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BearFood: a daily list of awesome and/or neato links

BearFood: a daily list of awesome and/or neato links

CIA’s Secret Fear: High-Tech Border Checks Will Blow Spies’ Cover An iris scanner from Senex Technologies on display at the CeBIT trade show. Photo: Fabian Bimmer/AP When Tom Cruise had to break into police headquarters in Minority Report, the futuristic crime thriller, he got past the iris scanners with ease: He just swapped out his eyeballs. CIA agents may find that just a little beyond the call of duty. Busy spy crossroads such as Dubai, Jordan, India and many E.U. points of entry are employing iris scanners to link eyeballs irrevocably to a particular name. “If you go to one of those countries under an alias, you can’t go again under another name,” explains a career spook, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he remains an agency consultant. ”So it’s a one-time thing — one and done. The issue is exceedingly sensitive to agency operatives and intelligence officials, past and present. “I can’t help you with this,” added a former intelligence agency chief.

7 foot long SERENITY made of LEGO August 7, 2012 AT 2:00 am 7 foot long SERENITY made of LEGO. Adrian writes – This project took 475 hours over 21 months. No comments yet. Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time. / photo: KIRK MCKOY / LOS ANGELES TIMES Lucy is a friend, educated and familiar with nutrition basics, who eats a relatively healthy vegetarian diet. Lucy recently surprised us by announcing she is going on the Master Cleanse Diet. For those unfamiliar, this is one of many “Detox” diets that purports to clean up our insides and provide quick weight loss. The Master Cleanse has been around for decades, originally called the lemonade diet. People doing the cleanse can consume nothing but a lemon drink for 4 days up to 2 weeks! A “serving” of the lemon drink consists of: 2 tsp of juice from fresh-squeezed lemons.2 tsp grade-B maple syrupone tenth tsp cayenne pepper10 fl oz. water The magic result at the end of the cleanse is supposed to be up to 20 pounds of weight loss. What you need to know: The cleanse diets make 2 claims: 1) clean your guts and 2) lose weight fast. With respect to weight loss, they are right – this is basically a starvation diet. With respect to detoxification – guess what?

Oi Santa: Full Size Formula 1 Simulator For Sale » WTF1 If you’ve been good this year… really, really good, Santa might just treat you to one of these. You’ll need a bloody big stocking though and your parents, sorry Santa, will need around £90,000 going spare. So you better have been good! The simulator comes in a choice of colours but it’d be even sweeter to have a livery painted on it. I’m gonna hook it up to F1 Race Stars, just for the lols. Specifications “Due to the nature of this product you cannot ‘Add to Basket’ & checkout from this page.” via Costco

I Speaky Good Engleesh Yup, sometimes even the geeks get it wrong. Typos are ok, bad English just isn’t. We’ve got to curb this before we literally start talking gobbledegook. Brush up on your grammar with this infographic that spells out a few of the common mistakes in today’s world. As an extra exercise – this is one I learned in highschool – add punctuation to the following words in order to make them make sense: Tom where John had had had had had had had had had had had the teacher’s approval Answer is after the infographic! Source: Copyblogger. Answer: Tom where John had had, “had,” had had, “had had.” I really like the Oatmeal infographic on grammar (I love how he injects humour into his posts). Also, there’s another word that people often misuse, and it’s been misused so much that we almost now consider that meaning a true definition: the word “quote” is not a noun. Shockingly, quote as a noun is actually at dictionary.com. No…no. [By copyblogger and Blue Glass via Daily Infographic]

There’s A Major Grand Canyon Controversy Going On Right Now Conventional Grand Canyon wisdom holds two things to be true: it is exceptionally deep, and about five million years old. A new study, though, has pegged the yawning chasm’s age as more than 10 times older than previously thought. So is the Grand Canyon really a 70 million-year-old dinosaur playground? The new theory, put forth this week in Science by researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and California Institute of Technology argues that 70 million years ago, back when Tyrannosaurses roamed the American West, a river flowing in the opposite direction of the Colorado carved the Grand Canyon into America’s fleshy middle. But not so fast, shout rival Grand Canyonologists. While this new study, published in Science, found traces of radioactive elements that indicate a prehistoric presence, the oldest gravel and sediment deposits found to date don’t go back further than six million years. Then again, maybe it’s more fun to pick a side. Image: David McNew/Getty Images

If it’s Tuesday this must be Houston All Fooked Up: I suggest you start drinking before you read this blog. This Is Mommyhood: A Mom To A Daughter Who's Like A Hummingbird On Crack. Flourish in Progress: (T)hug Life: Part hood. Part good. Mommy Shorts: Because you can't give them back. This is not that blog: It's that other one. Pregnancy Calendar at Alpha Mom: Amalah's week-by-week guide to the miracle of pregnancy and all the various indignities that come with it. Coffee, Clutter and Chaos:FULL OF AWESOME. OP! AVENGER OF SEXINESS: Christine's Superpower? The Woman Formerly Known As Beautiful: Mom Butler, Wife Dominatrix, Slightly Mustachioed. Blog Con Queso: Cheese, robots, margarita jello shots. Hyperbole and a Half Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem and Other Things That Happened. David Thorne: So fucking awesome it makes me hurt. Mama Bird Diaries: Funny, smart and she drives a gold minivan. The Candy Box: Political humor column with Candy Kirby. Carpool Goddess: Adventures from carpool to empty nest.

To Ace Interviews, You Need To Love Yourself While self-confidence is definitely a route to job interview success, it’s often suggested that outright arrogance and narcissism is a real turn-off for employers. A new study suggests that’s not the case: interview performance doesn’t depend on how much the interviewer likes you in the slightest, but just how much you like yourself. The research, carried out at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, suggests that narcissists’ innate tendency to promote themselves manages to get them jobs, regardless of whether the interviewers actually like them or not. Peter Harms, one of the researchers, explains to Science Daily: “This is one setting where it’s OK to say nice things about yourself and there are no ramifications. In fact, it’s expected… Simply put, those who are comfortable doing this tend to do much better than those who aren’t.” The study, which is published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, asked 222 interviewers to rate 72 mock interviewees. The takeaway message?

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