink my teeth […]

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CNN reports:

In 1993, Romeo Dallaire was full of hope for the future of Rwanda.
The Canadian lieutenant general and son of a soldier was about to take up the biggest command of his career — leading United Nations peacekeepers in the central African nation.
A year later he left Rwanda a broken man, having watched helplessly as […]

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Though my girlfriend would insist otherwise, I don’t really consider myself much of a geek — I’m geeky enough to take things apart, but not usually geeky enough to know how to put them back together. So I generally have no business watering down the genuinely geeky clientele at Den of Geek with my […]

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Nina Katchadourian creates very strange art. She does everything from mending tattered spiderwebs to projecting films onto her teeth, and though I don’t always get it, I almost always love it. Have a look at her book spine storytelling series, and then check out the rest of her site for a peek at […]

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About 25 young ne’erdowells are being forced to take court-ordered poetry classes after they threw a party in Robert Frost’s summer Vermont home, smashing windows and furniture and littering the property with plastic beer cups.

And yes, I came up with that headline all by myself.
From AP/AOL News:

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” [the teacher] […]

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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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On one of my frequent Wikipedia sidetracks, I stumbled across a link to the official biography of Kim Jong-Il, North Korea’s Chairman of the National Defense Commission, Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea and Grand Poobah of the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes:

From his childhood, Comrade […]

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In case you haven’t heard of it, Project Gutenberg and its affiliated sites feature more than 100,000 free books in 55 languages, all free for download. They’re all in the public domain — either because their authors have been dead for more than 50 years, because their U.S. copyrights have expired, or because they […]

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The house was on Inman Street, near Cambridge’s Central Square. Peter Woit recalls the morning he came downstairs and found his roommate obviously upset.
“John, what’s wrong?,” he asked.
Have you seen a dirty pink laundry bag?” came the response.
“No, why?”
“There was $80,000 in it.”

According to an Xcomony write-up, those are the words of John Chang, a […]

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