Woo hoo!
Email from the British Consulate Los Angeles:
Your application has been approved and the visa has been issued.
In related news, Blendor will soon be transplanted to a tiny island on another continent.
Blendor
it’s like hitting a piñata filled with exciting blog postsArchive for July, 2008
An interpretation of the Surge
Juan Cole takes a nuanced, balanced approach to analyzing the effects of the troop surge in Iraq:
For the first six months of the troop escalation, high rates of violence continued unabated. That is suspicious. What exactly were US troops doing differently last September than they were doing in May, such that there was such a big change? The answer to that question is simply not clear. Note that the troop escalation only brought US force strength up to what it had been in late 2005. In a country of 27 million, 30,000 extra US troops are highly unlikely to have had a really major impact, when they had not before.
Too bad the majority of the electorate won’t. Also some good comments over there.
Free show tonight
Household Names at the Parish – 11pm. Plus $2 wells / $2.50 Lone Star. Come on! You don’t have to sleep that much!
All My Friends
To Whom It May Concern,
Thanks for Saturday night.
I heard this song on the radio last night, and it suddenly was more meaningful to me than when I had first heard it.
There’s a pretty interesting interview with James Murphy over at NPR.
Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’)
Some ex-Googlers have started a new search engine that seems promising. It’s hard to beat the big G, but I’m all for alternatives – a little more diversity in the search engine market can only be a good thing, especially when it seems the big only get bigger and tend to gobble each other up.
Cuil – The World’s Biggest Search Engine
Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.
Though oddly, searching for ‘cuil’ in Cuil returns no results relevant to the site itself:
- as opposed to the Google results. Kinda weird. Their servers also seem to be hiccupping a bit right now.
I heart TED
Man, I just about spent my entire morning watching TED talks, and I probably could spend the whole weekend that way if I didn’t have stuff to do. Here’s one of the better ones I saw today:
It makes sense if you think about it
Democrats didn’t stop 9/11, and they won’t stop it again:
A controversial billboard in Orange County has a picture of the burning World Trade Center and the message, “Please Don’t Vote for a Democrat.” The man who paid for the ad says he’s trying to help Republicans, but officials with both political parties are calling the billboard inappropriate.
Brought to you by this guy. Dont miss the video! And do make sure you click that thumbnail for the fully-offensive version.
Happy Bastille Day from Aquarelle
Aquarelle chefs will also be preparing a special summer “street food” menu to pair with the wines. Each glass of wine is $5, and each menu item is $5 as well.
Rumbullion will provide live French jazz under the trees.
MIT amps up solar cells
MIT is developing a new solar cell technology that results in a tenfold increase in power conversion, takes up less space, and can be added to existing solar panels.
Photo caption:
Organic solar concentrators collect and focus different colors of sunlight. Solar cells can be attached to the edges of the plates. By collecting light over their full surface and concentrating it at their edges, these devices reduce the required area of solar cells and consequently, the cost of solar power. Stacking multiple concentrators allows the optimization of solar cells at each wavelength, increasing the overall power output.