Brian Short's Reading List

  • :  Before approaching me, Penn apparently made himself a nuisance to the California Department of Justice. Early on I was in touch with a nice investigator there named Fred Shirasago, who knew Penn’s father and could sometimes get him to make his son stop harassing me for a while. But I guess when you know something terribly important that the entire world thinks is hooey, it gets harder and harder to let it go.
    from Confessions of a Non-Serial Killer


  • :  

    This part happens all the time: A construction crew putting up an office building in the heart of Tysons Corner a few years ago hit a fiber optic cable no one knew was there.

    This part doesn’t: Within moments, three black sport-utility vehicles drove up, a half-dozen men in suits jumped out and one said, “You just hit our line.”


    from Metro Dig at Tysons Stirs Underground Intrigue


  • :  The program lasted eight weeks and participants were followed for an additional three months. Williams said they found those who received the mindfulness training “had significantly less daily hassles, psychological distress and significantly fewer medical symptoms” — like lower blood pressure and fewer aches and pains — than those who were handed a pamphlet.
    from Mindfulness Training Busts Stress


  • :  Instead of making the starting chemicals form a sugar and a base, they mixed them in a different order, in which the chemicals naturally formed a compound that is half-sugar and half-base. When another half-sugar and half-base are added, the RNA nucleotide called ribocytidine phosphate emerges.
    from RNA Can Be The Starting Point For Life


  • :  Today, mainstream print and electronic media want to be neutral, presenting both or all sides as if they were refereeing a game in which only the players—the government and its opponents—can participate. They have increasingly become common carriers, transmitters of other people’s ideas and thoughts, irrespective of import, relevance, and at times even accuracy.
    from Newspaper Narcissism


  • :  I have read many of the notes and letters sent to my office, and I have weighed my decision carefully,” he said in the release. “I did not come to this decision lightly or in haste.
    from Main Governor Signs Same-Sex Marriage Bill


  • :  Most cable breaks go unnoticed by users. Maybe a YouTube clip will take someone a nanosecond longer to download, but that’s about all anyone might notice when a single cable snaps. There are so many different lines connecting so many different places—a map of the network looks like the inside of a baby grand: strand after strand of cable stretching across the ocean floor like so many piano wires that service providers can usually reroute around any break. But if several cables snap in chorus, as they did several times in the past two years, big problems result.
    from Who Protects the Internet?


  • :  By the time Epyx got around to publishing the commercial version of Rogue, gamers had several free versions to choose from. The 1986 ports for the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga were even considered embarrassing by some, as critics could point out that more advanced roguelikes such as Hack and Larn were freely available, whereas the commercial Rogue was a typical full-priced game.
    from The History of Rogue


  • :  In other words, humans have been striving to make their lives better for a very long time. And it is very unsettling to realize that we may be entering an era where questions like “what is the meaning of life?” will be practical engineering questions.
    from Singularity 101 with Vernor Vinge


  • :  These devices from Amazon and other manufacturers offer an almost irresistible proposition to newspaper and magazine industries. They would allow publishers to save millions on the cost of printing and distributing their publications, at precisely a time when their businesses are under historic levels of pressure.
    from Big Screen E-Readers to the Rescue


  • :  Dr. Parviz says he is moving a step at a time in testing the lenses. Rabbits have worn them for 20 minutes without ill effects, he said. “The display has not yet been turned on while the rabbits are wearing the lenses,” he said. “But we have turned on the lenses while holding them with tweezers, and they work well.
    from Eyeglasses with a Digital Dimension


  • :  The skeleton is a multipurpose organ, offering a ready source of calcium for an array of biochemical tasks, and housing the marrow where blood cells are born. Yet above all the skeleton allows us to locomote, which means it gets banged up and kicked around. Paradoxically, it copes with the abuse and resists breaking apart in a major way by microcracking constantly. “Bone microcracks, that’s what it does,” Dr. Ritchie said. “That’s how stresses are relieved.
    from Bone, a Masterpiece of Elastic Strength


  • :  The hottest ticket in London this weekend is not for a pop singer or a football match but for a conference on communism which brings together some of the world’s leading Marxist academics. The international financial crisis has led to a resurgence of interest in a philosophy that many claimed had been buried with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
    from Communism Conference Sells Out


  • :  

    Until recent years, the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry were local pariahs. Mr. Silverman — whose specialty license plate, one of many offered by the state, says “In Reason We Trust” — was invited to give the invocation at the Charleston City Council once, but half the council members walked out. The local chapter of Habitat for Humanity would not let the Secular Humanists volunteer to build houses wearing T-shirts that said “Non Prophet Organization,” he said.

    When their billboard went up in January, with their Web site address displayed prominently, they expected hate mail.

    “But most of the e-mails were grateful,” said Laura Kasman, an assistant professor of microbiology and immunology at the Medical University of South Carolina.


    from More Atheists Shout It From The Rooftops


  • :  Unlike their Western counterparts, the Tarahumara don’t replenish their bodies with electrolyte-rich sports drinks. They don’t rebuild between workouts with protein bars; in fact, they barely eat any protein at all, living on little more than ground corn spiced up by their favourite delicacy, barbecued mouse.
    from The Painful Truth about Trainers


    • bshort's new thing is a snipblog by Brian Short