The 99 is based on a pivotal moment in Islamic history: the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258. In Mutawa’s series, 99 gemstones encrypted with Baghdad’s wisdom and power were scattered around the world, left for superheroes such as “Jabbar the Powerful” and “Noora the Light” to find before their archnemesis Rughal does.

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These hipster zombies… are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents,” wrote Christian Lorentzen in a Time Out New York article entitled ‘Why the Hipster Must Die.’ “And they must be buried for cool to be reborn.

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AMERICANS today spend almost as much on bandwidth — the capacity to move information — as we do on energy. A family of four likely spends several hundred dollars a month on cellphones, cable television and Internet connections, which is about what we spend on gas and heating oil.

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Life is the new media, rich in all it’s texture, drama, subterfuge, and transcendence. As the military struggles with soldier bloggers, embedded third-party reporters, wired insurgencies, and the ever-present satt feeds waving down from far up above with just a passing glint of sunlight, the injustices and atrocities wrought by man & machine are cataloged equally alongside silly cat pictures, personal bios, frat videos, copyright violations, knowledge wiki’s, satellite imagery, and reams & reams of pornography.

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All this said the ISS would be a great candidate for interplanetary travel. Although it might look a little ungainly, in the vacuum of space there’s little concern for aerodynamics (besides, for a station orbiting at a speed of 17,000 miles/hr, its shape is hardly holding it back!). It’s a tried and tested space-worthy candidate. Plus, the Constellation Program would fit right in. Perhaps the Orion module could be integrated into the station, and the engines from the powerful Ares rocket could be attached for propulsion. If something a little gentler is required, ion propulsion engines are becoming more and more sophisticated.

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5) The Apocalypse will be an adventure. It won’t. Somehow when we tell stories of the end of the world, we tend to always leave out the most fundamental experience of life during a disaster, which is powerless suffering. Disasters, as I’ve written before are all about bad food and wet feet and sick babies and pointless pain.

But reality is quite different from this. In reality, even the worst large-scale disasters come in variable speeds; in even the worst disasters, effects are uneven, with some places devastated and others left only mildly scathed; and in almost all disasters, rebuilding begins almost immediately (even the Black Death killing a third to half of the population didn’t put much of dent in Europe’s evolution – indeed some argue it accelerated trade and innovation).

In reality, in a disaster those with the largest stable group and the highest degree of cooperation come out on top, and, in fact, it is often those places which are best governed and most socially coherent that assist other places in the rebuilding… and those hard-hit places are generally quite receptive to good ideas for putting the pieces back together.

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In other words, the Twhirl client won’t have to ping the Identi.ca servers to get updates; instead, updates will be sent directly to the Twhirl client. This makes nanoblog conversations more live – you can have a back-and-forth without hovering over the “update” button. It also means that your Twhirl client doesn’t have to be hitting the Identi.ca servers every few minutes for updates, which reduces the load profile on the service, theoretically at least.

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Reminiscent of the West’s imperial push in the 18th and 19th centuries – but on a much more dramatic, determined scale – China’s rulers believe Africa can become a ‘satellite’ state, solving its own problems of over-population and shortage of natural resources at a stroke.

With little fanfare, a staggering 750,000 Chinese have settled in Africa over the past decade. More are on the way.

The strategy has been carefully devised by officials in Beijing, where one expert has estimated that China will eventually need to send 300 million people to Africa to solve the problems of over-population and pollution.

The plans appear on track. Across Africa, the red flag of China is flying. Lucrative deals are being struck to buy its commodities – oil, platinum, gold and minerals. New embassies and air routes are opening up. The continent’s new Chinese elite can be seen everywhere, shopping at their own expensive boutiques, driving Mercedes and BMW limousines, sending their children to exclusive private schools.

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The boomer population has grown up with technology and is comfortable with technology,” Thompson said. “Our research shows a willingness to adopt technology to make life easier. It seems like a logical extension of the boomer lifestyle to include technology that makes them safer on the road.

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What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.

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