"Today, America celebrates International Standards Day as one of THREE nations not using the metric system. We are a proud, stupid people."
-- T Campbell

In case you want to know which the other two are, check out the graphic at the beginning of this Wikipedia article, helpfully provided by ktron.

I don't know as much as i think i should know about Richard Feynman. These Narbonic reader comments from here told me a couple of things i didn't know before ( Read more... )

I'm mostly hoping aslade will find this entertaining. via Narbonic: Director's Cut. It's "science set to music". I haven't had time to listen to any of their songs yet.
Apparently the first album is actually Do Peterson's dissertation.

http://www.science-groove.org/

The world's smallest diamond ring

Not a ring with a diamond set in it. A ring made out of diamond. It's super-tiny, and the scientists in Australia who made it are hoping that eventually rings like this will be used to build quantum-based computers.

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Another Chuck Lorre vanity card for you. It happened to be a momentous one.

CHUCK LORRE ( Read more... )

They just discovered an audio recording made in France in 1860, which predates Edison's first recording by 17 years... and predates the (previously-thought-to-be-) oldest existing recording by 28 years ( Read more... )

from AWADmail #285:

Inshallah

Mocking legalese by summarizing succinctly

Commas and the 2nd Amendment

And, stuff that i came across while following links from those articles, and links from those, etc:

Oldest living human surrenders title at age 116

A woman's personal story of her desperate search for a kidney

How to stay "cognitively normal ( Read more... )

For a surprising change of pace, a bunch of news items on which i have no strong opinions one way or the other:

Evel Knievel passed away at the age of 69

Bush administration plans to cut counterterrorism funds for state and local governmentsThis just seems weird to me. "Fighting terrorism" has been Bush's beloved pet platform for pretty much his ( Read more... )

When i was in high school, my chemistry textbook said that the official SI definition of a meter was "the length of this one iridium bar locked safely in a vault somewhere" (possibly Paris). (I'm not sure, but these days, i think it's defined to be the distance light travels in some specific fraction of a second.) So, i would joke that if someone ( Read more... )

I think i first heard about the Technological Singularity in an email from ratjin... or maybe not, but for some reason, i'm associating the concept strongly with him. Anyway, this week's "I, Cringely" column is a bunch of talk about the Singularity and what will and won't change between now and then ( Read more... )

Possible discovery of the tomb of an Aztec emperor, which would make it the first find of its kind ( Read more... )