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Hail TripOILitania

The triumphant arrival of the Libyan rebels in Tripoli does not necessarily mean the end to the fighting in that country, and the final political settlement is nowhere near certain. Here’s a post from bookofjoe.com from back in March, just as the rebellion was beginning to find some success and material support from NATO, that features some political, ethnic, and resource maps (HINT: IT’S ABOUT THE OIL) which may have a lot of influence on the way things finally end up in the post-Gaddafi era.

Also worth a look is this roundup of links by Sam Smith at Progressive Review, several of which look a lot more closely at just how much the U.S. has been involved over the last six months and why (HINT: IT’S ABOUT THE OIL).

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Lemming Blog

Here are a handful of links that have gotten plenty of coverage on the assorted blogs I read, included here to maintain my blogger cred:

If you somehow managed to miss this, you really DO need to read this very cool Atlantic article about the engineering marvel that is the pizza box. And in case that only whets your appetite, this American Scientist article goes to even geekier depths.

Everybody also got in this Smithsonian article officially declaring the 1979 movie “The Champ”, starring Jon Voight, Faye Dunaway and Ricky Schroeder, “The Saddest Movie In The World”. How sad, you ask? So sad, they say, that psychologists show it to people to make them cry to measure their ability to feel sadness. I will never forget watching this movie on HBO with my parents, probably around 1980, and the three of us simply bawling and sobbing like abandoned babies. I inherited my father’s Irish sentimental streak, to be sure, but the three of us were reduced to a blubbering mess by the ending. If this movie somehow doesn’t make you cry, you are surely dead inside.

Okay, maybe this one wasn’t quite so widely posted, but I did see it on several of my regular visits: scientists have discovered that at least one species of parrot, the green-rumped parrotlet of Venezuela, has linguistic sophistication enough to give unique names to their offspring as chicks, and there is evidence to suggest that the parrots retain and self-identify by those names throughout their entire lives.

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Mappity-Map

There may be no words more poetic in the English language than “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal..”, but for his “felicity with words”, ol’ Thomas Jefferson didn’t have much of a way with names. Exhibit #1: this map he created divvying up the Northwest Territory into 10 new states with such mellifluous names as “Assenispia”, “Chersonesus” and “Metropotamia”.

Big Map Blog has been doing an ongoing series of “birdseye” maps of American cities created in the late 1800s, and yesterday was Boston’s turn. The amount of detail included by the original mapmakers is simply incredible. Here, for example, is the State House:

Recently, Foreign Policy magazine ran its 2011 edition of their “Failed States Index”. It’s rather interesting to see China in the same category as Egypt, which experienced a weird and still-unresolved change of government earlier in 2011, but equally intriguing to see the U.S., Japan, and virtually ALL of Europe except for Scandinavia as a full step short of “Most Stable”. And this was published BEFORE the debt ceiling fiasco really came to the forefront. Right now I wonder if it might not be more honest to put us in with China and Egypt.

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An Early Pocket Computer

This is a calculator designed for use by WWII bombardiers to determine the accuracy of their bomb loads during missions. John F. Ptak tells us about the provenance of the device, which was developed by a group of scientists including Vannevar Bush, who is widely considered one of the original visionaries of the modern computer age. It’s also interesting to learn about the relative inaccuracy and imprecision of WWII aerial bombing in comparison to the astoninshing precision of modern missiles and smart weaponry.

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Two Sides To Every Coin

Here’s a pair of posts from a blogger named Mike Gene, who normally writes about “intelligent design” (pace):

Back in 2009, he came up with a list of 10 precepts of intellectual honesty that he felt everyone who engages in the never-ending rhetorical war of the Internet should follow. Given the rather contentious nature of his field and many of the proponents thereof, it is a very measured list of do’s and dont’s that anyone who wants to engage in sincere debate and discourse would want to emulate.

Late last year, he followed that up with a list of “10 signs of intellectual DIShonesty” that he found on another blog, written in response to his original post. The blog where he found it seems not to exist anymore, but he was good enough to share the list, which strikes many all-too-familiar notes about the practices of the “blogosphere” (do we still use that term?), not just in arguing over evolution, but in pretty much everything else.

Both are worth keeping in mind.

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This Is Gonna Kill Property Values In Park Slope

Brooklyn Nuked!! Nation Cheers As Millions Of Hipsters Are Annihilated!!

It’s almost like something from The Onion, but it’s a mock newspaper from Civil Defense propaganda from the early 1960s promoting fallout shelters. I found it via John Ptak’s collection of ephemera, but he found it at this long and detailed post about the history of the fallout shelter at a blog called CONELRAD Adjacent, which focuses on that era. That post also has this excellent photo of officials putting up a fallout shelter sign in front of the Massachusetts State House:

Next time I’m over by the State House, I’ll look to see if it’s still there. I’ll bet it is. Of course, Brooklyn is still there, too. For now.

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Why Didn’t YOU Think Of That?

Proving once again why they are smart and you are dumb, the people at Instructables.com show you how to make your own drinks-and-snacks caddy for the car using a plastic paint tray and a couple of pieces of PVC pipe. Clever bastards.

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Not My Blog

Though it really feels like Facebook has killed every single personal blog in the world, I still enjoy reading what some of my old blog-buddies post. It’s just that there aren’t nearly as many of them still posting.

GoingLikeSixty and his wife up and sold their house in Kentucky and are moving to Costa Rica in just a few weeks. He’s been posting about the upcoming move and the huge culture shock they’re facing by moving to a less-developed country. I would make a joke about how he already lives in a third-world country right there in Kentucky, but we both know it’s not really a joke. His wife, Nancy, who also blogs, has some backstory to explain how they decided to chuck it all in the first place. I have a client who spends the winter months in Costa Rica, and she makes it sound pretty good, too, but I have a hard enough time living in suburbia; I think I’d lose what little sanity I have left trying to live the pura vida.

Joel Sax apparently wants to give us all nightmares by talking about all the horrible things that happen to your teeth. Personally, I’m not too concerned about developing meth mouth, but having suffered with dry mouth as a side effect of prescriptions for a couple of years, his descriptions brought back some unpleasant memories. I know Joel has had to deal with complicated and difficult dental procedures over the years, and it’s a fate I would not wish on anyone. I count myself as incredibly lucky not to have had many dental problems over the years, despite never having been a regular customer of a dentist until I became a parent and had to put my money where my mouth was, so to speak.

Even as other bloggers fall by the wayside, my buddy Jack Cluth manages to keep grinding it out after all these years just by keeping up with the headlines. This morning, though, he offers us this very helpful infographic that distinguishes between Canadian beers and unnatural sex acts. This should be especially useful even to Canadians, who just last week voted en masse to fuck themselves.

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Just DON’T Do It

Pruned, a blog by Alexander Trevi that usually features posts about landscape and architecture, recently had this post about the Nike air defense missile system that the United States operated in the 1950s and 1960s and, more specifically, about the missile launch sites in and around Chicago. Nike missile sites were deployed around 40 “Defense Areas” in the U.S., but the Chicago area had the largest number of missile batteries (22), and, to my astonishment, three of those batteries were located right along the lakefront in central Chicago. One was located underneath Jackson Park, right next to the Museum of Science and Industry. Another was located near the McCormick Place convention center. The third was located at Belmont Harbor. Trevi includes a Google Map that allows you to locate the sites.

All of the sites were decommissioned in the late 1960s, as military planning shifted from air defense to ICBM deployment, and most of the sites were completely destroyed or converted for civilian use. Trevi’s post includes some photographs from inside a missile site elsewhere in the Chicago Defense Area, taken during decommissioning. There is also this photograph of one of the Nike sites here in Massachusetts:

Wikipedia tells me that there were twelve Nike sites in and around the Greater Boston area, including a couple very close to my home: a site in Reading that is now a skating rink just a couple of miles from my house and one in Burlington that is now a parking lot for a Northeastern University satellite campus. According to the Wikipedia list, at least a couple of the sites are still mostly intact (minus the missiles, of course).

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But Does He Know Tipper Gore’s Real Name?

The media couldn’t fall over themselves fast enough to cover the JEOPARDY! match between the IBM supercomputer “Watson” and human champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The computer won, of course. Puny humans.

In the middle of this huge publicity stunt…demonstration of artificial intelligence, my blog-buddy, the unbelievably-cool John Tolva got to go head-to-head with Watson at another demo event, complete with fully-detailed replica of the JEOPARDY! set. He lost, too.

It’s kinda hard to believe that next year will be the 20th anniversary of my JEOPARDY! appearance. I finally found my long-lost videotape of the episode not too long ago, so I probably ought to digitize it while we still have a working VCR in the house. Funnily enough, I was also working at IBM when I appeared on the show, but I was a lowly admin person, not some hoopy frood like Tolva. I didn’t win either, so at least we have that in common.

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