Month: December 2009

  • 99designs

    This is odd – someone is trying to design a cover for my book and I had no idea – http://99designs.com/contests/33223/designers/359437 99designs

  • Xenolinguistics and the Na’vi

    A linguist blog gives the detail of the langauge of the Na’vi from Avatar and the thought behind the language created for the movie: Na’vi has 20 consonants, 7 vowels, 4 diphthongs, and 2 syllabic “pseudovowels,” rr and ll. via Language Log

  • You Have No Right Not to Be Tortured

    The Supreme Court refused to hear a case of four detainees bringing suit against Rumsfeld, et al: Obama’s Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad…. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act – a statute that applies by its […]

  • How to Deal With Cellphone Talkers During Movies

    Love this! Do you want to do something really, really nasty and evil to the person with the lit up cell phone? Get up count where the person is (which row, how many over) and go to the usher. “Hey I saw this bright light during the movie in row 7 from the front. He […]

  • Ezra Klein on What Lieberman Wrought

    From WaPo: Single payer became a strong public option, a strong public option became a weak public option, a weak public option became Medicare buy-in, and Medicare buy-in became Joe Lieberman’s revenge. via Ezra Klein – What Lieberman has wrought.

  • Why He Quit Working at the Casino

    From Metafilter: I quit for a lot of reasons, but one of them will always stick out in my head: the woman who came to me crying hysterically and begging for a hotel room so she could continue gambling in order to finally win and pay off her house in foreclosure. She couldn’t stop gambling, […]

  • 419 Million-Year Old DNA Found

    It won’t make Jurassic Park a reality, but scientists have discovered 419 million-year-old DNA intact inside ancient salt deposits. The genetic material, the oldest ever found, belongs to salt-loving bacteria whose ancestors may have been among the first life forms on Earth. via World’s oldest known DNA discovered – Discovery.com- msnbc.com.

  • CDC Failed in Vetting Vaccine Advisors

    Great: Most of the experts who served on advisory panels in 2007 to evaluate vaccines for flu and cervical cancer had potential conflicts that were never resolved, the report said. Some were legally barred from considering the issues but did so anyway. The report found that 64 percent of the advisers had potential conflicts of […]

  • Power Law Explains Insurgent Violence

    From ScienceNOW: First, the timing of attacks in each conflict proved to be remarkably similar. Rather than occurring randomly, they came in a characteristic “bursty” distribution over time; days of extreme violence were clustered as well. This would be easy to explain if the attacks were coordinated–as they are in traditional command-and-control warfare–but in these […]

  • Sigourney Weaver Interview

    From Esquire. Gems: I changed my name when I was about twelve because I didn’t like being called Sue or Susie. I felt I needed a longer name because I was so tall. So what happened? Now everyone calls me Sig or Siggy. … That whole generation that’s gone now, that lived through the two […]