Here’s a neat article from Good Magazine about up and coming bicycle cities in North America.
[via CRS, photo of Miami cyclists from the article]
2009/04/29
2009/04/28
Surprising news from Arlen Specter today, who announced his intention to run as a Democrat in 2010. The NYT Caucus blog has some commentary, and here you can recollect Vermont’s own Senator Jeffords’ switch of parties in 2001. The details are different but the comparison is obvious. (Good news in a sea of bad news. Joseph Stiglitz’s perspective on the Obama bailout is worrying.)
me: this is such a depressing issue of harper’s weekly this week
ag: depressing week this week too
2009/04/27
I think Peter Shumlin should run for Governor in Vermont and Vermont’s left should seriously stop and think if they start to think before they run candidates against him.
[Photo from the Rutland Herald]
2009/04/26
Breaking News Alert
The New York Tmes
Sunday, April 26, 2009 — 2:20 PM ET
——-
New York Times Swine Flu News Alert Prompts U.S. to Declare Public Mental Health Emergency
American health officials on Sunday declared a public mental health emergency over increasing cases of psychosomatic swine flu, saying that they had confirmed 2.75 million cases of the disease in the United States and expected to see more as investigators review tweets, emails, blog posts, and Facebook status updates.
Officials reiterated that swine flu is “a lot like the flu flu” and that “if you wash your hands, you’ll probably be fine,” but acknowledged that most Americans affected with psychosomatic swine flu had probably not read the second paragraph of the News Alert where it was reported that “most of the cases had been mild” and that “the emergency declaration frees resources to be used toward diagnosing or preventing additional cases and releases money for more antiviral drugs.” The officials were similarly resigned that people won’t read this second paragraph either. An unnamed CDC source who asked for anonymity because he’s not authorized to make ‘correlation/causation’ statements said that most hysteria in the United States can be blamed on 24 hour cable news, including “Howard Dean,” “the financial crisis,” and “rioting due to psychosomatic swine flu.”
[The actual news alert was sent out at 1:45ish EDT and linked to this story.]
At least one student at the University of Chicago who felt perfectly fine before getting a NYTimes.com News Alert over email about swine flu confirmed to us in an interview that he began to feel ‘slightly ill’ after reading the message.
2009/04/23
North American Envelope Sizes
For your quick reference, here are the standard envelope sizes for North America, from Wikipedia.
| Format | Dimensions (in) | Dimensions (mm) | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| A2 | 4 3/8 × 5 3/4 | 110.3 × 144.9 | 131% |
| A6 | 4 3/4 × 6 1/2 | 119.7 × 163.8 | 137% |
| A7 | 5 1/4 × 7 1/4 | 132.3 × 182.7 | 138% |
| No. 6¾ | 3 5/8 × 6 1/2 | 92.1 × 165.1 | 179% |
| No. 9 | 3 7/8 × 8 7/8 | 98.5 × 225.5 | 229% |
| No. 10 | 4 1/8 × 9 1/2 | 104.0 × 239.4 | 230% |
| No. 11 | 4 1/5 × 10 3/8 | 114.3 × 263.5 | 231% |
| No. 12 | 4 3/4 × 11 | 120.7 × 279.4 | 232% |
| No. 14 | 5 × 11 1/2 | 127.0 × 292.1 | 230% |
2009/04/22
Mike Stimpson creates and recreates photographs with Lego men. This is a recreation of Peter Leibing’s 1961 photograph of an East German border guard jumping a barbed wire fence during the construction of the Berlin Wall.
(His recreation of the VJ Day kiss was featured on Boing Boing, and that’s how I found this.)
Monty Python put skits up on YouTube a while ago. Their YouTube user description is funny:
“For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube. Now the tables are turned. It’s time for us to take matters into our own hands.
We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell. But being the extraordinarily nice chaps we are, we’ve figured a better way to get our own back: We’ve launched our own Monty Python channel on YouTube.
No more of those crap quality videos you’ve been posting. We’re giving you the real thing – HQ videos delivered straight from our vault.
What’s more, we’re taking our most viewed clips and uploading brand new HQ versions. And what’s even more, we’re letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there!
But we want something in return.
None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.”