No contest which festival is the unsafe alternative. Unsafe even according to a pro wrestler.
Then again, Tuska is chronically safer than the domestic Tango festival.
Archive of posts filed under the news category.
Exactly how much of the Baltic Sea would the Mexican Gulf spill cover?
howbigreally.com, awe-inspiring geographical visualizations.
Not so hallowed after all
Hallowed Ground proves that the area surrounding Ground Zero is not exactly pristinely religious patriotic niche of the Big Apple.
Devotion to favorite author – 12,328 miles worth
“Read Ayn Rand”.
Still haven’t.
And this display of too much time on somebody’s hands isn’t like to persuade otherwise.
Top of the world!
According to a Newsweek article Finland is the best country on earth.
Yay. Recognition that once again builds on top of the Pisa study, showing finnish schoolkids to be the best educated. But who’s counting – this may be the sole victory of the year for the nation (yes, in addition to two orienteering gold medals, that is).
Addictive much?
Five inmates escape when a guard concentrates on Plants vs. Zombies.
Yes, PopCap’s quasi-tower defense game is good entertainment, but not this good…
Too impressive to be true
Resignation via dry eraser board was a hoax. I was a wee bit suspicious, but got suckered nonetheless. I blame the Farmville reference.
The 51st state = Money pit
96% (8.7 Billion dollars) of the money allocated to rebuild Iraq is unaccounted for.
Facts In The Case Of Dr. Andrew Wakefield
A fifteen page comic explains how Andrew Wakefield subverted research on the connection of vaccines to autism.
Long form journalism
In the era of 23 second soundbite news it’s good to see that longer form journalism is far from dead. Longform.org collects the finest bits.
!Stranded
The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland has pushed the jetsetting world to chaos.
Even 9/11 wasn’t this disruptive. The amount of canceled flights has been far greater in the last week.
Several friends and colleagues have been stranded in various spots of the world. And several have had their travel plans scuttled.
I made it back from Tokyo just in time – even though a prolonged stay would have been an interesting experience, the cost (which the airline companies are not willing to take on) would probably been prohibitive.
And an uncomfortable sidenote to this subsiding volcanic activity is the fact that all Eyjafjallajökull eruptions have been followed up by a far bigger volcano, Katla. A sub-ice eruption would spew a lot more ash into the air and cause even more widespread havoc.
Black #1
Peter Steele passed away yesterday.
Saw Type O Negative live only once. 1993 in Club Zephyr in Salt Lake City. One of the finest gigs I’ve witnessed.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Seriously!
Exactly what it says.
Might be a misfiring guerrilla advertising trick, but I do doubt that.
CCTV != Safety
Bruce Schneier’s essay on the matter is as water-tight as they come.
In Lower Merion the Big Brother is indeed watching
The “spying laptop”-scandal that surfaced in the well-heeled Philadelphia suburb of Lower Merion seems like a business plan cooked up by truly incompetent peeping toms:
- Donate laptops to pupils.
- Remotely activate the webcams on the computers to observe activity at home.
- Get caught red-handed.
- Get sued.
Profit.
The backlash should be severe, swift and punitive in biblical proportions.
After all, this would be a perfect place to play the “think of the children”-card.
And as the commenters in the deservedly long thread in the boingboing article note, this reeks of both big and little brother.
100 now known unknowns
BBC has published their annual “100 things we didn’t know last year”-selection.
RESEARCH
Under the guise of “RESEARCH”, Japan practices very non-scientific whaling.
A confrontation between a research vessel and a Sea Shepherd trimaran turned almost lethal last week.
As usual, the bigger vessel outclassed its smaller competitor.
Me, as a firm believer in rooting for the underdog, have a serious hankering to buy a Sea Shepherd t-shirt or two. And a much deeper ingrained plan to wear such shirts on any future visit to Japan.
The organization’s website seems to be hammered right now. Hopefully this raises the awareness even further.
Keystone, meet cop; cop, meet keystone
Security theatre expands once again, after the failed attempt on a Delta plane.
Certainly the appropriate countermeasure for a surreptious explosive strapped to the sessile wannabe-terrorist’s groin is to ban all passenger movement within the final sixty minutes of the flight as well as all electronics.
But following the ipods full of soothing music and laptops packed with ripped movies being forcibly taken away, in most airplanes there’s not much to do for amusement.
Unless the airliner-provided in-flight entertainment systems are globally improved to the level of Singapore Airlines and such, the remaining trio of books, alcohol and mile high club will segregate passengers to two categories: either very quiet or rather rowdy.
Beyond satire
To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of breaking the Berlin Wall, U2 played an open air gig on Brandenburger Tor.
To prevent people without tickets from catching a glimpse of the show, the organizers built a wall around the area.
The combined electricity consumption of American video game consoles is equivalent to that of San Diego. I assume this uses only the current generation, and not the cumulative sum of all seven thus far.
