Friday February 19, 2010

WEB BOHEMIAN (Friday February 19, 2010)
(1)- AYN RAND STUFF -- Ayn Rand was never appreciated or influential in Europe; at the height of her American fame, her name conjured little on the other side of the Atlantic. Middle-class young Indians read her and now she is much read globally.

(2)- HARRUMPH --The National Enquirer wants the 2010 Pulitzer, seeking official recognition from the media Brahmins for its ownership of the John Edwards sex scandal. Said Brahmins are harrumphing, and here's why they're wrong.

(3)- MEASURING LOVE -- a social psychologist does brain scans on people newly in love, finding activated after that first magical meeting, a complex brain system that is essentially "the same thing that happens when a person takes cocaine."

(4)- AN EXHIBIT -- No one really knows who first created condoms (or named them), since bladders, animal membranes, sheaths and salve-coated cloths have been used for similar purposes since the beginning of recorded history.

(5)- YALTA -- The decisions they arrived at, and agreements made, proved so momentous that Yalta symbolized political failures that led to the Cold War. Eastern Europe blamed Yalta for putting it under Soviet Union control.

(6)- SOCIAL HISTORY -- Facebook, the world's most popular social networking site, was founded in a Harvard dorm room in 2004. Like Microsoft, the other famous tech company started by a Harvard dropout, Facebook was not particularly original.

(7)- OLD CARS – Here is a website devoted to cars when they were a thing of beauty. This is slide show worth watching through to the end.

(8)- BIGGER WAVES – Waves in the north-east Pacific are getting taller, and the height of the most extreme "100-year" waves is increasing fastest. The analysis, found each year's biggest wave increased by an 10 centimetres per year.

(9)- TATS –- AND MORE TATS -- According to a study published by the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, twenty-four per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and fifty-four have at least one tattoo.

POLITICAL COMMENTARY

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