Thirty-Three Things for Right-Minded People
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A few years ago, billionaire David Koch donated $25 million to his alma mater, Deerfield Academy. From his presentation speech:
- You might ask: How does David Koch happen to have the wealth to be so generous? Well, let me tell you a story. It all started when I was a little boy. One day, my father gave me an apple. I soon sold it for five dollars and bought two apples and sold them for ten. Then I bought four apples and sold them for twenty. Well, this went on day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, until my father died and left me three hundred million dollars.
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The pirates of Somalia have an entire country nearly the size of Texas to use as a sanctuary. They hijack ships, sometimes as far out as one thousand miles from shore, and then steer them to well-known pirate dens where they dine on freshly slaughtered goat while conducting ransom negotiations. For the hostages, it can be a long, hellish wait.
Paul and Rachel Chandler, a retired British couple, have been held in a thorny, sweltering village a few miles from the Somali coast for almost a year, since their sailboat was seized in October 2009 during what was supposed to be their “trip of a lifetime.”
In 2008, when more than a dozen hijacked ships, with more than three hundred hostages, were anchored off the coast of Somalia, Pottengal Mukundan, director of the International Maritime Bureau in London, told me, “You can see the images of these ships on Google Earth. Nowhere else in the world would this be tolerated.”
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3. Steven Johnson on “Where Good Ideas Come From”
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4. Barack Obama And Sarah Palin To Appear In Archie Comic
When President Obama and famed politician Sarah Palin arrive, Riverdale becomes the center of a national crisis! Archie and Reggie have each claimed support from one of these political powerhouses, but they don’t! Now Riverdale is in chaos and when the Secret Service gets involved it only gets worse! (Via: Geekosystem)
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5. Hares Can Get Pregnant While Pregnant
The idea that you could conceive a second pregnancy while already pregnant is definitely weird (and probably creepy for any woman in her last trimester). This is all but impossible in humans, but what about other species? Aristotle suggested more than two thousand years ago that the hare—the rabbit’s relative—could do this . . . Now scientists in Germany have confirmed that Aristotle got it right: the European brown hare (Lepus europaeus) can get pregnant while it’s pregnant.
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6. Weird News of the Week: Doctor Sued For 'Branding' Woman's Name on Uterus
Dr. Alinsod is not commenting on the lawsuit. But according to the Smoking Gun website, Alinsod claimed he engraved her name so he did not get her uterus confused with others. Alinsod told the site that labeling of body parts in that manner is not typical. But, he said, he "felt comfortable putting her name on the uterus" since the 47-year-old hairdresser was a "good friend."
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7. Researchers discover the “Homer Simpson gene
Deleting a certain gene in mice can make them smarter by unlocking a mysterious region of the brain considered to be relatively inflexible, scientists at Emory University School of Medicine have found. . . . Since RGS14 appears to hold mice back mentally, John Hepler, PhD, professor of pharmacology at Emory University School of Medicine, says he and his colleagues have been jokingly calling it the "Homer Simpson gene."
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8. Quote of the Week: "I think President Obama will be difficult to beat in 2012, because I think an incumbent has extraordinary advantages. He will pull out all the stops, although he's pulled out so many stops at this point that there might not be a whole lot more to pull out in terms of federal reserve, interest rates and stimulus and so forth. But he will do everything he can to get the economy going back again, and most likely -- at least in my view -- the economy will be coming back." — Mitt Romney
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Attorney Brittney Horstman was scheduled to visit a client in the Miami, Florida, Federal Detention Center. But when she went through the metal detector her underwire bra set it off, and guards refused to let her in. She reminded them that federal officials sent out a memo a few years ago specifically telling guards that they must allow attorneys wearing underwire bras in. But they wouldn't relent. So she stepped into a restroom and removed her bra. They still refused to let her in. This time because prison dress code requires women to wear a bra.
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10. 7 Ways To Get What You Want According to Napoleon
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11. Hypothetical of the Week: What if John Lennon had lived?
“Look,” he says, “every month is the anniversary of something that the record company can repackage and resell to you in re-digified-nanofied-retromastered form for a luxury fee. ‘Here’s the 47th-anniversary edition of the alternate take of “From Me to You” with John playing lead because George was off having a wee. Pre-order now on iTunes!’ It’s a con. But a brilliant one that keeps me in ruby-spangled codpieces and caviar hosiery.”
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12. Image of the Week: Porcelain Pistol
The Porcelain Pistols are replicas of James Bond’s Walther PPK and its contemporary sister, the P99,with friendly permission of Carl Walther Inc.The fragile weapon, hand-painted in the style of classic tableware motifs, liesnext to your coffee and cake, asking to be picked up. Its coolness andcomfortable grip increase the qualms of the user, leaving him in a quandary between the pleasure of luxury and violence.
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13. The truth behind the sinking of the Titanic
The Titanic hit an iceberg in 1912 because of a basic steering error, and only sank as fast as it did because an official persuaded the captain to continue sailing, an author said in an interview published on Wednesday. Louise Patten, a writer and granddaughter of Titanic second officer Charles Lightoller, said the truth about what happened nearly 100 years ago had been hidden for fear of tarnishing the reputation of her grandfather, who later became a war hero. Lightoller, the most senior officer to have survived the disaster, covered up the error in two inquiries on both sides of the Atlantic because he was worried it would bankrupt the ill-fated liner's owners and put his colleagues out of a job.
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14. Study Predicts 75% Americans Will Be Overweight
The world’s superpower will also be home to the most super-sized people as more and more in the United States are getting fatter, and at a greater rate than any other nation. The OECD predicts that by 2020, three out of four Americans will be suffer from obesity and other health related issues. The Paris-based organization, which charts economic data for 33 of the world’s leading economies, believes this pandemic will paralyze many of the world’s richest nations.
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15. Brutally Honest Divorce Attorney Ad
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16. Infographic of the Week: The chosen research areas of mad scientists, 1810-2010
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17. Infographic of the Week (Part II): The World’s Most Dangerous Sports
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18. Last Suppers: How Do You Choose a Final Meal on Death Row?
The last meals of death row inmates are often quite memorable. Karla Faye Tucker requested a fruit plate but didn't eat it. John Wayne Gacy asked for shrimp, fried chicken, French fries, and a pound of strawberries. Timothy McVeigh ate two pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Instead of a last meal, Tennessee convict Philip Workman requested that pizza be distributed to the homeless in Nashville. (Prison officials denied his request, but local groups passed out pizza in his honor.) Before his execution in 2000, convicted rapist and murderer Odell Barnes requested a last meal of "Justice, Equality, World Peace." In 1992, Arkansas convict Ricky Ray Rector, who had brain damage from shooting himself in the head after killing a police officer, ate a final meal of steak, fried chicken, and cherry Kool-Aid, but famously said he wanted to save his pecan pie for later. (Via: Gawker)
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19. Criminals of the Week (Part I): Lorenzo, a parrot—and drug gang lookout
A parrot that Colombian police claim was trained to act as a lookout for a drugs gang has been caged in the Caribbean coastal city of Barranquilla. Police Commander Fredy Veloza said Lorenzo had been taught to squawk a warning as security forces approached. "We have a parrot that, as soon as the police arrived to the street in Barranquillita, the parrot alerted the people who were there by yelling, 'Run! Run!' so the people would run away," he said.
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20. Criminals of the Week (Part II): The French Vaccum Bandits
A group of thieves known as the “gang à l’aspirateur,” or “vacuum gang,” have figured out a devious way to rob French supermarkets — specifically, Monoprix supermarkets — using just a drill and a powerful vacuum cleaner. On Monday, they robbed one Monoprix near Paris to the tune of 70,000 Euros, bringing their total number of robberies up to fifteen since 2006. The key to the thieves’ nearly uninterrupted streak of success, per French reports, is the way that Monoprix delivers money from the checkouts to its safes: Envelopes of cash are funneled in via pneumatic suction tubes. Whereas breaching the safe itself might be considerably difficult, requiring explosives or safecracking, the thieves realized that if they just drilled into the delivery tubes near the safebox and hooked up a powerful vacuum, they could suck the money out and get at it much more easily.
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21. The Fed, Translated Into English
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22. HistoricalLOL of the Week
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23. Five best movie villains of the 2000s
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24. Ben Stein: If Raising Taxes Won't Help Economy, Why Am I Being Punished?
There is no known economic theory under which raising my taxes in the midst of a severe recession will help the economy recover. It isn't part of any well known monetarist or Keynesian theory. So if it does no good to raise our taxes, I assume we are being punished. But for what? I don't own slaves. I employ a lot of people full- and part-time and they are all happy with their pay. When charity calls, I almost always write out a check. I don't have a yacht or ponies or a plane. My wife doesn't wear a tiara. I don't gamble. What did I do wrong? I know I have often lost my temper with my wife and the cats, but that's not a crime, yet.
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25. 10 Words That Can’t Be Translated To English
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26. The Paris Review, the literary journal co-founded by George Plimpton, has posted online its extensive archive of interviews with famous literary figures. The site includes interviews with TS Eliot, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir, Saul Bellow, Borges, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, John Steinbeck, Joan Didion, Kurt Vonnegut, Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver, Russell Banks, Don DeLillo, Stephen King, Marilynne Robinson, and many more. (Via: Open Culture)
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27. How-To of the Week: Build A Keyless Car Unlocker Out of a Cellphone
28. The 7 most dangerous places you should never visit
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29. A Husband and Wife Build a 19th-Century Wooden Submarine
In 1894, American inventor Simon Lake designed the Argonaut Jr., a wheeled vehicle that would drive along the seafloor, the only way to reliably navigate underwater at the time. The unusual concept has inspired sub aficionados ever since. Among its fans are Doug and Kay Jackson, married DIYers from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who in June built a watertight replica from lumber, lead and enough marine epoxy to overflow a bathtub.
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30. Bad News for Bears (Part I) - Woman fends off bear attack with zucchini
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31. Bad News for Bears (Part II) - Bear gets beat up by a herd of cows
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32. Ways to Win an Argument by Arthur Schopenhauer (Part 1 of 38) - Carry your opponent’s proposition beyond its natural limits; exaggerate it. The more general your opponent’s statement becomes, the more objections you can find against it. The more restricted and narrow your own propositions remain, the easier they are to defend.
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33. The Case Against Pennies
Why we shouldn’t subsidize the "disgusting bacteria-ridden disks of suck that fail to facilitate commerce".
