Link roundup

1. Criticism of the metrics Petraeus used to decide who to promote.

2. Serious Eats says the bacon shake at Jack in the Box is terrible, but recommends this bacon shake recipe.

3. The Magicians did not get picked up by Fox.

4. Jurassic Park brochure reproduction at the BBTS.

Link roundup

1. How China bought its first aircraft carrier. (Hint, they lied about it.)

2. MIT students receive their acceptance letters in cardboard tubes and are encouraged to modify them. One student sent hers into space. (Have you noticed that all of the interesting stories about space have nothing to do with NASA?)

3. Mysterious new Google device being tested. Via.

Link roundup

1. Links to the personal websites of the Tron Uprising art team.

2. Astonishing data on the number of politicians in India also facing criminal charges.

3. "'Huffington Post' Employee Sucked Into Aggregation Turbine
Horrified Workers Watch As Colleague Torn Apart By Powerful Content-Gathering Engine"

4. Are we headed to a future where our wars will be entirely fought by robots and the only people at risk are contractors?

5. Oops:

An advertising agency for BMW has paid to name a cold weather front sweeping Europe "Cooper" in Germany, after the carmaker's Mini Cooper.

But the public-relations stunt by the agency went wrong after the freezing conditions led to dozens of deaths.

*Buy Tron Legacy posters at eBay.

American commandos rescued hostages from Somali pirates

The White House:

In a phone call from the U.S. Capitol immediately after the State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama informs John Buchanan that his daughter Jessica was rescued by U.S. Special Operations Forces in Somalia, Jan. 24, 2012. First Lady Michelle Obama stands behind the President. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Here's the story.

Link roundup

1. Like the Prisoner, but with good intentions:

Its detractors may end up dubbing it "Dementiaville", but Switzerland is brushing aside a debate raging among geriatric-care experts with plans to build a mock-1950s village catering exclusively for elderly sufferers of Alzheimer's and other debilitating mental illnesses.

Via.

2. "What do Army junior officers actually recommend reading?: Their own top 10."

3. A hobbyist piloting a drone spotted a river of blood - - a meatpacking plant in Dallas was simply ejecting blood into the river. Via.

4. Sam Wolfe Connelly has a new shop featuring some illustrations I've featured.

5. Paul Pape's having a sale on his custom made stuck in carbonite sculptures.

Sculptures by Stephen Ives

A small selection of sculptures by Stephen Ives.












There's many more clever, provocative sculptures on display at his site. Via these sites.

Link roundup

1. This week's Google research challenge is on an interesting topic. (I think this guy is the answer, and this is a description of the battle.)

2. Depressing article about soldiers struggling to reassimilate at an army base in Washington.

3. Thomas Barnett on the unlikelihood of war with China.

4. Walter Russell Mead on the possibility of war with Iran and Turkey's competition with Iran for influence.

Link roundup

1. Kotaku's review of the dark side choices in Star Wars: The Old Republic:

I cannot remember a single video game experience that has made me feel quite as dirty and evil

2. You might as well make peace with your body type, because absent drugs, dieting doesn't really work.

3. Why WW2-era fighter planes used pink camouflage.

Link roundup

1. Ice Worms:

In 1887, a glacial geologist named George Frederick Wright was hiking across the Muir Glacier in southeast Alaska when something strange caught his eye. Just as the daylight began to fade, the previously uninterrupted expanse of white snow around him began to develop what appeared to be a five o’clock shadow. These wriggling “whiskers” grew rapidly end emerged from the solid ice, leaving the snow crawling with an astonishing number of small black worms. Within approximately an hour there were tens of thousands of them criss-crossing the snow as far as he could see, leaving nary a square inch unwormed. A few hours later they began to slip effortlessly back into the ice, ultimately leaving nothing but pure white snow behind for the morning sun. The ice scientist brought news of these strange ice worms back to polite civilization, yet even over a century later little is known about the intriguing organisms.

(Been a long time since I saw the movie, but didn't they have something to do with Smilla's Sense of Snow?) Via.

2. Last week's mysterious lines in China are "are almost definitely used to calibrate China's spy satellites."

3. "By my calculations, at least 10 times as many girls are now trafficked into brothels annually as African slaves were transported to the New World in the peak years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade." Via.

Link roundup

(A few more starred items from the depths of my Google Reader feeds.)



Class Portrait by Anna Brooks and Samantha Harvey. Via.



20,000 bouncy balls dropped from a helicopter. Via.



The purpose of the space shuttle. Via.




Relatedly, might have posted this before - - The Secret History of Silicon Valley. Via.





Performing magic tricks in the drive-thru. Via these sites.

Link roundup

1. Interesting article on the history of China's Bayi Rockets, the military-sponsored basketball team that got into the big fight with Georgetown. Once dominant, the team couldn't adapt to changing rules:

From its outset, the CBA had allowed teams to import two foreign players, including retreads from the NBA, as a way to expose Chinese players to better competition. The exception was Bayi, which remained all-Chinese. It would have been embarrassing for the army team to import foreign mercenaries. Yet as better foreigners began arriving, Bayi began to struggle, which was more embarrassing. The league tried to give it special protection: Any team playing Bayi had to limit the playing time for foreign stars.

2. I enjoyed Brian Lam's ridiculous article about Steve Jobs. Its subtitle is "Regrets of An Asshole", but he: (1) timed the publishing of the article to benefit from Jobs's death; (2) goes to great pains to brag that Steve Jobs thought he was really talented; and (3) blames much of the iPhone 4 fiasco on coworkers, especially the people still at Gawker media ("I probably should have quit right after the first story was published for several different reasons. I didn't know how to say that without throwing my team under the bus, so I didn't.").

3. And speaking of articles on Steve Jobs, here's Robin Hanson discussing Jobs and signaling.

Link roundup

1. Kim Jon-Il's exiled grandson is named Han Sol.

2. Hand signals used by restaurant staff. Via.

3. Mysterious Russian radio tower. Via.

4. The Daily seems to be doing terribly, but it does feature a lot of great articles, such as this one about Zach Baron's misadventures in Las Vegas.

Link roundup

1. "Look at this graph. Study it. It is the answer to the question 'What's wrong with 1950s wages in 2011?' The core of our life -- gasoline, electricity, homes, health care and higher education -- is getting expensive faster than general inflation. Meanwhile, average wages are barely keeping up with the yellow line."

2. "Military police are investigating the disappearance of nearly 14,000 rounds of ammunition from Fort Bragg." Via.

3. Cool art by Lee Misenheimer.

Link roundup

1. Big gallery of Bruce Timm's comic work (NSFW).

2. For my fellow Blogger users: new Blogger app for IOS.

3. "Sidney Gottlieb proved to the world that there are few things more dangerous than a chemist with a metaphysical streak - especially if he collects a few thwarted ambitions. Born in 1918, he was deemed physically unfit for duty in the Second World War. Instead of going to war, he went to the University of Wisconsin, and graduated with a degree in chemistry. His degree didn't help him into the army, but it did interest the CIA."

4. From a summary of Gawker Media's first company-wide meeting:

Gawker Media's tech build-up includes what is said to be a very intense commenter system. (What was your top takeaway from the evening? I asked one writer. "Soon writers will be obsolete," the writer told me. "Reddit?" said another. To be fair, that's a common refrain over the years at Gawker, but it is an ideal outcome for a tech company. Gawker Media loves talent, but they also know there's always more talent.

(How many Gawker Media writers have you continued to follow after they left the company?)

Link roundup

1. The winners of the Neil Gaiman-inspired short story competition.



2. Weekly Standard reporter in Libya:

I helped call in my first NATO strike yesterday. We were being shelled.

Via.



3. Apparently Ron Artest is going to be on Dancing With the Stars.

Leaflets being dropped by NATO on Tripoli

Apparently NATO is dropping these leaflets on Tripoli. Via.

"The Irish teen who tracks and kills Gaddafi's snipers"

"His mother is from Belfast, his father is Libyan and, as if drawn from the script of a Hollywood movie, he is now using what he learnt hunting game in the desert to liberate Zawiyah, his city that lies almost at the gates of Tripoli."

Lockheed Martin's spinning, flying machine

Lockheed Martin's "Samarai" flies like a spinning maple seed. It can take off from the ground like a helicopter, and you can throw it like a boomerang. Via these sites.

Link roundup

1. A report that Chelsea Ives, "an Olympics ambassador who helped to promote the Games with London Mayor Boris Johnson was yesterday exposed as a riot suspect." Turned in by her mother. Via.



2. A fun conspiracy theory - - is this the real story behind Bin Laden's death?



3. Photo of Disney's Progress City.



*Buy Disneyland toys at eBay.

Link roundup

1. How to remove yourself from various background check sites.

2. Good article about the history of DDT. For example:

The German army purposely triggered malaria epidemics, such as in Italy in 1944. Drainage pumps on the Roman marshes ordinarily pumped excess water out to sea, desiccating the land enough to make it malaria-free and thus habitable for thriving cities and towns. By stilling the pumps, the Germans could have flooded the region and effectively impeded the Allies' progress. But German malariologist Erich Martini had studied the habits of the local malaria vector, Anopheles labranchiae, in depth, and he knew that inundating the region with the Mediterranean's salty waters would allow A. labranchiae, which can thrive in brackish water, to flourish. And so rather than simply stopping the pumps, they reversed them, salinating some ninety-eight thousand acres. Then they confiscated local stockpiles of antimalarial drugs. As the German soldiers departed, they left behind "clever sketches," The New York Times reported in 1944, "of the plague of mosquitoes that would follow the flooding of the farmlands." More than 100,000 of the 245,000 locals sickened with malaria.

3. Today's economic news (aside from the stock market's freefall, and the continuing slow motion collapse of the Euro) was about protests in Israel. This was the most interesting analysis. (Hint, their economic problems don't really look anything like the USA's.)