"I don't think the report is true, but these crises work for those who want to make fights between people." Kulam Dastagir, 28, a bird seller in Afghanistan
Make a Mont Blanc for less that $20
Topic: Miscellaneous
11:10 pm EDT, Jul 15, 2007
Save $200 in 2 minutes and have the worlds best writing pentransform a $3 pen into a $200 pen in just seconds. Mont Blanc pens are the worlds finest writing pens but they make specialized refills so you must buy their $200 pens to use their amazing ink...until now. This is the easiest hack/adaptation to give anyone the king's writing ink.
Yup, the refills are cheap, and most of the pen is, in fact, the refill.
Uzodinma Iweala - Stop Trying To 'Save' Africa - washingtonpost.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
5:16 pm EDT, Jul 15, 2007
Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself.
An African speaks out at the dishonesty of self congradulatory liberal campaigns. (Its probably worth pointing out that the speaker, while presenting himself as a voice of Africa, was born in Washington DC and attended Harvard. Its not that I think he is wrong. Its that I think he is also assuming someone else's identity.)
Web radio will keep playing, rather than play dead, come July 15. The music industry won't impose higher royalty rates, which were to take effect that day, but the good news for Webcasters may prove fleeting.
"SoundExchange is in the business of generating revenues, and it's not going to help them if a good chunk of the industry goes out of business," explains Paul Palumbo, research director for AccuStream iMedia Research.
The World’s Best Candy Bars? English, of Course - New York Times
Topic: Miscellaneous
12:28 am EDT, Jul 14, 2007
Bryn Dyment, a Web developer in the Bay Area who grew up in Canada, said he was shocked when his parents took him to a candy counter in the United States. He found out that not every child in the world was eating the same chocolate bars he was.
It wasn’t until he moved to the United States as an adult that he realized just how vast that divide is.
“You get in these religious arguments with people,” he said. “I haven’t met a Canadian who likes a Hershey bar, but Americans think you’re crazy when you say that, because they think everyone loves a Hershey bar.”
“Hershey’s tastes like ear wax...”
I agree whole heartedly. While I am in most respects an American one aspect of me which will always and forever be Canadian is my taste in chocolate. My two great disappointments upon moving to the United States at the age of nine were learning that your Cheerios are made with whole wheat, and learning that basically all of your candy bars suck. Nearly everywhere else in the world that I've travelled to, from France to Hong Kong, has English chocolate like Smarties and Aero Bars on the shelf. For a long time I'd thought the reason Smarties weren't available here was due to a trademark conflict with the rolled up sweettarts popular at halloween, but this doesn't explain the fact that no other English candy is available, or if, like Kitkat, it is available, the recipie has been screwed up. Something is deeply wrong with American taste buds.
I'm disappointed that this article, while finally putting the honest truth in print in the United States, fails to delve into the details of why. However, I have a hypothesis. I'm not sure when candy bars first became popular but there are only two possibilities:
1. They became popular before the revolutionary war, in which case Canada and the United States should have both inhereted the same taste in chocolate from England. 2. They became popular after the revolutionary war, in which case you'd think Canadians and Americans would have started eating chocolate manufactured in the same way, and that while English tastes might have diverged, Canadian tastes would have tracked American tastes and not English ones.
Neither occured. So, my hypothesis is that in the beginning, American and Canadian tastes in Chocolate tracked English tastes, and then this funny thing called World War II happened. During WWII Hershey got a contract with the US Army to distribute Hershey bars to American GIs. These bars were designed to have a high melting temperature so they could be handled by Army logistics easily, and be sour enough that soldiers wouldn't eat them when they weren't supposed to. Soldiers came back from the war with an endearing relationship to Hershey, and a taste for flavorless bars, and so now everyone in the country is eating the chocolate equivelent of MREs.
I have no idea if Canadian soldiers were issued chocolate during WWII, but as these flavorless candy bars were an American invention its likely that whatever they had, it was different.
To boldly surf: the new destinations for armchair astronauts - Independent Online Edition -- Sci_Tech
Topic: Science
1:32 pm EDT, Jul 12, 2007
The internet is revolutionising space exploration, bringing new sights and discoveries to anyone who cares to look just as quickly as to the scientists involved.
Forever Minus a Day? Some Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright
Topic: Intellectual Property
12:06 pm EDT, Jul 12, 2007
The second part of the paper focuses on the specific case of copyright term. Using a simple model we characterise optimal term as a function of a few key parameters. We estimate this function using a combination of new and existing data on recordings and books and find an optimal term of around fourteen years.
washingtonpost.com - Presidential Debate Between President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry
Topic: War on Terrorism
2:05 am EDT, Jul 12, 2007
After watching the Frontline documentary on the surge, take a second to consider an alternate history. Consider this comment from Kerry during the 2004 Presidential debate:
KERRY: The president just talked about Iraq as a center of the war on terror.... You don't take America to war unless have the plan to win the peace... we don't have enough troops there.
If the surge is successful but isn't allowed to continue because it is politically untennable, imagine the irony, as Bush is prevented by the Democrats from doing the thing that might have worked and would have been done had he lost to the Democrats in 2004.
There is a limited theatrical release of Blade Runner this fall. I don't know what that means, but often "limited" means "not in the South East accept Austin."
I'm willing to fly somewhere to see this in a theater. Please someone post if you see more information.
The discovery of a baby mammoth preserved in the Russian permafrost gives researchers their best chance yet to build a genetic map of a species extinct since the Ice Age, a Russian scientist said on Wednesday.
