“What Angelina did was very uncool,” Aniston declares in the December issue of Vogue magazine.

The snipe comes in response to how Jolie, 33, spilled intimate details about her love affair with Aniston’s ex-husband Brad Pitt, 44, in a 2007 interview with the same magazine.

“There was stuff printed there that was definitely from a time when I was unaware that it was happening,” says Aniston about how Jolie gushed about the excitement of seeing her then married “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” co-star Pitt everyday. “I felt those details were a little inappropriate to discuss.”

Though Aniston obviously still has a sore spot for Jolie, she has nothing but kind words for Pitt, and says the two now enjoy a cordial relationship.

{ NY Daily News | Continue reading }

New Oxford American Dictionary 2008 Word of the Year: hypermiling.

“Hypermiling” or “to hypermile” is to attempt to maximize gas mileage by making fuel-conserving adjustments to one’s car and one’s driving techniques. Rather than aiming for good mileage or even great mileage, hypermilers seek to push their gas tanks to the limit and achieve hypermileage, exceeding EPA ratings for miles per gallon.

Many of the methods followed by hypermilers are basic common sense—drive the speed limit, avoid hills and stop-and-go traffic, maintain proper tire pressure, don’t let your car idle, get rid of excess cargo—but others practiced by some devotees may seem slightly eccentric:

• driving without shoes (to increase the foot’s sensitivity on the pedals)

• parking so that you don’t have to back up to exit the space

• “ridge-riding” or driving with your tires lined up with the white line at the edge of the road to avoid driving through water-filled ruts in the road when it’s raining

{ OUP blog | Continue reading }

{ First pictures taken of extrasolar planets | NY Times | more | Related: Unknown “structures” tugging at Universe. }

{ Left: original NASA Comet Tempel Image taken by the expensive Deep Impact probe. | Right: a Photoshop version. | “As soon as I saw the images coming in, I thought, Man, I could do that! They don’t have to waste money sending probes out into space, I can make all the fuzzy comet images they’d ever need with Photoshop.” | lyzrdstomp.com }

{ RADI Designers, P.O.C. (airbag for pedestrians), 2001 }

New research finds that heart transplant patients have better odds of survival and a lower risk of rejection if they get organs from donors of the same sex.

Size may be part of the explanation. Men’s hearts are bigger than women’s and have greater pumping capacity, and men who get men’s hearts fare better. But doctors think differences in hormones or immune systems between the sexes may also play a role. (…)

Unfortunately for many patients, the findings won’t make much of a difference. The average wait for a heart is 108 days for women and 119 for men. Three-fourths of heart transplants are done in men, so by necessity, many must receive organs from the opposite sex.

{ PhysOrg | Continue reading }

Developed by Dr. Harold Edgerton in the 1940s, the Rapatronic photographic technique allowed very early times in a nuclear explosion’s fireball growth to be recorded on film. The exposures were often as short as 10 nanoseconds, and each Rapatronic camera would take exactly one photograph. A bank of four to ten or more such cameras were arranged at tests to record different moments of early fireball growth.

{ Moonriver | Continue reading | pics }

related:

{ Hiroshima: The Lost Photographs | Design Observer | more }

{ Kim Rugg, Works on Paper, 2007-2008 }

related { Fake New York Times declares Iraq War over. | It should be noted that the modern standard for fake news was set in October 1978, with the publication of the one and only issue of Not The New York Times. }

Senate Democrats on the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees last week told the White House to preserve all records produced by the Bush administration and expressed “particular concerns” whether Vice President Dick Cheney’s office will comply with the law.

“We believe it is vital the presidential and vice presidential documents belonging to the American people be preserved, including those related to key national security decisions in which the (office of the vice president) played an important role,” the senators wrote in the Nov. 7 letter to White House lawyer Fred Fielding. The letter was obtained by The Associated Press.

{ AP | Continue reading }

previously { The Washington creature }

Dr. Ronald L. Mallett was only the 79th African-American to earn a doctorate in physics. But being black wasn’t the only potentially complicating factor he faced on the road to becoming a tenured theoretical physicist at the University of Connecticut.

Another was his reason for choosing his vocation, one he kept hidden for years. (…) Ronald Mallett wanted to build a time machine.

Traveling into the future is easy. (…) All you have to do is build a spaceship that moves nearly as fast as the speed of light, pump it with enough fuel for a long round-trip voyage, and head for the stars. By the time you return to Earth in, say, five years, you’ll have aged half a decade while everyone and everything else on Earth has aged considerably more.

But who wants to go to the future? (Nowadays, it’s terrifying even to ponder what the headlines will be tomorrow.)

Certainly not Mallett. For more than 50 years, he’s been obsessed with finding a way to return to the past. Specifically, to the Bronx, in 1955. That’s the year his father, Boyd Mallet, died. Mallett’s lifelong mission? To traverse spatiotemporal continuum and warn his dad to take better care of himself. To tell him to kick the two-pack-a-day habit that helped lead to the fatal heart attack he suffered at the age of 33.

The “overwhelming shock” of his father’s death caused Mallett, now 63, to “just disconnect from reality,” he says. So when, at age 10, he started building a jury-rigged jalopy, based on the gyroscopic contraption on the cover of the Classics Illustrated version of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, it might have seemed as if he had gone over the edge.

But the next decades only saw Mallett’s focus on his mission intensify with laser-like precision. He devoured every book on Einstein he could find. He boned up on differential equations and tensor calculus. And by 1973, at Penn State, he’d earned his Ph.D. Moved by the intensely personal nature of his quest, Spike Lee announced this past summer that he’s currently writing a screenplay for a movie — which he’ll direct — based on Mallett’s book, Time Traveler (Thunder’s Mouth, 2006).

{ The Boston Phoenix | Continue reading }

Related:

Even as the company was pleading the federal government for another $40 billion dollars in loans, AIG sent top executives to a secret gathering at a luxury resort in Phoenix last week. Reporters for abc15.com (KNXV) caught the AIG executives on hidden cameras poolside and leaving the spa at the Pointe Hilton Squaw Peak Resort, despite apparent efforts by the company to disguise its involvement.

“AIG made significant efforts to disguise the conference, making sure there were no AIG logos or signs anywhere on the property,” KNXV reported.

(…) Company officials confirmed the company spent an estimated $343,000 to sponsor the 2008 Asset Management Conference.

{ ABC news | Continue reading }

The U.S. government reached a deal Sunday night to scrap its original $123 billion bailout of American International Group Inc. and replace it with a new $150 billion package, according to people familiar with the matter. (…)

The new package is a tacit acknowledgment that the original $85 billion rescue in September, combined with an additional $37.8 billion made available to the company last month, together haven’t come close to stabilizing AIG.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn’t require approval by Congress, Americans have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

The Bush administration has committed $290 billion of the $700 billion rescue package.

Yet for all this activity, no formal action has been taken to fill the independent oversight posts established by Congress when it approved the bailout to prevent corruption and government waste. Nor has the first monitoring report required by lawmakers been completed, though the initial deadline has passed.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

The Treasury Department on Wednesday officially abandoned the original strategy behind its $700 billion effort to rescue the financial system, as administration officials acknowledged that banks and financial institutions were as unwilling as ever to lend to consumers. Treasury officials said they hoped to invest about $50 billion from the bailout fund into the new loan facility, with the aim of helping companies that issue credit cards, make student loans and finance car purchases.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

According to CreditSights, a research firm in New York and London, the U.S. government has put itself on the hook for some $5 trillion, so far, in an attempt to arrest a collapse of the financial system.

{ Forbes | Continue reading }

{ Amy Stein | more | Chashama ABC gallery, NYC }

{ Making The Shining }