The Uninformed Filipino Electorate

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An Uninformed Electorate:

Apart from harassment, vote-buying and patronage politics, we are saddled with a poorly informed electorate that picks candidates because they look good or can sing, dance and speak well in the movies or on television.

Yeah, that about sums it up. And as an Issues PEXer opined last week, it’s actually advantageous to the average Filipino politician to keep the voters uneducated. :(

Rapatronic Photographs

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Rapatronic photographs of test nuclear explosions in the 1950s. Each shot was taken at intervals of millionths of a second. Even milliseconds after detonation, the deadly fireball had already engulfed the blast tower. Amazing.

Update, March 2019: I updated the now-dead link here because I got a Dell SEO contractor email asking me to remove “irrelevant” old VCE.com hyperlinks, which I find hilarious.

Smithsonian Folk Life Festival

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Note: Those of you searching for info on the Festival, check out the Smithsonian’s official Folk Life Festival page.

I’ve just returned from the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival on the National Mall, featuring the Silk Road Project. It wasn’t quite Disneyland, but the different international exhibits were quite interesting, and the food looked potentially good.

(I say potentially, because I never got to try any of that Afghan, Italian, Chinese, or Mongolian food. The lines were just too long, so I ended up just getting a hotdog. Yes, that’s right. Giant international exhibit with exotic food galore, and I ate a hotdog with mustard. Can you say Accidental Tourist?)

Josh helped clear up some of my bad history in the “Under God” comments thread. If I’d read the linked article properly, I would have seen it for myself. Thanks, Josh. :)

E-Jesus

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A few months ago, I was telling John (Where is John, anyway?) about the electric light-up “Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary” picture frames and wall clocks that you could buy off any corner sidewalk vendor back in Manila.

I never did get to buy one, but Daniel of ansiblenetwork.com was able to get one on a honeymoon in Rome. He calls it E-Jesus, and he has even included a javascript-enabled E-Jesus so you can see for yourself. Click here to try.

Link via Rylanddotnet. As with the old Sacred Heart Light-up Wall Clocks and the framed 3D picture of the Virgin Mary that I got for Christmas two years ago (the kind that looks at you no matter what angle you hold it at), I don’t know whether to be horrified or titillated.