“I get blamed for selfies,” Sasson told me with a chuckle. “They do it just to get a rise out of me or something.”

Says the poor guy who invented the digital camera.

A group of vultures is called a wake, committee, venue, kettle, or volt. The term kettle refers to vultures in flight, while committee, volt, and venue refer to vultures resting in trees. Wake is reserved for a group of vultures that are feeding

Source: Vulture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

She also became part of a growing crisis in Europe, where a surging number of young people from non-Muslim homes are flocking to the Middle East to heed the call of violent jihad. It is happening, terror experts say, as converts emerge as some of the most dangerous and fanatical adherents to radical Islam — a fact driven home this week by Elton Simpson, a 30-year-old American convert who joined one other man in opening fire on a Garland, Tex., contest for cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

The Washington Post

It's a phenomenon as old as humanity (so, nearly as old as the phrase "as old as humanity"): those people who are the most un-critical and zealous about a cause - any cause, really - are often those who have just taken up the cause. They're full of energy and enthusiasm. They want to spread the word. This new thing is changing their lives and want to devote themselves to it completely. They haven't yet figured out that elation is always temporary, and that they'll eventually be back to dealing with all the same crap that they were trying to get away from in the first place. And until they do, smart recruiters will make the most of the converts' enthusiasm.

Anyway, "the zealotry of the newly-converted" is a phrase I've always admired. If you don't already have a copy of it in your head, get one! You might be surprised how often you'll get good use out of it.

Techdirt tells us about how the FBI spent years trying to decipher the lyrics to "Louie Louie" to determine if they were pornographic. And then they realized that the US Copyright office must have the lyrics already.

The evolution of western pop music, spanning from 1960 to 2010, has been analysed by scientists.

A team from Queen Mary University of London and Imperial College London looked at more than 17,000 songs from the US Billboard Hot 100.

They found three music revolutions: 1964, 1983 and 1991.

In the early 1960s, chords called dominant sevenths, found in jazz and blues started to die out.

Instead, in 1964 the invasion of British bands - from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones - introduced a radical new rocky sound.

The researchers say this was this the first of three stylistic revolutions - periods of extremely rapid change within the charts.

New technology, synthesisers, samplers and drum machines, drove a second major style shift in 1983.

The third, in 1991, came about when rap and hip-hop went mainstream.

My prediction: revolution #4 will be the infusion of dance music coming from Asian countries.

A team of engineers working for the JSDD, with help from the Orient Industry Company have created an experimental robotic bear to assist in euthanasia and assisted suicide in Japan.

[no, they didn't]

...

SeppuKuma, which loosely translates to “Suicide Bear” has robotic arms that are able to carry up to 80kg of weight, hands that are powerful enough to crush human bone, and roller legs that can retract or extend from a base as necessary when bending to pick someone up out of bed or when maneuvering through tight spaces like doorways.

nope. nope. Snopes.

No, let's not reconsider The Wire.

It was not written as a comprehensive survey of all of Baltimore's troubles for future arm-chair sociologists to ponder over. It was not written to address all of the problems that caused a riot more than a decade after the show started. It leaves out a million things about Baltimore of the mid-2000's, and doesn't even try to say anything about the Baltimore of the mid-2010's. It's fiction. And like all fiction - even fiction that tries to be as realistic as possible - it can't include everything. Even non-fiction can't include everything. By necessity, all writing focuses on the things that help tell the stories the writer wants to tell, at the time. And what doesn't help tell that story isn't included. And the writers for The Wire wrote five seasons of interesting and compelling stories about a wide range of very serious issues in a way that few programs have even tried. The Wire succeeded because it made those issues real and interesting to people who might not have ever thought about them before. And none of what they didn't address makes it any less of a great show today than it was a month ago - what they did illustrate, and how they went about it, is what makes it a great show.

  
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+ 000000001           + 100000000
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 1083676269      =     1083676269

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The famous carnivorous plant, The Venus Flytrap, is native to a small bit of coastal wetland that straddles the NC/SC border.

We have a friend who was convinced that this was because Venus Flytraps literally came from Venus, aboard a meteorite that landed in the swamp just outside of Wilmington NC.

Thom Yorke: From the beginning, my goal was to make an album that would get us all sent to jail for the rest of our lives.

Ed O’Brien: Thom’s problem with Pablo Honey and The Bends was that neither of those albums had resulted in jail time for the band. I don’t know why he wanted us all to go to jail, but he was very insistent that we should all spend 20 to 30 years in jail to be considered a real band.

Philip Selway: We wanted to record [the album] in a Best Buy in order to be close to computers, but they kept kicking us out, so we eventually moved into our own studio in Oxfordshire.

Jonny Greenwood: We love recording there because we’re allowed to chew gum inside the booth. Radiohead is a big gum band. We love gum.