Dive into the archives.

• Cookie Monster searches deep within himself and asks: Is me really monster?

  Me was thinking and me just don’t get it. Why is me a monster? No one else called monster on Sesame Street. Well, no one who isn’t really monster. Two-Headed Monster have two heads, so he real monster. Herry Monster strong and look angry, so he probably real monster, too. But is me really monster?

  Me thinks me have serious problem. Me thinks me addicted. But since when it acceptable to call addict monster? It affliction. It disease. It burden. But does it make me monster?

  Apr 17, 2008 · category: Articles, Humor
  
  Posted by Tom Collins

• 41 Hours Stuck on an Elevator

  This video from the New Yorker of a man stuck in an elevator car for 41 hours is surprisingly difficult to watch. The accompanying story about the man’s experience — and then, more specifically about elevator safety is quite intriguing. I never thought I’d think about elevators for so long in one sitting.

  Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete. And the elevator is energy-efficient—the counterweight does a great deal of the work, and the new systems these days regenerate electricity. The elevator is a hybrid, by design.

  Apr 16, 2008 · category: Articles
  
  Posted by Tom Collins

• Vatican Lists Seven (NEW) Social Sins, Including Drug Abuse

  The Vatican has put together a list of seven new so-called “social” sins that includes excessive wealth, drug abuse, littering, genetic tampering and creating poverty.

  The seven social sins are:

  1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control
  

  2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research
  

  3. Drug abuse
  

  4. Polluting the environment
  

  5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
  

  6. Excessive wealth
  

  7. Creating poverty
  
  

  The original deadly sins:
  

  1. Pride
  

  2. Envy
  

  3. Gluttony
  

  4. Lust
  

  5. Anger
  

  6. Greed
  

  7. Sloth
  

  Link

  BuzzFeed has also picked up this story.

  Mar 11, 2008 · category: Articles, Religion
  
  Posted by Tom Collins

• Meltdown

  There was an interesting article in this month’s GQ on the merits of Nuclear Energy. The article is based around the 1979 meltdown at the TMI Plant at Three Mile Island. And, more importantly, why that single event shouldn’t shape our view of Nuclear Energy. But unfortunately it does.The author, Wil S. Hylton, spends an extensive amount of time touring the Plant:
  

  The inside was like nowhere else in the world. It is tempting to say that if you were to wake up inside, without ever having seen a power plant, you would know instantly where you were. Pipes the diameter of a Volkswagen bus and painted in glossy primary colors stretched along the walls and the ceiling, springing into the room at ninety-degree elbows before shooting upward to the floor above or down to the one below. Hoses the size of anacondas coiled their way around corners and over door headers, and stop valves that looked like nautical steering wheels were strapped to the walls with tags to identify them. Everything was polished and reflective under bright lights, and the air seemed to shiver from the pipes’ vibrations. It was like being trapped inside a giant air conditioner.

  The most interesting part of the article, though: The carbon footprint of a nuclear plant is precisely…nothing.

  Mar 3, 2008 · category: Articles, political
  
  Posted by Tom Collins