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A New Thing Under the Sun

Also, from NYTimes.com

By NICHOLAS WADE

Published: May 20, 2010

The genome pioneer J. Craig Venter has taken another step in his quest to create synthetic life by synthesizing an entire bacterial genome and using it to take over a cell.

Dr. Venter calls the result a “synthetic cell” and is presenting the research as a landmark achievement that will open the way to creating useful microbes from scratch to make products like vaccines and biofuels. At a press conference Thursday, Dr. Venter described the converted cell as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.”

“This is an important step, we think, both scientifically and philosophically,” Dr. Venter said in an interview with the journal Science, which is publishing the research this week. “It’s certainly changed my views of definitions of life and of how life works.”

Other scientists agree that he has achieved a technical feat in synthesizing the largest piece of DNA so far — a million units in length — and in making it accurate enough to substitute for the cell’s own DNA.

Five masterpieces stolen in Paris

Summarized from NYTimes.com and dressed up a little.

A lone thief stole five paintings early Thursday from the Paris Museum of Modern Art, across the Seine River from the Eiffel Tower.

The prosecutor's office initially estimated the five paintings' total worth at as much as euro500 million ($613 million).

Christophe Girard, deputy culture secretary at Paris City Hall, however, said the total value was ''just under 100 million euros.''

He said ''Le pigeon aux petits-pois'' (The Pigeon with the Peas) an ochre and brown Cubist oil painting by Pablo Picasso, was worth an estimated euro23 million

''La Pastorale'' (Pastoral), an oil painting of nudes on a hillside by Henri Matisse about euro15 million.

The other paintings stolen were ''L'olivier pres de l'Estaque'' (Olive Tree near Estaque) by Georges Braque;

''La femme a l'eventail'' (Woman with a Fan) by Amedeo Modigliani;

and ''Nature-mort aux chandeliers'' (Still Life with Chandeliers) by Fernand Leger.

The director of the neighboring modern art museum Palais de Tokyo, Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr, called the thief or thieves ''fools.''

''You cannot do anything with these paintings. All countries in the world are aware, and no collector is stupid enough to buy a painting that, one, he can't show to other collectors, and two, risks sending him to prison,'' he said on LCI television.

''In general, you find these paintings,'' he said. ''These five paintings are un-sellable, so thieves, sirs, you are imbeciles, now return them.''

The McGangBang

lifted straight out of eatmedaily

The McGangBang: a McChicken Sandwich Inside a Double Cheeseburger [a chronicle]

March 2, 2009, 9:45 am  

January 30, 2009: Photograph from gree(blue)n, also on Flickr.

The McGangBang ranks up there in the holy pantheon of WTF. It's a sandwich made from a double cheeseburger and a McChicken sandwich — where you put an entire McChicken sandwich inside a double cheeseburger. It's a creative manipulation of existing menu items, and an exercise in frugality: taking two items off of the Dollar Menu and creating an entirely new sandwich for a total of $2.16. Truly, it's a sandwich that's more than the sum of its parts.

The naming, of course, is somewhat obscene — "gangbang" is defined as "sexual intercourse with multiple partners in turn or at the same time." It's illicit in more ways than one — chicken and beef most definitely make for an unnatural pairing.

In addition, it's sort of a subversive act for people to order it by name, as well as a thrill to confound the McDonald's employee with an order for a McGangBang — so much so that people are documenting their experiences at drive-thrus and counters on YouTube.

November 22, 2008: Photograph by bdaddyja

In some locations, the McGangBang appears to have become part of the McDonald's employee lexicon — explanation is unnecessary — they know how to make it, much like the off-the-menu items at In-N-Out.

An oft-repeated quote from user DasKosmischeVonUT on the VWVortex forums sums it up:

It's kind of like having a threesome with two ugly chicks. While it's happening you're stoked, because hey threesome!!! But once you're finished it kinda sinks in about what you've done.

Von Kármán Vortex

Lifted straight out of Wired

The crazy-looking swirls in the image above may be one of the weirdest cloud formations that can be seen from space. The pattern is known as a von Kármán vortex street, named after Theodore von Kármán. First noticed in the laboratory by fluid dynamicists, it occurs when a more-viscous fluid flows through water and encounters a cylindrical object, which creates vortices in the flow.

Alejandro Selkirk Island, off the Chilean coast, is acting like the cylinder in the image above, taken by the Landsat 7 satellite in September 1999. A beautiful vortex street disrupts a layer of stratocumulus clouds low enough to be affected by the island, which rises a mile above sea level.

More strange and wonderful vortex streets formed by islands can be seen in the images below . Below is Guadalupe Island, 21 miles off the coast of Mexico’s Baja California, shot in 2000 by Landsat 7; Rishiri Island in the northern Sea of Japan, photographed by space shuttle astronauts in 2001; and Wrangel Island, above the Arctic Circle northeast of Siberia, flanked by a vortex street created by the smaller Gerald Island, imaged by NASA’s Aqua satellite in August 2008.

Images: 1) Bob Cahalan/NASA, USGS. 2) NASA. 3) NASA. 4) NASA (STS100-710-182).

Personality Test

Malamanteau

Brought to you by wikipedia, xkcd and wikipedia's talk pages

A malamanteau (plural malamanteaux) is a neologism for a portmanteau created by incorrectly combining a malapropism with a neologism. It is itself a portmanteau of malapropism and portmanteau. In a less strict definition, a portmanteau of a malapropism with another word can also be considered a malamanteau. The contained malapropism must be typically a very common one, probably most people are not aware of, in order to be able to regain the meaning of a malamanteau.

A malamanteau often is created when somebody tries to use a neologism (alternatively, an idiom) but mistakenly confuses a word with another one. However, unlike a malapropism or an eggcorn, the fumbled word is not completely replaced, but merely transfixed to the new one. A famous example is: "misunderestimate" which was popularized by the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush. Probably it was intended to be "underestimate" but mistakenly jumbled with "misunderstand."


Examples:

Somebody describes his misunderstanding of what someone was saying by stating, "I misconscrewed it up."

Somenone explains his inability to talk while being upset by saying he was "flustrated."

A meaningful malamanteau is "ambiviolent," as in: "Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill was ambiviolent. She didn't know who to kill first."

Library of Congress Will Save Tweets

Lifted straight out of NyTimes.com

By STEVE LOHR

Published: April 14, 2010

Not everyone would think that the actor Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter musings on his daily doings constitute part of “the universal body of human knowledge.”

But the Library of Congress, the 210-year-old guardian of knowledge and cultural history, thinks so.

The library will archive the collected works of Twitter, the blogging service, whose users currently send a daily flood of 55 million messages, all that contain 140 or fewer characters.

Library officials explained the agreement as another step in the library’s embrace of digital media. Twitter, the Silicon Valley start-up, declared it “very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history.”

Academic researchers seem pleased as well. For hundreds of years, they say, the historical record has tended to be somewhat elitist because of its selectivity. In books, magazines and newspapers, they say, it is the prominent and the infamous who are written about most frequently.

read more here

Eyjafjallajökull from Hvolsvöllur

From here. Look closely! It's a live video!

Eyjafjallajökull from Hvolsvöllur

Camera position

Camera GPS coordinates: N63 44.977 W20 13.913

Why Does This Exist?

Click this link or the picture below to be brought to a magical place that will take away valuable minutes of your life and also reduce productivity in an already fragile economic climate:

Nashville Flood Footage

Well-shot footage of the Cumberland River flood in Nashville, TN by local photographer Michael Deppisch.