Monday, August 30, 2010

WEB BOHEMIAN (Monday, August 30, 2010)
(1)- POOR OLD U.S. -- The U.S barely hangs to its First World status. Saddled by debt, engaged in many wars with a rising police state at home, declining economic productivity, and wild currency fluctuations all threaten America's future.

(2)- SPAGHETTI MYSTERY -- Why do strands of spaghetti so rarely snap into only two pieces? Here’s the solution to a mystery that baffled famed physicist Richard Feynman. And check out slow motion films of shattering spaghetti here.

(3)- FINALLY EXPLAINED - A large collaboration of physicists working at the Fermilab Tevatron particle collider has discovered evidence of an explanation for the prevalence of matter over antimatter in the universe.

(4)- IF EARTH STOPPED SPINNING -- If the Earth stopped spinning, the oceans would divide, a megacontinent would emerge at the equator, one day would last one year, and our now-ellipsoid planet would become spherical.

(5)- BOOK REVIEW -- Julian Hawthorne's posthumously published Memoirs is interesting, revealing things about his famous father incompatible with our image of the fey loner of Salem who wrote the haunted stories’ classics.

(6)- CELEBRITY – The word itself gained currency in the 18th century. Slowly replacing older notions of "fame" and "renown," "celebrity" was more fleeting than its hallowed predecessors and less grounded among traditional aristocrats.

(7)- JEFF DECK – He set off on a road trip around the United States in order to document our country's many misspellings. He gave himself the mandate of correcting at least one spelling mistake every single day.

(8)- HOUSE OF WAR -- After Ramush Haradinaj led Kosovo’s fight for independence from Serbia, becoming provisional prime minister, he was tried for war crimes by the U.N. tribunal. It was 21st-century justice versus 15th-century laws.

(9)- PROBABILITY CHIP -- Lyric Semiconductor, a start-up that emerged from work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, plans to build a chip that can compute likelihoods for commercial uses such as book sales or even gene sequencing.

POLITICAL COMMENTARY

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