flickering pictures

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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The top-notch Web design team at the New York Times has put together a very neat interactive graph highlighting the ways different groups of Americans spend their day. Here are some interesting facts, with the usual caveat about correlation not equaling causation and all that:

People with two children are more likely to be actively […]

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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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Probably not. But tell that to this guy.
Jay Weidner at Reality Sandwich compares the cinematic style of Stanley Kubrick’s work to the famous moon landing footage, and says he’s convinced beyond any doubt that Kubrick was enlisted to show up the Russians, NASA stole flying saucer technology from the Nazis, and JFK was assassinated […]

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Go on, find Palau on a map without Googling it — I double dog dare you.
Its 21,000 citizens have only had a country for 15 years, but the Pacific mini-state of Palau is already distinguishing itself by welcoming 17 Chinese Guantanamo inmates with open arms, and inviting them to settle wherever they like on its […]

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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.’ […]

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The Food and Drug Administration says the promises of decreased cholesterol and heart disease prevention on Cheerios boxes mean that America’s best-selling cereal is not actually food, but a drug.
From the FDA’s warning letter:

Based on claims made on your product’s label, we have determined that your Cheerios® Toasted Whole Grain Oat Cereal is […]

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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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So you’re an advertising exec at Burger King. In these tough economic times, you reason, Burger King needs a children’s commercial that will grab attention and boost sales. Kids, you know, like Spongebob Squarepants. They also like rap. And lord knows, they totally dig a nice big bedonkadonk. There’s really […]

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So there’s this guy with a broken foot in New York who has been hobbling around town on crutches, and who’s fed up with perfectly healthy people who refuse to give up subway seats reserved for people with limited mobility. He’s so fed up, in fact, that he started taking their pictures and posting […]

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