Geographical breakdown: birthers vs. fact-thinkers

...and a long, but informative and well-thought out NYT Mag article on the transformation of American cooking from an active skill to a network TV spectacle of passivity.

Yet another nice Maira Kalman NYTimes piece

Skeletown (via boingboing)

Moon the Balloon
More than 70 people say they will participate in a “moon the balloon” demonstration Aug. 15 by dropping their drawers to protest a high-tech surveillance balloon and camera monitoring the international border at Sarnia (Canada).

Mexican Sand Banditos
"Today we made the decision to close this stretch of ill-gotten, illegally accumulated sand," said Patricio Patron, Mexico's attorney general for environmental protection. "This hotel was telling its tourists: 'Come here, I have sand ... the other hotels don't, because I stole it.'"

Aye carumba.

I'm really digging the 60's girl-pop sound of Stuart Murdoch's God Help the Girl

http://carsihaveseen.com/

"Light waves can be sculpted"
(harvard)
Albert Einstein and just about every other physicist insisted that light travels 186,000 miles a second in free space, and that it can't be speeded-up or slowed down. But in 1998, Hau, for the first time in history, slowed light to 38 miles an hour, about the speed of rush-hour traffic.

A thoughtful analysis of Birther madness

An economic analysis of the Somali Pirate business model (wired)
Harvard Business Review this ain't.

Like any business, Somali piracy can be explained in purely economic terms. It flourishes by exploiting the incentives that drive international maritime trade. The other parties involved — shippers, insurers, private security contractors, and numerous national navies — stand to gain more (or at least lose less) by tolerating it than by putting up a serious fight. As for the pirates, their escalating demands are a method of price discovery, a way of gauging how much the market will bear.

Wi-Fi Allergy? Sounds like BS

Who Shredded Our Safety Net (mother jones)

More GOP Birther wingnut insanity (Huffpost)

Folks, this is what it has come to. The most powerful people in the world -- nationally elected legislators responsible for setting policy for the most powerful country on earth -- are lining up with cuckoo-bat-shit-crazy elements of the lunatic fringe.

And they have to. It's their base.

Hawaii responds (again)

The 15 most lucrative college degrees are all math-related

America's future has a face (and it's wearing clown makeup and drinking 40s)

Scientists worry that Machines may outsmart man PUNY HUMAN INTELLECT
(nytimes)

Monkey crime.

Colonel's Secret: cracked.
'KFC' mix
1 teaspoon ground oregano
1 teaspoon chilli powder
1 teaspoon ground sage
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried marjoram
1 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon onion salt
1 teaspoon garlic powder
2 tablespoons Accent (MSG)

Vampire bats are biting people. great...

An amazingly beautiful ride

Walter Cronkite has died.

The Google Tri-force conspiracy (via metafilter)

Boring postcards at wfmu's Beware the Blog

The museum of forgotten art supplies
Going digital has waylaid a lot of cool gear.

What fast looks like (kottke)

Techcrunch, in combing through 300+ hacked Twitter documents sent to them, found that the microblogging site is planning to launch a TV show. Bad reality TV is the 'pulse of the planet'?

12-mile biological flesh-devouring goo attacks Alaska. Details at 11.

Ernest Hemingway, failed KGB spy?

LOLFinance

Dennis Kucinich is a really good guy. Check out his dressing down of a pro-insurance lobby doc on the Canadian system vs the US system (pnph). This is a lesson on how our elected officials should be representing Americans. Kudos!!!!

During the questioning by committee members:

Rep. Dennis Kucinich: Dr. Gratzer, you’ve tried to make the case for rationing in Canada - worse than it is in the U.S. Do you know what Statistics Canada - the analogue to the U.S. Census - says the median wait time is across Canada for elective surgery?

Dr. David Gratzer: Why don’t you inform us,sir?

Kucinich: It’s four weeks. And what does Statistics Canada say the median wait time for diagnostic imaging like MRIs is?

Gratzer: I could tell you the Ontario government recently looked at that for…

Kucinich: It’s three weeks.

Gratzer: … for cancers, was six months.

Kucinich: It’s three weeks. How many uninsured are there in Canada?

Gratzer: Probably relatively few.

Kucinich: That’s right, none or very few. How many medical bankruptcies are there in Canada?

Gratzer: Depends on how you define medical bank..

Kucinich: None or very few. How many insured Americans go without needed care due to high cost of health care which is due to health insurance companies?

Gratzer: (Pause) Am I allowed to answer, or are we just going to continue to…

Kucinich: If you have an answer, you can answer. But if you don’t, I’ll answer. What’s your answer?

Gratzer: Go for it, sir.

Kucinich: What’s your answer?

Gratzer: Why don’t you answer your question, sir?

Kucinich: What’s your answer?

Gratzer: My answer…

Kucinich: How many insured Americans go without needed care due to the high cost of health care which is due to health insurance companies?

Gratzer: (Silence)

Kucinich: The witness isn’t responding.

GyroBike: using gyroscope to eliminate training wheels by balancing a kids bike.

Google Chrome OS announced
and some more info direct from the horse's mouth.

Hmm. Looks like this Republican stole his "O" logo from across the aisle.
Weak.

Ever wonder what happened to the space shuttle boosters when their stage of the launch job was done? (via metafilter)

Rolling Stone has released it's excellent article on Goldman Sachs.
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States
More sociopathic, anti-American doom-wishing from Bush's CIA Bin Laden leader