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December 6, 2011
At the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, a yacht race was taking the world's teams through dangerous waters at breakneck speeds. Stig Käll and his brother Lars were in the running to win when, behind them, the Australian team capsized and slipped below the deadly waves. Making a split-second decision, the Källs turned their boat around and rescued the Australians, losing the race and vanishing from the pages of Olympic history, but winning recognition from the Japanese press, who awarded them the headline "Gold Medal of Humanity". The Käll brothers were the first to receive recognition from the
International Fair Play Committee, a group that now gives awards and recognition to people who display unusual sportsmanship, such as:
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posted by shii at 11:32 PM PST - 41 comments
Back in October, NYT columnist David Brooks asked his older readers (aged 70+) to send him "life reports." He wanted them to appraise their lives, in an effort to glean some life lessons for all of us to learn by. After receiving thousands of replies, he published his assessment of them a couple weeks ago, in two columns (
Part 1: Nov 24, 2011;
Part 2: Nov 28, 2011). He's also selected specific ones and published them
on his blog.
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posted by crunchland at 9:46 PM PST - 64 comments
We got through the basics—how I’d arrived in Libya, why I was there—in civil tones. Then the Inspector asked, “If you were a professor at Harvard, why did you quit your job to come risk your life in Libya?” I explained as best I could that I had not been a professor but a graduate student, and part of my training was teaching undergraduates. The academic job market was tough and demoralizing, and the rigidity of the academic lifestyle had never appealed to me that much anyway. I had suspected for a few years that I’d be temperamentally better suited to working as a reporter. “Why you work journalist? You don’t study journalism, you study history!”
—
What I Lost in Libya by Clare Morgana Gillis, a journalist who was captured by Gadhafi forces.
posted by Kattullus at 7:41 PM PST - 12 comments
The day before last, Dianne Hackborn, a software engineer from Google,
posted a lengthy essay on Google+ about Android UI rendering also touching on the hardware accelerated UI debacle. Not to let sleeping dogs lie, one of the previous Android interns, Andrew Munn,
posted a reply regarding other areas where Android needs to improve. Both posts provide an absolutely fascinating first-hand look into how the Android UI works.
posted by Talez at 2:33 PM PST - 57 comments
The
Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana started as an open pit copper mine in 1955, and was closed in 1982. At that time,
groundwater pumping ceased and the pit started to flood, leading to what is now one of the largest
Superfund sites. The water body was considered uninhabitable, with
high concentrations of copper, cadmium, arsenic, aluminum, manganese and zinc and of pH of 2.5 (
as acidic as a lemon), but
in 1995, a small clump of green slime was noticed floating on the water's surface. Since then,
the algae blooms have been studied as a possible method of remediation for the toxic waters. That same year,
a migratory flock of snow geese landed in the pit lake. Stormy weather kept the flock on the lake, and when the weather cleared, 342 birds were dead.
A Migratory Bird Protection Plan was then put in place, to prevent such occurrences from happening again. In the spring of 1996, a surprising discovery was made:
yeast, which shouldn't grown in those pH levels, was surviving, and absorbing eighty-seven percent of the metals in the water. Furthermore,
Andrea and
Donald Stierle, professors who have been studying the pit lake since 1995, have found 70 compounds that might be medically useful.
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posted by filthy light thief at 11:05 AM PST - 36 comments
Northumberlandia is coming. "A mile away, I stand at the base of Northumberlandia’s head which, at this distance, looks just like a mountain of mud. We drive up hillside tracks to her hip and one of her breasts (the other one has yet to take shape) and then wind our way up to her face. Even now, as bulldozers comb her hair and steamrollers flatten her skin, it is easy to make out her feminine contours."
posted by Paul Slade at 9:49 AM PST - 13 comments
"What was really most healing, for me, besides the drugs, was meeting my own people, my tribe. When you meet each other the relief of knowing you’re not alone and that you both feel like the walking dead. It’s such a relief to be with someone who will never say, “Perk up.” Black Dog Tribes is a (beta) social platform for people with depression created by
Ruby Wax.
posted by lucia__is__dada at 5:35 AM PST - 17 comments
This song was recorded at home in the 1970s by German actress Sibylle Baier. Her son collected her recordings and created an album to share with family, and in 2006 the Colour Green was released by label Orange Twin.
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posted by KingoftheWhales at 1:06 AM PST - 11 comments
