2008.12.20

New Zealand Herald: The iPod? It's bound to fail (and other terrible tech predictions).

"In 1878, Sir William Preece, the chief engineer of the British Post Office, said: ‘The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.’"

CaptionX: Back when smoking was healthy.

2008.12.14

Slate: Political Corruption Smackdown. Which state is the most crooked -- Illinois or Louisiana?

"When Edwards ran for governor in 1983, he said of the incumbent, ‘If we don't get Dave Treen out of office, there won't be anything left to steal.’ (He also memorably said Treen was so slow it took him an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes.) Raised among figures like these, Louisianans tend to accept corruption as inevitable, to be somewhat proud of it, and to forgive it easily."

2008.12.10

University of Texas Office of Public Affairs: Discovery of Giant Roaming Deep Sea Protist Provides New Perspective on Animal Evolution.

"Matz and his colleagues recently discovered the grape-sized protists and their complex tracks on the ocean floor near the Bahamas. This is the first time a single-celled organism has been shown to make such animal-like traces. The finding is significant, because similar fossil grooves and furrows found from the Precambrian era, as early as 1.8 billion years ago, have always been attributed to early evolving multicellular animals."