Time lapse video of volcanic explosion from space

No introduction necessary.

Was Osama bin Laden ever in America?

According to the New Yorker, yes.

Osama was here for two weeks in 1979, it seems, and he visited Indiana and Los Angeles, among other places. He had a favorable encounter with an American medical doctor; he also reportedly met in Los Angeles with his spiritual mentor of the time, the Palestinian radical Abdullah Azzam.

Another super interesting article from the New Yorker.

Obamtourage

From Landline.TV:

Gwyneth Paltrow "Disses" NYC and the USA?

The New York Daily News ran a story with the headline "Gwyneth Paltrow disses New York, U.S., people who 'always have BlackBerries on'." But it seems to be a bit of hyperbolic Drudge-bait (and it did get posted on Drudge) after reading the article.

She seems to be "dissing" a certain part of New York and American coverage. While talking about Spain, Paltrow said:

"Also, the way people live over there. They seem to enjoy life a little bit more. They aren't running around as much as in New York."

Umm... yeah.

Stupid headline for the story.

The Big Picture: Glastonbury 2009

Wow. More great pictures, this time from the 2009 Glastonbury Festival, Europe's largest open-air music festival.

Go check it out.

Sarah Palin

It's a high bar to find shocking new revelations about Palin's character and political identity. But this piece may bring home how truly shocking a decision it was for McCain to pick Palin. Not a bad decision or an ill-considered one, but one that in single stroke showed McCain had no business being president. An angry, resentful, small-time crooked pol. And she really could have been president because of McCain's recklessness.

From Talking Points Memo on an article about Alaska governor Sarah Palin from Vanity Fair.

Read them in that order.

College grads don't play baseball

College grads don't end up playing the Major Leagues very often. According to The Wall Street Journal, there are only 26 major league college graduates. No, that isn't a typo -- it's 26 total, not 26 percent.

And that's not just players, but also managers.

I wrote before about Ross Ohlendorf, a Princeton graduate who is probably smarter than you. I'd guess that he's the most accomplished member of the major leagues -- at least when it comes to education.

Never try to rob the house of a 72-year old former boxer

Because you just might get beat up.

He added: ' Photographs of the defendant showed what looked like a car accident and photos of the scene looked more like a murder scene.'

Happened in the UK.

Firefox 3.5 downloads

Wonder how many times a new version of Firefox gets downloaded?

Well for Firefox 3.5 right now you can see at a website that Firefox makers Mozilla set up how many people have downloaded it total and per country.

As of this writing, at 9:12 PM mountain time, 2.62 million downloads total, 868,000 in the United States

Can someone tell me why we don't have this in U.S.?

The European Union has agreed on a cell phone charger universal standard -- at least among all of the big cell phone manufacturers.

The agreement by Nokia, Sony Ericsson and other industry majors will mean phones compatible with standard charging devices are available in Europe from next year, said the EU executive, which has pushed for such a deal.

"People will not have to throw away their charger whenever they buy a new phone," said EU Industry Commissioner Guenter Verheugen, estimating that unwanted phone accessories accounted for thousands of tons of waste in Europe each year.

The standard will be micro-USB.

Hopefully the phone manufacturers don't make the phones destined for the United States with a different size cell phone charger port.