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Gawker shared photos of pillaged Safeway and Wegmans stores in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Maybe it’s my roots in upstate New York’s snow belt, but I have to ask: D.C., you do remember that snow melts, right?
See, this is the effect of mass weather-induced panic and, apparently, an area almost wholly dependent on takeout food.
Snowpocalypse ‘10: Everybody Panic! [Gawker]

Mark Siegel, the editorial director of the remarkable graphic novel publisher FirstSecond, has begun serializing his comic “Sailor Twain, or the Mermaid in the Hudson” on the web. This is Siegel’s labor of love, a wonderful and weird comic that he’s been working on for five years now. It’s damned exciting to find it online!
Sailor Twain
(Thanks, Mark!)
(Disclosure: I am currently in contract negotiations with FirstSecond for a graphic adaptation of one of my stories)



Mark Siegel, the editorial director of the remarkable graphic novel publisher FirstSecond, has begun serializing his comic “Sailor Twain, or the Mermaid in the Hudson” on the web. This is Siegel’s labor of love, a wonderful and weird comic that he’s been working on for five years now. It’s damned exciting to find it online!
Sailor Twain
(Thanks, Mark!)
(Disclosure: I am currently in contract negotiations with FirstSecond for a graphic adaptation of one of my stories)

 
How Bangladesh was divided by leader’s killing
People are able to recognise negative sounds such as expressions of disgust across cultures, say scientists.
1. In 1961, the only doctor at a Russian research station in Antarctica was forced to remove his own appendix to save his life. Two other inhabitants of the station (a driver and a meteorologist) held a mirror and provided instruments. The operation was a success, and believe it or not, it’s not the only one of its kind.
2. In the mixed-up world of radio personality qualifications, political pundits and best-selling authors Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity are all college dropouts, while both of the jovial mechanics who host CarTalk have science degrees from MIT.
3. You walk up to the front desk in an office building and ask for a form. The person behind the desk bends down out of sight to get it, but then quickly moves aside while a different person pops back up to hand the form to you. If you’re like 75% of people, you don’t notice a thing.
4. There is more than enough food to feed the entire world. Our problem is distribution, not production.
5. Studies suggest you learn more by getting something wrong on a test than you do by getting it right.
Note: Apologies to Mr. Aaron Whitworth for my continuing superlative use of “mind-blowing.”

Events are held at Auschwitz to mark the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp on Holocaust Memorial Day.
A church billboard depicting a semi-naked Joseph and Mary in bed together has caused a furore in New Zealand.
Anyone know how to fix this? Oh, we fired them
HP managers are reaping the harvest of their deep cost-cutting at EDS, in the form of a massive mainframe failure that crippled some very large clients, including the taxpayer-owned bank RBS.…
Case Study: WhatsUp keeps Legoland turnstyles ringing

And it’s all over, folks: The US District Court for the Northern District of California has just permanently forbidden wannbe Mac cloner Psystar from selling modified versions of OS X, providing any tools that enable users to bypass the OS X kernel encryption, and / or intentionally aiding anyone else from infringing Apple’s OS X copyrights in any way. We knew this was coming following Apple’s decisive victory against Psystar last month — the only open questions were whether the court would include Snow Leopard and Psytar’s Rebel EFI software in the ban, since the lawsuit was specifically about Leopard and Rebel EFI wasn’t the subject of any proceedings. Both issues were predictably resolved in favor of Apple: the court specifically included Snow Leopard and any future versions of OS X in the scope of the injunction, and while Judge Alsup couldn’t address Rebel EFI directly, he did expressly forbid Psystar from “manufacturing, importing, offering to the public, providing, or otherwise trafficking” in anything that circumvents Apple’s OS X hardware locks — which we’d say covers Rebel EFI’s functionality pretty thoroughly. Psystar has until December 31 to comply, and the Judge Alsup isn’t kidding around: “Defendant must immediately begin this process, and take the quickest path to compliance; thus, if compliance can be achieved within one hour after this order is filed, defendant shall reasonably see it done.” Psystar can still appeal, obviously, but it’s already got its own hefty legal bills and a $2.67m fine to pay to Apple, so we’ve got a feeling this one might have reached the end of the line.
P.S.- Amusingly, Judge Alsup appears to be pretty sick of Apple’s shenanigans as well: in the section discussing Snow Leopard, he says Apple first tried to block any discovery of Snow Leopard before the OS was released, and then pushed to include the software in the case after it launched. That’s why the Florida case over Snow Leopard wasn’t merged into this case — Alsup thought it was a “slick tactic” that “smacked of trying to ‘have it both ways,’ and offended [his] sense of fair play.” Ouch.
Psystar banned from copying any version of OS X, helping others install it originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Dec 2009 13:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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“It’s 50oC and has a humidity of 100%, less than a hundred people have been inside and it’s so deadly that even with respirators and suits of ice you can only survive for 20 minutes before your body starts to fail. It’s the nearest thing to visiting another planet – it’s going deep inside our own.
For ‘How Earth made us’ I have been lucky enough to film everywhere from tiny Pacific islands to the centre of the Sahara desert, yet nowhere could prepare me for filming in The Giant Crystal Cave – Cueva de los Cristales of Mexico.”
Read the full story at The Iron Ammonite
Dinotopia artist James Gurney posted this video about a “change blindness” experiment. 75% of the participants didn’t notice that the experimenter who bent under a counter was replaced by a different person. Says Gurney: “Here’s proof that most of the time we look but don’t see.” I think Matisse said something to the effect that he didn’t really see things unless he was painting them.

 
Seagoing Barry Whites finding it easier to get ladies
The songs of blue whales around the world have become significantly less high-pitched over the last 40 years, according to scientists. Boffins analysing the trend believe it may be to do with an increase in whale populations following the international ban on commercial whaling.…
Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn’t work
COURTESY of Blake Hounshell over at Foreign Policy:
Percentage of Americans who believe in angels: 55
Percentage of Americans who believe in evolution: 39
Percentage of Americans who believe in anthropogenic global warming: 36
Percentage of Americans who believe in ghosts: 34
Percentage of Americans who believe in UFOs: 34
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