Gulfstream

http://flickr.com/photos/iiiii/57839726/ Sign mischief via iiiii. Where I went to university the signs on the study carrels could be turned from “Please return books to sorting shelves” to “Please turn books into snorting elves.” 23:06

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb/
browse_thread/thread/390c8093cbcf4a95/bef903f4426a0291 Old school newsgroup reminiscence! This thread is somewhat representative. 18:22

http://www.slate.com/id/2128743/ Henry Blodget’s psychological profiles of Bush appointees (via their financial disclosure forms) have been rather good; this one is of Ben Bernanke. (Another, of Harriet Miers, reveals that at 60, she has a net worth of only $675,000 despite earning $624,000 a year in her last private-sector job; Blodget speculates that this may be because she’s had to spend a lot on medical care for her mother.) 00:11

http://justgiving.com/Statements/about_us/our_fees.asp Justgiving collects money for charity, but their fees (5% of donation) are more than PayPal’s… 19:47

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4260178.stm Surreal story about conjoined twins Reba and Lori Schappell. Says Lori, of attending her sister’s country music concerts: “I have to pay, just like every other fan that comes …” 08:30

http://www.slate.com/id/2128464/ A study of that thank-you note business, via Miers. 22:15

http://www.slate.com/id/2128361/ ”Why South Korea leads the world in stem-cell research.” 19:06

http://www.slate.com/id/2128080/ “The truth is that individuals and institutions usually turn to architecture at moments of decline. … ‘During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters … The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done.’” 23:24

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051017/full/051017-8.html Geologists puzzled after hot ground starts fire. 19:02

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en-GB/googlemail.html Google mail removing instances of “gmail” from site for UK users; from October 19th, all new accounts will be @googlemail.com. And: “What if I’m a UK user who already has a Gmail address? Will that address ever change? / Unfortunately, we don’t know…” Ouch. 18:38

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051024/rice “Why is Africa Still Poor?” (Book reviews.) 18:28

http://www.miniglobz.com/games/ovni_en.html Fun little one-button Flash game. 09:21

http://www.cardstacker.com/faq.html 01:05

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/cellphones/sony-ericsson-
naming-problem-130159.php Wow, there sure are a lot of products called P990. 06:19

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/
10/09/whip09.xml Book review: how to be successful the hip-hop way. The author apparently gets new trainers every second day—if you’re going to go that far, why not get a fresh pair every day? It would be a waste? 17:10

http://www.livejournal.com/users/elysesewell/33965.html Total asshole awards. (Gold is the money.) 08:59

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_toilets 05:37

http://www.slate.com/id/2127567 On the greatness of Bill Simmons, ESPN’s Sports Guy. Simmons really is a helluva writer, and I wish I was able to appreciate more of what he writes. I love how his quotes archive is mostly sports quotes, but with some non-sports quotes mixed in, as if the sports/non-sports balance matched their real-world relative importance. 06:01

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/wdc/97729383.html “Strategy for Reading the Best of CL page” 04:40

http://www.lise.jp/honyaku/noguchi.html Personal filing system—involves no categorisation! 02:32

http://maps.a9.com/ 01:35

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/051010crat_
atlarge Malcolm Gladwell on the college admissions process. 23:26

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4306936.stm The best places to live, according some calculation. (Only three countries in the top ten: Canada, Australia and Switzerland.) The problem with these lists is that they bear very little resemblance to where people say they would like to live. 20:44

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/
09/18/wkat418.xml Hurricane-starved bit bulls take on an actual bull. 17:22

http://www.slate.com/id/2127374 Dahlia Lithwick is impressed with Roberts’s first day in court. (She’s not so happy with Miers’s, though it seems a little unfair for her to be personally criticised for only being in the, oh, let’s say, top 0.1% of legal professionals rather than the top 0.001%.) 11:07

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3177 How the NBA is marketing itself to China via Yao Ming. (Apparently, a few years before David Stern took over the NBA in 1984, the final was shown on tape delay.) 20:15

http://www.ppsp.org/PledgePicket-index.asp Planned Parenthood Southeast Pennsylvania is asking people to pledge them some amount of money for each protestor that turns up outside their clinic during Setember and October; a billboard will display a running total of the amount raised. This is kinda neat: essentially they’ve arranged things so that the greater the effort their antagonists put in, the more money they raise. The runing total is a work of genius too: without it there wouldn’t be much point doing this. (Though I can’t quite figure out why this part is so important.) It also raises the intriguing possibility that the pro-lifers would start up a pledge-a-picket scheme of their own. They could even make one up: psychologically, it would have the greatest effect if its total fluctuated randomly, but was always slightly more than Planned Parenthood’s. 03:22

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/051003ta_
talk_paumgarten Story difficult to summarise, but basically someone ran into the back of someone else’s Saab, causing some minor cosmetic damage; in lieu of damages, the perpetrator tries to get the Saab owner to accept a donation to Katrina victims. 03:11

http://www.herodios.com/atsign.htm What the “@” sign is called in different countries. 21:43