January 6
On December 4, 2008, at NYC's
Symphony Space,
NPR's
Intelligence Squared program conducted an
Oxford-
style debate. As their future debate schedules in
Australia,
England, and
America show, the propositions of such debates are routinely phrased strongly to provoke debate, and this was no exception. The motion that was put forward was: "
Resolved, that Bush 43 is the worst President of the last 50 years."
[mp3, 23 MB, 50 min.] What lifts this above the
reams of media and multimedia already spent on this issue is that, moderated by ABC's
John Donvan, this premise was debated — under formal debate guidelines — by
Jacob Weisberg,
Sir Simon Jenkins,
Bill Kristol, and ...
Karl Rove.
[more inside]
posted by WCityMike at 9:34 AM -
18 comments
A nice photogallery, with descriptions, illustrating
the progress of Moore's Law from a 1958 single-transistor Texas Instruments integrated circuit to the anticipated 2009 AMD Phenom II, with 758,000,000 transistors.
posted by beagle at 9:15 AM -
12 comments
January 5
Bought a video game second hand and found it doesn’t have a manual? Or have you been thinking about that great manual that came with that copy of
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past you owned years ago and wouldn't mind taking a look through it again? Well, help is at hand!
Vimm offers you heaps of free pdf manuals from retro systems as old as the Atari 2600 and as recent as the N64! Meanwhile
Meekeo does much the same, although it mostly looks after current generation systems (including the PC) only. Finally, if you own a Nintendo Wii, DS, Gamecube or Gameboy Advance, Nintendo is
offering up full colour pdfs of games they publish(ed) for these systems, as well as manuals for some of their older games.
posted by Effigy2000 at 9:24 PM -
15 comments
Do you have something to say, but never had the chance to? Founded in late 1997 and originally published August 15th, 1998,
So There has stood as a testament to your daily lives for over five years.
posted by cjorgensen at 8:03 PM -
23 comments
A year and a half ago, a professor of underwater archeology at Northwestern Michigan University
discovered a pattern of stones 40 feet below the waters of Lake Michigan. The story has been surprisingly under-reported, given that the Stonehenge-like structure is potentially estimated to be 10,000 years old. One of the stones even appears to have a
mastodon carved on it.
posted by jon_hansen at 1:42 PM -
42 comments
"Church was not part of my family life, and I don't think I ever expected to find myself being a Christian or, as I used to think of it, a 'religious nut.'"
Sara Miles grew up an atheist. One day she went into a
church, took communion and had a moment with God. She's now a Christian that has made it her mission in life to
feed the homeless. She's started a
food pantry in the slums of San Francisco that feeds over 450 hungry families every week.
She's also a
lesbian who is
outspoken for gay marriage and considers herself a liberal but doesn't really care for
liberal guilt.
posted by Hands of Manos at 11:11 AM -
63 comments
The Great British Sandwich is a 'collaborative web project' to build the world's tallest sandwich, one ingredient at a time. It began picking up inedible layers early (20th from the bottom is Cat Hair, 38th is an iPhone 3G) and is now
almostover 400 layers including the Higgs Boson, Child's Tears and All the Turtles. via
the Ridiculant
posted by wendell at 10:56 AM -
19 comments
New Yorker fiction 2008. Annotated list of short fiction from the past year. "As perhaps the most high-profile venue for short fiction in the world, taking stock of the
New Yorker's year in fiction is a worthwhile exercise for writers and readers alike."
posted by stbalbach at 7:38 AM -
24 comments
What was so shameful and embarrassing to me, an American journalist whose own Moscow-based newspaper, The eXile, had just been driven out of existence [previously] by these same Kremlin bastards, is that Sasha was rightly frustrated. A Kremlin minder right and the Western journalists wrong? What has this world come to when the Kremlin has a better grasp of the truth than the free Western media?
How to screw up a war story: The New York Times at work
posted by Anything at 12:04 AM -
32 comments
January 4
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