Afghanistan April 2011 @ The Big Picture

Confusion of Feelings & Death of Osama bin Laden

Whatever sort of emotional response I may have had on hearing the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. forces was immediately confused by everyone else’s response.
Jessa Crispin @ The Smart Set

My thoughts exactly.

He’s Dead – Americans Celebreate the Death of Osama bin Laden

He's Dead

Someone mentioned something about the death of Osama Bin Laden this morning (that would be around 9-10PM EST), but it took me a while to realize what exactly he was talking about. He had gotten a message from someone on his phone, via Twitter, email, Facebook, or IM, and mentioned it in passing. I was way too tired to realize what he was talking about. It’s only when I got home, at around 1:30PM that I understood what had happened. The US, thanks to some CIA and Joint Special Operations Command managed to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden.

Mark Singer on Trump

Marc Singer has a good article about Trump in the New Yorker. Ever since I became aware of his bubbling birtherism, he’s totally lost any respect that I had for him.

Donald Trump The Birther Over at NYT & Gail Collins

I don’t know what’s going on with Donald Trump, but he’s become a birther and he’s proud of it. Egomania breeds idiocy.

Vote for Donald Trump, the man who can make Bill O’Reilly look like the most sensible guy in the room.

Trump’s main argument for why he should be taken seriously as a presidential contender is his business success. Has Obama ever hosted a long-running reality series? Owned a bankruptcy-bound chain of casinos? Put his name on a flock of really unattractive high-rise apartment buildings? No!

“Celebrity Apprentice” is widely regarded as terrible and cheesy programming, but, actually, it has its moments. I recently saw an episode in which a former top model had a serious discussion with a fellow competitor about whether this was the 20th century or the 21st. You can’t get stuff like that on “Mad Men.”

To establish his birther creds, this week Trump produced his own birth certificate, after one failed attempt in which he came up with a document that was too weak to qualify for a passport. By the time he worked things out, we had an entire news cycle devoted to Donald Trump having been born in New York.

Here’s Trump’s response.

Reception of the French National Team In France

On Thursday, as France’s national soccer team returned home after its abject failure at the World Cup in South Africa, and were met by riot police sent to protect them from their fans, haters of the team, and the country, continued to heap scorn on the squad now blamed for sullying the nation’s honor.

★

Another noted simply: “When the team wins, the players are French. When it loses, they are Africans with French citizenship.”

Chatroulette’s Creator Is Revealed

The creator of the random webcam chat site Chatroulette was revealed as a Russian teenager.

Velocite Geos

Victor just announced that he’s testing a new lightweight frame that will be called the Geos. It’s going to be very light, something like the Storck Fascenario 0.7, but a little more affordable. In his post, Victor promises that it will be reasonable. The Geos won’t be as stiff as the Magnus or the Helios, but it will most definitely find a market, as I was personally looking for a lightweight frame, but found some of them very expensive. The Guru Photon, 747gr, costs $4,900 USD. Storck Fascenario 0.7 costs $6,350 USD.

Even In The US Better Off Drinking Bottled Water

One of the annoying things of living in Taiwan is that the tap water isn’t safe to drink. We buy filtered water. Homes have filtering system installed as well, making tap water safe, but our apartment lacks them. It seems like buying bottled water to drink is also a safe precaution to take in the US, as millions are drinking dirty water. The NYT reports. {via df}

Real Time Web Vs Traditional Media

Image via CrunchGear

I found this article on CrunchGear quite interesting. From time to time on the gadget blogs, you get some good articles. This was one of them. It discusses the different points and advantages of real time web, mainly via Twitter, compared to traditional news outlets such as blogs and cable news.

The article says that reporters for traditional media will always be on the scene first. I don’t think that this is 100% accurate. As Twitter and other forms of real time web become more popular, more and more people are using them and more and more data gets transferred into a dynamic medium, which disseminates information a lot faster than blogs and normal news outlets.

Given the fact that Twitter is also used a lot on mobile devices, this transforms every user into a sort of potential witness of events. That’s how real time web should be used. Even if reporters will be the first ones on the scene, before they’re able to file their report, some other witness will start pouring information into the real time web.