This is hilarious.
“Mitt Romney” — A BLR Soundbite (by BadLipReading)
I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.
—This is what competition looks like now.
Hundreds Register for New Facebook Website | News | The Harvard Crimson
Long day
Mr Diaby
Because nothing says Christmas like synthetic neurons automatically reconstructed from microscopy image stacks.
(via Wellcome Image of the Month: Christmas Cells « Wellcome Trust Blog)
Big Ben, the Eye and the House of Commons christmas tree
Top economists reveal their graphs of 2011
Some pretty interesting, and highly depressing, graphs.
Looks impressive this morning
There’s an X on the ground at Dealey Plaza right where Kennedy was when he got shot. You never really realize he was looking at a goddam overpass right before he got hit.
Perhaps one of his last thoughts was: “Dallas is a fucking dump.”
Introducing mice, function keys, and “we call this ‘the desktop’”.
Xerox Star User Interface (1982) 1 of 2 (by VintageCG)
Sometimes people say “we can put a man on the moon, but we can’t..[do big challenge X]” where x is end smallpox, or feed children, or some similar ambitious but solvable problem.
But I wonder if we could put someone on the moon today? It feels like if we can’t, it’s because of a general loss of confidence, ambition and leadership rather than having the raw skills.
That post-war Kennedy era glow of manifest destiny feels like a long time ago. The tone today is of problems to be managed, resources to be squeezed. The narrative of climate crisis, to take one example, is about make-do-and-mend and doing more with less, rather than beating the problem back with ingenuity and foresight. We’re mitigating, because that’s the best we can hope for.
Maybe this all part of a bigger “Death of the West” narrative, where our inability to feel agency is connected to living in what we’re told is an increasingly debt-riddled, semi-employed gerontocracy where things like social mobility and youth employment feel like they were given up as part of the START II talks. I bet it doesn’t feel like this in India or Brazil.
We can do well, I’m sure, but I’m not sure we believe we can or we’re being told we can. And vicious circles are vicious.
Newfound Google Maps images have revealed an array of mysterious structures and patterns etched into the surface of China’s Gobi Desert. The media — from mainstream to fringe — has wildly speculated that they might be Chinese weapons-testing sites, satellite calibration targets, street maps of Washington, D.C., and New York City, or even messages to (or from) aliens.
It turns out that they are almost definitely used to calibrate China’s spy satellites.
(via Mysterious Symbols in China Desert Are Spy Satellite Targets, Expert Says | LiveScience)
