[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]
- Ubuntu-Certified Hardware List
- Ubuntu-certified hardware: "We work with all the top hardware providers to make sure Ubuntu runs on your favourite devices. The hardware below has all been awarded the status of Certified, Enabled, or Ready for Ubuntu."
- The haunting beauty of abandoned playground rockets
- [io9 - Charlie Jane Anders]
- The stupid or evil debate surges after primaries
- [Pandagon - Amanda Marcotte]
Christine O’Donnell winning in Delaware for the Senate Republican nomination and Carl Paladino in New York for the gubernatorial Republican nomination. Both aren’t just wacky…they’re cinematically wacky. O’Donnell went on MTV in the 90s… to explain why masturbation is evil. [video]
My favorite part of that has to be towards the end, when she asks, and I quote, “If he already knows what pleases him, and he can please himself, why am I in the picture?”
…[Perhaps] this is just a tidal wave of anger at the Republican establishment, and …the Tea Partiers brainlessly voted for anyone that wasn’t the party-backed candidate to register their displeasure. This narrative puts the teabaggers in the position of being a bunch of dupes, but it springs them from the moral responsibility for voting for someone who liked to pepper his mass forwarded emails with pimp jokes, vicious racial slurs, and misogynistic porn… [links]
- xkcd: Password Reuse
- Why did you think I hosted so many unprofitable web services?
- Oh, Rly? I Hadn’t Noticed!
- [I Can Has Cheezburger]
I'm a whale.
- Pelosi Implores Dems On Tax Cuts: ‘Who Do You Stand With?’ | TPMDC
- Speaker Nancy Pelosi tonight implored House Democrats in a private meeting to consider a pre-election vote on extending the Bush-era tax cuts for the middle class while letting those for the rich expire, framing the debate in partisan terms.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee told TPM after the caucus that Pelosi ended the meeting with a "resounding" and impassioned speech that fired up the Democrats and might even have brought more on board for a vote.
"She made it clear it's a black and white issue of who do you stand with," Lee told TPM. "It's the middle class and they need to know we are pushing for them. We have to say it over and over again. They've gotta see it, smell it, sense it, taste it."
- Doing Their Part By Not Doing Their Part – Science News
- [Ivana] Gudelj and postgraduate student Ayari Fuentes-Hernandez created a mathematical model that explains the puzzling result…
…on their own, enzyme-producing yeast [the "cooperators"] make a lot of invertase and quickly burn through their food supply, limiting growth. By taking up any extra glucose, cheater yeast help the other yeast limit expensive invertase production, which forces more efficient use of sucrose and slower, but steadier, growth.
The model predicts that cheaters can be helpful when three conditions apply: resources are squandered when abundant, organisms can’t predict the amount of cooperation needed and cooperators get a greater share of the resources than cheaters do.
…The new study shows that changing environmental conditions can alter the way organisms interact with each other, perhaps even turning a cheater into a cooperator in certain circumstances…
none
- Russia in color, a century ago
- [The Big Picture]
…extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time – when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun. Collected here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948. ..(34 photos total)
- The Hobbit (in approximately 115 seconds)
- [io9 - Cyriaque Lamar]
The Brothers Grim and Grimy, who previously condensed Call of the Cthulhu into two minutes, have now Cliff-Noted J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. They play it pretty fast and loose here. Did you know Gollum was a chupacabra?
- As the arctic melts, archaeologists discover a lost civilization
- [io9 - Annalee Newitz]
As the northern ice sheets retreat, perishable items from millennia-old cultures are emerging. Researchers in Norway have discovered everything from shoes to weapons, giving them a glimpse of everyday life thousands of years ago, before the Vikings.
The Of interest (Wed, Sep 15th, 6am) by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.