March 23, 2017
Beyond toques and two-fours
The revised second edition of A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles is now available online for all of your Canadian English needs.
A respectful write-up from The New Yorker.
A respectful write-up from The New Yorker.
Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies
Secret Message Is Only For Dogs (via reddit)—from this years PROSH, a satire newspaper made by students at the University of Western Australia. BONUS: Plunk your doggo in front of the monitor for a SECRET DOG-ONLY VIDEO TO GET DOGS PUMPED [noisy noisy noisy].
49 satin wedding gowns... one in each state's boxcar
The Merci Train was a train of 49 French railroad boxcars filled with tens of thousands of gifts of gratitude from French citizens sent to the US in 1949. They were showing their appreciation for the 700+ American boxcars of relief goods sent to them by Americans in 1948 via a project calledFriendship Train. Each of the 48 American states at that time received one of the gift-laden box cars. Many of those boxcars still exist. [more inside]
John despises his Alabama town.
bon voyage
He has played his last set --John Thomas “Sib” Hashian who played the drums on arena-rock group Boston's first two albums, has died at 67. [more inside]
Sad about Pluto? How about 110 planets in the solar system instead?
Kirby Runyon and five fellow science team members from the New Horizons mission to Pluto are at the 48th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Texas this week, promoting an alternative planetary definition (PDF, 2 page paper; PDF of their poster). They are offering a drastically different definition from the one the International Astronomical Union (IAU) set in 2006 (previously), one which would increase the planet count from 8 to 110 in our solar system. [more inside]
The Office Chair of the Future -- Today!
You may have heard that sitting in chairs is slowly killing anyone who works in an office. Now, however, you can buy the Altwork Station, an office chair that will definitely not kill the user.
Killing me softly with Wonderbread...
Syrian Football-World Cup Qualifying
There is no ignoring the control that president Bashar Assad’s regime tries to exert over its citizens and, once again, sport is no different.
The relative success of the team is both a passing panacea and a propaganda opportunity, the former for the people and the latter for the president.
To present a thriving football culture to the world fits in entirely with the agenda of normalisation, of having quelled the rebellion, of stabilisation and control.
However, as we discovered, the reality is far from that...
Ultimately, this is a story of 23 Syrian footballers, 23m Syrian people, 4.9m refugees, six years of war and one president.
“If you went in the room when it was switched on, you’d burn directly,”
German scientists are switching on “the world’s largest artificial sun” in the hope that intense light sources can be used to generate climate-friendly fuel. [The Guardian] “The Synlight experiment in Jülich, about 19 miles west of Cologne, consists 149 souped-up film projector spotlights and produces light about 10,000 times the intensity of natural sunlight on Earth. When all the lamps are swivelled to concentrate light on a single spot, the instrument can generate temperatures of around 3,500C – around two to three times the temperature of a blast furnace.”
Under the pump and over the moon, with lamb, prawns, and pavlova
Notes on Masterchef Australia, by blogger Adam Cadre (17,500 words)
You're going to the top of the mountain, broken legs and all.
"Eden, the ground-breaking Channel 4 project, saw 23 strangers cut off from the rest of the world and left to fend for themselves in a corner of the West Highlands ... Instead of being crowned reality TV celebrities and fought over by agents, the 10 who made it through the 12 months have learned that only four episodes have been shown – the last seven months ago."
Terrorist Attack in London
Four people were killed and twenty-nine injured in a terrorist attack in Westminster yesterday afternoon. [more inside]
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