flickering pictures

For a while now, I’ve been convinced that the secret behind Wired’s success is that its editors know their audience: a generation of ADHD technophiles that love cool new things but don’t want to read more than 50 words about them. The mag is chock full of charts, tables and pithy rapid-fire bursts of […]

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I’m poking around in the bowels of the site for the first time in ages, and just wanted to say I think its kind of awesome that an old post on DIY catapults, trebuchets and other siege weapons has been viewed nearly 14,000 times. What I want really to know is how many of […]

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After an impromptu beatboxing lesson from a pro, Paul MacInnes, the Guardian’s slightly disheveled entertainment editor, takes the stage and delivers a valiant if somewhat silly-looking live performance. I gotta say: it’s good to see a reporter who doesn’t take himself too seriously.
“They’ve got a special bit for me in the second half,” he […]

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Before I read this, I didn’t know that octopuses could navigate mazes, solve problems, and even work the lid off a screw-top jar in search of food.
Wikipedia says:

An octopus has a highly complex nervous system, only part of which is localized in its brain. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in the nerve cords […]

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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 see one […]

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Mao would be pissed.
Along with a bar and hair salon, the store offers 38,000 square feet of blonde-haired, big-boobed dolls. Despite its location, only 10 per cent of the store’s dolls will look Asian, apparently because of Mattel research that indicates Chinese girls and young women want American-looking Barbies.
The GlobalPost reports:

The plan is to […]

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They totally should have given it to him.

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Ever wondered why Mario can jump many, many times his own height? Or why he can then fall safely back to the earth at a speed that would crush the eyeballs out of a regular mortal’s head? So did this guy over at the Physics Factbook:

Gravity is [the] force which is responsible for […]

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If you’re a regular reader around these parts, you may know that I can sometimes be a little harsh when it comes to the fine city of Toronto. So to restore a bit of balance here at flickeringpictures, and as evidence of my journalistic integrity, here’s a positive post for a change — one […]

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And they say there’s no such thing as climate change…
For 12 weird and wonderful hours last week, a Kenyan village turned into a winter wonderland.
From a Reuters story picked up by Yahoo! News:

A huge hailstorm turned parts of central Kenya white, thrilling residents most of whom had never experienced such conditions, officials said on Wednesday.
[…] […]

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