links for 2010-04-29
Blue Virginia: What Would Gulf Coast Oil Spill Look Like Off Virginia's Coast? Beating me to the punch, Miles Grant provides an illustration of the Gulf Coast oil spill as it would look relative to Virginia. It's much, much bigger than I thought. A spill like this would bring about an economic apocalypse for our [...]
links for 2010-04-28
BBC: Underage gymnast costs China Sydney Olympics bronze 2000 Olympic medalist Dong Fangxiao has been stripped of her medal, after an IOC investigation has determined (a decade later) that she was 14 years old, two years too young to compete. Maybe come 2018, they'll finally figure out that those little girls competing for China in [...]
Is it worth the risk to drill off Virginia’s coast?
This is a NASA satellite photo of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: As of this morning, the slick is 100 miles long and 45 miles wide. It’s twenty miles off the coast of Louisiana, and due to hit the shore this weekend. If this wasn’t enough of a disaster in the ocean, [...]
links for 2010-04-26
Wikipedia: List of country name etymologies This is much more interesting than I thought it would be. I assumed most countries' names would mean something like "the land of our people," but in their own language. Turns out, no, not even close. The etymologies are really varied. (tags: geography linguistics wikipedia etymology) Full Text of [...]
links for 2010-04-23
Wikipedia: Sniper Range The longest recorded range for a kill by a sniper is 1.51 miles. That distinction is held by a Canadian sharpshooter, accomplished in 2002 in Afghanistan. The bullet dropped 156 feet during its four-second flight. (tags: wikipedia military) New York Times: A Court Victory Al Gore May Not Want to Advertise Gore's [...]
links for 2010-04-22
City of Ontario v. Jeff Quon, et al Remember those foolish comments that Supreme Court justices made, showing that they know nothing about technology? The transcript of the oral arguments that's now available makes clear that most of those were taken out of context. (tags: scotus technology) Marie Claire: Forcefeeding in Mauritania—West Africa Fat Camp [...]
links for 2010-04-21
Flickr: School Lunch The results of a search for "school lunch" on Flickr. Flip through a few pages to see examples of the crap kids are eating in the U.S., and the interesting and strange stuff that kids eat around the world. (tags: food diet health education children) DC Dicta: Technical difficulties at the Supreme [...]
links for 2010-04-14
London Times: Oil boom fuels mystery of the missing island in the Mexican Gulf Mexico's Bermeja Island, off the coast of the Yucatan, is gone. It was there, and now it's not. (tags: geography mexico) BBC: Japanese whale meat 'being sold in US and Korea' Researchers have made a genetic match on whale meat sold [...]
The Post profiles Creigh Deeds post-election.
Frederick Kunkle had a tough-to-read article about Sen. Creigh Deeds in yesterday’s Washington Post. For those of us who have gotten to know him in the nine years since he ascended to the senate, there’s a lot in here that’s sad. Losing an election is tough, and the easy thing to do afterwards is to [...]
links for 2010-04-13
Wikipedia: Doggerland I've wondered why in the world England has been so long occupied by humans. An island in the north Atlantic doesn't really lend itself to settlement (why continue past the south of France?) It turns out that Great Britain was connected to Europe by a land mass large enough that "land bridge" doesn't [...]
links for 2010-04-12
Tea Party NY Gov Candidate's E-Mails Exposed: Racism, Porn, Bestiality Well, that's awkward. (tags: teabaggers newyork) Smithsonian Magazine: Lincoln's Missing Bodyguard Where was Lincoln's bodyguard on April 14, 1865? Next door to Ford's Theatre, drinking a beer. (tags: history president) Daily Press: DMV tries to put the brakes on racy license plates I've often wondered [...]
links for 2010-04-10
FOX News: Republicans Fear Undercounting in Census Conservatives, led by Rep. Michele Bachmann and Rep. Ron Paul, are insisting that the census—utterly innocuous—is part of an evil one-world government plot to blah blah blah. Meaning that they'll be undercounted. Meaning that congressional representation will be affected. Meaning less Republicans in congress. Oh, irony. (tags: census [...]
Sheila Johnson just can’t be surprised by McDonnell.
During last fall’s election, former BET owner Sheila Johnson endorsed Bob McDonnell because she despises Creigh Deeds, on a personal level. What the backstory is there, I have no idea. But for her, this was personal. So I really got a kick out of seeing Johnson get all upset at McDonnell for his Confederate History [...]
links for 2010-04-09
Sunlight Foundation: Open Government—idling in the driveway Yesterday was the White House's self-selected deadline to release some huge open government datasets, but it didn't happen. A bunch of data is going to be made available, which is great, but this is disappointing. I suspect that the White House is finding out that cleaning up data [...]
links for 2010-04-08
New York Times: A Confederacy of Dunces Since Bob McDonnell took office, I think—seriously—we haven't been able to go for two weeks without becoming a national laughingstock, a punchline on The Daily Show or Leno. Now it's slavery just up and slipping McDonnell's mind when declaring it Confederate History Month. (Of course, he had to [...]
links for 2010-04-07
Washington Times: Catholic pharmacy shutters in Virginia A group of anti-birth-control Catholics opened a pharmacy a couple of years ago with the mission of not selling birth control pills or condoms. They've accomplished that and more. In fact, they've been so successful at not selling basic stuff that people expect at a pharmacy that they're [...]
links for 2010-04-06
Amber Waves: Guess Who's Turning 100? The March issue of the USDA's journal of food economics (what, don't you subscribe?) has some really interesting time series data on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of tracking what Americans eat. These charts of what we eat and how it's changed over time are awfully interesting. We [...]
links for 2010-04-05
WikiLeaks: Collateral Murder WikiLeaks has gotten their hands on a video that ostensibly shows an Apache helicopter in Baghdad shooting—for no apparent reason—an unarmed Reuters employee, waiting for people to come to the aid of the badly injured man, and then killing them, too. This was in 2007. Officially, the military was putting down an [...]
links for 2010-04-03
Gizmodo: Cory Doctorow, You Are a Consumer, Too Joel Johnson provides a great critique of the "iPad is anti-hacker" concept. Though the complaint is logically rooted, it's been taken to foolish extremes. Choice quotes: "So what if you can't make iPad programs on an iPad. I don't complain I can't make new dishwashers with my [...]
links for 2010-04-02
National Geographic: Rainmaking Bacteria Ride Clouds to "Colonize" Earth? For years now, I've been following the story of the bioprecipitative relationship between bacteria and rain. There's increasing evidence that rain is not a purely physical process—that it occurs in tandem with, or perhaps because of, the behaviors of vast bacterial colonies. It's possible that rainfall [...]
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Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Charlottesville, VA, USA. more »
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