2006.12.31
The decline of the American empire --
Financial Times:
Euro notes cash in to overtake dollar.
"The US dollar bill's standing as the world's favourite
form of cash is being usurped by the five-year-old
euro."
This PDF article from two years ago is a really excellent overview of the 'standard model,' the collection of conceptual systems that describe everything we know about the fundamental basis of physical reality --
Frank Wilczek:
In Search of Symmetry Lost.
"... modern physicists hypothesize that what we perceive
as empty space is actually a highly structured medium.
In fact, as I will elaborate below, we vehemently
suspect that the world is a multilayered, multicoloured,
cosmic superconductor."
> Unfortunately, it seems that a deeper understanding of reality only reinforces its absurdity.
Here's a great time waster --
City Rag:
50 Greatest Cartoons.
> Although it's great, I think people are probably confused when they vote for Chuck Jones' "What's Opera, Doc?" I think his "The Rabbit of Seville" is better, and it has always been my favorite.
2006.12.11
Slate:
The coming crackdown on trans fats.
They aren't exactly food. A century ago, they hardly
existed. Nature didn't mass-produce them; we did. By
adding hydrogen to liquid vegetable oils -- hence the term
‘partially hydrogenated’ -- we learned how to solidify
these oils, mimicking butter. The first trans-fat
triumph, in 1911, was Crisco."
2006.12.10
Science Daily:
Seismologists take Earth's temperature.
"U.S. seismologists say they have directly measured, for
the first time, the heat flowing from the Earth's molten
core into an area at the mantle's base." ...
"Using 72,000 hours of supercomputing time, the
scientists determined the temperature at the upper
boundary is about 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. At the lower
end of the boundary the temperature is about 5,800
degrees Fahrenheit."
Ancestry.com:
Where families lived in the US.
