flickering pictures

Stuffed with turkey, pie, and all sorts of yummy holiday foodstuffs, I’ve been a little delinquent with my posting lately. Some good friends are in from overseas, so I haven’t had much time to write, and I likely won’t be posting regularly until next week, when I finally collapse in a festive heap of […]

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According to new data from a U.S. military satellite, the ionosphere — the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space — is lower than it used to be, meaning the sky is quite literally falling.
The Air Force’s “Communications and Navigation Outage Forecasting System” satellite — C/NOFS for short — uses nifty-sounding instruments like an ion velocity […]

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Cracked.com features eight of the most pathetic exercises in futility in Guinness history.
Featured record attempts include a mass fire-walking event, a fellow who attempted to break the sound barrier by free-falling from 34 kilometres up, and something called “smurfing.”
Story via Mental Floss.
Image via the Science Creative Quarterly at the University of British Columbia.

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Information Week reports:

Despite her lifelike appearance and 32-23-33, anatomically correct measurements, Trung insists Aiko is not a sex doll. “I’m attached to it, but do I sleep with it? No.”

You heard it here first, folks.
Creepiness aside, Aiko can read, do math and recognize people, and responds to touch and voice commands. She can also […]

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If this isn’t the strangest thing you’ll read today, it’s up there.
A woman in China has apparently lost all hearing in her left ear after a session of “passionate” kissing with her boyfriend.
The BBC reports:

The doctor who treated the girl in hospital was quoted in the paper explaining what had happened.
“The kiss reduced the pressure […]

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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 mature sort, […]

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Knowing that this story combines three of my favourite things — beer, Eastern philosophy and neat-o whatnot — a buddy of mine sent me some info about this most postworthy endeavour.

Lloyd Alter at Treehugger reports:

Fifty years ago the Heineken Beer company looked at reshaping its beer bottle to be useful as a building block. It […]

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The remains of German billionaire Friedrich Karl Flick have apparently been stolen for ransom, on the same day that the skeleton of famed astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was identified.
The thieves who made off with Flick’s body in Austria somehow managed to get through the solid granite slabs that surrounded his remains before carting off a solid-zinc […]

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Once again, the folks at FlowingData have taken reams and reams of inane-seeming data, compared it to scads and scads of other inane-seeming data, and turned the whole reamy scaddy mess into something fascinating. Check out these maps of cotton-picking intensity in 1860 and presidential voting today in America’s South — see anything interesting?

And […]

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It’s been an exciting few days in Iran. First, a government stunt meant to encourage healthy eating habits ended rather badly. The Daily Mail reports:

The meat had been cooked, the sandwich almost assembled and assorted Guinness Book of Records dignitaries were patiently waiting by to give it their official stamp of approval.
But cooks […]

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