Wes Phillips

These Flash animations are amazing. Put a buck in the tip jar if you dig 'em as much as I do.

"Last fall, Condé Nast Traveler aviation correspondent Barbara S. Peterson applied to work as a Transportation Security Administration screener. Her mission: to investigate reports that despite a five-year, $20 billion overhaul of the passenger screening system, checkpoint personnel are failing at the job. Being hired was only her first surprise. Peterson's two months at the airport revealed how this overtaxed but dedicated workforce copes with equipment shortages, budget cuts, and record numbers of (not very pleasant) passengers. Here is an unprecedented look at the reality of America's last line of defense."

I was happily learning more than I ever thought I'd want to know about sushi, when it occurred to me to check out the article's byline. Who on earth writes 10 pages about shopping for fish in Tokyo's Tsukiji market? Oh, Nick Tosches, that's who.

The Archimedes Palimpsest suggests that the canny philosopher understood infinity not just as heuristics and mystics, but refined and defined down to the last line. Nearly two millennia before the Calculus—eureka indeed.

"They Thought You'd Say This: Unlikely phrases from real phrase books" is a hoot. When I lived in Peru, I collected tourist phrase books from our local second-hand book kiosk—a place that had a two-for-one trade-in policy on books in English. Since I was teaching ESL to folks that wanted to get jobs in tourism and on the police squad dedicated to tourist-related matters, I figured that they'd need to know a lot of these common phrases. I was stunned at how many books had unlikely scenarios, but few of them were as outlandish as in this article.

Ex-physics teacher John Atkinson pays his kids $1 for each example of bad science they spot in the movies they see. For The Day After Tomorrow, IIRC, he instituted a $50 cap.

Title says it all.