Category Archives: news

Current events or other “big” news stories.

Random News Bits

Posted on January 21, 2007 | Leave a comment
Hold your Wee for a Wii –
KDND-FM had a contest to see who could drink the most water without a bathroom break. Jennifer Strange came in second place, sadly several hours later she died from “water intoxication” which I had never heard of before now. But I guess anything to excess is bad for you. The station has fired 10 staff members of it’s staff as a result.
Irish Currency –
Researchers tested money for cocaine and 100% of the Irish bills had traces of cocaine on them. Now there were only 45 randomly selected bills in the test but that’s still pretty high. More at Yahoo!
An Inconvenient Truth –
A Seattle School has banned it’s schools from showing An Inconvenient Truth unless they show opposing views. The bible says the world will burn up in the end and this movie doesn’t show opposing views. From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

I saw most of these stories in The Week which I really like (I get the printed edition). They don’t write a lot (most?) of their articles, they get from other sources. They reprint some political cartoons and have a few columns I like such as “Only in America” (which contained the Seattle School article)

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Election “News” takes away from REAL news.

Posted on November 9, 2005 | Leave a comment

How many news stories weren’t heard yesterday (and today) because of election “news”. I say “news” that way because most of it was speculation after speculation until all the counts are done. And then they spend all day today talking about how close it was and/or why those guesstimates weren’t correct or why person X didn’t end up winning.

It’s a colossal waste of time until the real counts are done (and it’s not like we have to wait weeks for the results). There is real news they could be telling us. There are people missing, there are wars and disasters. There might even be something nice that happened in the world that they can tell us about. Heck, I’d rather hear the weather or traffic report than election speculation.

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Visual NewsMap

Posted on April 3, 2004 | Leave a comment

So you can visually see the Google! news now. You can break it down by types of news, location or even older news. It’s pretty neat (or at least neat enough to blog about).

“Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.” For more information go to http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/ and they do some other cool stuff if you go to their home page.

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