links for 2008-12-01

"Does everybody have a baseline film that they watch – something utterly undemanding and familiar? I have two – Men in Black and Men in Black II. I've probably watched each half a dozen times."

"://URLFAN is an indexing service which ranks websites by popularity, based on blog mentions. It's been around for a while, but we think it's reached the point now where it's a very useful tool to measure influence on the Internet. ://URLFAN is similar to Alexa and its measurement of popularity is reminiscent of Google's PageRank. ://URLFAN also has similarities to Technorati, except that instead of indexing just blogs – ://URLFAN indexes all websites."

Medicine as conversation. Inspiring.

"The Jewish Autonomous Oblast (in Yiddish: Yidishe Avtonome Gegnt) was created in 1934 within the framework of Stalin’s nationality policy, centered on the town of Birobidzhan, along the Trans-Siberian Railway, close to Khabarovsk. The settlement of the area (by Russians), under way from the middle of the 19th century, was greatly speeded up by the Trans-Siberian Railway (completed in 1916). The creation of the JAO was meant to counter both Zionism and (religious) Judaism by creating an atheist, Soviet version of Zion, and further to settle the still sparsely populated Siberian lands bordering China."