Pictured above is the 5000-year-old Newgrange megalith in eastern Ireland. The large structure was built such that every year on the winter solstice, as long as the skies are clear, the interior is dramatically lit up by the sun shining through a perfectly positioned hole in the rock.

I haven’t posted any year end lists since linking to fimoculous’s massive aggregation, but I want to point out three that I usually check out each year: Roger Ebert’s Best Ten Movies of 2005, Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2005, and Sight & Sound’s Films of the Year.

If you’re not sure whether Bush violated federal law by authorizing the NSA wiretap program, this post will clear things up. There are some questions that need to be answered here, such as why the New York Times waited a year until publishing this story, and why Bush circumvented the FISA act, which already gave him the power of warrantless surveillance in broad situations.

If you feel like you’re out of touch with the toy market, and wonder what you would be playing with instead of Alphie if you were a kid today, look no farther than the Fly Pentop. There was a long article on the development and popularity of the Fly Pentop in Wired magazine, but the article isn’t online.

Mitt Romney has announced that he will not be running for a second term as governor of Massachusetts. The unstated implication being that he’s so unpopular in Massachusetts that he would lose the reelection campaign, which result would kill his 2008 presidential aspirations. Maybe Massachusetts will finally realize that the Democrat population/Republican governor idea hasn’t been working out so well.

Following the Dollars: find out who in your zip code gave money to which political parties in the 2004 election by looking at a modded Google map. You can actually click on the person’s marker and view the donator’s name, address, the amount given, and the candidate who received the money. (via pw)

A conspiracy theory suggesting that the CIA might be using the social networking site facebook.com to collect large amounts of private information. I don’t believe the theory on its face, especially since DARPA connections don’t necessarily imply competence, but it is frightening how blind people are to the privacy policies of sites to which they give private information. (via waxy)

Regret the Error’s Year in Media Errors and Corrections presents the funniest and most shocking media corrections of 2005. Here’s one example from Reuters:

An article on the rapid growth of Las Vegas and the possibility that the housing bubble could soon burst. Only in Vegas could full-time waiters and valet parkers afford to buy homes, but that’s been changing over the past few years and could lead to a devastating housing crisis if the bubble bursts. (thx, lorelei)