Career Day at the Madrassa

Yes yes, sure it’s awful that there’s all this piracy off the Somali coast, how savage and mercenary and whatnot. But really we all think it’s incredibly entertaining and awesome that pirates are once again the scourge of the seas. So to help ease your social conscience after silently rooting for Real Pirates, read this [...]

War Crimes Are So Awkward

What might be the weirdest element of this whole presidential transition is the fact that the outgoing administration is guilty of war crimes.  To put it in brief, the Bush Justice Department, under Alberto Gonzales especially, acted as a political arm of the White House used to pressure political enemies and write legal opinions creating [...]

Snuffleupagus Will Kill and Eat You

Following up on today’s pachyderm theme, apparently Mr. Hammond and that guy from Law & Order have finished mapping the woolly mammoth genome. Next stop PREHISTORIC CLONES!
Science and I are making a deal.  I can get by without dinosaurs in my lifetime as long we get ourselves some woolly mammoths in the next twenty years. [...]

Let’s Teach Elephants to Talk

Elephants are pretty smart. They can recognize themselves in a mirror. They form clans and maintain cemetaries and hold funerals.  They can paint, probably better than you:

And according to this New Yorker article about beer, when the man is getting them down they get drunk and fuck shit up, which means [...]

Keifer Sutherland Has a TV Show?

Hey, did you guys hear about this show 24? You know Keifer Sutherland, Donald Sutherland’s kid? He was in Stand By Me and The Lost Boys?  Apparently he’s in it. Yeah, he plays some kind of spy.
Back in the Middle Ages when this show was last on TV, it got really REALLY shitty, and when [...]

Pop Culture Dissonance = Hizzlarity

As a matter of keeping posts semi-regular around here, please enjoy this clip of Martha Stewart & Snoop Doog:

For more, including Snoop making mashed potatoes and Martha Stewart proclaiming she will ball til she falls, check out Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Cotton Dyed Blue

Awesome map courtesy of Strange Maps, with the location of cotton plantations in 1860 laid over election results by county in 2008:

Quantum Leap

Yesterday morning I discovered this Discover article, via Andrew Sullivan, about the growing scientific movement in support of the ‘multiverse’ hypothesis, a.k.a. the idea that there are an infinite number of universes, each with its own laws of physics.
The basic idea is that if you combine the evidence for Inflationary Big Bang Theory and the [...]

Wildfire Weather

I wasn’t in my car all weekend, so when I left for work this morning it only made sense that a bunch of ash from the wildfires would fly into the air when I opened the door. Here’s a so-so pic of the hood coated in apocalypse weather, and let it be noted that [...]

It’s Alive!

Back in the spring I linked to this image (links to bigger version) comparing brain cells to the universe:
And now, from the Wikipedia page for ‘internet,’
Hmmm…