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Balaji’s Linkblog

Less talk, more linking

April 10, 2010

Permanent Link to "Couple find cow trapped under street"

The rescue was a success after a cow that was trapped underneath the streets of Kaysville was freed from a storm drain. Davis County Animal Control officers believe the cow wandered into a culvert and then got stuck as the drain became narrow. They say it was under the street for at least five days.

Holden Holt and his wife said they found the cow stuck the drain while walking Thursday morning. "We heard a noise in the storm drain and my wife went over and looked and there was a head with some eyes poking out. It was a little frightening," Holt said.

The cow was fully-grown and had just recently delivered a calf. It was said to have wandered through an opening in the culvert and when the concrete tunnel became narrow, the animal crawled on its knees to reach a wider opening where it could stand.

Construction crews were able to dig a portion of the street up to create an opening big enough to hoist the cow using a tractor.

Video.

By arbroath

January 9, 2010

Permanent Link to "(title unknown)"

Shared by Balaji
The Antikythera mechanism gets even more incredible...

By (author unknown)

October 30, 2009

Permanent Link to "Giz Explains: Why Every Country Has a Different F#$%ing Plug – Worldwide electric plugs – Gizmodo"

Ok, maybe not every country, but with at least 12 different sockets in widespread use it sure as hell feels like it to anyone who's ever traveled. So why in the world, literally, are there so many? Funny story!

By (author unknown)

October 21, 2009

Permanent Link to "Cutting edge: Just what is it about adding blades that makes a razor better? | Life and style | The Guardian"

Thomas Jones asks, just what is it about adding blades that makes a razor better?

By (author unknown)

October 18, 2009

Permanent Link to "Wall Street's Naked Swindle : Rolling Stone"

A scheme to flood the market with counterfeit stocks helped kill Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers — and the feds have yet to bust the culprits

By (author unknown)

October 12, 2009

Permanent Link to "I am a former executive of a large famous company in the computer industry. AMaA : IAmA"

By (author unknown)

Permanent Link to "Audrey: Our paroqial fermament, one tide on another."

Chinese Twitter users live in a density 2x to 8x their English counterparts; here's why

By (author unknown)

October 11, 2009

Permanent Link to "cloudscape"

cloudscape || Canon5D2/EF200f2.8L | 1/2000s | f5.6 | ISO400
Toronto's eastern clouds.

By (author unknown)

Permanent Link to "cloudscape"

cloudscape || Canon5D2/EF200f2.8L | 1/2000s | f5.6 | ISO400
Toronto's eastern clouds.

By (author unknown)

Permanent Link to "Iceland and datacenters"

After a disastrous experience with international banking, Iceland has a new angle to attract investment. BBC News reports that a company called Verne Global is currently converting an unused warehouse at the former US Navy airbase (Keflavik) near Reykjavik into a carrier neutral datacenter / colocation facility. The promise is abundant carbon-neutral low cost electricity and the lack of need for any air conditioner system. With a mean June/July temperature of only 13C, Iceland can use air side cooling to dissipate the heat generated by densely packed servers. Iceland is not exactly the best place in the world telecom-wise, but it is linked to Europe and North America by the FARICE , DANICE and CANTAT-3 cables.

By thewalrus

Permanent Link to "How Google Plans to Stay Ahead in Search"

"We ran over 5,000 experiments last year. Probably 10 experiments for every successful launch. We launch on the order of 100 to 120 a quarter. We have dozens of people working just on the measurement part. We have statisticians who know how to analyze data, we have engineers to build the tools. We have at least five or 10 tools where I can go and see here are five bad things that happened." Udi Manber, Google’s vice-president of technology, explains the business of running a search department. "It takes a very, very good engineer about two years to really understand search." From a surprisingly candid series of articles detailing the business of Google, "Can Google Stay on Top of the Web?"
CEO Eric Schmidt on the economy, “If you go back to last year, we began to see slowdown in U.K. quite early. We initially thought it was an error in our system. We made adjustments, and it wasn’t until September and October, when it became clear that it was a global collapse. From our perspective, the low point was somewhere in the spring…somewhere in May or June.”

By geoff.

Permanent Link to "Beating Swords into Plowshares, Micronesian-Style"

The Pacific theatre of World War 2 left many traces behind. The shipwrecks of Chuuk Lagoon are probably the most famous, but they're hardly the primary reminders of former military action present in the day-to-day lives of many Micronesians.
Besides the many large-scale remains of the war, such as abandoned airfields Quonset huts, and abandoned bunkers, many Micronesians live with recycled WW2 materials of a smaller kind.

Marsden Matting is one of the most commonly seen pieces of WW2 materiel, and Marsden airstrips still exist. The materials have also found new life as walkways, construction materials, and, most often, as fencing (2).

In the Marshall islands, Japanese military rice cookers have been turned into water catchments, and 127 mm ammunition boxes have been repurposed as water catchments, storage lockers, and copra driers.

The scavenging of airplane parts is perhaps the zenith of Pacific war recycling. B-24s, in particular, presented a wealth of parts that found new peacetime purposes, such oxygen cylinders, propellors, and fuselage pieces. Even after the war, the US military was leaving behind items that the local people found useful: drop tanks from F-86s.

For even more photos and text about Micronesian military recycling, check out this PDF (note: 7 MB).

By barnacles

September 26, 2009

Permanent Link to "Nothing to see here…: Tales of a Bottom Feeder Recruiting Agency"

By (author unknown)

September 19, 2009

Permanent Link to "Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession anchored just east of Singapore | Mail Online"

The biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history lies at anchor east of Singapore. It is is why your Christmas stocking may be on the light side this year.

By (author unknown)

September 5, 2009

Permanent Link to "How Team of Geeks Cracked Spy Trade – WSJ.com"

From a Silicon Valley office, a group of twenty-something software engineers is building an unlikely following of terrorist hunters at U.S. spy agencies.

By (author unknown)

Permanent Link to "By CRM114 in “‘It is necessary to be bothered from time to time.’” on MeFi"

I am a United States Marine. A former Marine, anyway. I served in Iraq in 2003, during the invasion and its immediate aftermath. Like a couple of others above, I am also sorry that the family of this young man did not want these photos published, but I think these photos must be published.

I am angry about this war. I am angry about the reasons for which it was ostensibly fought, I am angry about the way it has been conducted, and - maybe more than anything else - I am angry about the way that the American public has been sheltered from it.

When Americans went to war in the Second World War, GM stopped making cars and started making tanks, sugar disappeared from the markets, and meat went from being a staple to a rationed, once-a-week indulgence. Every American suffered in World War II. When I went to war in 2003, nothing changed in the US. And in a way, that's amazing. America can field the world's finest combat force and the people at home can eat Skittles and Subway sandwiches and buy trucks like nothing out of the ordinary is happening. But that is wrong.

When a republic fights a war, every citizen of that country should feel it. War is horrible. War is disgusting, and we should be reminded of that every day that Americans are carrying arms overseas, so that we may fight as few wars as possible.

I probably sound self-righteous and I am sorry about that. I try not to get on a soapbox about Iraq and I try not to mention it much if I can help it. But the fact that some Americans want to hide from the acts that are being done in their names overseas really upsets me. If you don't want to see Lance Corporal Bernard dying on the front page of the Times, don't complain to the Times. Complain to your Congressman.

By CRM114

Permanent Link to "Julie and Julia"

I caught Julie and Julia today in a theater with all of three people (including me) while everyone else in town was at the first showing of Gamer. I wanted to see this because I was intrigued how one even goes about making a movie about a blog.

It did a pretty good job showing how the Julie character decides to do a blog and what it's like to write daily about yourself and how that can sometimes hinder your offline relationships. The concurrent storyline of Julia Child seemed truthful and sincere and overall I enjoyed it and left the theater feeling uplifted and inspired to cook.

But there was this one scene. Julie is in her cube and she's ecstatic that a post got 53 comments and she high fives her coworker, and moments later her husband calls and says he just noticed she's #3 on the most popular Salon blogs list and her arms shoot up out of her cube in victory and I began to cry tears of joy.

I sat in the theater thinking about my little blog and how it became a community large and a business small. I remembered walking into a coworker's office in December 1999, arms in the air, as I exclaimed "100!!! One hundred people hit my web server today! 100!!!" I remembered being so stoked that three thousand people hit the site in January 2000, when I won a web site of the day award. I remembered the first time a newspaper reporter called and wanted to talk to me of all people.

The tears kept rolling through the next scene and stopped after 5 minutes or so and I thought to myself how weird that I was brought to tears by mundane shots about blogging serving as mere story continuity to others in the theater.

Sure, it's just another romantic comedy by Nora Ephron that most people could say is another forgettable chick flick or date movie. But it's the first movie about blogging and the first movie that resonated in a way no other movie ever has with my own experiences. This will probably make sense to about a few dozen people with experiences similar to mine but my god did that film move me.