A lightning bolt strikes near the Dubuque County Fair, July 27, 2011 during a storm in Dubuque, Iowa. (Dave Kettering/The Telegraph Herald/AP Photo)
Pretty Cool Picture
Daily chart: how slow is the recovery? The great recession hit America even harder than previously thought, according to revised figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The recovery has been painfully slow.
life:
That’s what we call old-fashioned-airconditioning: Six-year-old panda Weiwei steps onto an ice cube to cool himself down at a zoo in Wuhan, China.
see more — Adorable Pandas
Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing. Nowadays you can’t have a long dinner-table argument about who won the Oscar for that Neil Simon movie where she plays an actress who doesn’t win an Oscar; at any moment someone will pull out a pocket device and Google it. If you need the art-history meaning of “picturesque,” you could find it in The Book of Answers, compiled two decades ago by the New York Public Library’s reference desk, but you won’t. Part of Google’s mission is to make the books of answers redundant (and the reference librarians, too). “A hamadryad is a wood-nymph, also a poisonous snake in India, and an Abyssinian baboon,” says the narrator of John Banville’s 2009 novel, The Infinities. “It takes a god to know a thing like that.” Not anymore.
The business of finding facts has been an important gear in the workings of human knowledge, and the technology has just been upgraded from rubber band to nuclear reactor. No wonder there’s some confusion about Google’s exact role in that—along with increasing fear about its power and its intentions.
(via the-feature)
life:
Shark week isn’t so fun now, huh?
Are you enjoying Shark Week so far?
Interior from Batman #251, “the Joker’s five-way revenge”, September 1973, Story by Denny O’Neil, art by Neal Adams.
Amazing! Around the world in a minute.
NASA’s unmanned, solar-powered Juno explorer blasts off today from the Cape. It will take five years to reach Jupiter, 1.7 billion miles away. (AP photo/Terry Renna)
