North Korea Being Reviewed By Smartasses On Google Maps. True, but they have a great program to encourage return visitors. Tired of it just being a blank white space, Google added North Korea to their Google Maps service and invited "citizen cartographers" to look at satellite images and help map the hermit kingdom. Of course, since this is the Internet, people started reviewing gulags like they were hotels on Tripadvisor, and we couldn't be happier. Satellite images mean that the North is exposed for all to see, label, and attach snarky reviews to prison camps where thousands die every year. The Internet! Working together to bury tragedy with laughter. Chongjin is more of a Sandals couples-only gulag. Not for the kids. Maybe the US & N.Korea should do an exchange program to thin/fatten each other. Sure, the US has toll booths and airport security, but does anyone really "check" anymore?
Private Park's palms are pleasantly pliable, patiently patting your parts for pistols. Sources: Google Plus | Google Plus | Google Plus. Five organisms with real super powers that rival their comic book counterparts. There is no force more creative than the painstakingly slow process of evolution. Ever wanted to walk through walls? Naked mole rats can physically bore through concrete. How about fly? There are a couple dozen different ways to accomplish that goal, even if you’re a squid.
Incredible power of regeneration? Some real super power are more super than others: 1. Bdelloid Rotifers. photo by Diego Fontaneto Around 80 million years ago, a small, unassuming group of metazoa decided that sex just wasn’t for them. Bdelloid rotifers are incredibly tough. Bdelloid rotifers’ super power appears when they recover from their dormant state. 2. Scaly-foot Snail. Rogue isn’t the only X-Man with an Earth-1218 counterpart. 3. What if your body wasn’t your own? How to describe Sacculina?
Here’s where things get weird. Sacculina carcini. 4. Who wouldn’t want to be a shapeshifter? 5. What good is a super power without a compelling origin story? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Microscopic images of melanized fungal cells:. Two spaces after a period: Why you should never, ever do it. Illustration by Slate. Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong. And yet people who use two spaces are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste.* You'd expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you'd be wrong; every third email I get from readers includes the two-space error.
(In editing letters for "Dear Farhad," my occasional tech-advice column, I've removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.) A Slate Plus Special Feature: Never, ever use two spaces after a period: Listen to Mike Vuolo read Farhad Majoo’s classic takedown of an enduring typographic sin. What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. Typographers, that's who. Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule.
This readability argument is debatable. QR Code Curbside Haiku. Why Are LEGO Sets Expensive? | Wired Science. I’m not sure I would say LEGO blocks are that expensive, but the statement is that they are expensive because they are so well made. Really, this has to at least be partially true. If you take some blocks made in 1970, they still fit with pieces made today. That is quite impressive. But the real question is: what is the distribution of LEGO sizes? How does this distribution of sizes compare to other toys? Here is the plan. Here is my first set of data. These 88 measurements have an average of 15.814 mm with a standard deviation of 0.0265 mm.
What about older LEGO pieces? Fortunately, I found one of my original sets from the late 70s. v I even have the instructions. The pieces from the 70s have an average of 15.819 mm with a standard deviation of 0.026 mm. How about something else? Maybe that wasn’t such a great plot. What About Other Objects? Do other things have high precision parts too? I found three different sets of objects to measure.
Price Per Piece of LEGO About 10 cents per LEGO piece. Eclecticism, "Why do you hate the shape of breasts in plate armor so much?" You Have To Work Out To Get A Workout. Literacy Privilege: How I Learned to Check Mine Instead of Making Fun of People’s Grammar on the Internet | Painting the Grey Area. My name is Chandra, and I am a recovering grammar snob. There was a time that it gave me a blush of pride to be referred to as “the Spelling Sergeant” or “the Punctuation Police”. I would gleefully tear a syntactic strip out of anybody who fell victim to the perils of poor parallelism or the menace of misplaced modifiers.
I railed against atrostrophes and took a red pen to signs posted in staff rooms, bulletin boards and public washrooms. I was, to put it bluntly, really, really annoying. Four years ago, I was hired in a program that helps disadvantaged adults acquire fundamental literacy skills. It’s a tough habit to break, though. It’s one thing to take an erudite journalist or grandiloquent blogger (don’t know any of those, myself) down a notch, although there are valid arguments against even this; grammatical exactitude can suffocate creativity and clarity, and many prescriptive rules were totally fabricated by Latin-centric snobs. This is no trifling issue, either. Like this: The No-Stats All-Star. Washington Post. (Update: Second school joins protest, more background) Nearly all of the teachers at a Seattle high school have decided to refuse to give mandated standardized district tests called the Measures of Academy Progress because, they say, the exams don’t evaluate learning and are a waste of time.
Now teachers at a second Seattle school, Ballard High, said they were joining the boycott, according to the Seattle Education website. Almost all of the teachers and staff at Garfield High signed a letter explaining that they oppose the MAP because it is a flawed test that students don’t take seriously and that is being used by administrators to evaluate teachers, a purpose for which it was not designed. According to Monty Neill, executive director of FairTest, an organization devoted to stopping the misuse of standardized tests, the boycott is the first such school-wide effort in the country in a decade. We, the Garfield teachers, respectfully decline to give the MAP test to any of our students. Essay on the flaws of distance education. One potentially positive result of the current fascination with online education is that universities and colleges may be forced to define and defend quality education. This analysis of what we value should help us to present to the public the importance of higher education in a high-tech world.
However, the worst thing to do is to equate university education with its worst forms of instruction, which will in turn open the door for distance learning. Perhaps the most destructive aspect of higher education is the use of large lecture classes. Not only does this type of learning environment tend to focus on students memorizing information for multiple-choice tests, but it also undermines any real distinction between in-person and online education. As one educational committee at the University of California at Los Angeles argued, we should just move most of our introductory courses online because they are already highly impersonal and ineffective.
This Isn't the Petition Response You're Looking For. Official White House Response to Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016. This response was published on January 11, 2013. By Paul Shawcross The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn't on the horizon. Here are a few reasons: The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000.
However, look carefully (here's how) and you'll notice something already floating in the sky -- that's no Moon, it's a Space Station! Keep in mind, space is no longer just government-only. Even though the United States doesn't have anything that can do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, we've got two spacecraft leaving the Solar System and we're building a probe that will fly to the exterior layers of the Sun.
We are living in the future! If you do pursue a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field, the Force will be with us! My fake college syllabus. The following syllabus is for my new class, English 401: The Short Novel, meeting Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:10-2:50pm. Course Description In this class, we will analyze some of World Literature’s greatest short novels in an attempt to interrogate the essence of plot and character while reading as few words as possible. Each class session will begin with a student presentation of 15 to 20 minutes, so we’re looking at an effective class time of about an hour. I’d love to give you a five-minute break halfway through the period, with the tacit understanding that we actually blow 15, but then I’d have to pretend I didn’t notice when 36% of you didn’t bother to come back.
Or I’d have to pass around the attendance sheet again, which is a major pain in the ass. Books Course books are available at the campus bookstore. Please refrain from contacting me eight weeks from now to say that the book we’re discussing tomorrow is sold out and you are thus unable to do the reading.