A snippet of the full interview between Soledad O'Brien and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is in charge of the Cordoba Initiative which plans to build a cultural center, including a mosque, two blocks from ground zero with accompanying article. Five surprises to come from the interview, post-interview debate on Anderson Cooper, and iReporter Kathi Cordsen reacts.
Queen's English 50c: A translation service for English-speaking 50cent fans.
Here at Cereal Marshmallows Our Goal is to Deliver you the absolute best and Crunchiest marshmallows available and I believe that is just what we have.
I went Crazy for a few Months and tried the Cereal Marshmallows in almost every cereal you can name and i've got to say a favorite would be hard to pick.
"My brother says that some day two men in white coats will come and take me away. Someone said that if they are men, after looking at the shop, they will forget what they came for and I should remain free". A photo tour of the home workshop of Mr. Jacques Jodoin, including a video walkthrough.
"We infer that beyond about $75,000/y, there is no improvement whatever in any of the three measures of emotional well-being." Two social scientists at Princeton, Angus Deaton and Nobelist Daniel Kahneman, have a new paper in PNAS about money and the determinants of happiness. Increased income above $75,000 is not associated with higher subjective happiness, though it is associated with superior scores on measures of overall life satisfaction. Other tidbits: "Religion has a substantial influence on improving positive affect and reducing reports of stress, but no effect on reducing sadness or worry... The presence of children at home is associated with significant increases in stress, sadness, and worry."
The Digital Comic Museum, a site for downloading free public domain Golden Age Comics.
More info about each comic from Toonopedia.
Emily Yoffe (a columnist for Slate) has a job that sends her on all manner of exciting adventures. Usually, they involve clothing, but not this time. For her most recent article, she shed her clothes -- all of them. Apparently, journalists enjoy visiting nudist resorts because Lonely Planet's Tamara Sheward recently did the same thing and has some advice for would-be copycats. (Complete with a gallery of the best nude events and beaches.) But sorry bachelors, apparently most nudist clubs only allow couples and single women. Eureka, in the UK, is an exception. (No links contain sexual content.)
An ABC Investigative Unit team hit the streets of western Sydney, where young people are struggling to break a vicious cycle of unemployment and family breakdown, to find out what's being done to stop them from falling through the cracks. In a great article by ABC reporters Eleanor Bell and Ed Giles, they found that the lack of resources, infrastructure and support for families in these communities is getting worse, not better but that despite this, many locals are still proud of their community.
Ever wish you could do something to defend yourself from the flood of information on Twitter? Tuesday Flash Fun detweet to the rescue! The more popular the phrase you choose, the more enemies spawn, thus the harder it gets!
"Ramin and Rokni Haerizadeh on making art about sex and politics in the Middle East..." and how they fled and what they're up to now. More images here.
Ganja yoga combines marijuana and meditation
"When you're high, you can focus better on your breath," says Dee Dussault, who runs a monthly session of "cannabis-enhanced yoga" at her home dubbed Follow Your Bliss... Ms. Dussault also encourages participants to fine-tune their yoga skills before embracing ganja yoga. She wants to ensure that people "first experience the true teachings of yoga" and then try ganja yoga to enjoy a different yoga flavour.
If you loved Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, check out these gorgeous, high-resolution promotional photographs. The film's special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull invented numerous film techniques and effects to help Kubrick tell his story, and Trumbull is currently producing with film historian David Larson the documentary 2001: Beyond The Infinite - The Making of a Masterpiece (scroll down, click the link on the second video). This documentary aims to make use of the Kubrick Archives's well-preserved large-format Ektachrome photos taken of the film production, green screen techniques, surviving cast and production staff, and numerous interview transcripts to bring to life the story about the making of this classic.
Burn a Koran Day! A commercial for Terry Jones' upcoming "Christian" event. [SLYP]
My Rat, My Banana-Huffing Landmine Detector: A lush, montage-ready photographic survey of the humble origin, training, and subsequent career of Tanzanian rats enlisted in the fight against landmines.
The brain speaks! Scientists decode words from brain signals. "In an early step toward letting severely paralyzed people speak with their thoughts, University of Utah researchers translated brain signals into words using two grids of 16 microelectrodes implanted beneath the skull but atop the brain."
"On a particular night in October, you've got your nose ahead of J.M. Coetzee." Hilary Mantel writes about winning (and, previously, not winning) the Man Booker prize. Her victory has changed History Today's attitudes to historical fiction, it seems. But not Antony Beevor's.
Less than a year after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States detonated the fourth and fifth nuclear weapons under the name Operation Crossroads in July 1946. Beyond testing the capabilities of nuclear bombs, the Navy said it wanted the Bikini tests treated like "the story of the year, maybe of the decade, and possibly of a lifetime." Only two of the three bombs were detonated, and the project was shut down over the next months. To celebrate the efforts of Operation Crossroads, a cake in the shape of a mushroom cloud was featured at a publicized event on November 5, 1946. In response to this display, Reverend Arthur Powell Davies, the minister of the Unitarian All Souls Church in Washington, D.C., gave a sermon on the "utterly loathsome picture" and the message it sent to other nations. That sermon set off a flurry of replies and reactions, that extended around the world, including a connection formed between Reverend Davies' All Souls Unitarian Church and school children in Hiroshima.
World War II was over, but the US military was not done with the atomic bomb. Testing continued, and The Bomb was new grounds for what some called "the war between the Army and the Navy." A joint task force, JTF 1, was organized on 11 January 1946, as an effort between Army, Navy, and civilian scientific personnel. Time Magazine ran an extended article on the operation, atomic weapons, and Albert Einstein, and there were a radio presentations were broadcast before and the day of the events. More than 100 members of various news agencies were allowed to watch the events, including three members of the British press, one each from Russia and nine other nations, and three artists to record the project (prev). After the events, Joint Task Force One even published the official pictorial record.
The celebration following the official end to JTF 1, including the notable cake, made national news, and Time Magazine provided a good summary of the concern:
These were probably the harshest words ever spoken of a dessert. But a lot of non-Americans (notably Britons) had long regarded the U.S. public's attitude toward The Bomb as callous to the point of idiocy. Although this interpretation did the U.S. an injustice, it had a certain justification. Some Americans, for instance, missed the point of Davies' tirade. Said L. K. Stephens, bakery supply salesman, who helped design and bake the cake: "We intended the cake as something to eat."The concern of public image reached as far as the Secretary of the Navy, James V. Forrestal, who agreed that the display was less than positive, and wrote "people were becoming bored with such adolescent competitive publicity."
Sarah Nicole Prickett, who, as an interesting fashion writer, is something of a rarity, reviews the covers of September fashion issues for Toronto's Eye Weekly (Part 1; Part 2). It is, on the whole, a sorry lot. Just for instance: "The September issue of British Vogue stars Kate Moss, for no other reason than six months have passed and she is still not dead or, worse, fat.... The level of fail can't be expressed even in Caps Lock."
Felix Salmon formulates a theory regarding the interaction of cars, bicyclists, and pedestrians in New York City: "Cyclists get no respect as road users. Instead, tragically, they're treated like pedestrians."
28,000 people can't be wrong: McDonald's voted worst burger by Consumer Reports. Obama endorsed Five Guys Burgers came out top. Of course, everyone has their favorite and sometimes it's not a matter of what tastes best, but of what's most convenient.
'We feel that the stories in this book are such that if your nerves are not of the strongest, then it is wise to read them in daylight.' For a certain time, in every second-hand bookshop in the UK you would always be able to find a musty and dog-eared copy of one or more of the Pan Books Of Horror Stories edited by the splendidly named Herbert Van Thal. Now the first is being re-printed.
Charlie Higson tips the hat, including them in his top ten horror books
Flying 101. Kulula Airlines is a South African airlines with a great sense of humor. Yeah, I thought it was a hoax, too. It's not.
