An excellent example of a visual display of information that is immediately clear is again provided by The Economist. Just think how much less obvious this information would be as a list of percentages.
Yes, this is exactly my kind of thing: Snackspot.
There’s been a lot of linkage to summaries and discussions of this New Yorker article about how SecDef Rumsfeld is a stupid, petty dictator who over-ruled his top planners at every turn when they told him he needed more troops on the ground. Most discouraging feature of the article for me: frequent comparisons to Viet […]
Lest we forget, SARS is still out there, and it’s apparently more contagious than we thought. Two suspected cases in King County and, according to the CDC, one in Alabama, though their Public Health website’s news releases seem most concerned with Smallpox vaccinations.
An article in the NY Times, popular on Blogdex today, says that a lot of today’s teens are anti-abortion. Interestingly, a quote toward the end of the article reveals a fairly profound misunderstanding on the part of at least one young person: “There are better contraceptives—RU-486, the morning-after pill—along with an emphasis on sex ed, […]
An extremely cool view of a camel, from Japan, in 1862. Turns out they just love daikon!
Samuel Pepys’s (pronounced “Marshmallow Peeps”) diary is online now, a day at a time. American Memory has the life stories of ordinary people available, too, drawn from the Federal Writer’s Project. The only drawback is that an effort to present them as they really are makes some of them harder to read (every crossed out […]
University of Toronto researchers have constructed a “metamaterial” lens, with properties that appear to confound traditional physics. I read a couple years ago about somebody having constructed a material with a negative index of refraction, and this appears to be more of the same. Freaky shit.
In other news, people continue to die from SARS. The CDC has a contrary view to earlier reports that it might be a member of the paramyxovirus family. If transmission of this thing were just a little bit easier, I suspect we’d all be fucked.
I never learned conversation skills in school, but from the looks of a fifties English textbook I just bought, students used to be drilled in appropriate small talk and how to write a letter. I think this information could be quite helpful to the Internet community at large. Here’s the first of several tips on […]