Mark Trapp

"The world maybe in meltdown but Beirut is booming. The country best known for wars, turmoil and instability has not just survived the global financial crisis, it seems to be thriving because of it. Deep down in the basement of Lebanon's Central bank treasury vaults are full. Cash has been flowing in like never before, Lebanese banks are posting record deposits and bankers say this is the best year in Lebanon's financial history. According to the country's chief banker all of this is because while the world was shocked when in September the banking giants began to wobble, Lebanon was prepared. "I saw the crisis coming and I told the commercial banks in 2007 to get out of all international investments related to the international markets", says Riad Salameh, the governor of Lebanon's Central Bank. There is a tradition of conservative regulation at the Central Bank in Lebanon, which kept the banks safe." - RAPatton via Bookmarklet

"In hopes of slowing global warming and creating “green jobs,” Congress and the incoming administration may soon impose a mandate that the nation get 10 or 15 percent of its electricity from renewable sources within a few years. Yet the experience of states that have adopted similar goals suggests that passing that requirement could be a lot easier than achieving it. The record so far is decidedly mixed: some states appear to be on track to meet energy targets, but others have fallen behind on the aggressive goals they set several years ago." - RAPatton via Bookmarklet

" “I think we are really overselling how quick, how easy and how complete the transition can be,” said George Sterzinger, executive director of the Renewable Energy Policy Project, a Washington advocacy group. More than half the states have adopted formal green-energy goals. In many states the policies, known as renewable portfolio standards, are too new to be evaluated. But so far the number of successes and failures is “sort of a 50-50 kind of affair,” said Ryan Wiser, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and co-author of a recent report on the targets." - RAPatton

That photo is an amazing juxtaposition. - Ladybug Heather

"The genetic signatures of people in Spain and Portugal provide new and explicit evidence of the mass conversions of Sephardic Jews and Muslims to Catholicism in the 15th and 16th centuries after Christian armies wrested Spain back from Muslim control, a team of geneticists reports. Twenty percent of the population of the Iberian Peninsula has Sephardic Jewish ancestry and 11 percent have DNA reflecting Moorish ancestors, the geneticists have found. Historians have debated how many Jews converted and how many chose exile. “One wing grossly underestimates the number of conversions,” said Jane S. Gerber, an expert on Sephardic history at the City University of New York." - RAPatton

"Because most of the Y chromosome remains unchanged from father to son, the proportions of Sephardic and Moorish ancestry detected in the present population are probably the same as those just after the 1492 expulsions. A high proportion of people with Sephardic ancestry was to be expected, Dr. Ray said. “Jews formed a very large part of the urban population up until the great conversions,” he said." - RAPatton

"Families wanting an old-fashioned Christmas can now decorate their home with the world's oldest species of tree - dating back 200 million years. Wollemi Pines - which were only known from fossils until 1994 - are being sold as Christmas trees for the first time by a country estate in Cornwall. Nicknamed the 'Dinosaur Tree', the species was thought to be extinct until a handful of 100 trees were found living in an Australian valley in 1994. Seeds from the original trees were sent around the world by conservationists to ensure their survival and there are currently just 8,000 examples worldwide." - RAPatton via Bookmarklet

"Its peaty flavour and pipe-and-slippers image put many people off single malt whisky before they've taken a sip. But train your tastebuds and you could soon learn to love it." - RAPatton

wow..those bottles are just so beautiful :) I'm thirsty now..oh..making irish coffee for the walk tonight... - Anna Lynn M.

+1 @anika... i'll stick to being a tequila and craft beer snob. ftw! - .LAG

I liked both because the new design is much sleeker and refined than the old one. - Mattie Kenny

liek it, but it looks weird with Helvetireader now - and that was soooo nice... well, hope for a Helvetireader and Better GReader greasemonkey updates now. - Peter Efland

eh - Charlie Anzman

And thanks to GetSatisfaction, there's an answer for why this happens. Turns out special characters "count" as more than one character. I used the > character, which is stored as more than 1 character by Twitter. Updated the blog post for this information. - Hutch Carpenter

Isn't the 140 char limit driven by SMS -- whatever it allows/dictates should be what Twitter uses - Brian Sullivan

Brian: characters like < count as one character in SMS messages. The more-than-one-character thing is specifically a function of HTML escaping. - Mark Trapp

"The answer is not "Do what you did in the pilot, only bigger." Company-wide deployments are very different from departmental ones. It's like campaigning for the U.S. presidency: you're not really running one national campaign, you're running 50 state campaigns...or 5,000 regional campaigns. Each of those campaigns has its own local leadership, demographic profile, issues, and economics." - Hutch Carpenter

And IT is always the Palm Beach County, FL of the adoption campaign. They really should know better, but they always wind up spoiling it for everyone else. - Mark Trapp

Mark - LOL...the Palm Beach County of the adoption campaign. That's a good one. - Hutch Carpenter

What a good looking couple :) - RAPatton

You both look great and happy :) *edit* and cold ;) - Michael W. May

awwww :) - Brandon

"IT sounds like a plot straight out of a science-fiction novel by Michael Crichton. Toiletry companies formulate new cutting-edge creams and lotions that contain tiny components designed to work more effectively. But those minuscule building blocks have an unexpected drawback: the ability to penetrate the skin, swarm through the body and overwhelm organs like the liver. Humans have long lived in dread of such nightmare scenarios in which swarms of creatures attack. Alfred Hitchcock envisioned menacing flocks in “The Birds.” In the 1990 film “Arachnophobia” a killer spider arrives in the United States, where it attacks and multiplies." - RAPatton

"Last month, a consumer group in London called Which? published a survey it had conducted of 67 cosmetics companies on the prevalence and safety testing of nanomaterials in personal care products. Only 17 companies responded, of which eight acknowledged using nanomaterials. “When nanotechnology was hot, everybody wanted to talk about ‘nano this, nano that.’ Look at the iPod nano,” said Dr. Hansen of Consumers Union. “But now that the concerns have come out, people are not so sure the word nano is a good thing to be touted.”" " - RAPatton

"Today Lullabot released an exciting new project into the Drupal community. It's the Form builder module: an AJAX, Drag and Drop interface for constructing forms in Drupal. We hope that it will become the defacto standard in building forms in Drupal, replacing our inconsistent form-building tools that are spread across CCK, Webform, Profile, and other modules." - Dread Pirate PJ via Bookmarklet

Didn't the other projects start with that in mind, as well? - Mark Trapp

@Mark : the other modules wanted to simplify form creation in Drupal, but never had Ajax drag-n-drop form design functionality that degraded gracefully like this does. - Dread Pirate PJ via NoiseRiver

These would make great tree ornaments. - Ginger Makela via Bookmarklet

"Lynn Johnston ended the original run of For Better Or For Worse with a Sunday strip detailing how the Pattersons’ lives went after the strip’s conclusion, but have you ever wondered what would happen in more of your favorite comic strips if their creators decided to show readers what futures the fates have in store for the characters once their strips end? Let’s take a look at some ideas for how some of America’s most popular comic strips should end:" - James Ferguson via Bookmarklet

"The Family Circus: Mr. and Mrs. Keane finally realize that their children are functionally retarded, and not just cute and precocious as they’d always assumed. This revelation compels the family to move out of their house beneath the town’s power lines." - James Ferguson

Haha: "The Lockhorns: Two words: murder/suicide." - Mark Trapp

"Garfield: After coming home late one night after a date with his girlfriend Liz, Jon Arbuckle is shocked to find his loyal cat Garfield slumped face down in a plate of lasagna, dead of an apparent heart attack. Ironically, it is a Monday." - RAPatton

"For years its bones lay lost in a dusty museum. Now scientists have identified Lacusovagus magnificens as the imposing relative of the toothless pterosaurs of China. Soaring overhead in the Cretaceous skies with taut leathery wings longer than a family car, they would have made an unnerving sight. Now scientists, analysing a fossil that had lain for years after its discovery in a German museum, have for the first time glimpsed one of the most imposing of the prehistoric flyers. Lacusovagus magnificens, the magnificent lake wanderer, is the largest prehistoric flying reptile without teeth ever to have been found. The name comes from its preservation in lake sediments of the Araripe basin in north-east Brazil, a site well known for its excellently preserved fossils." - RAPatton via Bookmarklet

Every single ticket issued in New York City from July 2007 to June 2008. Most ticketed street? 14th Street between 7th and 8th avenue. Related article. - Cee Bee via Bookmarklet

The Amazon app also includes a new experimental feature called Amazon Remembers that allows you to use the camera on your iPhone to create a visual list of things you want to remember while out-and-about. The photos you take from the app are stored on both the Amazon Mobile app and Amazon’s website. If the item you want to remember is a product, Amazon Remembers will even try to find an product similar to your photo for sale on the web. - Nathan Chase via Bookmarklet

"From 3 December companies will be able to buy addresses associated with a new web domain. Called .tel, the domain is intended to act as a universal contact point rather than as a hook on which to hang websites. Owners of .tel domains will be encouraged to populate it with details about how they can be contacted. The domain is designed to work on the web and with mobile phones such as the Apple iPhone and Blackberry. "All other top level domains like .com use the net's domain name system in the same way," said Kash Mahdavi, head of Telnic which runs the .tel registry. "They all store IP address and they are all about websites."" - RAPatton via Bookmarklet

@Michael I think its about the convenience factor - it can be a major pain in the butt to find contact information, even on a big computer monitor. This could be really useful (if comprehensive...) for portable devices. If its simply the companies 1-800 number, then forget it. - Zach Landes

I think it'd be pretty cool to hand out marktrapp.tel to keep people up-to-date with my contact information. Rather than having millions of address books that could be potentially out of date (due to manual entry), all an address book has to do is look up marktrapp.tel, get the latest contact information, and call or email. Works just like DNS does for IP addresses: I don't need to keep asking, manually, what the IP address is of friendfeed.com, I just request friendfeed.com and the network handles the lookup automatically. - Mark Trapp

"Thousands of Icelanders marked the 90th anniversary of their nation's sovereignty with angry protest Monday, and several hundred stormed the central bank to demand the ouster of bankers they blame for the country's spectacular economic meltdown. Tiny Iceland has seen its banks and currency collapse in just a few weeks while prices and unemployment soar — leaving a country regarded as a model of Scandinavian prosperity in a state of shock." - Secret Ninja Steven via Bookmarklet

"Late last month, Abraham Biggs Jr., a seemingly confident 19-year-old college student, took an overdose of anti-depressants, lay down on his bed in Pembroke Pines, Fla., and died. But before he did, he turned on his webcam and channeled the feed through Justin.tv, a website for streaming live video, so that others could watch. A reported 181 viewers witnessed the act, some pleading with him to stop, others egging him on." - Anna Haro via Bookmarklet

recognition is everything, living or dying, for many many many people, if not all - Gregory Lent

I live about 5 minutes from this young man, It's such a sad story. I am utterly disgusted to think anyone would egg something like this on. I hope they feel major guilt. It's the same thing as killing someone (not exactly buty you know what I mean) - Adriana

"Water supplies to residents in Harare were cut by the authorities yesterday as Zimbabwe’s cholera epidemic tightened its grip and the city witnessed its worst unrest for a decade. The Zimbabwe National Water Authority turned off the pumps in the capital after it ran out of purifying chemicals. With cholera cases soaring above 11,000 across the country, and an anthrax outbreak ravaging the the countryside, David Parirenyatwa, the Health Minister, urged Zimbabweans to stop shaking hands to avoid spreading disease." - Secret Ninja Steven via Bookmarklet

:(( - BeeLing

:( - Mathew A. Koeneker

"Terrorists who battled Indian commandos for 60-hours last week relied on cocaine and other stimulants to stay awake for the duration of the fight.Officials said drug paraphernalia, including syringes, was recovered from the scene of the attacks, which killed almost 200 people. The heavily built men, who had undergone training at a special marine camp established by the Lashkar-e-Taibat (LeT) terrorist group in Pakistan, had also used steroids to build a tougher physique. "We found injections containing traces of cocaine and LSD left behind by the terrorists and later found drugs in their blood," said one official. "There was also evidence of steroids, which isn't uncommon in terrorists. "These men were all toned, suggesting they had been doing some heavy training for the attacks. This explains why they managed to battle the commandos for over 50 hours with no food or sleep." One terrorist used the drugs to keep on fighting despite suffering a life-threatening injury." - RAPatton via Bookmarklet

Those guys are beyond crazy. Well anyone who would do that would have to be. - Shevonne Polastre

"The State of Hawaii and the Hawaiian Electric Company on Tuesday endorsed an effort to build an alternative transportation infrastructure based on electric vehicles with swappable batteries and an “intelligent” battery recharging network. The plan, the brainchild of the former Silicon Valley software executive Shai Agassi, is an attempt to overcome the major hurdles to electric cars — slow battery recharging and limited availability. By using existing electric car technologies, coupled with an Internet-connected web of tens of thousands of recharging stations, he thinks his company, Better Place LLC of Palo Alto, Calif., will make all-electric vehicles feasible." - Abby Martin via Bookmarklet