Miss USA | Proud To Be An American

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Linda Holmes, writing for NPR:

One of the best parts of Miss Universe is that all the contestants have a national costume ... Since we are located here in Washington, D.C., I was curious about the national costume for Miss USA ... Yep. That's her. In case the flag distracts you from the other details of the outfit, here they are. The epaulets, the blue ribbon, and that glorious, glorious hat. It's like Washington crossing the Delaware to go to Hooters. I officially love this outfit, precisely because it is the most ridiculous thing maybe ever.

That line made me laugh out loud.

Ben Dewey | Things Could Be Worse

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Ben Dewey is a professional comic book artist, illustrator, musician, and blogger from Portland, Oregon. Tragedy Series: Things Could Be Worse features "depictions drawn from regrettable accounts of the less fortunate for purposes of instruction, so that one may avoid similar missteps." View many more tragedies at the web site.

Via Pleated Jeans

Sounds Of Silence

YouTube

I happened to be watching TV on Sunday morning and this just broke my heart.

Monkey Monday | Curious Tamarins

YouTube | San Francisco Zoo

Kuriositas | Focus On Bokeh

Photo by Steve took it | Click image to enlarge

Bokeh is the blurry or out-of-focus area of a photograph. Kuriositas has a stunning post illustrating the aesthetics of bokeh with superb photographic examples.

Rhombus Illusion

YouTube | io9

To watch in 3D, cross your eyes until the two images overlap and merge together. When watching in 3D, we will see the following optical illusions:

1. The spinning rhombus appears to switch directions
2. Striped band appears to rotate in the opposite direction of the rhombus
3. Red cube floats in space
4. Red cube becomes transparent
5. Red cube rotates impossibly
6. The light falling on the rhombus appears to come from a source opposite its real source

This illusion is remarkable once we manage to observe it, but the effect may not be visible right away. We may have to replay more than once for the effect to assert itself.

*The rhombus illusion was created by Terry Pope as a target for the Pseudoscope. By filming the target with a stereoscopic camera and reversing the left/right videos, the same illusion can be seen without a pseudoscope.

Wordle | September 11

Detail

From Gawker:

How do talk about 9/11, ten years later? What stories do we tell? What ideas grab us? We made a word cloud of editorials from 15 prominent local and national papers to see what came up.

The word cloud was made in Wordle using editorials from a number of local and national newspapers, including The New York Times, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the San Jose Mercury News, The Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Boston Globe, and The Star-Ledger.

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What You Should Have Learned In Senior Year

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Check out Michael Inman's web-comic The Oatmeal to find out what you should have learned in science, economics, english, phys ed, sex ed, and home ec during your senior year in high school.

Internet Archive Digital Library | 11 September

The Internet Archive is an organization that collects audio, moving images, and Web images for historical purposes.

The Archive recently announced the launch of Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive of coverage of the attacks, without any filters, by national and international broadcasteers.

The Archive serves as a resource for scholars, journalists, and the public and features one week of broadcasts (3,000 hours from 20 channels over seven days.) Besides audio and video, the site also provides a chronology of events. Click here for longer clips, program guides, and an extended event chronology.

Tuesday 11 September 2001

8:48 a.m.
First news reports that American Airlines Flight 11 has crashed into One World Trade Center (north tower).
9:03 a.m.
United Airlines Flight 175 crashes into Two World Trade Center (south tower).
9:17 a.m.
FAA closes NYC area airports.
9:21 a.m.
NYC Port Authority closes all bridges and tunnels in NYC.
9:24 a.m.
President Bush calls crashes "an apparent attack on our country".
9:32 a.m.
New York Stock Exchange closed.
9:40 a.m.
FAA orders all commercial flights grounded.
9:43 a.m.
American Airlines Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon.
9:45 a.m.
White House evacuated.
9:59 a.m.
Two World Trade Center (south tower) collapses.
10:00 a.m.
United Airlines Flight 93 crashes in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
10:10 a.m.
Portion of the Pentagon collapses.
10:13 a.m.
United Nations building evacuates.
10:22 a.m.
State and Justice Departments, and World Bank, evacuated in Washington DC.
10:24 a.m.
FAA reroutes inbound transatlantic flights to land in Canada.
10:28 a.m.
One World Trade Center (north tower) collapses.
10:45 a.m.
All federal office buildings in Washington DC evacuated.
10:48 a.m.
Police confirm Pennsylvania plane crash.
10:53 a.m.
New York's primary elections postponed.
10:54 a.m.
Israel evacuates diplomatic missions.
10:57 a.m.
NY Gov. Pataki announces closure of all state government offices.
11:02 a.m.
Mayor Giuliani urges New Yorkers to stay at home and orders an evacuation of the area south of Canal Street.

Periodic Table Of Beer Styles

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Detail

Mantis Designs

Chocolate-Covered Strawberry Shot Glasses

Yes.

Gusto 1 | Buzzfeed

Austin Pets Alive Resues Animals Endangered By Wildfires

A dear friend lives northwest of Austin, about 30 miles away from the Bastrop wildfires. He shares his life with a rescue dog, and he sent me this article from the Austin Pets Alive website about how shelter animals endangered by the fires are being saved and relocated.

The mission of APA is to provide education, resources, and programs to eliminate the killing of companion animals. Since the wildfires, they're also urging area residents to foster or adopt animals evacuated from shelters.

Update

Thanks, Soll

Animated Map Of Social Media

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In June 2009 there were 17 active social networks. By June 2011, there were nine.

I Love Charts

The Ten Commandments Of Steve

Photo by Axel Schmidt | AFP-Getty Images

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The Daily Beast

Tom Lehrer | Periodic Table Of The Elements Song

YouTube

Monkey Monday | The Two Sides Of Using Chimpanzees In Research

Two letters regarding the use of chimpanzees in research were recently published in the Washington Post:

From Kathleen Conlee, Senior Director of Animal Research Issues at the Humane Society of the United States:

An Institute of Medicine committee met this month to debate whether U.S. scientists should continue conducting medical research on chimpanzees [“Advances in research may help spare medical chimps,”]. Those with a financial interest or self-interest in the research tried to argue for continued chimpanzee use, but when pressed by the committee they couldn’t defend their claim that chimpanzees are scientifically necessary.

Ethical and economic issues cannot be divorced from science. It is expensive to warehouse chimpanzees in laboratories and unethical to confine these magnificent, long-lived animals in barren cages.

Congress’s Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would end invasive research on chimpanzees and retire government-owned chimpanzees to sanctuaries, would save taxpayers about $30 million annually and provide chimps the peaceful life they deserve. Let’s do right by the chimpanzees, taxpayers and medical research and pass this legislation.

From Alice Ra'anan and Claire Edwards, employees of the American Physiological Society:

The article on using chimpanzees for research noted that the United States is the only developed nation where this approach occurs. However, scientists from countries without chimpanzee research colonies regularly conduct such studies in the United States. In fact, when the Netherlands disbanded its colony, it explicitly cited research in the United States as a safeguard against future need.

Research with chimpanzees is highly regulated. The animals have access to excellent veterinary care and are housed whenever possible in compatible social groups and in an enriched environment.

Many nuances emerged in the discussions with the Institute of Medicine panel. Several experts who said that chimpanzees were no longer a primary research model in their fields nevertheless noted that small-scale chimpanzee studies might still be needed to resolve specific problems, such as providing proof of concept that a new drug or delivery system is likely to work in humans.

While the need may be small, instances remain where no other research model can provide timely answers without undue risk to humans.

Read the referenced article here.

Howling With The Wolves

YouTube | Arbroath

Real Invisibility Cloaks

Technology Review

Ever since scientists in Germany announced last year the ability to create a small-scale cloak of invisibility for a 3D object the size of a human hair, there has been growing excitement about the ability to extend this “cloak of invisibility” to larger objects. Now, researchers at Cornell led by Moti Fridman have gone one step further – they have shown that it is theoretically possible to create temporal “cloaks of invisibility” to hide events. In other words, for incredibly brief periods of time – no more than 120 microseconds – it is possible to create a “hole in time” where events can not be observed.

This is the proverbial “time warp” that works by bending space-time in such a way that renders an event invisible. This is exciting work, occurring at the fringes of everything we thought was possible through quantum physics. Yes, it’s time to re-read your Einstein, Hawking and Kaku. Unlike traditional “cloaks of invisibility,” which work by using meta-materials to hide an object from visible light, the “cloaks of invisibility” for events work not by changing the shape of a light wave hitting an object, but by shifting the time of a light wave ...

Read more at Big Think | Abstract via Cornell University Library

Devil's Mantis

YouTube | TDW

This impressive agonistic display is by the Devil's Mantis [Idolomantis diabolica], one of the largest [up to 5 inches long] species of praying mantis that mimics flowers.

Study Connects Child Abuse To Serious Depression In Adults

Alexander Chassey | "Stamp Out Child Abuse" Drawing Contest

Nearly one in 20 people in the UK have [multiple and long-lasting] depression as a result of childhood abuse, say researchers. The [mental health] charity SANE said the study highlighted how damaging childhood trauma could be.

Depression in some form can affect one in five people at some point in their lives. Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London were investigating depression which keeps on recurring. They reviewed 16 studies, on a total of more than 23,000 patients, and found that maltreatment in childhood - such as rejection by the mother, harsh physical treatment or sexual abuse - more than doubled the risk of this type of depression. One of the researchers, Dr Rudolf Uher, said: "If these things happen early in life, it is more powerful."

In the UK, 16% of people develop persistent depression by the age of 33. A quarter of them, or 4% of the whole UK population, were maltreated as a child. A separate review on 3,098 people showed childhood maltreatment was also linked to a poorer response to both drug and psychological treatment. Lead researcher Dr Andrea Danese said: "Even for combined treatments, patients with a history of childhood maltreatment cannot be adequately cared for." Their report suggests "early preventive and therapeutic interventions may be more effective."

There is no precise explanation of any link between abuse, changes in the body as a child and persistent depression 20 or more years later. Childhood maltreatment, it is thought, causes changes to the brain, immune system and some hormone glands - some of which are still present in adulthood. One possible mechanism is what is known as epigenetic changes to the DNA. While there is no change in the genetic code, the environment can alter the way genes are expressed.

Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of SANE, said: "It may seem obvious that traumatic events in our lives can make us depressed, but this study highlights how particularly damaging such traumas can be when experienced during childhood, when our brains are still developing. "We should all be concerned at how abuse and neglect creates a painful legacy that can last a lifetime, increasing our chances of experiencing repeated episodes of depression and reducing the effects of those treatments that are available to us.

"Yet we should not lose hope. Research such as this can point the way to better treatments and preventative measures."

Source: BBC Health News | American Journal of Psychiatry

How To Stop Your Children From Becoming Atheists

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reddit | Dangerous Minds

Literature Map

Type in the name of your favorite author and Literature Map will generate the names of other authors you might enjoy reading.

The Presurfer

Simon's Cat | Cat And Mouse

YouTube | Laughing Squid

Too Much Nature | Great White Shark(s)

A two-mile stretch of coastline at Casa Reef in La Jolla [CA] was reopened Thursday, following the third confirmed shark sighting along San Diego's coastline in a week. The coastline at Casa Reef was shut down, after several people spotted a 12-inch dorsal fin around 1:30 p.m. Wednesday near the Children's Pool, where a colony of seals live.

... In addition to the shark sighting Wednesday in the La Jolla area, another shark was spotted further north in Encinitas and was documented in a picture taken by a News 8 viewer. After receiving the photo taken at Swamis beach, News 8 spoke with a local shark expert who confirmed that the shark in the photo is a 10 to 12 foot great white.

Source | Gawker

Could They Mean 'Gender-Neutral'?

Source

The Importance Of Eyebrows

Brooklyn Mutt

Best Of Criggo

Criggo

Cat Tolerates Affectionate Puppy

YouTube | TDW

Thank You Letter From Roald Dahl

One rainy Sunday afternoon in 1989, with encouragement and much-needed help from her father, a 7-year-old girl named Amy decided to send something to Roald Dahl. Taking inspiration from her favourite book, The BFG, [The Big Friendly Giant] and using a combination of oil, coloured water and glitter, Amy sent the author a very fitting and undeniably adorable gift: one of her dreams, contained in a bottle. Thankfully, the sentiment wasn't lost on Roald Dahl. His lovely response can be seen above.

Letters of Note

Daddy Has A Penis?

YouTube | TDW