The Portals of Discovery

newsweek:

capitalnewyork:

laughingsquid:

Google+ Hangout with Barack Obama

In 23 minutes.

This is that moment in social media where the president does something before you’ve done it. Used to be he’d join Tumblr, or Twitter, well after we had used the toolsets. Now? 10 bucks says you haven’t done a “Hangout.”

thedailywhat:

Food For Thought of the Day: McDonald’s UK has announced that it will be temporarily replacing the toy commonly found in the company’s familiar “Happy Meal” with a book.

The fast food chain will thus become — at least for the duration of the giveaway — Britain’s biggest retailer of children’s books, as distributes nine million copies of War Horse author Michael Morpurgo’s Mudpuddle Farm titles.

Morpurgo will reportedly be donating his royalties from the promotion to benefit his charity, Farms for City Children.

In an amusing twist, the Children’s Food Campaign has expressed concern that giving away Mudpuddle books will “make fast food more attractive to children.”

I’ll take fat and well-read over skinny and illiterate any day.

[telegraph / guardian / eater.] 

(Source: thedailywhat)

thedailywhat:

This x That:

Know This:

• Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan latest Iranian scientist to die in car explosion, becoming fourth nuclear-program-affiliated academic to be assassinated. 

• French TV journalist Gilles Jacquier among eight killed in grenade attack during government-authorized visit to Syrian city of Homs.

Read This:

• Joran van der Sloot pleads guilty to murder of Peruvian woman Stephany Flores.

• Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour raises eyebrows with unconditional pardons for 193 inmates, including several convicted murderers.

• Reacting to Jodi Kantor’s controversial book, Michelle Obama says she’s tired of being portrayed as “some kind of angry black woman.”

• Minutes from 2 Broke Girls showrunner Michael Patrick King’s TCA meltdown: AV Club, Vulture, HitFix.

• State media puppet Wolf Blitzer “salutes” politicians for taking time out of being rich to answer the “annoying questions” of the unwashed masses.

• Ricky Gervais is a spoiled brat, and he knows it.

The Other:

• NewsFeed: Parents Sign Petition to Bring Breastfeeding Back to Sesame Street.

• Tea x Time List: 6 Horrible Aftermaths Implied By Movies With Happy Endings.

• Above: Newly discovered frog species is the world’s smallest vertebrate.

(Source: thedailywhat)

thedailywhat:

Before And After of the Day: Google today unveiled the result of an initiative to document the aftermath of Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami through Google Maps Street View.

A special website — Build the Memory — has also been set up to host the images gathered through a 44,000 kilometer trek across the affected regions.

From Google’s blog: 

A virtual tour via Street View profoundly illustrates how much these natural disasters have transformed these communities. If you start inland and venture out toward the coast, you’ll see the idyllic countryside change dramatically, becoming cluttered with mountains of rubble and debris as you get closer to the ocean. In the cities, buildings that once stood proud are now empty spaces.

[googleblog.]

(Source: thedailywhat)

life:

Here, on the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, LIFE.com presents rare and unpublished photos from Hawaii and the mainland, chronicling a nation’s answer to an unprecedented act of war.

Unpublished, training with gas masks in Hawaii, early 1942.

“Ambassador Nomura and Envoy Kurusu,” LIFE reported in mid-December 1941, “had come with the answer to Hull’s note [of protest to the Japanese delegation in D.C.]. Hull read it through and then, for the first time in many long, patient years, the soft-spoken Secretary lost his temper. Into the teeth of the two Japanese, who for once did not grin, he flung these words: ‘In all my 50 years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions — on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any government on this planet was capable of uttering them.’”

life:

Did you know? — On this day in 1884, the Washington Monument was completed.

It appears to be as simple and elegant a monument as you could find, but the record-breaking obelisk that dominates the Washington, D.C., skyline has a story that’s both complicated and even a little crude.

Pictured: On Dec. 6, 1884, the capstone was set and topped with the biggest piece of aluminum in the world, in the form of a 100-ounce lightning rod (aluminum was then as expensive and rare as silver). Workers tend to the tip of the monument in 1930.

(see more — Story of the Washington Monument)

discoverynews:

The Ancient Origins of Monopoly (and other board games)

Early playing pieces from places like Scandinavia and Scotland took on stylistic elements of the cultures of those regions.

These face-decorated stone cones were found within a dry stone, hollow-walled structure from the 5th to 7th century A.D. Shetland, Scotland. The anthropomorphized pieces have a distinctly Celtic look.

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