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Three days before he was shot, John Lennon talked optimistically about his family and future, saying that he had "plenty of time" to accomplish some of his goals.

Lennon's final interview was released to The Associated Press by Rolling Stone on Wednesday, the 30th anniversary of the musician's death. The issue using the full interview will be on magazine stands Friday. Brief excerpts of Jonathan Cott's interview with Lennon were also released for a 1980 Rolling Stone cover story days after Lennon's death but this is the first time the entire interview has been published.

On his choices:
December's total lunar eclipse is the only total eclipse of the moon of this year and in the Western Hemisphere it will begin on Dec. 21 at 12:29 a.m. EST (9:29 p.m. PST on Dec. 20) as the moon begins to enter Earth's penumbral shadow.    

Skywatchers won't notice any changes in the moon's appearance until about 45 minutes later when shading will become evident on the upper left portion of the moon's disk.   

The 72 minutes of the total lunar eclipse will be visible from North and South America, northern and western Europe, and northeast Asia, including Korea and much of Japan. Totality will also be visible from the North Island of New Zealand and Hawaii. 
There are few instances where climate scientists attribute specific events to climate change - the only time anyone prominent did it, Al Gore when he implied Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming - made scientists cringe a little, though they scrambled to rationalize it for him.

They haven't done it because science doesn't work that way.   It's fine for sociologists to portray odd correlation-causation claims as fact, like that good grades make students healthier, but physical sciences prefer to stick to the data and away from circumstantial evidence.
Own a company in Venezuela?  If you are one of the few successful companies left that hasn't been nationalized, you won't be much longer because they are getting too much rain.

The recent rains have left 70,000 people homeless, mostly in the coastal area where millions live in hillside shantytowns and have had mudslides ruin homes.

Wait, isn't Venezuela an OPEC nation?   And rich as all get out?  Indeed they are, so it seems odd that Chavez blames other capitalists - the ones making him rich - for rain yet doesn't spend any money to get his people out of cardboard boxes.
U.C. San Diego researchers have discovered that some ad codes are tracking user history far beyond what was previously believed - and not just shady sites.  

This 'history sniffing' was found on large sites like Morningstar.com and Newsmax.com, among others.  The culprit in those cases - ad-targeting company Interclick - admitted to being the tracking code on those sites.

Interclick said its new homegrown code
I can't make sense of the point behind this video but that's why I have a science site and not a chat show like "Gylne Tider".

They made a promotional video of people lip syncing a remake (1987) of Paul McCartney's "Let It Be" (I know, I know, it was technically The Beatles, but we all know their agreeing to list themselves as Lennon-McCartney gave John Lennon a lot more credit for Beatles work on those last few albums than he deserved - he was phoning it in) but they aren't singers - and the subtitles are fun to read.

Tonya Harding, the not Don Johnson guy from Miami Vice, Glenn Close Botox-ed into oblivion, Katarin Witt on air guitar and many others - this is a keeper.
Who would you think is the most read person in the world;  Shakespeare, God, that lady who wrote the Harry Potter books?

Nope, it turns out to be Matthew Carter of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Never heard of him?  Neither had I but the Babbage blog at The Economist has.  Carter is the person who created the Georgia and Verdana fonts, which are now on practically every personal computer in existence.  He created them both in the 1990s for Microsoft, which released them with Internet Explorer and bundled them into Windows and then issued them as a free download for all PCs.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Julius Genachowski announced Wednesday that he has circulated draft rules that will "preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet" - but they ironically couldn't be disclosed to the public ahead of the December 21st vote.

Yes, rules on openness no one in the public will get to see.  Welcome to government oversight of Internet freedom.
TSA is positively Grinch-like this holiday season, with complaints of an eerie choice between uncertain X-ray scanners or 'gate rape' by TSA security if you refuse to be irradiated, neither of which has any chance at all of stopping terrorists, since actual countries with terrorists don't do anything of the sort.
The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, which wasn't officially on a secret mission though it raised various alarms when it disappeared for two weeks, has returned.  

Tracking X-37B was a delight for amateur astronomers since, let's be honest, you can't really keep a secret in the sky from them.   While NASA employees were drinking coffee, an amateur found a gaping hole in Jupiter, so not a lot gets by unpaid sky watchers.
This isn't the kind of Ferrari you expect Formula One drivers to be in but it sure goes fast - it is the world's fastest roller coaster, screaming along at 150 MPH.

Watch F-1 drivers Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa go from 0 to face-peeling in two seconds flat.


The Post Carbon Institute has a video on 300 years of fossil fuel usage.  It isn't entirely accurate (we didn't 'run out' of wood, it got surpassed) but it's interesting.

As they write "While there's a damned good chance we'll fall off a cliff, there's still time to control our transition to a post-carbon future" - the private sector will do it.   There is a reason we are not an alcohol or whale oil economy, after all.
In another chapter in the Democratic War on ScienceKentucky scientists are concerned about Democratic Governor Steve Beshear's announcement that the state is partnering with Answers in Genesis (AIG) to create "Ark Encounter," to make what developers call a full-scale ark including models of dinosaurs.  Cost: $150 million.   
Scientists at the Vatican support so-called genetically modified crops but the head of the Catholic Church's science advisors has now said that the statement does not represent an official Church endorsement - only 18% of the scientists present agreed with the endorsement though, to be fair, that is many more than the 2% of astronomers who determined Pluto is not a planet.

Given the recent endorsement of condom use, where the Church is now for it unless it is against it, and subsequent clarifications, means Catholics have a crisis of communication these days.
What is the totalitarian solution to young people spending too much time on the Internet?  An Internet 'curfew' forcing them off.   

The proposed "Cinderella" ban would make it illegal for Internet service providers to allow online gaming access to users under the age of 16 between the hours of midnight and 6AM.  How will that be determined?  Government snooping, of course.
One day a year you can talk about dark meat and huge breasts without getting yelled at by your significant other.

Here are 15 other things you can only say on Thanksgiving and not get funny looks.
There's no denying Farmville on Facebook made gaming mainstream - your grandmother plays it, and so I am not knocking it.   It's cool enough and strategic enough and addictive enough, sure...but it is not complicated.   You can figure it out.
I'll be honest, I actually have been offered millions for Science 2.0.  Why not take it?  Well, I had to have that discussion with my wife, as you can imagine, but it felt wrong to have called up a lot of well-known scientists and told them we were going to change how science got to the public and implemented in policies and then suddenly announce, sorry, I got a check so I am out of here.
Eating a high cholesterol diet is not going to harm your brain but eating a chronic high cholesterol diet can, according to researchers from the Laboratory of Psychiatry and Experimental Alzheimers Research at the Medical University Innsbruck in the journal Molecular Cellular Neuroscience.

Like many things, it can even be implicated in Alzheimer's.