Swans on Tea

CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years
According to the report, sections of the documents— “almost invariably the most crucial passages”—are marred by an indelible black ink that renders the lines impossible to read, due to a top-secret highlighting policy that began at the agency’s inception in 1947.
CIA Director Porter Goss has ordered [...]

Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar 2008
As we head into the traditional western Holiday Season, I’d like to present this Hubble Space Telescope imagery Advent Calendar. Every day, for the next 25 days, a new photo will be revealed here from the amazing Hubble Space Telescope. As I take this chance to share these images of [...]

Some Lists
[H]ere instead is a list of phrases that (at the time of this posting) turn up no hits on Google:
“ate a violin”
“driver-side bidet”
“unlike normal furries,”
“Sarah, plain and tall and a cyborg”
“people are too civil on the internet”
And some more in the comments
“differential equations saved my life” – 0 results
“chess for Wookies” – 0 results
“erotic [...]

Science Is Interested in You
Are you worried about global warming? Should you be worried about global warming? Understanding the dangers posed by climate change and evaluating policies toward it require some understanding of science. How do we know the Earth is warming? What will happen when the temperature increases? What can be done to mitigate [...]

Real Advice Hurts
We can’t get good at something solely by reading about it. And we’ll never make giant leaps in any endeavor by treating it like a snack food that we munch on whenever we’re getting bored. You get good at something by doing it repeatedly. And by listening to specific criticism from people who [...]

Shopping Cart Science
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Here we have a beautifully illustrated example of Newton’s First Law of motion involving shopping carts. Did some force push those carts out the back end of the trailer? Not at all.

Movie Poster Quiz
Guess the movie from just one letter taken from the movie’s poster (not necessarily the first letter, or most artistically distinct letter that appears). I got five.