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Reading the fuss about Litvinenko's death, and the subsequent hunt for Polonium-210, made me a little suspicious. Am I the only person out there who thinks this should be a pretty easy crime to solve? Given that two aircraft have tested positive for the substance, British Airways or Scotland Yard should be able to compile a passenger list of ( Read more... )

Does anyone have (or know where I can find) vote totals for each state all in one place? I'd particularly like to see turnout percentage; party split for House, Senate, and governor races; and if there's a site with Boffin/Wonk level data, past totals for the same states... am I going to have to go to each state's site individually ( Read more... )

Sammy Sosa is the drugged-up baseball player.
Samoyeds are cute black-and-white dogs.
Samosas are Indian food.
Samoans are an island people from any of the islands called Samoa.

Samoas are the tasty coconut-and-caramel cookies that the Girl Scouts make.

Thank you; that is all.

Below find two pictures. One is the first LEGO kit I ever put together. The other is a MAZ-543 transporter-erector-launcher for a SCUD-C short range missile -- a close personal friend of mine these days. Note the similarities. Somewhere I've got a picture of myself leaning out the driver's side window of one of these things.

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This weekend I helped a friend move, and her neighbor, a little old lady, asked me to pull out a rosebush for her. I took her shovel and hacked the ever-living crap out of its taproot, then put on thick leather gloves and yanked it right out of the ground. We chopped it up and threw it on the compost pile. It probably would have taken her all ( Read more... )

via Andrew Sullivan:

A Colorado man approached the VP Cheney, said something to the effect of "I find your policies in Iraq reprehensible," and for daring to exercise his free speech in a non-approved manner, was arrested. Charges were later dropped, but for speaking his mind in public, he was forced to go to court. The Colorado man, it turns ( Read more... )

Hey. Have you heard of Maher Arar? Yeah, I heard about it last week, too. So sue me -- I'm taking two grad classes and work's gotten hectic. If you're not pissed off about this guy getting yoinked out of an airport, "disappeared" for ten months or so, tortured in goddamn Syria, and returned to Canada with barely an apology at all, well... you ( Read more... )

If you're talking about the geology of Mars or Jupiter, you could say "geology of {$PlanetName}" but that's kind of clunky. Also, "Geo" means "earth", which is an unintentional artifact of a time when people could not imagine studying the layout of other planets. Can you use (for example) "Areology" for Mars, or "Jovology" for Jupiter? You could ( Read more... )

A few months ago I posted an idea to LJ about a "universal character generator" that would let you import your own custom persistent avatar into multiple games. It turns out that the Wii will support such a feature, called the Mii Channel:
This morning, Nintendo also took the wraps off the machine's final feature, which it calls "Wii Channel". ( Read more... )