flickering pictures

In case you’re not an automotive engineer, that translates to the strength of about 104 trained athletes at peak output, or 2.4 Hyundai Accents. Take that, Spock. I’m not inclined to put much stock in this one, and I can’t find any independent verification of this anywhere, but according to this video report from Egypt’s [...]

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To voice its displeasure about joint South Korean-U.S. military exercises, North Korea is threatening to shoot down civilian airplanes that venture near its airspace — even if they don’t actually enter it. Russia, China, South Korea and Japan may have something to say about that. From the BBC: In the latest of a series of [...]

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This would be hilarious if it weren’t so terrifying. The BBC reports: HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant were badly damaged in the crash in heavy seas earlier this month. [...] The submarines are equipped with sonar to detect other vessels nearby but our correspondent said it be might the case that the anti-sonar devices, meant [...]

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IBM has patented an armoured body suit that actually DODGES FREAKING BULLETS. Or at least it will, if it ever gets built. For you geekier readers out there, here’s an excerpt from the patent explaining how this is supposed to work, via the United States Patent and Trademark Office: A method of protecting a target [...]

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* = 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 [...]

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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 its [...]

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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.

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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 post-Christmas [...]

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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 [...]

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Yesterday’s Boston Globe featured an unbelievable collection of photos of the ongoing anarchy in Athens. Nearly any one of these shots, if you took them, would be the best photo you’d ever take. The riots were sparked by the police shooting of Alexis Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old boy who was allegedly with other youths who threw [...]

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