30 November 09 - 07:06Virgin Galactic's Space-Grazing Aircraft Is Ready for Liftoff
Finally, the day of your flight arrives. Earth's curvature will just begin to be visible after a long, spiral climb attached to WhiteKnightTwo; above will be a crown of blackness. When the pilot releases the spacecraft, the mother ship will appear to rise above as you drop away. Six seconds after the rocket motor ignites, you'll be traveling at three times the speed of sound, perched on a high-energy Roman candle, hurtling into space, up there in the black void, subject to forces few humans have ever experienced.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/11/ff_whiteknight/3/
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24 November 09 - 03:41Crime Comic Luna Park Merges Gritty Art, Time Travel, Coney Island and Brighton Beach
Druggy, thuggy graphic novel Luna Park tracks a slipstreaming Russian soldier through time and annihilation. A gripping but arty hardcover, Kevin Baker and Danijel Zezelj's crime-travel comic samples cultural staples as different as Alexander Pushkin, Chinatown and The Manchurian Candidate.
Link
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22 November 09 - 23:02Blame contagion: The automatic transmission of self-serving attributions
When people blame others for their mistakes, they learn less and perform worse. This problem is magnified when blame becomes embedded in the shared culture of groups and organizations. Yet, little is known about whether—and, if so, how—the propensity to blame spreads from one person to another. Four experiments addressed this issue, demonstrating that blame is socially contagious: observing an individual make a blame attribution increased the likelihood that people would make subsequent blame attributions for their own, unrelated, failures (Experiments 1, 2, and 4). Results also indicated that this “blame contagion” is due to the transmission of goals. Blame exposure led to the inference and adoption of a self-image protection goal (Experiment 3), and blame contagion was eliminated when observers had the opportunity to alleviate this self-image protection goal via self-affirmation (Experiment 4). Implications for research on causal attributions, social contagion, and cultural transmission are discussed.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WJB-4XGBG5S-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=9f29f04c8049419ec7cdf6ecf917b676
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18 November 09 - 20:38Eight Ways In-Vitro Meat will Change Our Lives
In-Vitro Meat -- aka tank steak, sci fi sausage, petri pork, beaker bacon, Frankenburger, vat-grown veal, laboratory lamb, synthetic shmeat, trans-ham, factory filet, test tube tuna, cultured chicken, or any other moniker that can seduce the shopper's stomach -- will appear in 3-10 years as a cheaper, healthier, "greener" protein that's easily manufactured in a metropolis. Its entree will be enormous; not just food-huge like curry rippling through London in the 1970's or colonized tomatoes teaming up with pasta in early 1800's Italy. No. Bigger. In-Vitro Meat will be socially transformative, like automobiles, cinema, vaccines.
http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/bio/eight-ways-vitro-meat-will-change-our-lives
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18 November 09 - 20:04Overcoming Bias : Evolving Diverse Fragility
Over the last 50,000 years humans have evolved many fragile features that in the wrong situations fail badly, but in the right situations gain greatly. Apparently, in previous environments the cost of failure was too high to tolerate such fragile features, but our larger denser societies somehow magnify the gains while minimizing the losses, enough to make such features useful.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/evolving-diverse-fragility.html
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18 November 09 - 05:4617 Things Worth Knowing About Your Cat
Handy chart
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17 November 09 - 17:28Flip Reversed
Gallery of role reversals. Cute.
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17 November 09 - 17:22Where Should I Eat?
"Fast food flowchart"
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16 November 09 - 17:39More Sex Is Safer Sex
The economic case for promiscuity: still a fun read.
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09 November 09 - 03:44How Everything Goes to Hell During a Zombie Apocalypse - The Oatmeal
Handy guide
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