This is another off-topic article that I found fascinating.
From the article:
Billy Beane is an ex-ballplayer who, according to the scouts who recruited him out of high school in 1980, was destined for a successful big-league career. They were wrong. During his 10 years in the majors, Billy Beane’s vaunted athletic prowess and skill never played [...]

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This is another fascinating article for my off-topic series.
From the article:
They are said to produce unparalleled sound quality. Until now, however, no one has been able to explain why 300-year-old Stradivarius violins have never been matched in terms of musical expressiveness and projection.
A study has found that the secret may be explained by the consistent [...]

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Over all, French travelers landed 19th out of 21 nations worldwide, far behind the first-place Japanese, considered most polite, quiet and tidy. Following the Japanese as most-liked tourists were the Germans, British and Canadians. Americans finished in 11th place alongside the Thais.
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My Comment:
This is a little off-topic, but I just couldn’t resist posting this [...]

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In which our heroine Su Fei goes around Beijing, asking Chinese people what their English names are, and why they need them. Who said China is not a creative country? - Starring Su Fei, shot and edited by Luke Mines, with music by Fernando Fidanza
Watch the YouTube video here.
Check out the Sexy Beijing series here.
Sexy [...]

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While eating out in Moscow, choosing a suitable place is not a problem - one can find reliable food almost everywhere without challenging your stomach. But outside the city, things are different. Considerable care should be taken when eating on your journey. Luckily, times have changed, and quality food can be found outside cities. While [...]

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Who cares about Vicky? Well, young women like Vicky are reeking demographic havoc all over the planet. These party girls are too busy to have a family, and all of us will ultimately pay the price.
Her friend Vicky Yang is hunched over a borrowed laptop, downloading an e-mail from a pesky client on her cell [...]

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The Carrie Bradshaw lifestyle (Sex and the City) is showing up in unexpected places, with unintended consequences.
Three demographic facts are at the core of the New Girl Order. First, women—especially, but not only, in the developed world—are getting married and having kids considerably later than ever before. According to the UN’s World Fertility Report, the [...]

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I have written a couple of essays regarding the Greek impact on the rise of modern science, and why the Scientific Revolution didn’t happen in the Islamic world. I find this to be an interesting topic, especially since there are so many myths regarding this perpetrated by Muslims and their apologists today, so I will [...]

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Tiny ‘Tin Whiskers’ Imperil Electronics
The Associated Press - 20 hours ago
(AP) — They’ve ruined missiles, silenced communications satellites and forced nuclear power plants to shut down. Pacemakers, consumer gadgets and even a …
Within a whisker of disaster Fort Worth Star Telegram
A Look at Big Tin-Whisker Failures The Associated Press
Tiny ‘Tin Whiskers’ Plague Electronics The Associated Press
all [...]

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The Naval Base Coronado near San Diego has gone unnoticed since it’s groundbreaking in 1967. Then Google Earth had to come in and ruin everything. The satellite mapping site revealed to the public that, from the air, the structure was shaped like a swastika (oops!). Turns out that the Navy knew about this all along, [...]

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BERLIN: Hitler’s globe is missing. Wolfram Pobanz, a 68-year-old retired cartographer, is positive that it’s not the one in the Deutsches Historisches Museum, with the Russian bullet hole through Germany, and he can prove it.
Neither is it the one in the Märkisches Museum, the Berlin history museum nearby, nor the one in a geographical institute [...]

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The story of the astronomers unit - amateur astronomers who assisted the Haganah in gathering intelligence about the Arab Legion’s movements in and around Jerusalem - still rouses Gihon, an 85-year-old professor, archaeologist and historian, to enthusiasm.
“It all began one morning in the fall of 1947, when David Zaichik came to see me,” he recalled. [...]

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One hundred years of technological progress can be erased in minutes by nature’s fury. Recent disasters have left not only destruction, but also heroism in their wake, and we can learn from the experiences of the survivors. The right tools, skills and mind-set—the survival worldview—will help you withstand the worst.
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A comical cataclysmic card game for 2-6 players of all ages. A humorous confrontation between touchy world powers as each player attempts to sway his opponents’ populations with diplomacy, propaganda, and finally nuclear weaponry. Little old ladies defect in electric cars and the dread SUPERGERM spreads devastation! Takes about 10 minutes to learn and about [...]

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This is a resource for all things about amateur Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): How-to’s, links, videos, images and a discussion group.
Link to this website.
Among other things, this is where we’ll be listing all the parts, software and instructions to build each of our UAVs. Here are some starting links for the first five (and a [...]

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Here’s a fun exercise for conservatives: Spend some time just listening to your liberal friends. Don’t bother to say anything at all. You’ll be amazed. I’ve certainly been wowed every time I’ve tried it.
8. Israel. Israel is a pretty bad and nasty place. This is from a very liberal friend with many Jewish friends.
10. Population. [...]

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Backyard astronomers can float through the cosmos, navigating 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies, with Google’s latest online venture.
The internet giant this week unveiled Sky, part of its popular Google Earth program, which allows users to view the night sky above and zoom in on faraway constellations and planets.
The high-resolution images have been provided [...]

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Buried for 2,000 years in its native soil, China’s terracotta army is on the move. Our critic joins the parade
In 1974 a group of Chinese peasants sinking a well on scrubby land outside the city of Xi’an discovered some fragments of terracotta. As the work progressed, one side of the well disappeared into an underground [...]

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Lucy and Pete, returning from a remote Pacific island, find that the airline has damaged the identical antiques that each had purchased. An airline manager says that he is happy to compensate them but is handicapped by being clueless about the value of these strange objects. Simply asking the travelers for the price is hopeless, [...]

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BEIJING — The 22-year-old was a freelance prostitute. Henna-haired, eyebrows painted and dressed no differently than a college student, she moved from beauty salon to beauty salon, taking calls on her mobile phone from salon managers when they couldn’t find enough girls for all their customers.
She said she wasn’t as well paid as call girls [...]

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TAIPEI (Defense News Weakly) - A suspected Chinese ballistic missile facility located at Delingha in the central-northern part of the country has been revealed to actually be a termite colony instead.
By The Spoof.Com
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