All the actions is in the first 140 seconds.The remaining four minutes of explanation, involving claims of "information transfer" and "signals," strike me as, frankly, bulltwaddle. Much more plausible is the explanation furnished by Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, which in turn came from an even more thorough explanation on Rhett Allain's blog at Wired.com. What you're seeing: If a slinky is hung by one end such that its own weight extends it, and that slinky is then released, the lower end of the slinky will not fall or rise, but will remain briefly suspended in air as though levitating. Explained: [T]he best thing is to...

25 June, 2012

Andrew Sullivan, who writes the Daily Dish blog on The Atlantic's website, is one of these rare commentators who's fun to read when you agree with him, more so when you don't. If he weren't the sole member of the selection committee, he'd be a perennial shoo-in for his own Yglesias Award, which honors partisans willing to criticize their own side when warranted. In that spirit, I'll register my disappointment at Sullivan's recently announced decision to decamp for Tina Brown's Daily Beast, which itself recently merged with the faded Newsweek. I'm a Dish addict, but following Sullivan to the Beast will...

22 March, 2011

The cutline reads: The documentary was filmed over three years. Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall. Which propelled University of Pennsylvania sociologist Jeff Weintraub to ask: Were Merle & Kris & Robert ever actually married? What the caption writer neglected, of course, was the serial comma, the one that comes (or is omitted) after "crackle" in "snap, crackle, and pop." When left out of a sentence, this tiny mark sometimes seeks revenge by sneaking up on a unwary writer and landing a devastating blow. In a similar, but more famous example, perhaps apocryphal, a book dedication implied a...

24 October, 2010

The blogosphere is agog at a Washington Post series that uncovers the astonishing, bloated, secret, and likely ineffective national security apparatus that has grown up in the United States following 9/11. Two crack WaPo reporters, Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, spent two years tracking down the story, an increasingly rare example of what the dead-tree media can do when it taps its traditional strengths. Here's the opening sentence: The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it...

20 July, 2010

The scale is deceptive. This is not the ordinary crab we're used to, but a giant Japanese spider crab (Macrocheira kaempferi), whose leg span (3.8 meters or 12.5 feet) and weight (up to 19 kg. or 41 lb.) make it the largest arthropod in the world. This time-lapse video was shot over a 6-hour period. Hat tip: Enoshima Aquarium, Fujisawa, Japan, via Daily Dish....

27 June, 2010

First Fivethirtyeight.com gets Canadian politics bassackwards, now the Daily Dish's Andrew Sullivan compounds the error: The Americanization of British politics continues. First the TV debates, now fixed parliamentary terms. If that's true, it means that the new government will not be a caretaker before another snap election, but a potential fusion of the Liberal and Tory brands over several years - perhaps the embryo of a whole new center-right party. It feels a little like Canada's Progressive Tories. [Emphasis added.] Canada's Progressive Tories? How is it possible for US* journalists to misperceive Canadian politics so utterly? The Conservative Party of Canada was...

11 May, 2010
The Atlantic's* blog section, my single favorite part of the Internet and a frequent source of posts and links here, is in turmoil this morning owing to a redesign that has stripped its superb habitues of the graphical personality and color that made their individual pages so compelling. It didn't help that a series of glitches accompanied the changeover, including the (apparently temporary) loss of RSS feeds and the (hopefully temporary) disappearance of daily email updates. The esteemed James Fallows, though characteristically uber-polite, is unable to conceal his unhappiness:
[T]he new layout scheme -- in which you see only a few-line intro to each post but no pictures, block quotes, or other amplifying material -- unavoidably changes the sensibility and tone of personal blogs. It drains them of variety and individuality, not to mention making them much less convenient to read. Only now that it is gone do I realize how important the placing of photos has been to my own sense of what I wanted to convey, along with the ability to alternate between longer and shorter posts on a "landing" page, or to deliberately save some material for "after the jump" placement.
01 March, 2010

I promise not to go on about this ad nauseam, but I just discovered that Beagle-owner Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic noted Rosie's obit in his Daily Dish blog Sunday. Rosie's sardine can caper reminded Andrew of the time his now aging beagle Dusty broke into an overnight bag some house guests had imprudently left on the floor of his loft—with two large boxes of Godiva chocolates hidden inside. Moneyquote: It was a beagle Linda Blair - with viscous chocolate liquid projectile vomiting everywhere in sight. I went to grab her to get her outside. She decided this was a game....

09 October, 2009