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13 May 2010 22:02

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U.S.: Should we trust the numbers we’ve been hearing from the oil spill?

  • The government has a responsibility to get good numbers. If it’s beyond their technical capability, the whole world is ready to help them.
  • Florida State University oceanographer Ian R. MacDonald • Regarding the numbers the government has been using to explain the growth of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. MacDonald and others claim that the spill has spewed forth far more than 5,000 barrels a day (still very high), and suggest that the method that they used to measure the spill was not designed for spills the size of the uncontrollably-spewing Gulf spill. For its part, oil company BP suggested that the leak could spew as much as 60,000 barrels a day – in other words, an Exxon Valdez worth of oil every four days. Scared yet? source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

12 Feb 2010 17:31

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World: Time for action: The U.S. and Afghanistan take the Taliban head-on

  • Get your war on! In the first major assault since Obama moved to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, NATO and the U.S. are attacking the Taliban stronghold of Marjah, which is a new style of fighting for the region. Marjah is the last large stronghold the Taliban has in the rough and tumble Helmand Province. Here’s a lineup of the troops ready to kick ass and chew bubble gum:
  • 4,500 U.S. Marines are leading the offensive
  • 1,500 Afghan troops are joining in the attack
  • 300 U.S. soldiers are taking part, too source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

06 Oct 2009 10:46

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World: Wow, that was a big battle: A U.S. soldier death toll gets perspective

  • eight Americans died in a huge weekend battle in Afghanistan; it was the worst loss of U.S. soldiers in the region in a year
  • 100 Afghan fighters died in the same battle, NATO said today, which gives an idea of the sheer scale of the fighting source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

21 Sep 2009 21:53

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Tech: The scale of World of Warcraft is beyond massive

  • 5.5 million lines of code for the game, which is 1.3 petabytes in size (a petrabyte is a BILLION megabytes)
  • 4.4 billion in-game rewards have been handed out the game’s 12 million subscribers/shut-ins source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 4 Comments • Permalink

28 Jun 2009 21:29

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U.S.: The influence of the Stonewall Riots has grown over time

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

01 Jun 2009 22:40

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Offbeat: Turning trash into highly-zoomable photorealistic art

Chris Jordan likes taking data about our how we waste, scaling it up as large as possible, zooming out and creating works of art. He rules. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
 
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