NASA - NASA Images Suggest Water Still Flows in Brief Spurts on Mars
NASA photographs have revealed bright new deposits seen in two gullies on Mars that suggest water carried sediment through them sometime during the past seven years.”These observations give the strongest evidence to date that water still flows occasionally on the surface of Mars,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, Washington.
Decline and fall of the Roman myth - Newspaper Edition - Times Online
The Romans kept the Barbarians at bay for as long as they could, but finally they were engulfed and the savage hordes overran the empire, destroying the cultural achievements of centuries. The light of reason and civilisation was almost snuffed out by the Barbarians, who annihilated everything that the Romans had put in place, sacking Rome itself and consigning Europe to the Dark Ages. The Barbarians brought only chaos and ignorance, until the renaissance rekindled the fires of Roman learning and art.It is a familiar story, and it’s codswallop
CNN.com: Japan developing remote control for humans
I felt a mysterious, irresistible urge to start walking to the right whenever the researcher turned the switch to the right. I was convinced — mistakenly — that this was the only way to maintain my balance.The phenomenon is painless but dramatic. Your feet start to move before you know it. I could even remote-control myself by taking the switch into my own hands.
There’s no proven-beyond-a-doubt explanation yet as to why people start veering when electricity hits their ear. But NTT researchers say they were able to make a person walk along a route in the shape of a giant pretzel using this technique
CraftRobo is, if I understand this right, an inkjet that also has a paper cutter in it, so it cuts out the shape of what you print.
That is so money. Unfortunately, the currency is Yen only at the moment.
“Taking Liberty” by William A. Galston
George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, with its sweeping rhetoric about the spread of freedom abroad and at home, sparked strong but varied reactions. Most of the president’s conservative supporters ranked it with the greatest inaugural speeches, such as John F. Kennedy’s 1961 call to bear any burden and pay any price in the service of human freedom and Lincoln’s sermonic 1865 meditation on the inscrutable justice of God’s judgment on those who deny freedom to others. The president’s liberal critics were less laudatory, agreeing instead with former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan’s surprising judgment that the speech fell “somewhere between dreamy and disturbing.” Whether the speech was a display of visionary statesmanship, or an exercise in hubristic overreach, is something only history can determine. But it is not too early to say that the speech was both a wakeup call to liberals—from whose vocabulary the evocative term “freedom” has been mostly absent in recent years—and a guide to the deep flaws in the modern conservative understanding of freedom.
Ever since reading RE/Search #4/5
as a child, I’ve been curious about the Dreamachine. Over time, it began to sound more like drug mythology (”dude… there’s a machine, and you look at it for a few minutes and you start dreaming while you’re awake! It’s like tripping for free! And it’s toooootally legal!”) than something that actually existed.
Well I guess, to be fair, I really thought of it as wish fulfillment via drugs, i.e. that Gyson et. al. wanted a Dream Machine, and because they were so high on various drugs, they thought they had one.
Wow, that sounded very fair, didn’t it?
Anyway, to my surprise the dream machine has been gaining a lot of attention lately, including a mention in the [cough sputter] Home & Garden > Decor by Timothy Leary” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/20/garden/20mach.html?oref=login&8hpib”>New York Times.
Apparently, the dream machine is regaining popularity. There’s even a guy selling ‘em for $500-3,000. But you can make them for around $10, if you have a record player.
In case I ever want to build my own, I could.
So in Trinidad last weekend, a calf was born with 7 legs.
Here’s the part that got my interest:
Rattandai Singh… described the birth of the seven leg calf as a miracle.
“We are living in the dark age which is called (Kalyug), and during this time miracles would happen all over the world, so no one should be surprised,” she said
It’s interesting to me that someone could look at the birth of an organism so mutated that it will be unable to walk, and probably would not survive a month in nature.
Thanks to Boing Boing for the original scoop.
David Pescovitz reports in the article the morphine in all of us that wired magazine is reporting that morphine [is] apparently in your head.
What does that mean for you? It means that you are a morphine factory, probably designed by centipedes in moroccan genetic/firework laboratories for the sole purpose of providing narrative pleasures to a hyped up crowd of sycophantic lower mammals–rodents and marsupials mainly. The pressure in you head will only be relieved by the installation of a tap and hose system, allowing the golden nectar to be sucked directly from your cranium, providing the purest of transcendental bliss to the centipedes most wealthy of customers, the rat-bastard (excuse the pun) chipmunks landlords of the field.
Paging Dr. Benway.
It’s not as interesting as all that, but it did make me think of my old friend Bill. Basically, the idea is that morphine is a naturally occurring neurochemical, like serotonin or dopamine. By giving patients a precursor to morphine as opposed to synthetic morphine, researchers are having success with the brain generating morphine by itself.. presumably at more exact levels than a shot could provide.
If you can stand it, it’s probably best to read the paper from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
Endogenous formation of morphine in human cells — Poeaknapo et al., 10.1073/pnas.0405430101 (abstract and full-text available)
For some reason, I keep getting into conversations about the Fundamentalist position that the world is less than 7,000 years old. I keep mentioning in these conversations that some guy actually figured out from the bible the date the world was created.
It turns out that some guy = Bishop James Ussher (1581-1656), Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin.
The date the world was created? Sunday October 23, 4004 BC.
What really took me by surprise was that Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden on the 10th of November later that year–only 18 days later. It hardly seems fair, if you think about it.
I mentioned this to Stabinski, and he replied “they were only there for a couple of pages”
True, true.
EroTech Industries has invented Bill Lee’s dream/nightmare lunch date.
I guess it’s more David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch than Burroughs, but still.
Yikes.
When I look at the Bunny Killers, I don’t know whether to smile or sneer, laugh or cry.
CNN reports that Jessica Simpson will get her own series.
Is it the apocalypse yet?
Well, I guess I must be getting older because these days I seem to get all religious around the holiday season, and I start reading Isaac Bonewits’ Homepage for little bits of the spiritual.
Well, as in the spirit of the old year, where lying was the vogue, I’ll link you to Isaac’s Halloween Errors and Lies, a compilation of fun facts and stories to make you feel better about Halloween, the Day of the Dead, etc.
Anti-Halloween propagandists use these claims to disrupt or
prevent our religious rites, slander our beliefs, and blaspheme
our deities, despite the total lack of evidence to support them:
- Local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, including
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, have never found even one example of a “Satanic cult human sacrifice.” What they do occasionally find are budding psychopaths killing small animals in what a psychiatrist would call a “ritualistic” manner. As that link just cited puts it, “FBI expert K. J. Lanning defines a satanic murder as ‘one committed by two or more individuals who rationally plan the crime and whose primary motivation is to fulfill a prescribed satanic ritual calling for the murder.’ Using this definition he has been unable to identify even one documented satanic murder in the United States.”- Similarly, the urban legends about “Satanic cults looking
to kidnap blond blue-eyed children for sacrifice” (presumably
by evil “non-Aryans”) reveal more about racism than
crime in America because here, too, there is not a single
real incident recorded by law enforcement agencies.- All those stories of poisoned candy and razor blades in apples
— which some Christian Fundamentalists would have
us believe is how modern Witches and Druids now “sacrifice”
kids — turn out to be more urban legends with zero law
enforcement backing — see Curses! Broiled Again!: The Hottest Urban Legends Going, by noted folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand for details.- Claims are made that “the ASPCA reports the evidence of animal mutilation and destruction is ten times more available on the week preceeding and the weekend following Halloween.I’ve been unable to get the ASPCA to back this up. Apparently, some pounds and animal control facilities may not adopt out black kittens to scary-looking teenagers just before Halloween, but the evidence on which they base these policies is unclear. It may just be another urban legend based on teenaged sociopaths killing animals in years past. See Wren Walker’s article on The Annual Halloween Scaredy Cat Ban for details.
-Read more at Halloween Errors and Lies
Anocht Oidhche Shamhna! Happy New Year!
The current Search Query Report:
#reqs: search term
—–: ———–
4: corgis biting
2: yoshi pictures attack
2: pictures of yoshi
1: shackle quests for iksar monks on everquest
1: ann coulter and pictures
1: legal sex at 13
1: kiev 60 mlu body
1: handsome boy modelling school
1: oidhche shamhna
1: ann coulter pics
1: ”messenger service” winxp
1: suddenly everything sucks
1: microsoft messenger sucks
1: fisherspooner emerge lyrics
1: zoo sex blog
1: ann coulter sexy
1: fat lady singing
1: ann coulter
1: ultima ratio regum
1: kiev mlu
Well kids, we haven’t looked at the “search query report” in a while so let’s see how ol’ uncle ilovich is doing up against the zeitgeist:
46: shiba inu pictures
35: pictures of yoshi
32: shiba inu pics
25: shiba inu puppy pictures
24: acid for mac
22: veritas numquam perit
14: shiba inu puppy
11: yoshi pictures
11: shiba inu images
11: ann coulter sexy
10: sexy ann coulter
10: homelandsecurity.com
8: gunthak
7: shiba inu
7: humansex
6: yoshi pics
6: kiev 60
6: squeak blog
5: gulf of gunthak
5: ultima ratio regum
352: [not listed: 291 search terms]
Happily, “sexy ann coulter” is in the minority of topics that generate traffic around here. I still am at a loss for why my site comes up if you search for humansex. The only time it occurs on this site is when it’s mentioned in the search query report. Quite a strange chicken/egg riddle.
Those of you who know me well will be unsuprised by the fact that my dog generates more interest than I do. However, I now have data indicating how much more:
#reqs: %bytes: directory
-----: ------: ---------
1: : http://
10: 0.01%: /everquest/
91: 0.04%: /dreams/
14: : /reason/
1820: 0.53%: /images/
43: 0.04%: /photographemes/
70: 0.07%: /games/
2791: 0.23%: /MT/
4609: 2.97%: /archives/
21814: 92.90%: /yoshi/
1812: 1.80%: [root directory]
2150: 1.39%: /sqicons/
There you have it. conclusive data that Yoshi is approximately 9 times more interesting than I am. Perhaps it’s time that dog got his own website and started paying for his keep with ad revenue.
But Infiltration does. I’ve been jealous of the courageous urban exploreres for so long… there are so many sites that I’ve wanted to explore, but for some reason I never feel, I’ don’t know, allowed.
Kind of weird, now that I think about it.
On each blanket the ladies sewing club embroider, by computer sewing machine, the following love message in hippie street language:
Jesus Kicks Down Phat.
Prayerline 1-877-566-7264.
My kind of church. They describe themselves as a “1st Century Church” with a Food Bank, Clothing Bank, and Showers Laundromat, Phone Center, and E-mail Center. They make blankets for homeless kids called Rainbow Sleeping Bags (the quote is from that page).
They will also help you keep your self safe from UFOs. Right. On.
Kingdom%u2019s Leading Executioner Says: “I Lead a Normal Life”
Good for you, pal. Good for you.
On that Fisherspooner song Emerge, does he say “hypermedia critique” or “hyper mediocrity?.”
Words fail me.
Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t put much stock in prophecy, and I’m not a christian…but still, this really creeped me out, sort of like the Nostradamus documentary I saw when I was 10:
Does it make you think of anything?
I’m getting less and less hits these days. I must be getting more and more out of touch with the mainstream… maybe I should start blogging more about current events, or celebrities or something. Or maybe just keep posting stuff with the words “ann coulter sexy” so I can keep getting the same couple people over and over again… I guess I did get some traffic over the Eric Hall incident, so that’s nice to know my opinion is out on that one.
I apologise to everyone that my comments are still broken. I don’t know how to fix it, but I’m looking into it.
#reqs: search term
-----: -----------
22: direct advertiser
11: ann coulter sexy
7: webdav apache
6: teh suck
6: james smoak
3: sexy ann coulter
3: everquest blog
3: microsoft messenger service
3: abe krieger
2: momoko kikuchi
2: ninja power braggable
2: humansex with animals
2: messenger service winxp
2: goebbels with tits
2: cookeville police officer eric hall
2: ann coulter
2: turning japanese
2: winxp messenger service
2: blog everquest
2: projectbuilder bluej
EDIT: I guess I’d better make a style sheet for preformatted text, huh? That line spacing, oy! How ya lack me no?
Weird. I was just cruising amazon.de and I found out that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Book 5) will be shipping on June 21. Cool!
What’s weird is that the same information is not available on the US website. /shrug.
A neat article from the NYT From Wolf to Dog, Yes, but When? addresses a couple recently released studies about the history of the human-dog bond.
One of the studies found that dogs have a unique ability to intuit things based on human behavior that is not found in either chimpanzees or wolves–even when the wolves are raised by humans.
Chimpanzees will notice where a person is looking but do not take the hint that the box being looked at is the one holding the hidden food. Dogs get the picture immediately, Dr. Hare reports.
Another interesting point raised by the article was that it is possible that humans did not domesticate wolves at all, but rather that they partially domesticated themselves…and changed our evolution as well:
When two species live together for a long time, each usually influences the genetically conferred qualities of the other. People may have selected preferred abilities in the dog, but dogs too may have fostered their favorite qualities in people — not of course deliberately but simply by giving people who used dogs a better chance of surviving than people who did not.
Wow, the month is not up but it looks like the inscrutible Abe Krieger has replaced “sexy ann coulter” as my zeitgeist topic. ‘gywo’ is getting a respectable number of click-throughs as well, but man it seems like everybody is looking for Abe Krieger. I hope they don’t think I was too mean in my response to his letter to the Daily News, but hey… he called me a loser (by proxy).
#req: search term
—53: abe krieger
—23: webdav apache
—18: gywo
—-8: ann coulter
—-5: sexy ann coulter
—-4: photographist
—-4: ann coulter sexy
—-4: q330904
—-3: leggos
—-2: funny logs
—-2: teh suck
—-2: ann coulter sucks
—-2: perl cocoa
—-2: daylin leech
—-2: dialog between peter and uncle ben*
—-2: foofy
—-1: zentner 2002 email addresses
—-1: project builder javac cocoa
—-1: messenger service spam winxp
—-1: momoko kikuchi
—65: [not listed: 65 search terms]
* For regular readers, I actually did this web search and realized that this is a search for something related to the Spiderman movie, and not some lesser known folktale about the first pope and a corporate logo having a conversation.
just when you thought you had heard all the excuses in the book….
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Customs agents said they
found 13 pounds of Ecstasy pills in the luggage of a Dutch woman who expressed surprised (sic) at the discovery — she told investigators she thought she was smuggling gold.
I didn’t even realize you had to smuggle gold. Well, I guess there’s a lot of things I don’t know, so there you go.
Philadelphia’s City Paper just had a nice cover story about Ghost Towns in Pennsylvania. It seems like everybody knows about Centralia, the burning ghost town in Western PA. But I had never heard of Celestia, an old millerite community Sullivan County PA. which sounds really cool… or Laquin, both of which sound interesting and creepy to visit, if I felt like driving the 6 hours to get there.
Nothing about bush I know. I just felt like referencing the byrne/eno record, k?
Well, just a quick check of stats… not so good yet this month…I must be off the zeitgeist. I feel really bad for whoever searched for “webdav apache” and wound up here. “shoo sex” I don’t even want to know… and “dialog between peter and uncle ben” I have to do that search myself.
#reqs: search term
—–2: webdav apache
—–1: shoo sex
—–1: fuzzzy
—–1: momoko kikuchi
—–1: sex blog
—–1: giant footprint
—–1: dialog between peter and uncle ben
—–1: druid quadding
Well, it’s that time of the month. No, not that. It’s search query report time! This is a list of the terms that people have used to find my website. I’m hapy to report that “gywo” (for Get your War On, I hope) has surpassed “ann coulter sexy”* finally. So if you’re an Ann Coulter fan, and you think she’s sexy you better get back to your googling and clicking, buddy.
11: gywo
08: ann coulter sexy
08: dell dude
06: leggos
06: sexy ann coulter
05: ann coulter
04: momoko kikuchi apple
04: gaak
03: photographist
03: teh suck
03: delldude
03: the dell dude
03: sneakernet
03: cocoa blog
03: illovich
03: humansex
02: ha ha so funny
02: sexy liberals
02: blog ethics
02: sandman vs spiderma
* I note with some reluctance that “ann coulter sexy” and “sexy ann coulter” combined are still ahead of “gywo.”
