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In His Own Words -- just in time for FlashQuicktime Friday, Bush's own words, from 2003's State of the Union matched with more appropriate and now-historic imagery than a man standing behind a teleprompter and podium. (Warning: some graphic stuff inside.) Realplayer version available here. and perhaps because not everything deserves the lighthearted jibjab treatment.
posted by amberglow at 9:11 PM PST - 46 comments

Internet Explorer 7. Dean Edwards does what a team of developers with billions behind them apparently can't -- update IE to work with modern standards. Almost, anyway... as he says, it's still in alpha, and has its quirks, but check out the Pure CSS Menus demo, for example.
posted by weston at 4:57 PM PST - 19 comments

Sam's Telecomms Index.
posted by hama7 at 3:50 PM PST - 1 comments

Giving back to the grid... looks like the idea that AC Propulsion has of empowering owners of electric cars to send energy back into the grid (like wind and solar consumers) is getting noticed.
posted by silusGROK at 3:02 PM PST - 14 comments

A guide to the English school system. From the BBC. This certainly explained a few things for me. (And remember, private school = public school)
posted by iffley at 2:49 PM PST - 7 comments

THE TERROR WEB. Were the Madrid bombings part of a new, far-reaching jihad being plotted on the Internet?
posted by semmi at 2:23 PM PST - 21 comments

Earlier this month, internal white house rumors were leaked saying that ideally, it'd be great to find an Al Queda suspect during the week of the Democratic National Convention, since the Democrats would likely be grabbing headlines. Sounds like some crass opportunism instead of truly protecting the republic from terrorists, doesn't it?

Well, what do you know, today this message floated at the top of CNN.com, more important than Kerry's keynote. Even though the guy was caught on Sunday, we don't hear about it until today. Foxnews looks the same way (screenshot), with the Al Queda headline above Kerry's one day in the sun at Fox News. But it's all just a coincidence and we're not being played like a fiddle. Sure.
posted by mathowie at 1:29 PM PST - 94 comments

Ricky Quits Football to Smoke Dope
Ricky Williams knew he'd failed a third drug test and retired from football before his coach found out.
Says Ricky, "I didn't quit football because I failed a drug test," he told the Herald. "I failed a drug test because I was ready to quit football."
Williams said he's not addicted to marijuana. And I'm sure he can quit anytime he wants to but maybe he got confused and quit his profession instead of his "hobby"?
Is this the first time a star athlete's quit because he wants to hang out and smoke dope?
posted by fenriq at 12:28 PM PST - 81 comments

Test your reading speed. How many words per minute do you read? [via waxy]
posted by riffola at 11:45 AM PST - 59 comments

Attention Alabama Sex Toy Shoppers: the Feds have agreed that you will have to buy your buttplugs, rabbit pearls, and french ticklers elsewhere.
posted by tsarfan at 11:27 AM PST - 36 comments

Barefoot Solar Engineers. India's Barefoot College teaches poor and illiterate women to build and maintain rural solar systems in areas with little or no electric supply. [Via WorldChanging.]
posted by homunculus at 11:06 AM PST - 7 comments

When paleoclimatologist William Hyde was asked whether he'd be watching the well-known educational film The Day After Tomorrow, he replied that he wouldn't endure it unless he was given $100. This challenge set in motion a series of wholly predictable events which saw the denizens of rec.arts.sf.written heroically raising the required sum against Hyde's protestations and duly sent him packing to cinema.

What did Hyde think? "The best summary of the movie comes from The Simpsons: 'It's cold and there are wolves.' - Abe."
posted by adrianhon at 10:31 AM PST - 27 comments

For almost ten years, independent rock critic Glenn Mcdonald has kept a highly personal and elegantly well-written music column, The War Against Silence. He has championed artists popular and obscure, and remembered acts that others might regard as 1980s nostalgia with melancholy and grace. As his past few columns have vacillated between the personal and the musical, he has opted to end his run at the beginning of September.
posted by pxe2000 at 10:02 AM PST - 16 comments

RIP Francis Crick. The man who helped discover the secret of life is dead.
posted by rushmc at 9:41 AM PST - 31 comments

Roadside Online. A blog about Diners.
posted by dchase at 9:04 AM PST - 5 comments

A political party urges Miami voters to use absentee ballots because electronic voting has no paper trail and cannot "verify your vote." The Democrats? Nope -- the Florida GOP.
posted by tregoweth at 8:28 AM PST - 13 comments

This website exists because astrosociology is not yet a widely recognized subfield of sociology, and therefore it can benefit from a centralized approach. It is intended to serve as a catalyst for the growth of astrosociology from a general state of nonexistence.
As a little known sociologist fights his lonely quixotic battle to introduce a new sociology subfield, some who are stuck in their earthbound paradigm object.
posted by found missing at 7:03 AM PST - 8 comments

A longtime Jacksonville weblogger normally devoted to wonky subjects like his blogging software made a frank public admission on his weblog recently: "I had an affair with another woman. My wife was a severe depressive and I was uncaring and unfeeling towards her when she needed me the most."
posted by rcade at 6:52 AM PST - 55 comments

The physicist Shariah Afshar has used a beautifully simple experiment, which no-one seems to have thought of before, to disprove Bohr's principle of complementarity, something which has been pretty much unchallenged for 80 years. He may also have gone some way towards showing that there is no such thing as a photon, and that Einstein's Nobel prize should be revoked. So, big stuff. What do you physicists think?
posted by Pretty_Generic at 6:36 AM PST - 35 comments

Toronto librarian accused of being wanted Panther More info [1] [2][3][4]
posted by srboisvert at 5:56 AM PST - 21 comments

Three nice book links from the University of North Texas Libraries: 1. Victorian Bookbinding - Innovation and Extravagance has some gorgeous examples of bookcovers from the Art Nouveau, Victorian, and Arts and Crafts periods. 2. The Great Menagerie is an animated tour of 19th and 20th century pop-up books. 3. Pop-Up and Movable Books - A Tour, showcases pop-up book artists through the centuries, and includes the master of the genre, Lothar Meggendorfer. More about Meggendorfer inside ---->
posted by iconomy at 4:58 AM PST - 7 comments

Math that makes you go wow: A multi-disciplinary exploration of non-orientable surfaces.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 2:36 AM PST - 12 comments

In 1934, the only thing standing between a fascist coup and democracy in the United States was the courage and honor of one man.
posted by euphorb at 2:22 AM PST - 50 comments