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A recent LA Times Piece bemoans the lack of freedom today's children enjoy. Given the rise of such articles, is this a shared consensus? Judging by the reaction's to Lenore Skenazy's child rearing practices, maybe not. The explosive popularity of The Dangerous Books for boys suggests there is a real movement to get kids outside. The New York Times and Reason magazine aren't so impressed. The American Enterprise Institute and Rush Limbaugh seem to think it's a Boy/Girl problem. Gever Tulley (TED talk video) of The Tinkering School thinks a little bit of danger is good; he lets kids play...
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Any Top 100 list of UK comedy shows has the famous Two Ronnies "Four Candles" sketch in the top ten. Silly word play, songs and Ronnie Barker's fabulous timing, made them TV blockbusters for 16 years. Presenting a brief youtube linkdump...
Mastermind : Answering the question before last
Round of Drinks (ignore the painful preable)
Swear Box
Crossed Lines
Aldershot Brasss Ensemble
Second Guesser
Your Nuts My Lord
Father of the Bride
and finally, the Two Ronnies + Stephen fry reworking an old Frost Report sketch...
I look up to him
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The remake of Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire is finally finished
The 1990 adventure/rpg game from Sierra has been almost eight years in the making by AGDInteractive Studio, who already remade Sierra's King's Quest I and II. The game is fully integrated into the original series by Sierra, meaning you can import a saved hero from the original first part and continue playing with your character in original part three. The download is about 85 megabytes and the game runs on Windows only.
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CERN has published the full technical details of the design and construction of the LHC and it's six detectors (1589 pages, 115MB). [via]
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Cleaning hotel rooms is a strenuous business. However, when Alia Crum and Ellen Langer talked to 84 maids, most were under the impression that they did not get enough exercise. Furthermore, when they were measured for tests such as BMI and blood pressure, their results were typical of couch potatoes. The researchers let half the group in on the knowledge that they were getting more than enough of a daily workout and kept the rest in the dark. After a month results showed the former group were healthier on every single one of the objective health measurements tested - despite claiming to have been doing no more exercise or to have changed their diet. The study raises the possibility...
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"Women and children, first," is a familiar cultural refrain, with its popular roots in the gallant sacrifice made by the male contingent aboard the doomed Titanic. Their sacrifice has inspired poetry, sculpture, male social clubs, and, of course, cinema. Yet, this sacrifice of near-mythic scale was in some respects a myth, with survival statistics skewing well in favor of men of higher social and economic class than children (and, to a lesser extent, women) of lower status.
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'Cinematic maps' of American elections a project from the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond
Video overview and short article from the Chronicle of Higher Education
('Cinematic' apparently means squished into little Flash videos. Some of the maps don't really benefit from animation (and I can't get the Interactive Map to load), but the analysis section provides some good commentary and by golly there's a bunch of maps to look at. Too bad they don't yet have the maps for this year's election. Warning: video)
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Oliver Reed. Movie star or hellraiser? Actor or alcoholic? But it was probably not as simple as that... The Real Oliver Reed (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) (Poss. NSFW Brief nudity)
Oliver Reed: The original hellraiser
15 Things You Genuinely Didnât Know About Oliver Reed
The infamous Aspel appearance , More on that and other chat show appearances
Oliver Reed - Resurrecting Proximo (1, 2, 3)
Uncut interview from 1992 (1, 2)
Johnny Carson interview (1, 2, 3)
At the Oliver! reunion (Poss. NSFW some swearing)
Reed on...
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Having always found the process of setting up a guitar slightly intimidating, I am so glad that there's now a robot that can do it for me. Plek is a German-designed system for mechanically adjusting the setup of your guitar. Short video here. I wonder what happens when the robot guitar tech meets the robot guitar?
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Amazing Olympics recap photos [slightly NSFW, due to an accidental bare ass or exposed boob]
Also: quite a lot of opportunistic ass and crotch shots. Via John Kennedy at Global Voices Online.
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A Sydney Morning Herald article about the teaching of philosophy in Australian high schools. Today, this article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. Finally I might be able to get a job with my philosophy major!
Not surprisingly the Australian Philosophy Teachers Network website is down, most probably due to the media attention. Hopefully it will be back up soon. As someone with both a philosophy major, and on the verge of an education degree, this could be the happy marriage between the two. It could also mean I don't just have to teach English at high school.
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Whether Einstein's "spooky science" or quantum weirdness, the Geneva tests that show entangled photons traveling at 10,000 times the speed of light are stirring up challenges and "Alice in Wonderland" discussions about "subatomic particles communicating nearly instantaneously at a distance."
... and much discussion and rejection ("Bohm's Bummed"!) of the experiments ensues ... along with speculation that these tests are proof of metaphysical theories or even teleportation .
Could it be love? ....
"Entangled photons are a peculiar consequence of quantum mechanics. Tricky to generate, they remain interconnected even when...
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lol-qats, a Pakistani-English blogger (author of the amusing Islamicist) pokes gentle fun at the coca-leaf like addiction to Qat (alternate spelling, Khat), which is common in Yemen and several East African countries.
His Muslim lolcats are fun too.
Qat litter.
Qat fanciers.
Qatnip.
Catha Edulis is the latin name for the plant.
Previously.
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10 Incredible Ancient Oases.
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Are you savvy metaboffs?
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Website
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