flickering pictures

Why does it always have to be “Death to so-and-so”? Is there no middle ground between “Long live Imam Khomeini” and “Death to the dictator”? Why not something a little more constructive, like “Stop beating and killing unarmed protestors for no damn reason”?
With temperatures dipping to a nippy 3°C on National Students’ Day, […]

[Read more →]

How brilliant is this interactive little site?
Well, it can tell you that Washington, D.C.’s lone legislator used a meager 35,679 words in 2008 — enough for a long-ish novella. In comparison, California’s 57 representatives spoke exactly 1,346,968 words — equivalent to 33 regular full-length novels, or about two and a half times the length […]

[Read more →]

From Slashdot:

“Law prof Eugene Volokh blogs about a US House of Representatives bill proposed by Rep. Linda T. Sanchez and 14 others that could make it a federal felony to use your blog, social media like MySpace and Facebook, or any other Web media ‘to cause substantial emotional distress through “severe, repeated, and hostile” speech.’ […]

[Read more →]

The Vatican has rejected yet another potential U.S. ambassador — Caroline Kennedy this time — because even though she’s Catholic, she isn’t anti-abortion. And as if to drive home the point, the Vatican chose Easter to express its outrage at Washington’s “calculated insult to the Holy See.”
Washington’s previous nominee, a former lawyer for Reagan […]

[Read more →]

* = 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 […]

[Read more →]

A neat new U.S.-based news service called the Global Post has started covering events around the world, with an emphasis on regions that traditionally fly under the mainstream radar and a novel insistence that its reporters must live full-time in the countries they cover. It’s too early to say if it’ll live up to […]

[Read more →]

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.

[Read more →]

From the inspirational self-authored obituary of Lasantha Wickramatunge, editor-in-chief of Sri Lanka’s Sunday Leader newspaper, written shortly before he was shot and killed on his way to work:

It is well known that I was on two occasions brutally assaulted, while on another my house was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Despite the government’s sanctimonious assurances, there […]

[Read more →]

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 just ever […]

[Read more →]

Born on January 8, 1935, Elvis Presley would have been 74 years old today. Other notable events on this day:

1835: For the only time in U.S. history, the national debt is exactly zero dollars. Today’s debt is just over $10.6 trillion, or about $35,000 for every man, woman and child in the country.

1867: […]

[Read more →]