I don’t follow canada.com, but they have a remarkably non-sensational news story on the most recent UFC — Cro Cop toppled by Brazilian Gabriel Gonzaga at UFC 70: Worlds Collide.
Cro Cop toppled by Brazilian Gabriel Gonzaga at UFC 70: Worlds Collide
Monday, April 23rd, 2007Nazi Manned Intercontinental Missile
Monday, April 23rd, 2007
Nazi super-weapons are endlessly fascinating. For instance, the Nazis had plans for a manned intercontinental missile. (The pilot would bail out before hitting the target. I suppose the Japanese would have skipped that last step.) Of course, in an era before atomic warheads, that’s a lot of effort to go through to deliver one convential bomb.
Mursi Tribeswoman
Monday, April 23rd, 2007
Even in this day and age, the image of a Mursi Tribeswoman is still quite exotic — particularly with her AK-47 and iPod:
We’d been hearing for days about the Mursi tribe — the one where women split their lower lip and insert a round metal plate. As we were repeatedly told, the Mursi are neither fun nor friendly. And while they’ve kept their distance from the outside world — largely in part because their territory is a vast expanse of remote national park — they nevertheless have turned their small contact with foreigners into an art form of extortion. Pictures equal money. No exceptions.
Adam Tolkien on The Children of Hurin
Monday, April 23rd, 2007I enjoyed reading Adam Tolkien on The Children of Hurin:
I was brought up in France, and although my grandfather died when I was very young, his work was always very much in evidence at home. My father, Christopher, the third of J.R.R. Tolkien’s four children, according to his father’s explicit wishes, has devoted himself to the publishing of my grandfather’s massive archive of material ever since he began work on the “Silmarillion” papers in 1974. Ideally suited as he was through his 25 years of experience as a professor of Anglo-Saxon in Oxford, his work has always been that of the most rigorous editorial discipline. I have always been impressed by his ability to preserve his father’s original writings as far as possible while applying the deft skill of an editor to make his volumes readable and not simply a catalogue of unpublished texts, something I was to learn first-hand when I undertook the daunting task of translating the first two volumes of The History of Middle-earth for Christian Bourgois, the French Tolkien publisher. With these books, complete with Christopher’s notes, as well as being able to discover some otherwise completely unknown tales, readers could begin to understand the way the author worked, and see how he would write and rewrite, often revisiting the same stories and passages after many years, keen to refine and improve his vast mythology, as well as to accommodate into his earlier writing the fruits of his later invention and to create a complete and seamless mythology, a saga spanning thousands of years.
Mursi Tribeswoman
Monday, April 23rd, 2007Even in this day and age, the image of a Mursi Tribeswoman is still quite exotic — particularly with her AK-47 and iPod:
We’d been hearing for days about the Mursi tribe — the one where women split their lower lip and insert a round metal plate. As we were repeatedly told, the Mursi are neither fun nor friendly. And while they’ve kept their distance from the outside world — largely in part because their territory is a vast expanse of remote national park — they nevertheless have turned their small contact with foreigners into an art form of extortion. Pictures equal money. No exceptions.
Do schools kill creativity?
Sunday, April 22nd, 2007Sir Ken Robinson asks, Do schools kill creativity?:
Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. With ample anecdotes and witty asides, Robinson points out the many ways our schools fail to recognize — much less cultivate — the talents of many brilliant people. “We are educating people out of their creativity,” Robinson says. The universality of his message is evidenced by its rampant popularity online.
Watch the video.
Report on Mesopotamia
Sunday, April 22nd, 2007A Report on Mesopotamia, by T.E. Lawrence — “Lawrence of Arabia” — was published in the Sunday Times, 22 August 1920:
The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster.
Anybody planning a campaign in Iraq would — or should — have read Lawrence’s classics on “his” WWI campaign and its aftermath.
‘How we made the Chernobyl rain’
Sunday, April 22nd, 2007Russian military pilots explain ‘How we made the Chernobyl rain’:
Russian military pilots have described how they created rain clouds to protect Moscow from radioactive fallout after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.Major Aleksei Grushin repeatedly took to the skies above Chernobyl and Belarus and used artillery shells filled with silver iodide to make rain clouds that would “wash out” radioactive particles drifting towards densely populated cities.
More than 4,000 square miles of Belarus were sacrificed to save the Russian capital from the toxic radioactive material.
“The wind direction was moving from west to east and the radioactive clouds were threatening to reach the highly populated areas of Moscow, Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl,” he told Science of Superstorms, a BBC2 documentary to be broadcast today.
“If the rain had fallen on those cities it would’ve been a catastrophe for millions. The area where my crew was actively influencing the clouds was near Chernobyl, not only in the 30km zone, but out to a distance of 50, 70 and even 100 km.”
In the wake of the catastrophic meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, people in Belarus reported heavy, black-coloured rain around the city of Gomel. Shortly beforehand, aircraft had been spotted circling in the sky ejecting coloured material behind them.
Moscow has always denied that cloud seeding took place after the accident, but last year on the 20th anniversary of the disaster, Major Grushin was among those honoured for bravery. He claims he received the award for flying cloud seeding missions during the Chernobyl clean-up.
A second Soviet pilot, who asked not to be named, also confirmed to the programme makers that cloud seeding operations took place as early as two days after the explosion.
Alan Flowers, a British scientist who was one of the first Western scientists allowed into the area to examine the extent of radioactive fallout around Chernobyl, said that the population in Belarus was exposed to radiation doses 20 to 30 times higher than normal as a result of the rainfall, causing intense radiation poisoning in children.
Mr Flowers was expelled from Belarus in 2004 after claiming that Russia had seeded the clouds. He said: “The local population say there was no warning before these heavy rains and the radioactive fallout arrived.”
Springtime for Taxes
Sunday, April 22nd, 2007John Stossel shares some tax facts in Springtime for Taxes:
Americans spent 6.4 billion hours complying with the tax code in 2005 — a chunk of time worth $265 billion, according to the Tax Foundation. That’s more than the 2006 federal budget deficit.Those of you who do your taxes yourselves spend an average of eight to 27 hours toiling for the U.S. government.
What a waste.
Other countries have made their citizens’ lives better by simplifying and lowering taxes. Estonians need an average 10 to 15 minutes to file their income taxes. Most do it without leaving their desk: 84 percent file online.
Twelve years ago, Estonia became the first country to tax everyone — companies and individuals — at the same flat rate. It started at 26 percent, dropped to 22, and will go to 20 in 2009. There are a few deductions for things like mortgage interest, educational expenses, and charitable donations. Very low incomes are exempt.
Unsurprisingly, Estonia is booming. The former Soviet republic used to be poor, with an average income 65 percent below its European neighbors. Today, Estonians are almost as rich as their neighbors, and their economy is growing more than 11 percent a year.
Corporations like a tax system that is low and simple, too, and that leads them to do more business in flat-tax countries. American companies such as Microsoft, Colgate, 3M, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, and Johnson & Johnson opened businesses in Estonia after the flat tax was adopted. Twelve years ago, foreign investment in Estonia made up only 5 percent of GDP, but today, it’s up to 20 percent. That means there’s more money in the Estonian economy to tax. So while the tax rate dropped, government revenues actually increased.
So why can’t we do that here?
Simple Approximations to a Fractal World
Sunday, April 22nd, 2007Matt McIntosh cites an insightful comment that moral rules are Simple Approximations to a Fractal World:
The picture that results is of a set of limits, or metaphorically speaking a set of fences that you are not to cross, not to trespass. It is not a set of valuations assigned to every possible thing you might do. . . . morality is a set of fences where, if you cross them, you will be violating morality and will be in the wrong, but if you do not cross them, then you are fine. . . .This also explains why the rules are easy to understand and to state, and why they have exceptions. They’re easy to understand because they need to be easily knowable by everyone. Simple rules are like straight fences. Rules aren’t actually visible, they’re in the mind and not in the physical world as actual fences. And similarly, if you were constructing invisible fences, the best sort of fence you could construct would be a straight fence, because it’s a lot easier to guess where all the different parts of an invisible straight fence are than it is to guess where all the different parts of a crazy curvy fence.
Germs and the City
Saturday, April 21st, 2007In Germs and the City, Peter W. Huber takes a long look at the history of public health and its shift toward “health care”:
Public authorities are ponderous and slow; the new germs are nimble and fast. Drug regulators are paralyzed by the knowledge that error is politically lethal; the new germs make genetic error — constant mutation — the key to their survival. The new germs don’t have to be smarter than our scientists, just faster than our lawyers.
(Emphasis mine.)
Read the whole article.
The Radical Incrementalist
Saturday, April 21st, 2007Nick Gillespie of Reason interviews libertarianish political journalist Jonathan Rauch, The Radical Incrementalist:
I also believe, on the other hand, that stability and order are an important part of life and shouldn’t be taken for granted. I fully understand the need for government to be around to do what it does. I’m also something of a Burkean, or a Hayekian. Which means I’ve come to have a lot of respect for institutions that have evolved in society over time. I’m well aware I may not understand why they do the things they do, and that if something’s been around the way it has been for a long time, that doesn’t make it immune to criticism. But I think it deserves at least a second or third look, so I’m no radical. I’m very anti-radical. It puts me in an odd position because I’m a big advocate of gay marriage, but I square that circle by saying the right way is to try it in a few states, to do it slowly. Remember, we’re messing with an age-old institution. I’m very much in that square.I’m a radical incrementalist. I believe in fomenting revolutionary change on a geological timescale. Life is long. We don’t have to do everything right away. I’m a little bit of a fatalist about solving problems and reforming things for the sake of it. I think we have to be careful that a lot of reform is just movement.
(Emphasis mine.)
Carefully designed to make you look stupid
Saturday, April 21st, 2007
Seth Godin notes that the apostrophe was carefully designed to make you look stupid.
Fruity cocktails count as health food, study finds
Saturday, April 21st, 2007Fruity cocktails count as health food, study finds:
Adding ethanol — the type of alcohol found in rum, vodka, tequila and other spirits — boosted the antioxidant nutrients in strawberries and blackberries, the researchers found.Any colored fruit might be made even more healthful with the addition of a splash of alcohol, they report in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture.
Dr. Korakot Chanjirakul and colleagues at Kasetsart University in Thailand and scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture stumbled upon their finding unexpectedly.
They were exploring ways to help keep strawberries fresh during storage. Treating the berries with alcohol increased in antioxidant capacity and free radical scavenging activity, they found.
Why did the Virginia Tech massacre happen?
Saturday, April 21st, 2007
Why did the Virginia Tech massacre happen? I think cartoonist Scott Stantis understands better than most.