50 years ago, there was something called civil defense
so apparently in all that stone under the entrance ramp of the
Brooklyn Bridge,
DOT workers found a hidden vault full of cold-war era provisions.
City workers were conducting a regular structural inspection of the bridge last Wednesday when they came across the cold-war-era hoard of water drums, medical supplies, paper blankets, drugs and calorie-packed crackers — an estimated 352,000 of them, sealed in dozens of watertight metal canisters and, it seems, still edible.
To step inside the vault — a dank and lightless room where the walls are lined with dusty boxes — is to be vividly reminded of the anxieties that dominated American life during the military rivalry with the Soviet Union, an era when air-raid sirens and fallout shelters were standard elements of the grade-school curriculum.
from the nytimes
while this is cool just from a city nerd/archeologist perspective, what really caught my attention was the description of daily life during that time, especially since monday marked the
three year anniversary of the war in Iraq, i know my daily life hasn't changed much from three years ago
For the officials who gave the tour, the discovery set off some strong memories. Judith E. Bergtraum, the department's first deputy commissioner, recalled air-raid drills — "first it was under the desk and then it was in the hall" — at Public School 165 in Queens. Russell Holcomb, a deputy chief bridge engineer, remembered watching Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe at the United Nations in 1960 on television.
this makes me wonder, if our daily lives were actually impacted by the Iraq war and the "
homefront" was more than a idea - as in, having regular terrorism drills, or plant
victory gardens, or have our jobs and industries retooled for the war effort- would the war have dragged on for this long?
on a total tangent,
Kenneth T. Jackson, who commented on the find in the article, wrote
crabgrass frontier, one of the best books i've ever read. he also teaches an undergrad class at
columbia on the history of new york city, complete with walking tours - this is one of those very, very rare instances where i am actually jealous of CU undergrads.
homefront:nyc
$9,000,000,000,000
ever wonder what nine trillion dollars could buy?
- enough to buy Buckingham Palace 9,000 times
- is roughly four times Britain’s GDP
- equates to $1,500 for every man, woman and child in the world
- would buy all the tea in China. In fact it would buy all the tea in the world for the next 2,000 years.
- is enough to solve the Palestinian crisis by rehousing every Israeli and Palestinian family in a £1.5m detached house in Henley-on-Thames
- would build 28 Eiffel Towers — constructed out of gold.
via the times uk
oh, and apparently it also translates into every single american owing $30,000. or
something like that.
To spend $1 trillion in the average American life span of 77 years, you'd have to be on a lifetime spending spree of about $35,580,857 and change every day from birth.
via reuters
and i thought i had a shopping problem!
debt:shopping
fantasy maintenance
i actually remember having heard about the company
realdoll several years ago; however, i never realized that the maintenance of these toys was so complicated!
Very tight or binding straps left on your doll over an extended period can form dents in the flesh, as on a real person. It is therefore preferable to store your doll in the nude.
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To avoid damage to painted areas such as the face, nipples, and vagina, avoid rubbing these areas without lubrication.
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Special note for cleaning the oral entry: Carefully remove the tongue from your doll’s mouth with your fingers; it should come out easily when the mouth is lubricated. Rinse the tongue separately and replace it once the orifice is clean.
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For times when you wish to use your REALdoll in the “face down” positions, it is highly recommended that you remove her face. This will absolutely save on wear and tear AND eyelashes!
via harper's
and apparently, while there are
several options for building your very own sexy lady, there is only one type of man that is desirable. somehow, that just seems unfair.
dolls:culture
your perfect major + penguins
Since the last time i posted a quiz everyone had so much fun, here's
another one i found via
scientist, interrupted. i don't know about anyone else, but my college major choices were between anthropology, geology, and ecology and evolutionary biology. apparently, what i chose (eeb) was spot on, according to this quiz. that 92% for dance however, is
bullshit. did the quiz correctly predict your major?
| You scored as Biology. You should be a Biology major! You are passionate about the sciences, and you enjoy studying cell growth and evolutionary concepts which enable living organisms to survive. Pursue that!
Biology | | 100% | Dance | | 92% | Anthropology | | 92% | Engineering | | 92% | Sociology | | 75% | Philosophy | | 75% | Mathematics | | 67% | English | | 67% | Theater | | 67% | Art | | 67% | Psychology | | 58% | Linguistics | | 50% | Journalism | | 42% | Chemistry | | 42% |
What is your Perfect Major?
created with QuizFarm.com |
oh, and one more thing. apparently
the universe was created by committee.
“Biodiversity is the primary stumbling block,” said Dr. Pootle. “Whoever created this cacophony of species would have had to be infinitely powerful and infinitely creative, but also infinitely schizophrenic to come up with the myriad different solutions to identical problems that the creators of the universe have. Either that, or we’re looking at a different kind of process altogether.”
...
“If you’re one guy designing a universe, why come up with twenty different ways of tackling the same issue?” Pootle said. “If you’re omnipotent, presumably you know perfectly well whatever the one solution is that will work best, and you go with that. The fact that the world obviously doesn’t work that way is what led us first to the committee theory. The plants and animals that inhabit the Earth show the kinds of random and incoherent thinking that can only otherwise be found in the products of design committees where there’s a lot of CYA and turf protection going on.”
...
“At the moment our thinking is that there is at least one committee of at least five omnipotent entities for every individual species on the planet, with little or no work-sharing or information exchange between different committees and often little internal cooperation. It’s one holy rigid mother of a dysfunctional bureaucracy. Extremely simple and poorly designed species, like an amoeba, for example, probably have committees of at least two dozen designers. They’re typical examples of the kind of work that gets produced when no one is capable of either making an independent decision or talking to the guy in the next cubicle. Same goes for penguins.”
biodiversity =
bureaucracyi love it.
college:life:god
shipwrecks, squid and mormons
yesterday
andrew and i spent the better part of the day driving around
staten island eating munchkins from dunkin' donuts (okay, maybe i ate most of them), when we happened across a
boat graveyard, which initiated a U-turn that very nicely showed off the tight turning radius of the
prius. too bad we couldn't stay very long - because clearly there is more than a little bit of
adventuring to be done here!
other things of note:
- in a nice case of art informing science,
damien hirst gives advice on
how to preserve a 8.6 metre long giant squid to the London Natural History Museum.
The team then needed to find someone to build a glass tank which could not only hold the huge creature, but could leave the squid accessible for future scientific research, and they decided to draw upon the knowledge of an artist famed for displaying preserved dead animals.
"We contacted Damien Hirst's group after seeing their animals preserved in formalin. They put us in touch with a company who could make these tanks," explained Mr Ablett.
-
Mormons dig evolution! Utah's state legislators voted down a bill intended to discredit evolution in the classroom.
The Origins of Life bill, in its initial form, would have required teachers to issue a disclaimer to their students saying that not all scientists agree about evolution and the origin of species. It did not mention any alternative theory to Darwinism, but was viewed by some supporters and opponents as part of the drive to encourage the teaching of intelligent design, which says that life is too complicated to have evolved without an architect.
Some Mormon legislators opposed the bill because they agreed with Mr. Urquhart that science and religion should remain separate, others because they thought intelligent design was not in keeping with traditional Mormon belief.
it's really too bad the article didn't elaborate on this last explanation! does anyone know what they might have been referring to?
shipwrecks:damien hirst:evolution
