A Little Story Not Many People Know About

A movie star and an avant garde composer together invent a weapons system.

 Lamarr, however, not only possessed a head for abstract spatial relationships, but she also had been in her former life a fly on the wall during meetings and technical discussions between her ­munitions-manufacturer husband and his clients, some of them Nazi officials. 

...Hedy’s folly may have been in assuming men in government might overcome their prejudice that a beautiful woman could not have brains and imagination. But she lived to see similar versions of her invention be put into common practice, and in 1997, Hedy Lamarr, at the age of 82, and George Antheil (posthumously) were honored with the Pioneer Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

Nature Wants To Eat You

What an amusing title for a web site.

The house centipede has the same poison fangs that normal centipedes do, but they can move towards you at great speed thanks to its long spindly legs. They have a top speed of 40 cm per second.
Incidentally, 40 cm is the exact distance between the house centipede and your face.

Buckley on Hitchens

Buckley is never as amusing as I want, but Hitchins usually was.

One of our lunches, at Café Milano, the Rick’s Café of Washington, began at 1 P.M., and ended at 11:30 P.M. At about nine o’clock (though my memory is somewhat hazy), he said, “Should we order more food?” I somehow crawled home, where I remained under medical supervision for several weeks, packed in ice with a morphine drip. Christopher probably went home that night and wrote a biography of Orwell. His stamina was as epic as his erudition and wit.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/12/postscript-christopher-hitchens.html#ixzz1gjgYWzL1