Potpourri for the Feast of St Olga

Yikes … need to clear off some tabs …

1. Who is St Olga?
2. The Roman Catholic Church is the “one, holy, apostolic church of Christ” –according to the Roman Catholc Church’s official doctrine office.  Though it allows that other folks (e.g., Episcopalians) who “suffer from defects” may share “elements” of “sanctification and of truth,” and most likely their congregants are saved.  Whew! 
3. The real story of the “Heroes of Telemark.”
4. On the other hand — the folks at the airport security may be able to find your water bottle, but are a lot less likely to find your bomb.
5. Meanwhile, looks like only one asteroid was responsible for the K-T Extinction Event, not two.  Did that increase or decrease the odds of another one hitting us?
6. What if the human population vanished overnight? And there’s a similar book, too. Days after our disappearance, pumps keeping Manhattan’s subways dry would fail, tunnels would flood, soil under streets would sluice away and the foundations of towering skyscrapers built to last for centuries would start to crumble. At the other end of the chronological spectrum, anything made of bronze might survive in recognizable form for millions of years—along with one billion pounds of degraded but almost indestructible plastics manufactured since the mid-20th century. Meanwhile, land freed from mankind’s environmentally poisonous footprint would quickly reconstitute itself, as in Chernobyl, where animal life has returned after 1986’s deadly radiation leak, and in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, a refuge since 1953 for the almost-extinct goral mountain goat and Amur leopard. (via kottke) Which reminds me of this classic.
7. How do you get off a plane stuck on the tarmac for four hours with no a/c?  Simple — get the police to haul you away.  “I figured if I started recording and asking the pilots what was going on and why they couldn’t make a decision to get people off the plane that the police would come and take us off — and that is exactly what happened,”  (via J-Walk)
8. The Lamest Edit Wars on Wikipedia.  Yes, Wikipedia has an entry on it.  And, yes, they are pretty lame.
9. What do all those wine ratings mean?
10. An interesting article on George Bush as a person, and how he handles the job, the defections, the disapproval ratings.  (It sounds like, at this point, with a healthy dose of “history will approve of me, eventually.”)
11. Yes, with age you do become a grumpy, humorless old person.  So get off my lawn, you darned kids! (via Avocet)
12. Graphic design and terrorist organizations.  So terrorist organizations have logos. It recently occurred to me that someone had to actually design those logos. But how did they decide who gets to do it? Did the job go to whichever terrorist had a copy of Adobe Illustrator?
13. The F-14 may be out of service for the US, but they’re being shredded to keep still-valuable bits and pieces out of the arms market.
14. I suppose it’s good news graphic design if it’s informative and you want to keep looking at it.  Regardless, tips for spotting folks carrying handguns is fascinating.  Lots of other nice graphics by the same illustrator further down in the article.
15. The EFF reports on the first umpteen thousand pages of Freedom of Information Act releases on National Security Letter usage by the FBI.  Not surprisingly, lots of goofs, misuse, and CCs to Alberto Gonzalez that he “failed to recall” during testimony about it. 
16. The Ultimate D&D Flowchart looks very amusing — a pity the link has gone dead (the BoingBoing Effect?).
17. Photo gallery of the “new” Seven Wonders of the World.
18. The Zorse.