Heavy Metal
This guy (who may or may not be James Bond) decided to create a bar of Iridium which turns out to be harder and more complicated than you might think, and wrote about it. (Part 1, Part 2) (via Metafilter)
The best way to find a line is to cross it
Even though Aum has officially been stripped of its religious status and tax concessions, its computer stores continue to generate impressive revenues, sufficient to fund new growth. Still adhering to Asahara's original prophecies, loyal cult members are making preparations for the Judgment Day. They believe that when that day comes, the entire population of the world will be annihilated. The only survivors will be those who have adhered to the guru's teachings.
Determined to stay rational, to record what was happening -- though maybe, he thought grimly, it would be just for those who'd find his remains -- he unhooked the underwater camera from his wet suit. He aimed it at his watch and snapped two pictures. Then he turned the camera toward himself at arm's length, snapping two more.
He reached for his diving slate and used the pencil to write the time: 10:28.
It had been two hours now. He fought a rising panic. Soon hypothermia would set in. How long could he last out here? How many more hours?
Then another thought came: If he survived to dusk in these cold waters, that, he knew, was when the great white sharks feed.
What's worse? Being menaced and bitten by a military German shepherd? Or being bitten while being compelled to eat a couple of struggling palm-sized spiders in front of a Las Vegas casino of sneering observers?
If you can answer without intellectually rupturing yourself, you may be right for a career in the military or in entertainment, contingent on how you wish to be compensated for your labor. You'll get almost nothing if you go the way of the enlisted man, a lot more if you're a private Pentagon contractor. However, the highest remuneration will be yours if you make it into televised entertainment.
“I’m a conservative, I’m a Christian, and I think that the United States is the greatest country that ever existed on the face of the earth. And because of those three beliefs, by law I have to be stuffed and mounted and put in the Smithsonian under the ‘Why He Didn’t Get His Own Sitcom’ display.”
Again, the problem he runs into, and this was one of the things that interested me in writing this piece, was how do you have a very rigid set of beliefs, when being a comic depends on being able to pick your target and call it as you see it. He’s trying to walk a tightrope of being irreverent and reverent at the same time, of tweaking conventions and proclaiming laws at the same time.
In 1997, the Toyota group suffered what seemed like a catastrophic failure in its production system when a key factory—the sole source of a particular kind of valve essential to the braking systems of all Toyota vehicles—burned to the ground overnight. Because of their much-vaunted just-in-time inventory system, the company maintained only three days of stock, while a new factory would take six months to build. In the meantime Toyota's production of over 15,000 cars a day would grind to an absolute halt. This was the kind of disaster with the potential to wreck not just the company itself, but the entire Japanese automotive industry. Clearly, then, Toyota, along with the more than 200 other companies that are members of the extended Toyota group, had ample incentives to find a solution.
"Back in 1993, I was playing the game and I sucked. And I'm not talking about sucking at playing the game. My character in Madden sucked. I was the worst guy on the team," Strahan said with a huge grin as he turned his attention away from the television set and his NFC East rival, Roy Williams of the Cowboys to tell me his story. "But it made me want to work harder. I seriously wanted to get better in real life so I wasn't so bad in Madden."
Last Sunday, U.S. officials told reporters that someone held secretly by Pakistan was the source of the bulk of the information justifying the alert. The New York Times obtained Khan's name independently, and U.S. officials confirmed it when it appeared in the paper the next morning.
None of those reports mentioned at the time that Khan had been under cover helping the authorities catch al Qaeda suspects, and that his value in that regard was destroyed by making his name public.