Random stuff worth reading on the internet thread

[dabrockster]

http://www.indiewire.com/article/hol...-made-20150707

:yikes:

[Donuthole]

This should be in the I Want To See That! thread.

I was debating between that thread, this thread, and the Blink Blink Blink, thread.

[falafel]

[TripletDaddy]

I was debating between that thread, this thread, and the Blink Blink Blink, thread.

what about the Ouch! thread?

[Donuthole]

what about the Ouch! thread?

Is that a real thing?

[Northwestcoug]

Whadayaknow. The ending of every AC/DC song DOES sound the same!

http://www.vh1.com/news/39670/acdc-song-ends-edit/?xrs=CLASS_5pm

[Dwight Schr-ute]

A pretty fascinating (from a science perspective) story about the potential hidden dangers of sand dunes.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/mystery-why-dangerous-sand-dune-swallowed-boy-180953404/

[Moliere]

A pretty fascinating (from a science perspective) story about the potential hidden dangers of sand dunes.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/scienc...boy-180953404/

I knew someone that died on a sand dune, although he didn't fall down a hole. He was my next-door neighbor of my childhood home and was a year or two older than me. He passed a couple years ago when his motorcycle flipped while climbing over dunes....granted it might have been more the motorcycle that caused the death but the dunes played a part.

[Donuthole]

There was a girl from St. George who died in a collapsed sand dune pit at Snow Canyon a few years back. Pretty sad stuff.

[BigFatMeanie]

At the Little Sahara dunes in Utah they have one of those "XX Days Since Last Accident" signs. It never gets out of the single digits.

[Dwight Schr-ute]

At the Little Sahara dunes in Utah they have one of those "XX Days Since Last Accident" signs. It never gets out of the single digits.

Growing up, my uncle had a bunch of sand toys and we'd occasionally go down to Little Sahara for Easter weekend. They made a documentary about that place called Mad Max.

[Armenag]

Interesting story on Chinese attempts to steal our corn technology. Ezra Taft Benson pops up in a couple portions discussing related history:

In 1953, the industry found its greatest ally, when Ezra Taft Benson took over as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture. (Wallace, by then, had retired from public life. He was briefly the editor of the New Republic before making a failed bid for the presidency in 1948.) Benson, a high-ranking member of the Mormon Church and a fanatical Red Scare Republican, immediately informed Eisenhower that he was philosophically opposed to the government price supports developed by Wallace, because, to his mind, they were tantamount to socialism. He publicly referred to small farmers as “irresponsible feeders at the public trough.”

Foreshadowing today’s aggressive, pro-corporate agricultural policies, Benson argued that the only way to outcompete the collective farms of the Soviet Union and Red China was to use our superior corn and chemical technology to the fullest. The United States could, if it chose, overproduce corn to drive down international prices, and it could use the surplus as a tool of diplomatic leverage in the form of foreign aid. Instead of guns, the United States began to give our allies grain—transforming, for the first time, a food product into a weapon in the national arsenal. The only problem was that by effectively militarizing American agriculture, Benson made agri-tech a target for foreign spying.

Had never heard this classic quote allegedly from him:

Even when Rachel Carson documented connections between DDT and 2,4-D and elevated incidence rates of rare forms of cancer in Silent Spring, Benson remained unmoved. He is said to have written to Eisenhower wondering “why a spinster with no children was so concerned with genetics,” and then, as if to answer his own question, offered that Carson was “probably a Communist.” (The Eisenhower Presidential Library, for what it’s worth, contains no record of this letter.)

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122441/corn-wars

[cowboy]

Interesting story on Chinese attempts to steal our corn technology. Ezra Taft Benson pops up in a couple portions discussing related history:



Had never heard this classic quote allegedly from him:



http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122441/corn-wars

Benson was right. Our technological advances have given us a crop yield trendline that far outpaces world population growth, and trendlines in any other country. Also, 2,4-D (or its derivatives) is one of the safest herbecides in existence and has been on the market for decades. BTW, organic agriculture is the best way I can think of to rid the world of 2 billion people almost immediately.

[Art Vandelay]

One of the first, of what will undoubtedly be many, Kobe-praising articles. A quick, easy to read, retrospective of his senior year in HS, as told by his former place-fillers teammates

http://mashable.com/2015/11/29/kobe-bryant-high-school-teammates/#jtRP1Lq98kqO

[hostile]

http://www.squattypotty.com