flickering pictures

I just read the news, and I gotta say, it made me a little bit sad. Polaroid has announced that it will no longer manufacture the gee-whiz insta-photo film that made it a household name. Though it’s leaving the photography business, Polaroid will continue to make portable DVD players that you’ve never heard of, as [...]

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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 [...]

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Why shallots? Why not shallots? From the Times of India: India would make Pakistan a barren land in the next six years by blocking its water through construction of dams in violation of the Indus Water Treaty, Pakistan Indus Water Commissioner Jamaat Ali Shah said on Monday. [...] Dismissing India’s claim that it had stopped [...]

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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 [...]

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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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Strange Maps, a delightful little site that has quickly become one of my favourites, tells the story of the “Routefinder,” a dapper-looking set of wrist-mounted scrolls that provided step-by-step directions for British intercity travel in the roaring 20′s: The technology – a curious cross between the space age and the stone age – consisted of [...]

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Now there’s something you don’t read every day. Ben Weider, the only person ever to be president of both the International Federation of Bodybuilders and the International Napoleonic Society, died yesterday in Montreal. For his contributions to fitness, philanthropy and the study of history, Weider was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, a [...]

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I love this sort of thing. From Damn Interesting: In 1891, Nikola Tesla gave a lecture for the members of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in New York City, where he made a striking demonstration. In each hand he held a gas discharge tube, an early version of the modern fluorescent bulb. The tubes [...]

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Though it’s not exactly independent, the tiny Republic of Kalmykia is a self-governing member state of the Russian Federation. Located just west of the Caspian Sea and not far from Ukraine, it’s a bit of an oddity in über-secular Russia for the prominence that Kalmykian leaders give to spirituality — all the more so because [...]

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From an exchange between the eminently reasonable British Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) and the lunatic hothead American Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), in the movie Dr. Strangelove (1964): Ripper: Mandrake? Mandrake: Yes, Jack? Ripper: Have you ever seen a Commie drink a glass of water? Mandrake: Well, I can’t say I [...]

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