A volunteer at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History has discovered what is believed to be the first, and maybe the only, color photos of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire that nearly destroyed the city.

Stereo photographs of 1906 San Francisco Quake discovered - Boing Boing

Fears of a double dip in housing are giving away to a realization that the nation's mortgage markets are facing a much colder reality — something that will not so easily be named, but is nonetheless hanging around for a very long time.

Nameless, formless crisis enveloping nation's home price indices « HousingWire

...

Homeless robot begs for energy - Boing Boing

That same cash-filled briefcase could buy seven Ferrari 599s or every single 2009 model Mercedes. You could snap up a top-shelf Maybach and employ a chauffeur until well past the apocalypse. Hell, in this economy, $2.1 million is probably enough to make you a one-man special-interest group with some serious Washington clout.

But don’t. Buy a Grand Sport. Even if there were another 253-mph drop-top with more luxury appointments than a Bond villain’s boudoir, you wouldn’t want it. You’d want this exact car, because more than being a blast to drive, it is the greatest gasoline-powered vehicle that has ever been, or will ever be, built. Seriously.

This is, in fact, hillarious.

Peak Oil: Bugatti Makes a Car for the Ages | Product Reviews | Wired.com

The present XKCD pokes at a major pet peeve of mine - websites that try to be "helpful" by handing out a useless mobile compatible index page to mobile browsers that request a specific article - thereby making it impossible to locate and view the specific article that was desired.

Chances are quite good that my phone can render your article even if it wasn't designed to be viewed on a phone. Please stop trying to be smart and just give me what I requested!

xkcd: Server Attention Span

Former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski:

The other major change in international affairs is that for the first time, in all of human history, mankind has been politically awakened. That is a total new reality – total new reality. It has not been so for most of human history until the last one hundred years. And in the course of the last one hundred years, the whole world has become politically awakened. And no matter where you go, politics is a matter of social engagement, and most people know what is generally going on –generally going on – in the world, and are consciously aware of global inequities, inequalities, lack of respect, exploitation. Mankind is now politically awakened and stirring. The combination of the two: the diversified global leadership, politically awakened masses, makes a much more difficult context for any major power including, currently, the leading world power: the United States.

Washington's Blog

Blackrock’s Chairman and CEO – Larry Fink – said on Bloomberg TV...

Head of World’s Largest Asset Manager: “Markets Like Totalitarian Governments” | The Big Picture

As always, Mr Stewart puts it into perspective -- the same people who object to limiting the tax-funded bonuses of bailed out bankers because it would violate their contracts say that teachers' contracts should be torn up and their benefits slashed.

Corruption.

Jon Stewart on the cushy lives of teachers - Boing Boing

The fungus species can infect an ant, take over its brain, and then kill the insect once it moves to a location ideal for the fungi to grow and spread their spores.

Photos: "Zombie" Ants Found With New Mind-Control Fungi

Future historians will long puzzle over how the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, in protest over the confiscation of his fruit stand, managed to trigger popular uprisings across the Arab/Muslim world. We know the big causes — tyranny, rising food prices, youth unemployment and social media. But since being in Egypt, I’ve been putting together my own back-of-the-envelope guess list of what I’d call the “not-so-obvious forces” that fed this mass revolt.

This Is Just The Start - Thomas Friedman