Reed Flute Cave

2009 November 15

Reed Flute Cave, Guilin, Guangxi, China

中国广西桂林的芦笛岩

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Wal-Mart

2009 September 1

This New York Post article by Charles Platt has one serving of pro-capitalism platitude, and a few servings of fascinating anecdotes about working at Wal-Mart, including a little bit about the application screening quiz anda little bit about the Telxon:

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IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster read more…

The plugin formerly known as Map Color Range in GIMP 2.2 and Color Range Mapping in GIMP 2.4 appears to have been removed in GIMP 2.6.

One way to get it back is to just grab the plug-in file from a previous version.  For example, you can run:

wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/Everything/i386.newkey/os/Packages/gimp-2.4.5-1.fc9.i386.rpm

rpm2cpio gimp-2.4.5-1.fc9.i386.rpm|cpio -idvm

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</object read more…

Because only the "in crowd" knows how to act

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Toys

2009 June 6

An approximate intake of calories per person in the U.S. from 1970 to 2007, broken down by category:

Source: USDA

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I doubt this is what Phil Gramm meant by "nation of whiners", but this memorable phrase of his sometimes to mind when I hear Americans complaining about their lot in news interviews.

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From what little I know, gay rights activists seem to generally advance the imprecise meme that being homosexual is an inborn trait.  I particularly remember this hilariously uncomfortable interview:

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