Posterous is a new blogging platform that Newsweek said is "...already making Tumblr seem archaic..." Indeed, it looks hot. I've imported TOTI over there if you want to check out what it would look like on there instead of blogger:"Posterous lets you post things online fast using email. You email us at post@posterous.com and we reply instantly with your new posterous blog....
Posterous is NOT a micro blog. There's nothing micro about it! There are no limits to what you can post."
The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures is an article on the dating site OKCupid that takes their user data and analyzes which kind of pictures get the most responses. 
Alfred Hitchcock and children
Salvador Dali
Auto-appendectomy in the Antarctic: case report is an article on The BMJ (British Medical Journal) by Drs. Vladislav Rogozov and Neil Bermel. It describes the saga of Leonid Ivanovich Rogozov, who in 1961 while on expedition in Antarctica, performed a self-appendectomy. Exerpt:"One of the expedition’s members was the 27 year old Leningrad surgeon Leonid Ivanovich Rogozov. He had interrupted a promising scholarly career and left on the expedition shortly before he was due to defend his dissertation on new methods of operating on cancer of the oesophagus. In the Antarctic he was first and foremost the team’s doctor, although he also served as the meteorologist and the driver of their terrain vehicle.This article begs the question, is the writer Rogozov related to the story's surgeon Rogozov? I could google it, but I'm kind of feeling lazy.
After several weeks Rogozov fell ill. He noticed symptoms of weakness, malaise, nausea, and, later, pain in the upper part of his abdomen, which shifted to the right lower quadrant. His body temperature rose to 37.5°C.1 2 Rogozov wrote in his diary:
'It seems that I have appendicitis. I am keeping quiet about it, even smiling. Why frighten my friends? Who could be of help?'...
He chose a semi-reclining position, with his right hip slightly elevated and the lower half of the body elevated at an angle of 30°. Then he disinfected and dressed the operating area. He anticipated needing to use his sense of touch to guide him and thus decided to work without gloves.
The Denzel Washington Venn Diagram is perhaps the most useless Venn Diagram ever made in the history of mankind. It's by Maxim magazine.
Photo: Pat Robertson, Sikh Times(From NPR/Minneapolis Star-Tribune)Dear Pat Robertson,
I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action.But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished.Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"?If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll.You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.Best, SatanLILY COYLE, MINNEAPOLIS
Rumpus: So in what other ways do you track behavior, that isn’t necessarily obvious to users?
Employee: We track everything. Every photo you view, every person you’re tagged with, every wall-post you make, and so forth....
Rumpus: You’ve previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use.
Employee: I’m not sure when exactly it was deprecated, but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user’s user ID, and then the password. I’m not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out ‘Chuck Norris,’ more or less. It was pretty fantastic.
Rumpus: This was accessible by any Facebook employee?
Employee: Technically, yes. But it was pretty much limited to the original engineers, who were basically the only people who knew about it. It wasn’t as if random people in Human Resources were using this password to log into profiles. It was made and designed for engineering reasons. But it was there, and any employee could find it if they knew where to look.
I should also say that it was only available internally. If I were to log in from a high school or library, I couldn’t use it. You had to be in the Facebook office, using the Facebook ISP.
Rumpus: Do you think Facebook employees ever abused the privilege of having universal access?
Employee: I know it has happened in the past, because at least two people have been fired for it that I know of.
Hipster Runoff is "intended to be a 'culturally relevant' blog." 
In honor of today's Facebook flurry of bra-color status updates and the ongoing controversy, here is an article from the perspective of a patient: "What sustained me through the "treatments" is a purifying rage, a resolve, framed in the sleepless nights of chemotherapy, to see the last polluter, along with, say, the last smug health insurance operative, strangled with the last pink ribbon. Cancer or no cancer, I will not live that long of course. But I know this much right now for sure: I will not go into that last good night with a teddy bear tucked under my arm."
Slowpoke Comics is a comic strip by Jen Sorensen. I don't normally read comics with this much text, but this one in particular explains a lot about the recent Nobel Peace prize. 
"When PW asks Hayne about his financial support of Santorum, he initially denies it. And when presented with a computer printout of Santorum's campaign donors from the Center for Responsive Politics website--which cites a $4,650 contribution from Urban Outfitters--he responds: "I'll have to look into this. I don't think this is right." In fact, he and his wife have contributed $13,150 to Santorum and Santorum's Political Action Committee over the years."
A study found that one American in four reported having no close confidants, up from one in 10 in 1985. The figures date from 2004, and there's little doubt that Facebook and texting and all the rest of it have already exacerbated the situation. The more people we know, the lonelier we get.
Happy New Year! 2010, fresh start. 
