Show Notes for February 13, 2013


  • Reading/movies
    • Uncle Tom's Cabin: "is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman."
    • Brokeback Mountain: "a 2005 romantic drama film directed by Ang Lee. It is a film adaptation of the 1997 short story of the same name by Annie Proulx with the screenplay written by Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry. The film […] depicts the complex romantic and sexual relationship between two men in the American West from 1963 to 1983."
    • Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln: "a book by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin published in 2005. The book is a biographical portrait of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and some of the men who served with him in his Cabinet from 1861 to 1865"
  • Beer
  • Gadgets
    • Jawbone Up
    • Pebble watch
    • Android notification LED: "Many Android devices contain a tiny lamp, called the notification LED, which is used to keep the user informed about events while the screen is off. Notifications with a priority level of MAX, HIGH, or DEFAULT should cause the LED to glow, while those with lower priority (LOW and MIN) should not. The user's control over notifications should extend to the LED. By default, the LED will glow with a white color. Your notifications shouldn't use a different color unless the user has explicitly customized it."
  • History
    • When was Nanjing the capital of China? "Nanjing has long been celebrated as a literary and political center. It was the capital of China from the 3d to 6th cent. AD and again from 1368 to 1421. The Treaty of Nanjing, signed in 1842 at the end of the Opium War, opened China to foreign trade. During the Taiping Rebellion insurgents held the city from 1853 to 1864. It was captured by the revolutionists in 1911, and in 1912 it became the capital of China's first president, Sun Yat-sen."
    • Taiping Rebellion: "a massive civil war in southern China from 1850 to 1864, against the ruling Manchu-led Qing Dynasty. It was led by Hong Xiuquan, who announced that he had received visions in which he learned that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. About 20 million people died, mainly civilians, in one of the deadliest military conflicts in history"
  • Science
    • Hippocampus: "the brain has a hippocampus in each cerebral hemisphere, so every normal brain has two of them"

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