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November 13, 2005
Here's an interesting series of scale/perspective images showing what all the water on Earth (1.4087 billion cubic kilometres of it), including sea water, ice, lakes, rivers, ground water, clouds, etc. would look like in comparison to the total spherical area of the Earth, and then again showing All the air in the atmosphere (5140 trillion tonnes of it) gathered into a ball at sea-level density. Both illustrations shown on the same scale as the Earth.
via
posted by jonson at 10:30 PM PST - 36 comments
Memory - 36 cards. Turn two over. If the pictures match, both get eliminated. Else turn them back and select another two. Repeat till field is cleared. Post the number of moves you took.
[via]
posted by Gyan at 9:40 PM PST - 77 comments
Operation Barbarella - from the London Review of Books, a review of
Jane Fonda’s War: A Political Biography of an Anti-war Icon by Mary Hershberger.
So, what is the story behind Jane Fonda? You will find few people so reviled among macho warrior types. Back in the Depressingly Christian Private School (DCPS) that I went to, to hear some of the things she had been accused of you'd have thought she was the Whore of Babylon herself.
The truly interesting thing about this article isn't the discussion of the reality of Fonda's anti-war protesting measured against the myth, but as an illustration of the kind of pass-it-along info, whose truth is a matter of almost-scriptural faith, that serves as the conventional wisdom concerning the Left in the ill-educated backwaters that compose so much of our nation. This kind of thing is the political equivilent of the story of the midget who hanged himself on the set of
The Wizard of Oz.
Additional reading: the
Snopes page on Jane Fonda.
Via Linkfilter.
posted by JHarris at 8:49 PM PST - 34 comments
Overheard in New York: A site so complex, so subtle and deceptive, that its site address couldn't
possibly tell you all you need to know about the site's content.
posted by shmegegge at 3:33 PM PST - 60 comments
Mortal Kombat! Test your might... by being able to watch the whole thing. And yet, still somehow better than the actual movie.
(WMV link)
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 2:09 PM PST - 28 comments
Is Kevin Bacon living near you? I just watched Bacon's
amazing performance as a paedophile returning home after 12 years inside, where the public accessibility of the Sex Offenders Register brought about by (amongst other things)
Megan's Law is a plot-point.
mapsexoffenders.com is a google maps powered site which enables you to see just who is living on your block, and what they did to end up being tracked for life, even after paying their debt to society. Is this information just becoming too easily accessible - is it making the chances of lumpheaded reprisals too high?
posted by benzo8 at 10:44 AM PST - 100 comments
Road trip to venus!
The
Venus Express was
launched on Nov. 9th, 2005 from
Baikonur, the
historic spaceport in Kazakhstan. It is the first Venus probe sent by the
ESA , and you can
follow it's progress on the six month journey to the planet.
Exploration of
Venus begin in 1962 with
Mariner 2, the first space probe to fly by another planet and other flights, including the Russian
Venera 7, which was the first probe to land on another planet. The Soviets took quite an interest in Venus and
dominated the exploration of the planet through the '70s and '80s. A lot of the images recorded by those early craft have been
reprocessed with modern technology.
In the early '90s the
Magellan spacecraft spent several years
mapping the surface of Venus, providing us
many,
many,
many images and
3D maps of
the planet.
As for
Venus Express, it's goal is to spend two years making detailed studys of
the planet's clouds and atmosphere.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:53 AM PST - 19 comments
The nkondi are the most powerful of the nkisi. They were used to identify and hunt down unknown
wrongdoers such as thieves, and people who were believed to cause sickness or death by occult means.
They were also used to punish people who swore false oaths and villages which broke treaties. To inspire
the nkondi to action, it was both invoked and provoked. Invocations, in bloodthirsty language, encouraged
it to punish the guilty party. It would also be provoked by having gunpowder exploded in front of it, and
having nails hammered into it. These fantastic Congo nail fetish figures are just one small, wonderful part of the impressive collection of images you can view at the content-rich, gratifyingly obsessive
Rand African Art, a site stuffed with nice large photos,
lots of lovely, lovely
links, and all sorts of intriguing nooks and crannies inviting exploration.
posted by taz at 4:28 AM PST - 14 comments
