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Hungry? A former Google chef says, “They had no budget, it was foie gras and Kobe steaks every day.” The Semi-Charmed Life Of A Tech Company Chef
comment posted at 8:54 PM on Sep-11-12

India mourns Dr Verghese Kurien who passed away today at age 90. If you have eaten butter in India, or been able to add a spot of milk to your tea, then you've experienced the impact of Operation Flood — the largest dairy development program in the world. Operation Flood helped India become the world's largest milk producer by 2010–11, with close to 17 percent of the global production. Gujarat-based co-operative, the "Anand Milk Union Limited", often called Amul, was the engine behind the success of the programme. While much more can be said about Dr Kurien's work with dairy farmers, cooperatives, milk production as well as his awards and honours, his best known legacy is perhaps the creation of the Amul brand. The little girl who knew just how to poke India's funny bone has her very own Previously.
comment posted at 8:48 AM on Sep-9-12
comment posted at 9:10 AM on Sep-9-12

Dear Wikipedia, I am Philip Roth. I had reason recently to read for the first time the Wikipedia entry discussing my novel “The Human Stain.” The entry contains a serious misstatement that I would like to ask to have removed.
comment posted at 3:32 AM on Sep-8-12

The Political Persecution of Australia’s First Female Prime Minister "Can it really be the case that a tax – a carbon tax – could spur so many people to such levels of hatred? I find that impossible to believe, so I have to conclude that the persecution of Julia Gillard has to be about something else." Warning - some text and imagery may be NSFW or offensive - a "Vanilla" version is available
comment posted at 10:00 PM on Sep-6-12

What are the secrets of former American President Bill Clinton noted oratory? Is it the writing, the body language or his unique human touch? Whatever it is, his gift for speeches was on full display at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.
comment posted at 8:39 PM on Sep-6-12
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comment posted at 12:55 AM on Sep-7-12

Comedians are using their fans for co-ordinated safety in numbers bullying. Simon Pegg, Ricky Gervais and Noel Fielding [...] have used their combined follower count of just under 6 million to bully people – Gervais in particular does so repeatedly – and I’m sick of the fact that they’re not called to account for it. You will have heard plenty about “trolls and haters” in the wider media, but very little about celebrities endorsing and directing this behaviour.
comment posted at 3:18 AM on Sep-6-12

Libraries all over the US and Canada are wrestling with bedbug infestations. In fact, the Travel Channel has named libraries the #1 bedbug infestation spot. Some libraries are closing temporarily due to bedbug problems; others have had to destroy valuable historic books due to serious infestations caused by well-meaning patrons (who then contemplate suing to get their library privileges back). The problem has become so common that some libraries are posting their bedbug management policies on their websites, and several have detailed them to the news media. Rest assured, however, the bedbugs are not a terrorist attack.
comment posted at 4:52 AM on Sep-5-12

Now that we're in the homestretch toward the November Presidential election, it's time to choose your favorite electoral-vote projection oracle. All of these are sites that monitor individual state polls and voter sentiment trendlines. Here are some options: — Electoral-vote.com has been at it since 2004 and is a bonanza for polling stats junkies. Currently it's calling the electoral vote at 332 for Obama, 206 for Romney, with no toss-ups. (It takes 270 to win.) The site is run from The Netherlands by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, who prepares daily commentary and news analysis. His leanings are Democratic; for those who are bothered by that, he suggests a Republican-leaning alternative:
comment posted at 8:40 AM on Sep-4-12

Andy agreed. “ ‘Cloud Atlas’ is our getting back to the spectacle of the sixties and seventies, the touchstone movies,” he said, rubbing his bald dome like a magic lantern. The model for their vision, they explained, was Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which the Wachowskis had first seen when Lana, then Larry, was ten and Andy seven. (Previously and Previously)
comment posted at 12:52 AM on Sep-4-12
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comment posted at 3:21 AM on Sep-4-12

Knocked Over: On Biology, Magical Thinking and Choice “Spare me the self-help bullshit,” I snarled at my sister while I sat, snot-nosed and gasping, behind a gas station off I-88 on my way home from Iowa. “Life isn’t Eat, Pray, Love. If you try to turn this into a teachable moment I will fucking scream.”
comment posted at 1:56 AM on Sep-4-12

In another attempt to increase the popularity of cricket in America, a tournament based on T20 (Twenty-twenty), an extremely short form of the game where a match can last as little as three hours, is planned for next year. Though cricket is one of the oldest sports in the country, and the USA is one of the 106 members of the International Cricket Council, speculation still periodically emerges (Slate, BBC) on whether the nation is ready for cricket's big 'breakthrough'.
comment posted at 7:12 AM on Sep-2-12

Tomorrow, Friday, August 31, 2012, you'll have that rare chance to do something "once in a blue moon". Perhaps a little moon music will be in order? Like, say... Blue Moon? DUH! Or, getting a bit more regional, Blue Moon of Kentucky? Then there's the other colors: Kiko and the Lavender Moon, Yellow Moon, Pink Moon, Silver Moon and...
comment posted at 10:32 PM on Aug-30-12

German dad dons skirt to support his cross-dressing five-year-old son.
comment posted at 3:13 PM on Aug-30-12
comment posted at 2:35 AM on Aug-31-12

If you haven't heard much about how takeover deals like Dunkin' and KB Toys work, that's because Mitt Romney and his private equity brethren don't want you to. The new owners of American industry are the polar opposites of the Milton Hersheys and Andrew Carnegies who built this country, commercial titans who longed to leave visible legacies of their accomplishments, erecting hospitals and schools and libraries, sometimes leaving behind thriving towns that bore their names. The men of the private equity generation want no such thing.

Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital
comment posted at 8:15 PM on Aug-29-12

Atos Healthcare is a French company that's a contractor to the UK department for Work and Pensions, hired to test disabled benefits claimants on whether they're fit to work. If they are, they'll lose their disability benefits and are back on normal unemployment benefits. It is a controversial company, as its standards for declaring people fit to work are very low, as The Daily Mirror has been showing. By design or through incompetence, quite a few people who are clearly incapable of work are declared fit for work anyway, lose their benefits and some of them even die because of it, either through suicide or through the stress and healthcare problems caused by losing their benefits. (previously.)
comment posted at 7:56 PM on Aug-29-12

The worlds shortest scheduled airline flight is from Westray Island in the Orkney Islands to the nearby Papa Westray Island. You can watch all two minutes of the flight.
comment posted at 9:17 PM on Aug-28-12
comment posted at 10:56 PM on Aug-28-12

YOUR QUESTION: You have the ability to, for one night, reanimate any two historical personages (“historical” = “not currently alive”) and have them discuss/debate a topic of your own choosing. Which two historical personages do you choose, and what subject do you have them discuss/debate? (from MeFi's own Jscalzi)
comment posted at 1:41 AM on Aug-29-12

The Saawan So Far: In Hindi, as it is in other Indian languages, they are simply the Nairutya Marut, the Winds from the South West. "Bursting" every year at about June for the last sixty million years, the Monsoons are the pre-eminent weather formation for the lands south of the Himalayas; over a period of three months, they travel all over the sub-continent in a north-easterly direction. They are India's meteorological tryst with destiny; as a past Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor once said, "If it rains everything is well on earth and cordial in heaven[...] I am once again hostage to monsoon;[...i]f it rains, the monetary policy works. [...] I want you to realise that all of us are 'Chasing the Monsoon'":
comment posted at 10:20 AM on Aug-26-12
comment posted at 10:25 AM on Aug-26-12
comment posted at 6:02 AM on Aug-28-12

"Gawker has obtained a large cache of confidential internal financial documents from more than 20 secretive hedge funds and other investment vehicles in which Mitt Romney has stashed his considerable wealth." Ongoing attempts to digest and analyze the dense contents are here.
comment posted at 11:53 PM on Aug-23-12

There is growing discontent within the food service industry between brick-and-mortar restaurants and mobile food trucks. Many restaurants feel that the food trucks' mobility advantages take away their business and support cities enacting time-and-location restrictions on food trucks in order to "level the playing field." The food trucks argue that these time-and-location restrictions are unfair because they prohibit the food trucks from competing fairly. In the Boston area, this discontent has been playing out in an ongoing feud between the Phantom Gourmet restaurant-reviewing brothers and the Staff Meal food trucks.
comment posted at 3:40 AM on Aug-23-12

How To Deal With An “Unruly Passenger” On A Cross Country Flight An independent film producer on a flight from New York to L.A. shares his conversation with a man who was so unstable that the plane had to land early in Denver.
comment posted at 5:52 PM on Aug-21-12

When a single politician says something insane, we tend to write it off as the mutterings of a feeble mind. But when there is a long history of anti-abortion politicians saying that women can't be impregnated when raped, then perhaps it's not just a new tactic in the War on Women, but a renewed attack on science-based reality.
comment posted at 9:32 PM on Aug-19-12

"Forget the actual product. What you want to read is the comments." As said by a friend who pointed this out. Boy howdy was she right.
comment posted at 3:41 AM on Aug-21-12

Following claims that Ecuador would accept Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's asylum application, Britain has threatened to raid the Ecuadorian embassy if Assange is not handed over.
Vans are gathered outside the London embassy, reports suggest British police have been seen entering the building. Live stream here.
comment posted at 5:06 PM on Aug-15-12
comment posted at 2:59 AM on Aug-16-12
comment posted at 4:26 AM on Aug-16-12
comment posted at 9:04 AM on Aug-16-12
comment posted at 9:08 AM on Aug-16-12

James Fallows, in a series of interesting blog posts, questions the typical English pronunciation of China's capital city arguing that "the "jing" in Beijing is pronounced basically like the "jing" in Jingle Bells. It's essentially the normal English j- sound. What it's not like is the Frenchified zh- sound you hear in "azure" or "leisure," or at the end of "sabotage."" One reader suggests, "My working theory about "Beijing/bay-zhing" is that at some deep, unconscious level, English speakers secretly believe that all foreign languages are French and should be pronounced as such in the absence of instructions to the contrary." Another reader argues, "Major cities and countries have historically had different names in different languages, and these names serve a good purpose by being easy to pronounce and identify in the languages where they are used. There is really no more reason to say "Beijing" in English than "München" or "Moskva.""
comment posted at 12:35 AM on Aug-14-12

The man likely to be Australia's next Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, has used a lunchtime speech to the conservative think-tank the Institute of Public Affairs to call for Australia's racial vilification laws to be wound back. Section 18C makes race hate speech unlawful, but not illegal. Abbott's calls come in the same week that Facebook has been in the firing-line over hosting the controversial "Aboriginal Memes" page.
comment posted at 8:03 AM on Aug-12-12

A Post-Mortem on India's Blackout: IEEE Spectrum's energy, power, and green tech blog gives an excellent overview of what led to the devastating blackouts that occurred in India on July 30th and 31st leaving more than 600 million people (approx 10% of the world's population) without electricity. Bonus: BBC's Soutik Biswas gives us 10 interesting factoids on India's power situation to chew on.
comment posted at 8:32 AM on Aug-10-12

We are so steeped in the tradition of railways as a single line cutting through the wilderness. But [...] there is a tradition you can tap into that completely inverts what has become the cliché, and focuses instead on branching lines, on sidings, on reversibility and on the breaching of timetables—and you end up with a notion of rails that can be an ineffable symbol of potentiality. I liked the idea of trying to honour that alternative tradition.

But that's all post-facto to the basic gag—and it is a gag—of someone shouting "there she blows!" and it's a mole, not a whale.

BoingBoing interviews China Mieville on his new book, Railsea.
comment posted at 5:26 AM on Aug-10-12

204 Nations, 204 Photographers, 204 Londoners - The World In London
comment posted at 6:29 AM on Aug-9-12

'Bookish' Australians indifferent to Olympics success.
comment posted at 2:25 AM on Aug-9-12

From TOR.com: What Everybody Gets Wrong About Jekyll and Hyde: 'And when I say everybody, I mean everybody.'
comment posted at 6:34 PM on Aug-8-12

McSweeney's will list 90 reasons, a day at a time over the next 90 days, on why you should vote for Barack Obama in November. Today was the first.
comment posted at 5:36 PM on Aug-8-12

The Blue has had Dark Knights Rises posts and 'Call Me Maybe' posts, but Batman Maybe combines the best of the two. (SLYT). Spoilers, obviously).
comment posted at 9:00 AM on Aug-8-12

What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress? [NYTimes.com]
comment posted at 9:10 AM on Aug-8-12

The history of the Sikh Diaspora in USA and Canada goes back to Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1897. Emerging as a casteless alternative to the ongoing Hindu Muslim wars in India, the Sikhs have always been known as a martial tribe, their prowess and courage respected by the British and others alike. Colloquially addressed respectfully as Sardarji, the men take Singh (lion) as their middle name while the women bear the name Kaur (princess). This custom further confirmed the equality of both genders as was the tradition set by the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak. The first Sikh Organization was The Pacific Coast Khalsa Diwan Society organized in the spring of 1912.
comment posted at 6:02 AM on Aug-6-12

Wig-making may be the only industry that relies on religious devotion, Hollywood glamor, and raw materials harvested from human heads.
comment posted at 3:24 AM on Aug-6-12
comment posted at 5:12 AM on Aug-6-12