Muppets + Queen

If you haven't seen this video already, what have you been doing all day??

Awesomest little girl ever

Totally hardcore...awesome parents to allow this to happen also.


http://www.iheartchaos.com/content/hardcore-little-girl-gets-tooth-pulled-rc-car-video

Why I don't trust popular science books.

I've always been wary of the attempt to popularize science--while it's a worthy endeavor to try and make dense concepts more accessible, much tends to be lost in the translation. These types of efforts can be especially misleading with the social sciences, where anecdotes and statistics can combine to create an argument that has face validity to most people.

Malcolm Gladwell is a sterling example of how things can go wrong, as shown in this review of his latest book. It makes for exciting reading; unfortunately, the science doesn't stand up to scrutiny at times.

Glenn Beck Tuesday

In honor of the First Ammendment defeating Glenn Beck, here is some funny.

50,000 missing people discovered 2,500 years later

In a desert.

Talk to me: the Ethan thread (1)

How many of you folk are involved in gaming nowadays? One of our Haverford friends is DMing a cool D&D campaign in an ancient Greece setting. I'm playing a wizard, Mitra is a sorcerer, and Craig has made a scout. It's good times.

"Israel is not a tolerant society"

At least, according to the US State Department. Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to scare up some Jewish votes because of Obama's "alarming" tendency to at least give lip service to the idea that Israel can't do whatever it wants.

Robot of the future fleshy, terrifying

Observe it here in its larval stage.

Carl Sagan Day

It's a thing, apparently. Neat article about his cultural importance over at New Scientist.

From the article:

Carl Sagan, by equal measure professorial and childlike, offered space enthusiasts a new paradigm. Buck Rogers was out; refined and groovy cosmic citizen was in. Here was a visionary whose perspective dwarfed the politics of the space race and who spoke of humanity as a brotherhood with a common past and a transcendent future in the heavens.

We are doomed!

If you look at some of the autocompletes on Google, then you will come to the conclusion that we, as a species, are doomed.

All Praise Jebus...giver of buy one get one free

Everyone shop at Safeway.

Big science

Binge drinking in teenage rats? The plausibility of Superman's x-ray vision? Training alligators on treadmills? All topics worthy of scientific study, apparently. Read more at NCBI ROFL, a blog aimed at unearthing the funnier research papers in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) databases.

thanksgiving and/or christmas

So Thanksgiving is rapidly approaching with Christmas shortly after that and I was thinking it would be a good time to attempt a get together. So if I were to try to organize something on the east coast, who would be available and when? I'm sure my mom could offer sleeping space, and I suspect the Alguire's could too, if they are around, though obviously that would depend on them. Amanda has a pretty short break for thanksgiving, I think Wednesday through Sunday, really only leaving Thursday through Saturday for fun but that should be about when others are available too, so how about it?

As for interesting idea, how about a dinosaur civilization? More here

Thomas