Great high-res pics of the LHC at The Big Picture.

More from the now year-old “Gothamitis” piece in The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik:

By a city we don’t mean, or just mean, a place where many people live; we mean a place where many kinds of people live, all more or less on top of each other.  Though Mrs. Astor knew nothing of the Lower East Side, and the Lower East Side could only dream of Mrs. Astor, they were still nodes on one grid.  In the course of any even semiconscious wandering through the city—much less the kind of conscious wondering that marks the city’s poetry and literature from Walt Whitman to Alfred Kazin and beyond—each group bumped visually and tangibly into the other.  Only twenty-five years ago, a walk from Tribeca to SoHo and the Lower East Side would show as many kinds and classes—rich, aspiring, immigrant—as it had a century before; now that walk is likely to show only the same six stores and the same two banks and the same one shopper.

Read the full article here.

You have got to be fucking kidding me:

According to a recent survey, 100 percent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 percent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven percent claimed to have been raped.

Pretty disturbing.  Read more at Foreign Policy: Passport.

Direct Note Access is a technology that makes the impossible possible: for the first time in audio recording history you can identify and edit individual notes within polyphonic audio material.  The unique access that Melodyne affords to pitch, timing, note lengths and other parameters of melodic notes will now also be afforded to individual notes within chords.

Gotta see it to believe it.  Watch the demonstration video here.

Teaser trailer for the upcoming W. is out.  I, for one, am interested in seeing how Oliver Stone handles a topic as broad as George W. Bush.  The current trailer’s emphasis is on his immature, party-loving nature.  I guess we’ll see where it goes from there.  Also worth checking out is this great mock-up poster for the same film, complete with all our favorite quotations.  It appears in IMDb’s image gallery, but I’m not sure if it’s official or not.

PS:  Watch the trailer while you still can; it’s already been pulled from YouTube by Lionsgate.

By Adam Gopnik, from over a year ago in The New Yorker.

It is the sense that the city’s recovery has come at the cost of a part of its identity: that New York is safer and richer but less like itself, an old lover who has gone for a face-lift and come out looking like no one in particular.  The wrinkles are gone, but so is the face.  This transformation is one you see on every street corner in Manhattan, and now in Brooklyn, too, where another local toy store or smoked-fish emporium disappears and another bank branch or mall store opens.  For the first time in Manhattan’s history, it has no bohemian frontier.  Another bookstore closes, another theatre becomes a condo, another soulful place becomes a sealed residence.  These are small things, but they are the small things that the city’s soul clings to.

Read the full piece here.

Humorous comparison of the two, from the always-interesting editors’ blog of Foreign Policy.

Hundreds of dead baby penguins are finding their final resting place on Rio de Janeiro’s beaches.  Read the article in Discovery for more information.

Microsoft concedes their Windows Vista blunders.  …And now they’re ready to try again?

Sigh.  Read the New York Times article, if you haven’t already.

You have got to be fucking kidding me.  Bush’s parting words, leaving the G8 summit in Japan:  “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”

By Brian Dettmer.

Not to make light of things, but lolz @ Iran.