- Acting Like Animals: Penguin Flash Mob!
- …a normal flash mob would just do something stupid, like a spontaneous pillow fight in the middle of a big public venue. And the flashmobguins would probably do the same thing… EXCEPT THEY ARE FREAKING PENGUINS SO IT WOULD BE LIKE A MILLION TIMES BETTER!
- The original Battlestar Galactica series bible is Ron Moore’s rebuke to Star Trek
- [io9 - Charlie Jane Anders]
Ron Moore's original series bible for Battlestar Galactica is online, and it's full of critiques of "bumpy-headed aliens," "techno-double-talk" and other Star Trek mainstays. The most important thing to remember about the Cylons? "They are not the Borg."
- ‘Looking for Evidence,’ Authorities Demolish House Where 2 Cops Were Fatally Shot Yesterday
- [ABA Journal Top Stories]
A relatively routine attempt to make an arrest yesterday ended in tragedy and a dramatic gunfight between hundreds of officers from multiple police forces and a single suspect…
Two city police officers died of their wounds, a loss of life unprecedented there in 73 years, and other officers were injured as a suspect was also killed, either by officers or with his own semi-automatic. Meanwhile, "looking for evidence," according to a police spokesman, authorities demolished the house overnight…
Admittedly, some evidence may have been lost in the demolition process, another police spokesman tells the newspaper. However, police said the structure wasn't safe to search…
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- Congress.org – News : More troops lost to suicide
- For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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- Scalia Slaps Down GOP’s Tentherism
- [Think Progress - Ian Millhiser]
Although Scalia was asked about earmarks, his answer is nothing less than a wholesale repudiation of the right’s tenther vision of the Constitution. After President Obama took office, right-wing lawmakers suddenly began claiming that the Constitution places strict limits on how Congress is allowed to allocate federal funds. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) claims that Social Security, Medicare and federal disaster relief are all unconstitutional. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) believes Pell Grants, federal student loans and all other federal education programs are unconstitutional. And the GOP’s Pledge to America embraces tenther rhetoric…
…, it is a sad commentary on the state of the modern GOP that ultra-conservative Justice Scalia has transformed into a voice of moderation against the even more radical Tea Party.
- See Through Your Kids’ Eyes, Wirelessly Upload from Their Camera to a Flickr Stream
- [Photojojo - lisbeth]
Jason placed a digital camera in Ollie’s teeny 3 year-old hands to see what would happen.
The most awesomely clever part? He used an Eye-Fi memory card in Ollie’s camera to automatically and wirelessly upload Ollie’s photos from his camera to a Flickr account.
At any moment of the day, family and friends can take a look at his photo stream for an instant window into Ollie’s daily photo adventures.
It’s like seeing right through little Ollie’s eyes, and the photos themselves are adorable (the low-to-the-ground point of view) yet astonishing (portraits of his grandfather).
[Links to a how-to]
- LibreOffice gets 3.3.0 stable version release
- [Ubuntu Geek]
LibreOffice 3.3.0, announced on Tuesday, is the first milestone release of the open-source productivity suite from The Document Foundation since it split from the Oracle-led OpenOffice consortium in September. The release brings new features as well as popular options found in OpenOffice 3.3, according to the foundation…
- Squee Spree: Onesies …Nope Foursises
- Puppies on a clothesline!
- All 493 Original Pokemon Drawn as Anime Cosplaying Girls
- [Geekosystem - James Plafke]
I’d want to say that someone having drawn all 493 original Pokémon as anime cosplaying females is a weird thing, but this is the Internet and stuff like that is fairly standard.
- Conscience Clause and Idaho Revisited
- Remember the case of a pharmacist who refused to prescribe methergine to a patient she believed to have had an abortion? Methergine is used to stop bleeding after abortion, miscarriage or giving birth. Uncontrolled bleeding under those circumstances could kill the woman.
Turns out that according to The Idaho Board of Pharmacy the pharmacist has broken no laws!
…I might become a Christian Scientist, get a pharmacy degree and then refuse to fill any prescriptions whatsoever because prayer is the only acceptable treatment. Would the Idaho Board of Pharmacy stand behind me, I wonder?
Or is it just women who are expected to bear the brunt of other people's consciences?
- DailyTech – Chicago Police: Tape Us, Get Sentenced to 15 Years in Prison
- Class 1 Felony of recording a conversation is just below the prison time you'd spend for murder…
The law is seldom applied in other situations – in fact, most don't even know it exists. The law even makes it a lesser offense to tape a civilian once (a Class 4 felony) or twice (a Class 3 felony), versus taping a law enforcement officer (a Class 1 felony)…
Along with laws against video taping police in public, the measures against video and audio taping police encounters seem like a concerted effort to chain the hands of the citizenry and prevent them from reporting misconduct and wrongdoing. Without direct evidence, claims are often discarded and laughed out of court.
The Illinois branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (A.C.L.U.) fought the law [but it still stands.]
…Massachusetts and Oregon both make it illegal to digitally record (i.e. "eavesdrop") on an officer. And a number of states are considering similar legislation.
- Gun Control and Making Tucson Shooting Even Scarier
- Today, I got what must certainly rank in the top 5 of the most offensive emails I've received since starting Calitics over 5 years ago. A group is apparently planning on eliminating a Georgia ban on carrying weapons in a place of worship.
"We are literally one Jared Loughner away from a major massacre here in Georgia in one of our places of worship…"
…surely we can recognize that our failure to control the proliferation has resulted in higher rates of violence [link] compared to similarly situated nations. MoveOn is supporting an action [link] by NYC Mayor Bloomberg's Mayors Against Illegal Guns [link] calling for additional gun reform. Perhaps now might be a good time to let our leaders know that America hasn't given up on controlling guns.
- Ohio’s New Attorney General Makes Case for Health Care Reform
- [Balloon Juice - Kay]
"In Mike DeWine’s first week as Ohio attorney general, his car collided with a bicyclist downtown – and he ended up having the man taken on a 100-mile round trip to be treated by the officeholder’s personal physician…"
[Aw, how sweet. He's a man of the people. -L]
"…[The cyclist] wasn’t seriously injured… [and] said he has no insurance because he can’t afford it, didn’t want to go to a hospital emergency room and left the scene … However, DeWine tracked him down and insisted that he see a doctor.
"Kirk told The Dispatch that he doesn’t know the results of an X-ray taken at Sherrett’s office because he doesn’t have a home phone and his cell phone was crushed in the accident."
DeWine, of course, is suing to block the Affordable Care Act.
- As Perry Bashed Recovery Act, Texas Relied Most Heavily On Recovery Act Funds To Fill Budget Hole
- [Think Progress - Pat Garofalo]
Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), who has raised his national profile by repeatedly criticizing the Obama administration’s response to the Great Recession, found out earlier this month that his state’s deficit for the 2012-2013 fiscal years is twice what he had thought. …Perry wound up facing a budget fiasco on par with that in California.
…[He] is hardly alone amongst GOP governors in bashing the stimulus and then turning around and taking advantage of the important funding it provided. … But Perry was the only one threatening secession as a response to government spending, even as his state took advantage of that spending more than any other.
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- Cultural Differences in Cognitive Perception
- [Sociological Images - Lisa Wade]
…even basic cognitions vary across the world.
Most Americans, for example, perceive the two lines in this optical illusion to be of different lengths, with line a shorter than line b. In fact, they are the same length.
…The figure below compares how individuals in different societies perform on this test…
Observing that individuals in more developed societies (e.g., Evanston, Illinois) tend to be more vulnerable to the illusion — indeed, that in some societies, such as the San foragers of the Kalahari, it doesn’t qualify as an illusion at all — Henrich and his co-authors argue that exposure to “modern environments” may be the culprit:…
As Henrich et al. argue, this calls into question all of the truisms of psychology based, primarily, on experimental research with Western subjects.
[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. Signal boosts are awesome! --L.]
The Of interest (Tue, Jan 25th, 12pm) 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.