So I just had one of the weirdest dreams I’ve dreamt in a while.
On Tuesdays I usually have nuclear lab from 8-10. But today the lab got moved back to 9. Last night I went to bed about 30 min later than I had hoped, but still set my alarm for my usual [...]

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Photo by Jim Wilson / New York Times
Across the nation, the ultimate symbol of suburban success has become one more reminder of the economic meltdown, with builders going under, pools going to seed and skaters finding a surplus of deserted pools in which to perfect their acrobatic aerials.
In these boom times for skaters, Mr. Peacock [...]

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A group of college students raises $250,000 for Darfur and looks for an appropriate and impactful way to spend it.
Bell and Hanis’s aborted foray into the world of discount drone shopping was done on behalf of the Genocide Intervention Network (GI-Net). Founded at Swarthmore in October 2004 by Hanis and another student, Andrew Sniderman, GI-Net [...]

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“I have never been considered a part of the religious right, because I don’t believe politics is the most effective way to change the world,” he says now. “Although public service can be a noble profession, and I believe it is our responsibility to vote, I don’t have much faith in government solutions, given the [...]

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⇒ Holy Ghost (xkcd)

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In “Schools, Skills and Synapses,” Heckman probes the sources of that decline. It’s not falling school quality, he argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.
Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment [...]

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Some great stuff. It’s not too original of an idea, but the execution is what sets it apart from everything else.
⇒ Lightmark | Cenci Goepel and Jens Warnecke (via Design You Trust.)

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Some high quality photoshop work at this site.
⇒ Beefactory Retouching Workshop (via Changethought.)

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Unlike the English Whigs and the American Founders, the modern liberal regards suffering not as an unavoidable element of life but as an aberration to be corrected by up-to-date political, economic, and hygienic arrangements. Rather than acknowledge the limitations of our condition, the liberal continually contrives panaceas that will enable us to transcend it.
Barack Obama, [...]

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Before the 200 butterfly final at the 1976 Olympics, the Americans Steve Gregg and Mike Bruner were in the ready room opposite Roger Pyttel of East Germany, who had broken Mark Spitz’s four-year-old world record in the event that summer.
“We had a lot of fun with Roger,” Bruner said, recalling the act that he and [...]

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Imagine if the current crop of public figures had grown up during the Facebook era. We might have photos of John McCain in Florida slurping body shots off his stripper girlfriend. Barack Obama rolling a joint on a beach in Hawaii. George W. Bush passed out at a Yale frat party, 40-ounce beer bottles duct-taped [...]

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All I can say is, wow. His photography is so real, it’s just unbelievable.
⇒ Nick Brandt (via Design You Trust.)

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Enter Erik Prince, the chairman and CEO of Blackwater Worldwide. Yes, that Blackwater. Most of the attention the company has attracted has been for its security work in protecting U.S. diplomats in Iraq. But much more of their work is training: from border and narcotics police in Afghanistan to police and maritime forces in countries [...]

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Ironically, I have accepted Jesus into my life – along with Buddha, Gandhi, and other great teachers – as a metaphor for peace, love, compassion, and reverence for life. That’s not what our smiling preacher was talking about, though. It’s the Bible’s way, or the highway . . . to hell. But as I looked [...]

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Which is, of course, true; we don’t much value words – especially written words – anymore, if in fact we ever did. But it does not necessarily follow from that fact that words are themselves valueless. I suspect quite the opposite is true: we devalue words because they are a threat to our comfort, to [...]

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