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Facebook Fauxlore: Kerouac, Burroughs, and a Fight Over the Oxford Comma That...
Perhaps you've seen this plaque on the Internet. It's been liked thousands of times on Facebook and passed around all kinds of social media networks. Maybe you love it. You should love it, I would...
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A Trip Through a 3D-Modeled Brain
Brains are, by design, incredibly dense. Whether a particular brain belongs to a human or a mouse, it features layer upon layer of matter that twists and turns and is almost incomprehensible in its...
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Luvit.Me: Bitly Lets You Tell People How You Really Feel About Links You Post
Bitly, the link-shortening service, has something small and good for you to play with. They call it Bitly for Feelings, and it adds a clever new capability to social media. As you can see in the image...
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On the Latest Bogus NYT Plane-in-Peril Story
Yesterday I mentioned that yet another NYT story on a brush-with-danger aboard an airliner was suspicious. Let me rephrase that: The story the imperiled traveler told is phony, and America's best...
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Coffee, the Viagra of the 17th Century
The earliest known print of a coffee shop, dated to 1674 (Public Domain Review)Today, coffee consumption is linked (a little dubiously) to all sorts of positive outcomes. Just last week, a study...
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NASA's Massive Free E-Book Collection
Cosmonaut Pavel Belyayaev in 1965 from Rockets and People (Asif Siddiqi) Behold, the hundreds of free e-books about space history contained on this webpage. From old favorites like The Difficult Road...
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13 Little Things NASA Did to Get Alan Shepard Ready for Space
Alan Shepard getting pulled out of his capsuleI was digging around the NASA archives when I stumbled upon the flight surgeon's report for the Mercury-Redstone 3 mission, otherwise known as the second...
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How to Refer to the Milky Way Across the Globe
Our home galaxy -- which, in English, we call the Milky Way -- over California's Lake Manzanita (Josh Hawley/Flickr)Silver, sweeping, seemingly translucent, the Milky Way is one of the few celestial...
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Edward Snowden's Apparent E-Mail Provider Goes Offline
(Reuters/Bobby Yip)The secure email service said to be used by Edward Snowden has abruptly shut down. "I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the...
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Einstein Likely Never Said One of His Most Oft-Quoted Phrases
Wikimedia Commons/Rebecca J. RosenOn the list of tales we like to tell about Albert Einstein, the story of his "biggest blunder" is near the top. It begins with a problem that was bugging Einstein: How...
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The Grand New Visualization That Represents Some (Not All) of the Web
Designly.comThe Internet is a big place. We all know this. And we all hear numbers about this central bigness, too, nearly everywhere. There are now this many tweets per day, this many phones on...
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'The Music Is Waiting to Be Tapped': Listening in the Era of the Stream
A needle in the groove (Alexis Madrigal). Take an average record. A piece of vinyl 12 inches in diameter, a groove cut into the surface contains music. For a standard LP, the groove is 1,500 feet long....
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This Week's Aerial-Themed News of the Weird
While gathering material for descriptive posts on Holland, Michigan, here are several items catching up on recent aerial themes. 1) Great moments in corporate branding. A friend traveling in China...
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The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet
Washington PostIt turns out that the NSA's domestic and world-wide surveillance apparatus is even more extensive than we thought. Bluntly: The government has commandeered the Internet. Most of the...
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Who's to Blame for Climate Change?
Alexis Madrigal explains how energy really works in AmericaRead more Global warming is a global problem, but some nations get the lion's share of the blame. Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic's senior...
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The Complexities of Climate Change
A German coal plant (Reuters)If we're to avoid destructive climate fluctuations, scientists say we need to slow, and eventually halt, the emission of greenhouse gases that do and will continue to...
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When a Cold-Hearted Corporation Takes Away Your Beloved (Virtual) Pet
Pet Society was a Facebook game played by hundreds of thousands of people. Users raised pets and interacted with other virtual pet owners. Launched in 2008, Electronic Arts shut it down in June,...
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Marimba! How Apple's Default Text-Message Alert Was Born
Flickr/William HookIt started, as so many things do, with SoundJam. In 1998, a trio of developers released the Mac-friendly MP3 player -- the WinAmp-style software that would evolve into iTunes. iTunes...
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The NYT Just Made It Way Easier to Remix Its Journalism
IFTTTThe New York Times has now opened a channel at the website If This, Then That (IFTTT). For journalism hackers and tinkering readers, this is fine news. IFTTT is elegantly useful and usefully...
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Finally, Prisoners and Their Families Won't Have to Pay Crazy Phone Rates
ReutersEvery year, 700,000 people walk through the doors of a correctional facility, back into a society that they left months or years ago. Who is waiting for them on the other side? When was the last...
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