July 2010
52 posts
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Amazing high-speed flash insect photography →
chrisdctex:
Used by a UT-Austin entomology professor named John Abbott to capture some amazing shots.
Amazing!
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The White House Daily Snapshot →
Want to get the inside scoop on what’s going on at the White House delivered to your inbox each morning? The Daily Snapshot is a quick look at what’s happening each day at the White House. It includes the President and Vice President’s daily schedules, a look at what’s hot on the White House blog, the Photo of the Day and other important updates.
Signed up. I’m hoping @whitehouse will...
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Texas Athletics commits to establish Texas... →
The secret to achieving carbon reductions is to pair it with college football. Texas leads the way!
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David Brooks: The Long Strategy for Obama... →
Featuring a shout out to my boss, Jason Bordoff:
Not much is going to get passed in the next two years anyway, but the president could lay the groundwork for a whopping second-term agenda: tax simplification, entitlement reform, a new wave of regional innovation clusters, a new wave of marriage-friendly tax policies. If the president is looking for a long-term growth agenda, he could read “Path...
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WatchHappy Birthday, @jakemaguire! I honor the place where our honky tonk line dancing at a country bar in Virginia then pretending to be unamused with your birthday only to surprise you at 3am after sending you on a long walk while we decorated the house with balloons and streamers shenanigans become one.
Seriously, though. Happy birthday. I’m so glad we met and have become such good friends...
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Listen to our Metro conductor provide hilarious...
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Home
I’ve made it a point to not think about home while in D.C. I’m not here to pine over Tex-Mex, breakfast tacos, or the lake (as much as I’d like to). I’m here to live, work, experience, and soak up as much of D.C. in the three months that I’m here. And I figure that if I start thinking about home, I’ll get homesick. And really, I’m just super busy here so I don’t really have...
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The climate bill is, uhh, capped until after... →
Not that this is really a surprise. Now we get to see how the midterms circus affects the legislation. Will the Senate man up?
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“All you need in life is a horrendous sex drive and a good ego - brains...”
– Captain Tony.
There is this pub/bar near us in Eastern Market called Tune Inn, and on the wall is a picture of a guy with a pipe, presumably Captain Tony, with his quote brandished across the top. I have no idea who he is, or what he did during life, but it must have been pretty awesome.
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Penn & Teller interview →
I’m a huge fan of Penn & Teller. Their magic shows are one of the unique instances where I don’t want to know how things are working behind the scenes - I just want to be wowed. I saw them in Vegas a few summers ago and had a blast (they also signed my book - huzzah!). The interview is full of great tidbits (“This is going to sound horrible, but I don’t even know how much I...
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The iPhone 4 Camera
I get asked a lot about what I like about the iPhone 4, and while I love pretty much everything about it (the design is solid and it’s faster and has better reception than my iPhone 3G), the camera stands out as its most impressive feature.
I’m in D.C. for the summer so I get to play local/tourist all day long, which means I need to have a camera with me at all times to capture neat...
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Incredible interactive map of U.S. GHG emissions... →
Wyoming comes in as having the highest GHG emissions per capita, but no one really lives in Wyoming so it doesn’t really count. Texas is ranked 16th for GHGs and 13th for CO2 emissions, but that’s also misleading because while we have a large population, the total amount of emissions is very large. In Texas’ defense, we’re home to a lot of the nation’s refining and...
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The Onion: Nation Demands Tax Dollars Only Be... →
Speaking of spending money.
Our government throws away billions on the hopelessly inefficient bureaucracy that runs the Pentagon,” McGill continued. “But has it thrown away even one red cent of that same inflated defense budget on, say, a huge fucking laser cannon that we can take turns shooting?
Hahahahaha.
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New report: domestic biofuels subsidies fail →
This week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report detailing the costs of our biofuels subsidies programs:
In fiscal year 2009, the biofuel tax credits reduced federal excise tax collections by about $6 billion below what they would have been if the credits had not been in effect.
The costs to taxpayers of using a biofuel to reduce gasoline consumption by one gallon are $1.78...
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How cool: the uncensored story of Britain’s most... →
The web of secret treaties in the 1940s which laid the foundation of intelligence co-operation between America and Britain—and by extension with Canada, Australia and New Zealand—had at its heart the pooling of sigint on the Soviet Union. Early in the second world war, Britain took its time to let America into the secrets of Ultra, the decryption of German secret communications by code-breakers...
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Mackerel Sky asks, "do you know what's powering... →
Takeaway: The moment you jump online, you are consuming natural gas — and lots of it.
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“Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m...”
– Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: I’m Comic Sans, Asshole.
(via texburgher)
I love McSweeney’s. Comic Sans? Not so much.
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Jake Maguire won the Internet for this week →
And it’s only Monday!
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'There is no hurry. Wait and see.' →
Whether anguishing over American military interventions abroad or delivering jabs at Wall Street tycoons, this Twain is strikingly contemporary. Though the autobiography also contains its share of homespun tales, some of its observations about American life are so acerbic — at one point Twain refers to American soldiers as “uniformed assassins” — that his heirs and editors, as well as the writer...
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Hogwarts House Sorting Quiz: Hufflepuff?! →
Balls. I can be loyal, dependable, and hardworking in Gryffindor. Right? No, okay.
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“If you are a dreamer, come in.
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A...”
– Shel Sylverstein- “Invitation” - Where the Sidewalk Ends
I found a copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends while perusing books at Kramer’s this evening. There is nothing like reading a few Shel Sylverstein poems to cut through the hustle and bustle of our grown up lives and remind us...
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The New Yorker got themselves a swell looking... →
(via jimray)
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Heatwaves in NYC show just how important climate... →
So it went throughout the area, as accommodations were made to try to avert brownouts or blackouts. Horse racing at Belmont Park was called off. New Jersey Transit canceled some morning trains. Amtrak warned customers of delays on its Northeast Corridor service on Wednesday because trains were operating at reduced speeds.
There were reports that a woman who died in Queens on Tuesday was the...
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What does the EPA’s proposed “transport” rule have... →
EPA’s recently proposed a “transport” rule that would replace the existing Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR), which reduces non-GHG emissions locally and downwind (that’s where the transport part comes from). But the D.C. Circuit Court has rejected CAIR because the of the uncertainty in the interstate trading.
It looks like we’ll be lucky if the final version of the new rule includes any...
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WatchWe decided to take a more scenic route around New York City on our way back to DC; we got to avoid traffic on the GW bridge and also saw some beautiful countryside (and found a White Castle - huzzah!).
Here we’re crossing the Hudson River on the Tappan Zee Bridge, which is only about 20 miles outside of New York City. It all came together with the music (the same song was playing in the...
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Speaking of climate scientists... →
U.S. climate scientists have been receiving hate mail and death threats:
Professor Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University and leading proponent of the “Hockey Stick graph”, said his experiences of hate mail were “eerily similar” to those described by Schneider. “I’m not comfortable talking about the details,...
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Is there a climate change debate? →
The short answer: no.
“When you look at the leading scientists who have made any sort of statement about anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change, you find 97 percent of those top 100 surveyed scientists explicitly agreeing with or endorsing the IPCC’s assessment,” he says.
That result has been borne out by several other published studies that used different methodology, as well as some that...
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Joe Montana is back in the bay area →
On one of his favorite throws ever:
The other one was a game that we played back in Philadelphia. We had fought our way back from three touchdowns. It was 3rd-and-3 or 4. We were just trying to get a first down. The back was wide open, and I threw a touchdown to Jerry Rice.
Montana to Rice!
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WatchReady to get on the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard.