Cairaguas

NYTimes 6/26/2009. Minutemen enter an Arizona home looking for money and drugs to fund their cause. They shoot a father and his 10-year-old daughter. The family wasn’t even affiliated with the narcotics trade! They were victims of extreme xenophobia/racism. I am so sad.

Thu Jul 2

“ So many decades ago, it was words appearing letter by letter on a small computer screen, and we stared at it with wonder. ” Jon Carroll has Twitter now. Sees tweets apprering like “a ham radio tuned to 1,000 stations simultaneously.” Is nostalgic.

Fri Jun 12

America's poor donate more, in percentage terms, than higher-income groups do, surveys of charitable giving show.

What’s more, their generosity declines less in hard times than the generosity of richer givers does.

Thu Jun 4

Wolfram|Alpha: Making the world's knowledge computable

Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Search ideas:

structure of aspirin
cos(2x)
pka of acetic acid
sun vs. moon
weather in san francisco

Wed Jun 3

Short LOLfilm about cars and dinosaurs and drifting into other dimensions.

Fri Mar 27

Search the 1828 Edition of Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language

COMPUTER, n. One who computes; a reckoner; a calculator.

Fri Mar 20

“ We’re fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we’re still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. ” Rolling Stone weeps over the absurdity of our economic situation and the way we let ourselves fall into it. 3/19/2009. 8 pages.

Tue Feb 24

AmericanRhetoric.com

This website archives famous speeches and makes them available for free to the public. All those famous speeches you’ve only heard bits and pieces of? Find them here, and finish hearing them.

Sun Feb 15

“ Ironically, then, the belief in a just world may take the place of a genuine commitment to justice. For some people, it is simply easier to assume that forces beyond their control mete out justice. When that occurs, the result may be the abdication of personal responsibility, acquiescence in the face of suffering and misfortune, and indifference towards injustice. ” Essay explaining the social psychology concept called The Just World Theory.

Fri Jan 16

Waking up superbugs may destroy their drug resistance

1/16/2009. New Scientist. “The protein that enables some bacteria to become dormant and avoid the effects of antibiotics has been identified – sleep may no longer be an escape option.”

Sat Dec 6

AIDS - A New Disease's Deadly Odyssey

February 6, 1983. New York Times.

This article details the medical knowledge of AIDS in 1983, and its history from its first appearance in 1979. If you want to see the news articles about AIDS before it even had a name, type in “Kaposi’s sarcoma” into the NYT search and start reading oldest first.

Wed Dec 3

“2008 Bailout Costs As Much As Several Large And Famous Government Projects Combined.” The Consumerist. 12/3/2008.

I’m unclear as to how exactly they generated the graphs, but I think they set the radius of the bailout graph (left) to be proportional with respect to the radius of the graph of the other government plans (right).

The other government plans: $3,920,000,000,000 (adjusted for inflation).
The 2008 bailout total as of Nov 2008: $4,616,000,000,000.

The ratio is 1:1.1776, or put another way, the bailout costs 17.76% more than all those other projects put together.