LarsonsWorld -- just another persons /dev/null

While the use of high-pressure sprays on rocks effectively helped move the Exxon Valdez oil spill off the Alaskan shoreline, it further damaged the ecosystem by destroying and displacing marine life. (Natalie Fobes/Corbis)

March 24, 1989: Valdez Spill Causes Environmental Catastrophe -- Wired

What Exxon Valdez spill can still teach us -- CNN

Not Mincing Words -- Slate

And so it seems, Robert Gates really will be leaving the Pentagon soon. On his way out the door, he gives the military some refreshingly frank advice.

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How the atom bomb helped give birth to the Internet -- Ars Technica

Johnny Ryan's A History of the Internet and the Digital Future has just been released and is already drawing rave reviews. Ars Technica is proud to present three chapters from the book, condensed and adapted for our readers. This first installment is adapted from Chapter 1, "A Concept Born in the Shadow of the Nuke," and it looks at the role that the prospect of nuclear war played in the technical and policy decisions that gave rise to the Internet.

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A good day to read George Washington's Farewell Address

Read the full text here.

FYI: he was actually born tomorrow, 22 February 1732

Hunter S. Thompson (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005)

Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted -- PCWorld

Paul Revere galloped from Charlestown to Lexington on that famous night in 1775. He couldn't have done it without his horse, so did that mean the American Revolution was really the "horse revolution"? That's silly, of course. But calling the Egyptian revolution the "Facebook (or Twitter) revolution" is just as misguided, and it's a symptom of our ethnocentric habit of viewing the world through the prism of the American experience or -- in the case of Egypt -- American technology.

There's no doubt that Twitter and Facebook were tools the mostly young Egyptian rebels used to good effect. But that's all they were: tools. After all, the revolution continued -- and intensified -- when those tools were disabled by the Egyptian govenment's shutdown of the Internet. Yet we in the media and the technology industry are absolutely convinced that it couldn't have happened without social networking. As New Yorker magazine author Malcolm Gladwell puts it: "Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools." Exactly.

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What "original intent" would look like -- Salon

With reverence and awe, Michele Bachmann and the Tea Party pay homage to the original Constitution and framers who drafted the document in 1787. The House of Representatives, in a nod to them, began its session this year by reading it. Bachmann even brought Antonin Scalia to a seminar on the Constitution for members of Congress, where the Supreme Court justice instructed members to read the Federalist Papers and follow the framers' original intent. Moreover, many of the Tea Party's political positions, such as opposition to President Obama's healthcare reform program, are rooted in their adherence to the original document.

But what if they actually got their way? If a Tea Party constitutional reading suddenly took sway and we returned to the original document as conceived, what would the American republic look like? Much to the surprise of Bachmann and others, there wouldn't be that much freedom and democracy.

Read on ...

Darwin Day is a recently instituted celebration intended to commemorate the anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin on February 12, 1809. The day is used to highlight Darwin's contribution to science and to promote science in general.

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Jules 'The Father of Science Fiction' Verne is born-- February 8, 1828 – March 24, 1905

• Wikipedia Entry
• 8 Jules Verne Inventions That Came True (Pictures) -- National Geographic
• Google has a fancy Doodle that you can use to navigate the undersea
• How Jules Verne Invented NASA -- Gearlog

Photo by Dennis Fernkes

3 February 1959, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson die in an airplane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa