July 2010
Graphene under strain creates gigantic... →
“We have shown experimentally that when graphene is stretched to form nanobubbles on a platinum substrate, electrons behave as if they were subject to magnetic fields in excess of 300 tesla, even though no magnetic field has actually been applied,” says Crommie. “This is a completely new physical effect that has no counterpart in any other condensed matter system.”
The Influence of Language on Culture -Wall Street... →
Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?
In one study, Spanish and Japanese speakers couldn’t remember the agents of accidental events as adeptly as English speakers could. Why? In Spanish and Japanese, the agent of causality is dropped:...
Afghanistan: The WikiLeaks war logs on Task Force... →
Compiled by the Guardian, a massive collection of intelligence leaks on the realities of the war in Afghanistan.
The Nato coalition in Afghanistan has been using an undisclosed “black” unit of special forces, Task Force 373, to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial. Details of more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a “kill or...
Divorcing Tradition: Freedom, Equality and... →
oh, ironic quote by the way.
If we want to protect traditional marriage, we should be prepared to sacrifice our love affair with equal rights and sexual freedoms. If tradition is to be maintained, its place in society must be above human rights
Updates will be slow for another few days, I’m still struggling with moving all my stuff to the new apt. Amazing how much clutter you get to hoard in thirty or so years.
Love and all that good stuff,
-h
“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you...”
– Roman Polanski
“I have the two qualities you require to see absolute truth. I am brilliant, and...”
– Steven Moffat Forest of the Dead
Anasyrma →
bestofwikipedia:
Anásyrma is the gesture of lifting up the skirt or kilt. It is used in connection with certain religious rituals, eroticism, and lewd jokes, see e.g. Baubo. The term is used in describing corresponding works of art. Anasyrma differs from flashing, a physically similar gesture as an act of exhibitionism, in that an exhibitionist has an implied purpose of his/her own sexual...
“it is a lamentable idiosyncrasy of feminism that, unlike other rights movements...”
– Hannah Betts
Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown... →
Wired on the Apple and AT&T relationship. This little gem :
We consistently said ‘No, we are not going to mess up the consumer experience on the iPhone to make your network tenable.’ They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’ and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.’ I think history has demonstrated...
The Bill Murray Interview: GQ →
Murray on Kung Fu Hustle :
“Oh man, I just saw this thing,” and “God, that’s just staggering, just staggering. That movie is just AHHHHHH!” And when I saw that, I was like: That. Just. Happened. There should have been a day of mourning for American comedy the day that movie came out.
“If you look out the window as a human being at nature; all of nature is...”
– Stephen Fry
“We are informed that if repression has indeed been the fundamental link between...”
– Michel Foucault
The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1
SPACE.com -- Record Collapse of Earth's Upper... →
An upper layer of Earth’s atmosphere recently collapsed in an unexpectedly large contraction, the sheer size of which has scientists scratching their heads, NASA announced Thursday.
well that’s reassuring.
Immortality Explored In 'Long For This World' -NPR →
And one more for the reading queue.
According to Weiner, the goal is to emulate the actual hydra, not the mythical one.
“It continually restores itself with its stem cells,” he says, so “it’s immortal in the sense that it’s no more likely to die at a week old or two weeks old or two years old, than it was at one day old. It’s aging negligibly.”
...
“If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need...”
– John Carmack
How Microbes Defend and Define Us - The New York... →
I just finished reading Ryan’s Virolution. We are truly, each one of us, living planets.
We have over 10 times more microbes than human cells in our bodies,” said George Weinstock of Washington University in St. Louis. But the microbiome, as it’s known, remains mostly a mystery. “It’s as if we have these other organs, and yet these are parts of our bodies we know nothing about.”
