Dr. Who's Reading Room

theatlantic:

Penn State Students Go Nuts After Joe Paterno’s Firing

Thousands of Penn State students poured into the streets of State College, overturning cars and tussling with police after the university decided to fire coach Joe Paterno late last night. Paterno had offered to resign at the end of the football season, but the Board of Trustees dismissed him and university president Graham Spanier immediately.
The gathering didn’t exactly devolve into a full-fledged riot, but police did resort to pepper spray and some arrests to disperse students. The worst trouble makers threw bricks and bottles at police, smashed car windows, and overturned a TV news van adding more embarrassment and heartache to an already troubled community. But as CBS Sports pointed out, the fact that there was very little resistance to the police crackdown shows their hearts were really in it. Read more.

Penn State Students Go Nuts After Joe Paterno’s Firing

Thousands of Penn State students poured into the streets of State College, overturning cars and tussling with police after the university decided to fire coach Joe Paterno late last night. Paterno had offered to resign at the end of the football season, but the Board of Trustees dismissed him and university president Graham Spanier immediately.

The gathering didn’t exactly devolve into a full-fledged riot, but police did resort to pepper spray and some arrests to disperse students. The worst trouble makers threw bricks and bottles at police, smashed car windows, and overturned a TV news van adding more embarrassment and heartache to an already troubled community. But as CBS Sports pointed out, the fact that there was very little resistance to the police crackdown shows their hearts were really in it. Read more.

jasencomstock:

joshsternberg:

Nate Silver spreading the joy with some numbers:

The numbers do not paint a pretty picture. According the model, a hurricane with windspeeds of about 100 miles per hour — making it a “weak” Category 2 storm — might cause on the order of $35 billion in damage if it were to pass directly over Manhattan. Such a storm would probably flood New York’s subway system as well as acres upon acres of prime real estate in neighborhoods like the East Village, the Financial District, Tribeca, Coney Island, Red Hook, DUMBO, as well as parts of Staten Island and most of the Rockaways.

Read the rest of the article to learn how costly different strength hurricanes would be if they hit directly over NYC.

Happy Friday!

Isn’t $16T a bit much for even the total destruction of Manhattan? I mean, we could still pick up all the money after the fact and give it back to everyone else.

Oh, the futures that never were. I’m about to start having a fugue à la “The Gernsback Continuum” by William Gibson. It’s bad enough life in the Midwest is starting to imitate Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather.

markcoatney:

generalelectric:

Selenium was traditionally one of the principle ingredients in solar cells. This chamber purified the selenium used for early photovoltaic cells. We found it in our archives, but can’t shake its uniquely futuristic look. (Taken with instagram)

In which we learn that GE invented the Big Daddy…

publicradiointernational:

globalvoices:

Time-lapse video by John Caelan from the website The Swamp Post mapping global protests from December 18 2010 to March 7, 2011.

See Middle East protest time-lapse video and read the original post at Global Voices Online.

Awesome. There are a lot of little signs bunched in there.

Coherence need not be the crucible for evaluating the schizophrenic rants of a homicidal megalomaniac. Loughner’s world reads like the call-in transcript to an overnight AM radio show — an anti-government acid trip of black helicopters, currency runs, and constitutional overreach.

Given that Loughner’s target was a congresswoman, the politicization of his act was inevitable, incumbent, and immediate. Yet it also marks the appearance of what some scholars have called an “interactive spectacle” — the authorship and distribution of an online, multiplatform PR package as an accompaniment to understanding unfolding events.

“

—	“Jared Lee Loughner and the Rise of Anti-Social Media” - Michael Serazio - Politics - The Atlantic Or, “Hate Radio Goes Social (Media)” While I do think this is an interesting line of inquiry, I fear it may be watered down to yet another instance of “blaming the Internet.”