This is why I love Roanoke lacrosse. Matt Burkhead wrote and produced this 33-minute video highlighting what was supposed to be a rebuilding year in 2011.

After losing 15 seniors, five All-Americans (including their starting goalie), and two position players of the year at the end of the 2010 season, most lacrosse fans suspected that Roanoke would struggle during their 2011 season. However, it was this set of circumstances that provided the 2011 team with a chance to achieve something great.

Watch on GoNoke.org.

I can’t believe my old team is still eating at Famous A’s, nor can I get over how crappy Stevenson’s facilities look. Go Noke!

R.I.P. Holly, 1998-2012. She was the best and we’ll always remember her incredibly human-like behavior and indelible love for men.

I somehow missed this a few weeks ago. Popular Mechanics has a detailed article analyzing the transcript of AF447′s cockpit voice recorder. It is chilling and incredible and horrifying and terribly sad.

Bonin yields the controls, and Robert finally puts the nose down. The plane begins to regain speed. But it is still descending at a precipitous angle. As they near 2000 feet, the aircraft’s sensors detect the fast-approaching surface and trigger a new alarm. There is no time left to build up speed by pushing the plane’s nose forward into a dive. At any rate, without warning his colleagues, Bonin once again takes back the controls and pulls his side stick all the way back.

02:14:23 (Robert) Damn it, we’re going to crash… This can’t be happening!

02:14:25 (Bonin) But what’s happening?

02:14:27 (Captain) Ten degrees of pitch…

Exactly 1.4 seconds later, the cockpit voice recorder stops.

On June 1, 2009, 228 souls were lost in the worst accident in the history of Air France, the deadliest commercial airline accident since 2001, and the deadliest in French aviation.

See also: The Last Four Minutes of AF447 and What Happened to Air France 447?

A great collection of photos from the Twisted Sifter – the top galleries from 2011.

Often the most popular posts on the site, the galleries not only take our readers around the world, but back in time as well. Some galleries even show us the farthest reaching points of the Cosmos and the thriving microscopic world invisible to the human eye.

Fascinating article in Vanity Fair, my favorite magazine, on the TSA and the $1.1 trillion the US Government has spent on the agency since 9/11. Written by Charles C. Mann:

To walk through an airport with Bruce Schneier is to see how much change a trillion dollars can wreak. So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost. And directed against a threat that, by any objective standard, is quite modest. Since 9/11, Islamic terrorists have killed just 17 people on American soil, all but four of them victims of an army major turned fanatic who shot fellow soldiers in a rampage at Fort Hood. (The other four were killed by lone-wolf assassins.) During that same period, 200 times as many Americans drowned in their bathtubs. Still more were killed by driving their cars into deer. The best memorial to the victims of 9/11, in Schneier’s view, would be to forget most of the “lessons” of 9/11. “It’s infuriating,” he said, waving my fraudulent boarding pass to indicate the mass of waiting passengers, the humming X-ray machines, the piles of unloaded computers and cell phones on the conveyor belts, the uniformed T.S.A. officers instructing people to remove their shoes and take loose change from their pockets. “We’re spending billions upon billions of dollars doing this—and it is almost entirely pointless. Not only is it not done right, but even if it was done right it would be the wrong thing to do.”

(via)