Friday Links

17 mistakes startups makes.

The first picture of a laser pulse. Wow!

Big Brother wins in Sweden.

Curing cancer with the immune system?

The Volt cometh.

Old video games resurrected.

Is REM sleep necessary for intelligence?

Iran on its heels?

Bad boys get more girls.

How wiretapping works.

Russian justice.

The ethics of stealing WiFi.

The Taleban cleared from Kandahar.

Where are the missing Tibetan protesters?

The first hydrogen cars are here.

Canada's thought police.

Weekly Links

Nerd tatoos.

There's no absolute freedom of speech in Sweden.

Google is building a lobbying powerhouse in Washington.

This doomed star is approximately 150 times the size of the Sun.

Cheap ethanol from glycerin, from biodiesel, care of bioengineering.

France bans Canadian Blackberries on fear of US spying.

11 cures for procrastination.

New study shows Vista more secure than Linux or Macintosh OSX.

The world's best business sites. (hat tip: Buddy Larsen)

A binary adder made from marbles. (hat tip: Seneca the Younger)

Top cities for young professionals.

Sun delivers its first Blackbox data center to Stanford.

Social trip finder.

We actually belong to the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy, not to the Milky Way. Who knew?

How to cool your house.

If fire were made of water.

The essential 1,000 films.

Aurora Borealis from space.

Philosophy of History.

Quantum dots might be the key to teleportation.

Giant penguins roaming the tropics.

The UK is the worst for social mobility.

The coming global cooling.

7 secrets of the super-organized.

Chimps can be altruistic.

World's first robot construction worker.

1 in 10 Brits born overseas.

Inside China's factories.

Iranian forces cross into Iraq.

Hot rocks keep North America afloat.

Facebook vs. MySpace.

Eugenics in Sweden

Facts I bet you didn't know.

Between 1934 and 1976, when the Sterilisation Act was finally repealed, 62,000 people, 90 percent of them women, were sterilised. 15-year-old teenagers were sterilised for "crimes" such as going to dance halls. One woman was sterilised in 1960 for being in a motorcycle gang. Orphans were sterilised as a condition of their release from children's homes. Others were pinpointed on the basis of local neighbourhood gossip and personal grudges. Some were targeted because of their "low intelligence", being of mixed race, being gypsies, or for physical defects.

Hmmm, I knew Swedish socialism had fascist roots, but I didn't know about the eugenics. Of course, eugenics was progressive science back in the early 20'th century. I believe that Margaret Sanger spoke twice to the KKK about eugenics in the 1920's. I have also read that the text at issue in the Scopes trial promoted the practice. But I didn't know Sweden had been so deeply involved, apparently they sterilized more people per capita than any other country besides Germany.

More here.