▲

Wow:

Mystery behind two Libyan fighter jets landing in Malta, revealed

Military officials say their pilots have asked for political asylum amid a bloody crackdown on anti-government protesters in Libya, in which air force pilots were ordered to fire on civilian demonstrators. Apparently, these pilots refused to follow those orders.

[via BoingBoing]

The NYTimes today reports on how easily the US government was conned out of millions of dollars for software that could supposedly decode secret al-Qaeda messages being transmitted via bar codes in Al-Jazeera broadcasts.

“

—

And a substory: Marginal Revolution investigates and discovers that the NYT report is being a bit disingenuous in not giving Playboy more credit for actually uncovering the story - I will take credit for that little pun, but Marginal Revolution ends their article with an even better one:

Are you surprised that Playboy would break such an important story? I was, that is, until I remembered that Playboy has been uncovering fakes for a long time.

All the joking aside, a fascinating story into how a big government can be so easily duped, particularly when technology is involved.

this here is just to say that we were more than taken aback and surprised about the speed of ticket sales for the april 2nd MSG gig, as well as the effectiveness of scalper pieces of fucking shit at getting their hands on said tickets before fans could, and it’s knocked us on our asses.

“

—	Oh snap. James Murphy is pissed and he’s about to drop a beat on somebody.

Craigslisp »

Tho much better!

Repeated delays imposed on children whose last names are late in the alphabet create in those individuals a chronic expediency motive that is automatically activated

“

—	the Tyranny of the Alphabet explores how your last name influences how fast you buy stuff. [via Kottke]

Some timely work being done on my part, how about you?

This is one of the many reason why Tumblr is so successful - they are flat out with-it.

Matthew Innman of TheOatmeal created his Winter 2010 State of the Web which, in its own right, is a hilarious, spot-on take on current state of the web. In this post, he pokes fun at Tumblr and offers a Twitterest excuse 503 page for Tumblr to use when their servers [often] go down. Then, of course, Tumblr uses it.

I’d light a cigarette, balance it on an ashtray, and then my left hand would reach forward and stub it out. It would take things out of my handbag and I wouldn’t realise so I would walk away. I lost a lot of things before I realised what was going on.

“

—	Alien Hand Syndrome sees woman attacked by her own hand featured in the new BBC series The Brain: A secret History

10 Fascinating Word Graphs, From 200 Years of Google Books »

Includes the rise and fall of Angels vs. Unicorns vs. Mermaids.

For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“

—	congress.org

Would More Education Reduce Unemployment and Income Inequality? by Daniel Indiviglio.

Interesting read even if one can guess the answer to that one….

Hater's Gonna Hate-Bit »

Aled Lewis’ Make Something Cool Every Day

Space Invaders »

Duly Noted: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.

Research suggests a person’s perception of how much time has passed between two points and how well memories are recorded onto an individual’s brain are partially dependent on the amount of new experiences that person has during any given day.

Experts argue that when one engages in a new experience, that person’s perception of time differs from when that individual engages in a mundane or repetitive task.

The Time Hack aims to explore these two ideas.

“

—	BBC writer Matt Danzico quest in attempting to slow time by creating unique, memorable experiences.