tech@vedella

[Video Link] I traveled to Japan recently with PBS NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien, and helped shoot and produce a series of stories related to the March 11 disasters: earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis. The first of those stories from Miles aired last night: on "the elusive science of earthquake prediction -- whether seismologists will [...]

Today's Google Doodle honors Mary Blair, the Disney artist who defined the look of "It's a Small World" and the tremendous tile-mural at the Contemporary Resort in Walt Disney World. Today is Blair's centenary.

I would just like to take a moment to congratulate my alma mater on being ranked #1 by the World Quidditch Association. Rock Chalk!

Glenn Greenwald rounds up a number of reports related to the killing of al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son by an unmanned aerial drone from the US: Two weeks after the U.S. killed American citizen Anwar Awlaki with a drone strike in Yemen — far from any battlefield and with no due process — it did the same [...]

Reports the Associated Press: "Moammar Gadhafi's blood-streaked body has been stashed in a commercial freezer at a shopping center as Libyans try to keep it away from crowds as they figure out where and when to bury the hated leader."

Scenes from a Multiverse, the delightfully weird webcomic from John Rosenberg (creator of the transcendently bizarre Goats, is now available in book form. Rosenberg created Scenes as a more accessible alternative to Goats, whose convoluted storylines, while immensely entertaining (and mindbending) required quite a commitment to follow. By contrast, Scenes mostly takes the form of [...]

Ommatidia's recipe for "Bolognese Machiavelli" is a delightfully savage bit of cookery: 1. Arrange to have garlic and onions cast into hot oil. 2. The carrot and celery you must divide against themselves. Ground beef, too, shall turn upon the burner; crush any coherent resistance with a spoon of wood. Sautee until no hint of [...]

The UK Open Rights Group has released a report on the way that the UK government approaches copyright policy, in the wake of the government's recent plaudits for the UK film industry's online offering. This matters because the UK government's position is that the film industry constitutes a major part of the British economy, and [...]

Beyond Infinity, an installation by french artist Serge Salat, is described as "interweaving mirrors, light, music, and fractal art" to "conflate visitors' perceptions of space". Sponsored by Buick, it was also apparently the world's most awesome vehicle showroom for the two days it was installed in Shanghai's Westgate Mall. Design Boom via JWZ

Haley Pierson-Cox of CRAFT found a tutorial from Wee Little Stitches to make a personalized cross-stitched iPhone cover. It uses this terrific Justice League of America Cross Stitch Pattern. How-To: Cross-Stitched Cell Phone Case

[Video Link] If you like this, be sure to check out the fun companion iPhone app. Anne Lucht's visual music clip takes you for a trip round the town of Düsseldorf, Germany - the place where electronic music made some huge leaps 30-40 years ago with bands like Can, Neu! and Kraftwerk. A low-res alien [...]

Khaddafy. Gadhafi. Gaddafi. Qadhafi. Qaddafi. el-Qaddafi. "Good luck googling his obituary." (Rachel Maddow Show)

[Video Link] In the video above: Noted troll Andrew Escher Auernheimer, aka weev of Goatse Security, on his federal case and why Occupy Wall Street matters to him: "I've had a strong decade of infuriating rich people," he says, "I am the 99%." Among other things, weev speaks about his friend Ari Douglas. He also [...]

Tom Watson, the Labour MP who's tirelessly hounded Murdoch's News of the World over its illegal spying, has flown to the USA to attend the NewsCorp's shareholder meeting (he's got the AFL-CIO's proxy) to reveal that NewsCorp's sins go much deeper than the odd bit of mass-scale crude voicemail hacking. This is a pretty plausible [...]

Susannah Breslin in Forbes: "Really, there isn’t much of a distinction left between porn and snuff, between selling sex and selling death, between the world’s desire to see a dead person dragged through the street by a hooting mob and the media’s desire to give us what we want no matter what it is."

From NASA: "Earth is about to pass through a stream of debris from Halley's comet, source of the annual Orionid meteor shower. Forecasters expect the shower to peak on Saturday morning, Oct. 22nd, with more than 15 meteors per hour. Earth isn't the only world in the debris stream; NASA researchers will also be watching [...]

[Video Link] The documentary Revenge Of The Electric Car opens in the US beginning Oct. 21. Looks like fun. Revenge Of The Electric Car follows 4 larger-than-life entrepreneurs at the forefront of the electric car race. First, there's Bob Lutz -- Mr Detroit himself, the cigar-smoking vice-chairman of GM, who has been making gas-guzzling cars [...]

I'm not sure I have any comment for this, other than to say how pleased I am that puns work just as well in math. Via Vincent Knight

There are many pretenders to the throne of Violet Beauregarde. Buddy Bumper Ball

Whenever you see a dust cloud, there's an almost instinctual reflex to start talking about The Grapes of Wrath. It's natural. But it's often misplaced. Your average cloud of dirt is less apocalyptic than the dust storms that ripped across the Central Plains of the United States during the 1930s. They can also have different [...]