(Technically it was hemp, the other variety of the cannabis sativa plant that can’t get you high. But that distinction is usually lost on all the annoying stoners who love to philosophize in college dorms about how legalizing hemp would renew our nation’s agriculture, fix our tax base, and, like, George Washington totally grew it, too. This one’s for them.) Hemp advocates, who feel that the government has wrongly banned the cultivation of their beloved plant, have a new patron saint: Agriculture Department botanist Lyster Dewey. The Washington Post reports that Dewey tended “Uncle Sam’s hemp farm” on a plot…
Browsing: Friday Fun
I came across this interesting nugget in an article about the Library of Congress’ efforts to permanently archive 120 years of film history. Ken Weissman, supervisor of the Library’s film preservation laboratory, has started a pilot program to once and for all fix a mistake caused by the agency’s lousy interpretation of copyright law more than a century ago. The Library started archiving films in 1894, and over the next two decades, accumulated some 3,000 movies such as The Great Train Robbery and A Trip to the Moon. But the Library’s interpretation of the then-current copyright law led it to conclude that these newfangled motion pictures…
This is, hands down, the best solicitation I’ve seen in a long time: The mad scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are moving forward with their plans to develop a flying car. Seriously. This $55 million flying car will need to seat four troops and their gear, operate like a regular SUV on land, and be able to turn into a vertical-take-off-and-landing aircraft that can fly 250 miles, at up to 10,000 feet above sea level, on a single tank of fuel. “This presents unprecedented capability to avoid traditional and asymmetrical threats while avoiding road obstructions,” DARPA said in its…
Nobody likes paying taxes, of course, but here are two things that might take a little sting out of today. The Onion has the scoop on the U.S. Postal Service’s latest can’t-miss scheme for boosting its dwindling revenue: Late-night post offices to draw in the nightclub crowd. “We’re busier than ever, though to be honest, a lot of these people’s packages never even make it to the processing center,” Loftus continued. “The address will be illegible, or the envelope soaked in beer or hot sauce. You’d be surprised how many people try to mail themselves hot sauce at 2:30 in…
Happy Friday! Here’s a few amusing links to take you into the weekend. The Onion breaks the “news” here that the federal government plans to save $300 billion a year by eliminating the wasteful and “100 percent redundant” Senate: Established in 1789 as a means of overseeing the passage of bills into law, the once-promising senator program has reportedly failed to contribute to the governing of the nation in any significant way since 1964. … In fact, the program has gone unchecked for so long that many in Washington are now unable to recall what purpose U.S. senators were originally…
Happy Census Day! April 1 is the day the 2010 Census forms are officially due, but it’s kind of a soft deadline. The Census Bureau will keep accepting forms by mail until mid-April, and will start door-to-door surveys May 1 to collect information from households who haven’t yet responded. Of course, they’d prefer to get as many mail responses as possible. It costs the Census Bureau $57 to visit an average household, versus the 42 cents it costs to mail a survey in. Only 54 percent of the nation’s estimated 134 million households have so far responded to the Census. It’s…
Here’s some Friday Fun for space geeks like myself. NASA astronauts earlier this week installed the Tranquility node, featuring a domed window giving astronauts a panoramic view of Earth, on the International Space Station. This picture, the first taken through Tranquility’s 6.5 foot by 5 foot cupola window 250 miles above the Earth’s surface, is of the Sahara Desert. The window wouldn’t look out of place in the cockpits of Star Wars spaceships like the Millennium Falcon or TIE Fighter. Its intended purpose, NASA said, is to give astronauts a good, direct view of robots operating on the station’s exterior without having to rely…
The Smithsonian’s National Zoo today announced the arrival of two prime candidates for the Daily Squee: A pair of clouded leopard cubs that were born on Valentine’s day. To hear the Zoo tell it, the birth of these little guys — or gals, it’s hard to tell — is something of a minor miracle. The breeding of clouded leopards has been a challenge, primarily due to male aggression, decreased mating activity between paired animals and high cub mortality. […] Since the cubs born in the Thailand breeding program are only one or two generations removed from the wild, their genes are…
For your Friday enjoyment, faux TV pundit Stephen Colbert ribs Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano about the White House gate crashers, al Qaida, immigration enforcement and swine flu: [HTML1]
Happy Friday! As we all ready for the weekend, here are a few offbeat stories with a federal angle to brighten your day: Angry residents of Lantana, Fla. sent a not so subtle message to Post Master General John Potter about his plans to close their local post office: 1,000 coconuts. Potter, in turn, donated the produce to the D.C. food bank Bread for the City. [h/t: DCist] The Smithsonian uses the photo sharing Web site Flickr to remind us of an era in photography where you couldn’t instantly share an image with thousands of your closest friends around the…