Infographic of the Day

Humans are visual creatures and information is sometimes too hard to process if it isn't in a visual form. We have such limited minds for these sort of things. Luckily, we have some creative ways around this limitation. We take data and find a way to represent it visually. You can use this concept to create an understandable format for complex scientific findings, maybe make your company's finances more concrete, or maybe you can just say 'fuck it imma graph every monster from Chucky to Cloverfield'.

And that is exactly what someone did.

Leslie Neilsen dead?!?!!

Postmedia News, National Post
Sunday, Nov. 28, 2010

Iconic Canadian actor Leslie Nielsen has died.

Nielsen appeared in more than 100 movies, with the star shining perhaps most brightly in comedies including Airplane! The Naked Gun.

He died Sunday afternoon in a hospital near his home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, from complications of pneumonia. He was 84.

Nielsen’s nephew, Doug Nielsen, who lives in Richmond, B.C., said his uncle had been in the hospital with pneumonia for 12 days, and in the last 48 hours it got worse.

“This afternoon, surrounded by family, his wife and friends, he basically just fell asleep. It was very peaceful,” he said.

“He was truly a nice man. A very caring, naturally funny guy in day-to-day life, not just because someone wrote something on paper for him. He was a very tender-hearted man. He was one of my best friends and I loved him dearly. I’ll miss him greatly.”

His family also released a statement Sunday night.

“We are saddened by the passing of beloved actor Leslie Nielsen, probably best remembered as Lt. Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun series of pictures, but who enjoyed a more than 60 year career in motion pictures and television,” said the statement.

Nielsen’s father was a Mountie and the actor moved around as child, growing up in Regina, Edmonton and towns in northern Canada.

Nielsen once said he was never the class clown. “In those days, I was too busy trying to be Mr. Perfect. You try to be Mr. Perfect so that your parents can find nothing wrong with you. They have a lot of other things to think about like putting food on the table, so you just don’t want to rock the boat.”

However, he began to suspect comedy was in his genes after he discovered some details of his father’s life.

“I remember seeing pictures of my father at RCMP Sports Days, and he was in a clown outfit. He was the regiment clown.”

Nielsen got his foot into the showbiz door through radio, as an engineer, disc jockey and announcer at a Calgary station.

In December 1949, Nielsen broke into the fresh medium of live television. During the ‘60s and ‘70s, Nielsen constantly worked in TV action series, such as Wagon Train, The Fugitive, The Virginian, Cannon Kojak Gunsmoke’s Matt Dillon.

Throughout his career, he appeared in some of the best-known television programs, including M*A*S*H, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Hawaii Five-O, Columbo Murder, She Wrote.

However, he may be most recognizable for his comedic big-screen roles. In Airplane! Nielsen uttered an often-quoted retort to the question: “Surely, you can’t be serious?”

“I am serious . . . and don’t call me Shirley,” he said.

In 2003, Nielsen received both a lifetime achievement award from the Alberta Motion Pictures Industries Association and was presented with an Award of Excellence from the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists.

He received the Order of Canada in December 2003.

With files from the Edmonton Journal and the Vancouver Sun

http://www.nationalpost.com/m/blog.html?b=arts.nationalpost.com/2010/11/28/comedian-leslie-nielsen-dead-at-84&s=Opinion

NASA Discovers a New Form of Life

Well.

I found this little tidbit about a new arsenic based life form that was discovered by NASA. This is actually a pretty big deal. If you know a little about basic biology, you know that all lifeforms that we previously knew about, from bacteria to humans, was carbon based. This was theoretically possible but scientists were unable to do much other than speculate.

As Gizmodo put it:

At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

But not this one. This one is completely different. We knew that there were bacteria that processed arsenic, but this bacteria—discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California—is actually made of arsenic. The phosphorus is absent from its DNA. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don't have to be like planet Earth.

This opens a lot of possibilities in my opinion. This makes the likelihood of finding life in planets that we would find inhospitable a lot higher.

What do you think?

Ahhh, I love these stories from the Middle East

"Dubai 'bearded lady' marriage off

An Arab country's ambassador to Dubai has had his marriage contract annulled after discovering the bride was cross-eyed and had facial hair.

The woman had worn an Islamic veil, known as the niqab, on the few occasions the couple had met.

The envoy, who has not been identified, told a Sharia court her mother had tricked him by showing him pictures of the bride's sister, Gulf News reported.

He only discovered the deception when he lifted the woman's veil to kiss her.

The court had annulled the marriage contract but rejected a $130,000 (£83,000) compensation claim for gifts he had bought his intended, the report said."



This is the kind of thing that happens when you get married without ever even seeing a girls face. I'm more of a 'try before I buy' sort of guy myself.

Sometimes the title is all you need to know about a story

Boy gang-raped by 10 women at knifepoint in Papua New Guinea

There is nothing I can possibly add to make this any better.

Do you miss the 90s as much as I do?

They just don't make movies like they did in the 90s. Incredibly awkward fight scenes, retarded choice of weaponry, and stereotypical villains were rampant. It was a sort of alright time to watch movies. Not really great but they didn't all suck either.

I guess they might have learned a little something about realism since then. But it didn't matter in the 90s.

Anyway check out this fight scene. It was either the greatest or worst thing I have ever seen. I'm not really sure which.

Just to keep it alive

Find any cool deals on this Cyber Monday?