flickering pictures

When all this first started with Tunisia, I didn’t think there was any way the people could oust their president after some 24 years in power. I’d spent just a couple of weeks there in 2008, and people seemed more or less willing to accept the corruption of a government that was at least […]

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Sand animation is the art of storytelling through continuously created and recreated images in sand, and there may be no one better at it than Kseniya Simonova. In the video above, she steals the show on Ukraine’s equivalent of the America’s Got Talent TV show, and has the judges and audience in tears as […]

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This summer, the Iranian government brutally suppressed citizen unrest following an election that incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad won in a landslide. The consensus — on the left, on the right, and everywhere in between — is that the election was rigged.
Five months later, the anti-Ahmedinejad protests have become more muted — probably due in […]

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From CNN:

PHOENIX, Arizona (CNN) — A man toting an assault rifle was among a dozen protesters carrying weapons while demonstrating outside President Obama’s speech to veterans on Monday, but no laws were broken.

I’m not sure what’s more ridiculous about that sentence — the fact that a guy thought it was okay to bring an assault […]

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When I was a kid, comic books always had those little ads for mail-order venus flytraps, with promises that they’d keep your home bug-free by crushing the life out of unsuspecting houseflies with their razor-sharp fangs and super-corrosive digestive juices. When my mom finally got me one, I was a little disappointed — no […]

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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 […]

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I’ve just passed the dawn of my 28th year, and like the song says, I may be getting old, but I’m not old yet. Still, I’m starting to wonder if I’ve passed some magic age barrier that separates the people who are on top of technology from the people who aren’t. Does anyone […]

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So the posting here has been a little slow for the last week or so — mainly because the rest of my life has been anything but. I’ve got reams of work to plow through and don’t even really have time to be posting right now, but this story was exactly the kind of […]

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Much as I hate to admit it.
A new study involving half a million people has found that eating just 4 ounces of red meat or cold cuts each day makes middle-aged and elderly folks 30% more likely to die within a decade. Daily doses of poultry and fish actually decrease your chances of death […]

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FlowingData seems to have gotten itself up and running again, and contrary to my previous post, it features 27 neat-o infographics that explain the worldwide financial meltdown, not 16. Very much worth a look.

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