Berlin at night from space, with the old west and east still visible:
“Berlin was divided into two parts for over 40 years,” explains Christa Mientus-Schirmer of Berlin’s city government. “And although we’ve made a lot of progress in the 20 years since the wall fell, we haven’t had the money we would have liked to equalise the two parts of the city.”
Daniela Augenstine, of the city’s street furniture department, says: “In the eastern part there are sodium-vapour lamps with a yellower colour. And in the western parts there are fluorescent lamps – mercury arc lamps and gas lamps – which all produce a whiter colour.” The western Federal Republic of Germany long favoured non-sodium lamps on the grounds of cost, maintenance and carbon emissions, she says.
Guardian quote via chriswoebken.
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Roman Abramovich vs. Boris Berezovsky: The Bitter Oligarch Feud Exposing Russia’s Corruption | Vanity Fair
(via Instapaper)
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What Really Smart People Worry About At Night
- The proliferation of Chinese eugenics. – Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist.
- Black swan events, and the fact that we continue to rely on models that have been proven fraudulent. – Nassem Nicholas Taleb
- That we will be unable to defeat viruses by learning to push them beyond the error catastrophe threshold. – William McEwan, molecular biology researcher
- That pseudoscience will gain ground. – Helena Cronin, author, philospher
- That the age of accelerating technology will overwhelm us with opportunities to be worried. – Dan Sperber, social and cognitive scientist
- Genuine apocalyptic events. The growing number of low-probability events that could lead to the total devastation of human society. – Martin Rees, former president of the Royal Society
- The decline in science coverage in newspapers. – Barbara Strauch, New York Times science editor
- Exploding stars, the eventual collapse of the Sun, and the problems with the human id that prevent us from dealing with them. — John Tooby, founder of the field of evolutionary psychology
- That the internet is ruining writing. – David Gelernter, Yale computer scientist
- That smart people—like those who contribute to Edge—won’t do politics. –Brian Eno, musician
- That there will be another supernova-like financial disaster. –Seth Lloyd, professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering at MIT
- That search engines will become arbiters of truth. —W. Daniel Hillis, physicist
(via bustr)
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Driving directions between two houses in Florida (specifically, a suburb of Orlando) that share a back garden fence: “7.0 mi, 17 mins”. Via Eric C, via Eric Fisher.
Love this so much - reminds me of Ross Racine’s fictional suburbias.
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The Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms, 1931, Chernikov, from Russian Literature and Works on Paper
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So, the Nexus 4 arrived nearly three weeks early and I have been playing with it for about an hour or two. Very much like the text input software - maybe it can be a more productive tool. Otherwise my life remains gratifyingly unchanged.
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“Google ‘gin and bingara’ and you’ll find this, like i did.The only hardboiled-type guy I can think of who regularly drank a mixed drink is Marid Audran, the hero of George Alec Effinger’s Budayeen novels (When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss; they’re near-future science fiction, but very much in the hard-boiled detective tradition).
Marid always drank something called “gin and bingara” with a splash of Rose’s Lime. I’ve always wanted to try it, but I have no idea what bingara is. Every once in a while, I remember Marid and do a Google search for bingara…but the closest I’ve come is that Bingara is the name of a town in New South Wales, Australia.
Maybe Effinger made it up. We can’t ask him, because he died in 2002 at 55 years old. Which is sad. What’s infinitely sadder is that he only wrote those three Marid Audran novels. They’re fantastic, and when you reach the end of the third and realize there aren’t any more…well, it’s kinda like an alcoholic realizing the bottle’s empty and there’s never going to be another one.
”
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Absinthe jelly shot (at Mark’s Bar)
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