A most unusual museum in Cambodia

Have you ever been to a landmine museum? Neither have I, but two friends just returned from incredibly beautiful country of Cambodia, which is still feeling the effects of horrific periods of war and unrest. And one can still find live landmines--there are millions of them in Cambodia, many of those landmines being "found" by current amputees. Which leads to the story of the Cambodia Landmine Museum, founded by a man named Aki Ra. His goal: "I want to make my country safe for my people."

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Wireless phone company monopoly means 7,314% mark-ups.

Data should be data to a phone company, right?   No, no.  Not when there's big money to be squeezed out of consumers.  Therefore, the data the phone companies transfer as text massages will cost you 7314% as much as data sold to you when you transfer data through your phone operating as a modem. Having the functional equivalent of one big wireless phone company, which is where we're headed, is like living in a communist country.  The gouging consumers take in the markup of texting is proof.   The other proof is that the FCC in the process trashing net neutrality in the wire markets.    If our politicians weren't functional psychotics, they would clean up this mess in a week by breaking up the phone companies so that we had real competition, and then, for good measure, passing a constitutional amendment declaring that corporations are not people and forbidding corporations from playing any part in the electoral process.

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Republican mythology

I have often written that Democrats have been thoroughly corrupted by our campaign finance system, which encourages bribes and graft.   Equally so, have the Republicans been corrupted, but Republican politicians carry the weight of a long litany of absurd beliefs that they espouse with religious zeal.  This St. Louis Post-Dispatch opinion piece lists eight of the big ones, including:

• They must believe, despite the evidence of the 2008 financial collapse, that unregulated — or at most, lightly regulated — financial markets are good for America and the world.

• GOP candidates must scoff at scientific consensus about global warming. Blame it on human activity? Bad. Cite Noah's Ark as evidence? Good. They must express at least some doubt about the science of evolution.

• They must insist, statistics and evidence to the contrary, that most of the nation's energy needs can be met safely with more domestic oil drilling, "clean-coal" technology and greater reliance on perfectly safe nuclear power plants.

• They must believe that the Founding Fathers wanted to guarantee individuals the absolute right to own high-capacity, rapid-fire weapons that did not exist in the late 18th century.

Stunningly, none of these beliefs is founded on facts or self-critical thinking.   As Eric Hoffer pointed out long ago, this lack of objective evidence presents no problem for true believers.

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How LCD screens work

I like to understand at least the basics of how the machines around me work. I'm don't feel compelled to understand enough to design or build the gadgets I use--far from it. But I do seek to understand the fundamentals. Until tonight, I hadn't ever thought about how LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) screens work, but now I know the basics, thanks to Bill Hammack, the EngineerGuy:

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