Dissed by Matthew Prior.

Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool:
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.

Reminds me a bit of the Carl Sagan quote, "But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Oh, also my thesis is done, and has been for almost a couple weeks. It was 115 pages. Some of that was prose though. But wait, if I had pretended otherwise and put line breaks in or something, it would have been even longer.

Johnny Squirrel's Fairy Tale Page

Johnny Squirrel's Fairy Tale Page.

This is weird and creepy and amazing. Check out the "Janitor's Life". (WTFWTFWTF)

A website last updated over 10 years ago with this Finnish guy's crude, incomprehensible, creepy MS paint drawings, "for children and other fools." I think he's a janitor, or at least janitors feature prominently, as do mice.

H. P. Lovecraft's commonplace book

This fucking owns.

Also some art based on some of the stuff in his commonplace book. The first one, with the green beak/insect/carrot/robot/astronaut or whatever thing, is my favorite.

A couple of quotes from his commonplace book:

THE PLACE (horrible and sinister and extra-dimensional) [163]

174 Migration of Lemmings—Atlantis. [no idea but I love it]

Post your favorites :D

Ah, spring, and the weekend. This brings out a lot of people, like hippies. I have seen some really long dreadlocks and some fairly impressive fros. This weather also brings out the evangelizers, who have set up camp on a busy corner of the sidewalk. They have signs, which at least are not as obnoxious as some I've seen, with big lists of exactly what type of people are going to hell, and are handing out leaflets.

Still, not something I want to listen to. There is occasionally the worthwhile moment, though. For instance, this particular gentleman remarked on our use of the word "hell" in casual speech, e.g. "fat as hell," "cold as hell," etc. Why, he asked, is this amongst our idioms?

Because God put it there.

Hmmmmm. Sounds pretty iron-clad to me. Wait. iron-clad. Why do we say this?

Maybe iron put it there.

I could chew Alaska.

Thinking about pica.

I want to visit that psych museum in Missouri. Perhaps that will be a road trip this summer.

Also, www.icechewing.com

and this article. "I am drooling. I could chew Alaska."

Also this. How the hell do you swallow a fork? I suppose that's something you have to work up to.

auden article. I am doing an art project based on shield of achilles.

Ffffound invitation WHICH I DO NOT HAVE AND THEREFORE CAN NOT GIVE YOU

EDIT: NOTE TO EVERYONE. I DO NOT HAVE A FFFFOUND INVITATION. I WANT A FFFFOUND INVITATION. I CAN NOT GIVE YOU A FFFFOUND INVITATION.

I am writing this edit in March of 2009 and I still don't have a Ffffound invitation. So please actually read this post and stop asking me for an invitation!
============

I want a ffffound invitation. [AND DO NOT HAVE ONE TO GIVE TO YOU.]

Really, really, really bad. I love that site so much.

I am an Artist so it will be of great use to me.

Please? Anyone? Any leads? I will write you ekphrastic poetry about images of your choice. :)

Muppets and Murder

There are a great number of youtube videos of people destroying Elmo.

This one is kind of arty. It has an immolated chicken-dance elmo.

There are videos of people dousing Elmo in lighter fluid and setting him aflame, while he laughs, decapitating him with fireworks stuffed down his throat, exploding him at a shooting range (a canister of tannerite stuffed in his body), etc.

I would also like to draw your attention to this fine work:



When I saw this, I laughed until I cried.

This is not all. I present to you the story of Jesus' crucifixion, retold with Muppets:






If anyone knows the artists for these, the original sources, etc., please let me know, so I can credit them.

Also, can anyone tell me how to put shit behind a cut?

I originally had a script that did that, but it made it so that every post had a link at the end of it, instructing readers to click to see the whole post, even when that was the whole post. And that was really annoying, and I don't want that; I have some longish posts, and I'd also like to post more images. Advice?

Hmm, yes *fights the man, then returns to Pottery Barn to buy some accent rugs*

Although, yeah, that shit is pretty annoying, and I wonder how effective things like, say, glancing at someone's long-ass Costco receipt, are at deterring theft, vs., say, the store layout after the checking aisles, which seem quite enough.

According to actual studies, Coke douches are an ineffective form of contraception. You are likely not surprised at this.

However, bitter lemon (a soft drink with quinine and lemon) is a fairly effective contraceptive douche. (Look near the bottom of the page, for an excerpt of the study, and the citation.)

(Uh, obviously don't rely on this or anything. Spermacidal post-coital douching isn't going to be incredibly effective anyway, because there are already going to be thousands of sperm in your uterus by that point.)

I just printed out the 2nd draft of my thesis, which is 54 pages (including toc and crap) and all stuff that wasn't in the first. It is warm. I put it under my sweater. It feels good, like clothes fresh out of the dryer.

Flowers of bad

This looks pretty rad.

(I RHYMED)

magnetic liquid sculptures, bolivia bugs

Amazing art installation: magnetic liquid. I wonder how they manipulate it.

Also bolivia bugs own and i want them. I want them the size of puppies.

Also, haha: walking table. I don't know what all these videos have in common (they are all showing up as related) but I am digging it.

Also so awesome: magical table. I could watch this forever. I want one too. I have a vague mental list of stuff I would get if I was really really rich (I assume the table is expensive).

OH MY GOD, I want this too!

Magical chair. But can you sit on it? Yes, yes you can. SOMEONE FIND OUT HOW MUCH THEY ARE. They are made out of cardboard.

Aaaaaah.

I'm cataloguing stuff I've written. I seem to have a short-term memory about that--a list I compiled, a few years ago, filled w/ all these poems I've forgotten.

Oh my god I can hardly bring myself to read them. They're so bad. Or actually they're probably not that bad, I just can hardly stand reading them anyway. They make me writhe. Arrrrrgh.

I kind of want to show them to a trusted person and just get their assessment of it. So that I don't have to look at it. My eyes just want to slide off. laskjdflkasjf

Oh my god nasty.

Nicotini

And apparently it's as disgusting as it sounds.

Chameleons own, and not even because of the color change thing, I am not even talking about that. Their swivelly eyes and their fiddleback fern curled up tail and their 2-prong sideways feet! And their fast and sticky tongues.

dreamachine

Gonna do this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine

http://www.netliberty.net/dreamachine.html

Also want to do this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet

and those sensory deprivation floaty tanks.

wtf

Pink google search engine for ~*~*~*~*~girls~*~*~*~*~

I wish I was fucking joking.

What the fuck is it, where people think that making something ~*~*~*~*~pink~*~*~*~*~ automatically makes it interesting and relevant to women? Maybe if we were talking about a small percentage of five-year-olds.

Note the "shopping" link up there too.

This makes me want to barf. Please tell me it's an early april fools joke.

And dear god, could they have picked a more obnoxious shade of pink, too? How can anyone even look at it?

I sent them some "feedback."

general butt naked

Uhh.

General Butt Naked.

The civil war, which killed an estimated 250,000 people in this nation of 3 million, was characterized by the eating of human hearts and soccer matches played with human skulls. Drugged fighters waltzed into battle wearing women's wigs, flowing gowns and carrying dainty purses stolen from civilians.

Before he led his fighters into battle, wearing only a pair of lace-up boots [hence the name], Blahyi said he made a human sacrifice to the devil.

The sacrifice was typically "the killing of an innocent child and plucking out the heart which was divided into pieces for us to eat," he told The Associated Press on Saturday.

god damn.

I am making a list of all the stuff I have written. A lot of it is like chunks of stuff I haven't developed yet but so far the doc is 139 lines long (one item to a line) and I have not even gotten to the stuff I wrote before the program. Yay. I just want to write and that is all.

misc

The symptoms of Frey's syndrome are redness and sweating on the cheek area adjacent to the ear. They can appear when the affected person eats, sees, thinks about or talks about certain kinds of food which produce strong salivation. Observing sweating in the region after eating a lemon wedge may be diagnostic.

The Bai Ze was encountered by the Yellow Emperor while he was on patrol in the east. The Bai Ze dictated to Huang Di a guide to the forms and habits of all 11,520 types of supernatural creatures in the world, and how to overcome their hauntings and attacks. The emperor had this information written down in a book called the Bai Ze Tu (白澤圖). This book no longer exists, but many fragments of it survive in other texts.

I want that book. Check out the cool picture of it.

Oh, apparently Ren and Stimpy are gay. I'm not sure if they're actually a couple, though.

poop and related accoutrements

Toilet paper was invented in 6th century AD in medieval China.

Before the invention of the perforated roll of paper we know and love, in the 1800s, "wealthy people used wool, lace or hemp for their ablutions, while less wealthy people used their hand when defecating into rivers, or cleaned themselves with various materials such as rags, wood shavings, leaves, grass, hay, stone, sand, moss, water, snow, maize husks, fruit skins, or seashells, and cob of the corn depending upon the country and weather conditions or social customs. In Ancient Rome, a sponge on a stick was commonly used, and, after usage, placed back in a bucket of saltwater."

In Japan in the 700s they used these long pieces of wood that looked like paint sticks.

Sand. That seems like it would just make it so that you had sand-covered shit lodged in your asscrack, and I don't know how much of an improvement that would be. Maybe if you used multiple handfuls of sand you could pretty much get it off.

1942: first two-ply toilet paper from St. Andrew's Paper Mill in England; toilet paper becomes softer and more pliable. For most of the rest of the twentieth century, both "hard" and "soft" paper was common. Hard was cheaper, and was shiny on one side. Sometimes it had messages like "GOVERNMENT PROPERTY", "IZAL MEDICATED" or "NOW WASH YOUR HANDS PLEASE" written on each sheet near the perforation.

December 19, 1973: comedian Johnny Carson causes a three week toilet paper shortage in the USA after a joke scares consumers into stockpiling supplies.

Hahaha.

Toilet paper is sometimes made from recycled paper; however, large amounts of virgin tree pulp is still used.

Wiping our ass on the environment!

From the wikipedia article on "anal cleansing":

Some health faucets are metal sets attached to the bowl of the water closet, with the opening strategically pointed at the target anus.

Haha. As opposed to one of the other anuses that you weren't aiming at.

Toilets in Japan. I want to use one of the high-tech ones but I am also scared of something going wrong.

In Japanese culture, there is a tendency to separate areas into clean and unclean, and the contact between these areas is minimized. For example, the inside of the house is considered a clean area, whereas the outside of the house is considered unclean. To keep the two areas separated, shoes are taken off before entering the house so that the unclean shoes do not touch the clean area inside of the house. Historically, toilets were located outside of the house, and shoes were worn for a trip to the toilet. Nowadays, the toilet is almost always inside the home and hygienic conditions have improved significantly, but the toilet is still considered an unclean area, even though other places are much more likely to have higher bacterial contamination.

In Japan, being clean is very important, and some Japanese words for 'clean' can be used to describe beauty.

Haha: In England, there was historically much fascination with the act of going to the toilet, with royals appointing lesser mortals to assist with the removal of faeces and cleansing of the body parts using towels.

Apparently Louis XIV had bowel problems, and because, you know, L'etat c'est lui, this was a matter of public discussion and newspapers and such would publish updates.

Several non-profit organizations have launched a "Stop Flying Toilets" campaign, using a winged logo and sponsoring races with famous Kenyan marathon runners.

Though it is lower in energy than the food it came from, feces may still contain a large amount of energy, often 50% of that of the original food.[2] This means that of all food eaten, a significant amount of energy remains for the decomposers of ecosystems.

Feces are also an important as a signal. Kestrels for instance are able to detect the feces of their prey (which reflect ultraviolet), allowing them to identify areas where there are large numbers of voles, for example.

Ultraviolet shit! I wonder if most/all shit reflects ultraviolet, or if there's something in particular about vole shit.

To maintain nutrients in soil it is therefore important that feces return to the area from which they came, which is not always the case in human society where food may be transported from rural areas to urban populations and then feces disposed of into a river or sea.

Whoa, that never occurred to me, but it totally makes sense.

Shit is brown because of a combo of bile, which is yellow, and dead red blood cells!

Ok, I just thought of something. Black shit is caused by digested blood, and indicates you've got medical problems. But what if you have eaten blood, like with blood pudding, or, I don't know, vampirism?

Mirror neurons

Ok, this might help to explain something for me. Awesome.

Mirror neurons

"A mirror neuron is a premotor[1] neuron which fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another (especially conspecific) animal. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of another animal, as though the observer were itself acting."

"For example, a mirror neuron which fires when the monkey rips a piece of paper would also fire when the monkey sees a person rip paper, or hears paper ripping (without visual cues). These properties have led researchers to believe that mirror neurons encode abstract concepts of actions like 'ripping paper', whether the action is performed by the monkey or another animal."

"It is not normally possible to study single neurons in the human brain, so scientists can not be certain that humans have mirror neurons."

By "possible" I assume they mean ethical. I was wondering how they did those experiments where they isolated the activity of one neuron.

"Mirror neurons have been linked to empathy, because certain brain regions (in particular the anterior insula and inferior frontal cortex) are active when a person experiences an emotion (disgust, happiness, pain etc) and when they see another person experience an emotion. However, these brain regions are not quite the same as the ones which mirror hand actions, and mirror neurons for emotional states or empathy have not yet been described in monkeys. More recently, Keysers and colleagues have shown that people that are more empathic according to self-report questionnaires have stronger activations both in the mirror system for hand actions and the mirror system for emotions providing more direct support to the idea that the mirror system is linked to empathy."

None of the implications mentioned had to do with body self-perception, but it seems like it's on a similar track.

Oh my god best thing today:

Colors

Under "Cosmic latte" (a shade of white):

In 2001, Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry determined that the color of the universe was a greenish white, but they soon corrected their analysis in "The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey: constraints on cosmic star-formation history from the cosmic spectrum", published in 2002. In this paper, they reported that their survey of the color of all light in the universe added up to a slightly beige white. The survey included more than 200,000 galaxies, and measured the spectral range of the light from a large volume of the universe. The hexadecimal RGB value for Cosmic Latte is #FFF8E7.

and

What the study revealed is that the overwhelming majority of stars formed about 5 billion years ago. Because these stars would have been "brighter" in the past, the color of the universe changes over time shifting from blue to red as more blue stars change to yellow and eventually red giants.

omgggggg, this rules.

I am making lots of stuff, I rule.

random wikipedia pages

There is a page on wikipedia about Adolph Hitler's sexuality.

I wonder how many [famous person's] sexuality pages there are, actually.

I was going to make this post about more weird-sounding wikipedia pages but I couldn't find enough good ones in a short span of time. But some other random shit I found:

Lists of ambiguous human names

Mr. Floppy's Flophouse

"Mr. Floppy himself was said to be an elusive archeologist from Finland who while not excavating an inverted pyramid that is thought to house the knowledge of all mankind, was hosting late night events in the bowels of one of Oakland's most notorious districts."

"At dawn it was not uncommon for George, the owner of the property to appear in a wizard cape serving shrimp cup of noodle soups from behind his piano."

Mr. Floppy owns.

Myco-heterotrophs

Symbiosis

Like I said, fungi kind of freak me out and I should learn more about them.

Now I think I am going to go home and sleep.

Primate vision, experiments w/ trichromacy

Chinese vs. American visual perception habits

It would be cool, on a related note (it has probably been done, actually) to examine the different perceptions of people who read a r-l language, a l-r language, up-down or multiple directions, when it comes to scanning and analyzing stuff besides words (e.g. just the daily surroundings), and how non l-r readers envision timelines, the past and future, etc.

MIND BLOWN

omg

As to what I have done as a poet... I take no pride in it... but that in my century I am the only person who knows the truth in the difficult science of colours – of that, I say, I am not a little proud, and here I have a consciousness of a superiority to many.

(Goethe)

Physics-based musical classification schemes.

I especially like the plasmaphones and the quintephones, wtf :D

snow is ALIVE

omfg, wtf

omg, apparently the presence of bacteria facilitates snow formation at higher temperatures.

way fucked!

One of the authors of the study, Prof. David Sands, postulates that forming rain or snow is part of the bacterial life cycle; "We think if (the bacteria) couldn't cause ice to form, they couldn't get back down to the ground," Sands said. "As long as it rains, the bacteria grow."

Sands suggests that changing bacterial populations may affect rainfall; for example, overgrazing during a summer could reduce the bacterial population, resulting in lower raindrop formation, although more work would need to be done to firm up this theory. Regardless, it is an interesting glimpse into the world of the snowflake.

This is totally fucked up :D

some links

Dumping some links here.

This woman wrote a memoir about how she was raised by wolves after becoming a Holocaust orphan. Now, after the book has made millions of dollars, been translated into 18 languages, and become a feature film, it turns out it was kind of not exactly true. Who could have imagined?

That still sounds like a rad story and I totally want to read that book.

Mel's Hole.

Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter.

Frogs sealed in stone.

There we go.

"Capture and Move Microscopic Objects - by the Force of Light !"

How the fuck does this work?

Wait, is light even a "force"?

I really need to learn about physics and chemistry. I feel like I have a reasonable amateur grasp of biology--on the level of evolution, ecology, etc., rather than the level of organs cells, and smaller--but I was always pretty ignorant of chemistry and physics, mostly because things I can't see and that aren't alive were less interesting to me.

Also, dude tattoos eyeball lapis lazuli blue. If you're a pussy who has some sort of problem with needles in eyeballs, you might not want to look at the pictures.

A lot of interesting and perhaps relevant (for me) articles cited here.

Fingernails on a blackboard.

Snatiation and gargalesthesia are awesome fucking words. omg.

aswang

This is way fucked (in a good way):

Aswang
Manananggal

Man, these are awesome and totally scary.

I'm not sure if they just have better monsters, or if the novelty makes it seem better.

line breaks

I do not know what is up with me + lineation these days, and I should be working on my own thesis or reading someone else's rather than writing this post. Ah well. Factors that go into line breaks:

1) form (e.g. certain number of syllables or beats, end-rhyme)
2) breath/phrase/clause breaks (places one would naturally pause slightly or where there is a discrete clause. breaking across those can create greater momentum and sometimes a jarring sensation, which can be okay/desirable in some circumstances but generally not, I think)
3) making the first and last words of the line interesting and/or significant. We pay most attention to the words at the beginning and ends of lines, because of orthography, structure of English, left to right reading, etc.
4) similarly, placing more emphasis on a certain word than there might be otherwise (in unlineated writing or in a lineation that more closely followed breath or phrase breaks)
5) evoking different or multiple meanings (keeping in mind productive vs. nonproductive ambiguity, that is, ambiguity that actually enhances meaning or expands things in some useful or meaningful way, rather than just cramming in extra connotations/weirdness for the hell of it)
6) surprise or irony

So yeah. A few years ago I seemed to be more into the latter 3, especially doing the unproductive ambiguity thing. I was so all about trying to make poems and lines that made the reader feel like the back of their head was blown off (however ED phrased that exactly). Now I'm really not. That is one flashy trick out of a whole bag of them, and there are better ones. Now I feel like I'm focused more on the first two, or more than I was earlier at least. I don't want to be breaking lines just because it's "poetry" and there are line breaks. One poem recently I was like, fuck it, it will be a prose poem. I don't know, line breaks are awkward for me now.

Oh, also I forgot 7), how it looks on the page. This is an irritating one.

helium, color

"Most of the world's helium supply comes from underground fields in the United States."

Man, it must be hard to mine a gas, wtf. And why/how is it there?

spectral line

"Many atoms emit or absorb visible light. In order to obtain a fine line spectrum, the atoms must be in a gas phase."

"All atoms absorb in the Ultraviolet (UV) region because these photons are energetic enough to excite outer electrons."

"inelastic scattering of light"

photoelectric effect

Color

Why frequency gaps? Tetrachromats. Berlin and Kay

"In the 1969 study Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay describe a pattern in naming "basic" colors (like "red" but not "red-orange" or "dark red" or "blood red", which are "shades" of red). All languages that have two "basic" color names distinguish dark/cool colors from bright/warm colors. The next colors to be distinguished are usually red and then blue or green. All languages with six "basic" colors include black, white, red, green, blue and yellow. The pattern holds up to a set of twelve: black, grey, white, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, and azure (distinct from blue in Russian and Italian but not English)."

qualia

"The distinction between warm and cool colors has been important since at least the late 18th century but is generally not remarked in modern color science or colorimetry. The contrast, as traced by etymologies in the Oxford English Dictionary, seems related to the observed contrast in landscape light, between the "warm" colors associated with daylight or sunset and the "cool" colors associated with a gray or overcast day."

"Any color can be made to appear warm or cool by its context with other colors."

red-green color blindness

"Anomalous Trichromats are often able to readily spot camouflage clothing, netting, and paint that has been designed for individuals with color-normal vision."

Cerebral achromotopsia.

""Mr. I. could hardly bear the changed appearances of people ("like animated gray statues") any more than he could bear his own changed appearance in the mirror: he shunned social intercourse and found sexual intercourse impossible. He saw people's flesh, his wife's flesh, his own flesh, as an abhorrent gray; "flesh-colored" now appeared "rat-colored" to him. This was so even when he closed his eyes, for his preternaturally vivid ("eidetic") visual imagery was preserved but now without color, and forced on him images, forced him to "see" but see internally with the wrongness of his achromatopsia. He found foods disgusting in their grayish, dead appearance and had to close his eyes to eat. But this did not help very much, for the mental image of a tomato was as black as its appearance."

i have gone insane

I think I may have gone insane. Evidence:

i would totally wear this (maybe you know with some pants under it). i totally hate the whole SEXY EVERYTHING costume thing for women, where the most random things are sexualized (like uh, fucking PACMAN), but i mean, come on, look at this thing, this is fucking awesome.

I would totally wear this too minus the mouse ears.

dig the way they can't say the real names of shit (e.g. "polka-dot mouse") to avoid lawsuit presumably

OH MY GOD AND THE MISS MUFFET ONE, ahaha. okay i wouldn't actually wear that one, but i would be tempted too just because of the spider. there should me more clothes adorned w/ giant three-dimensional spiders.

OKAY I WOULD TOTALLY WEAR THIS TOO (just the dress and with like something opaque over my legs), have I snapped? I think I have snapped.

I have never, in my life, felt as badly about my writing as I do now.

Fuck you tropical thesis, I am going to shred you.

I'm so ridiculous. I should just channel AH forever and get it over with. I should drag feral cats from out under houses for a living. WTF.

I'd like this to pass, please. Jesus.

note to self: persona poems from fundie perspective.

i've been having fun looking at some old intentionally-horrible poems i wrote (evidently they were convincing as genuine efforts, rather than as something self-consciously mocking bad poetry) and writing some more. This character has kind of emerged (the writer of said poems) and I think I'm going to make her a myspace page when I figure out what kind of username she'd pick.

Whew.

Another inadvertent blood sacrifice to the Hopwoods.

Hopefully it will dry and look like coffee smears or something.

I feel proud of my manuscript, but now I'll be obsessively wondering whether I stuffed them in the binders wrong or something.

look what i found

Okay, so I'm looking over my work because I have to submit the first draft of my thesis to workshop, and submit stuff to a contest, very shortly (and on the same day). A couple weeks ago I just complied all my shit and put it in alphabetical order. Just now I went through my brain and computer to find poems which I hadn't included and there were 23, which I'd totally forgotten about.

This is probably because I rule.

Okay, fine, a lot of them are basically ore at the moment. I didn't say they were all great poems. But perhaps I am unusually productive after all. It doesn't feel that way. I think of all the time I spend NOT writing.

So much work to do. I was looking at a list of the poems I submitted to the contest last year and was like, no WONDER I didn't win, I can't believe I even made it to the judges. I must have drastically improved/changed as a poet. At least, I hope that's true. I suppose it's possible that I simply have a different perspective on my previous work, just because I'm more removed from it now, and that I am making all sorts of equally clueless blunders. That I am just as bad, but my blind spot has shifted around, so to speak.

So much revision needed. And so little free time. I just want to have to do nothing but write. Caffeine is my friend.

Oh, I think a lot about titles. What will make someone pick up a book? Issues:
--Will it make someone pick up the book?
--Is it lame and potentially eyeroll-inducing?
--Is it a reference to a strong poem, and/or possibly one people might consider emblematic of the whole work? (because people are going to try to make that connection--including they're actually reading your poetry in the first place, of course)
--Is it okay to have a title which tangentally relates to your poems, or even doesn't relate to it entirely? I feel like it's cheating. Because sometimes I have way more fun coming up with titles than anything else.

Jaroslaw Kukowski

Also, this guy rules and has freaky paintings. What is it about polish surrealists? I think the l in his first name is actually the kind with the cross thru it that is pronounced like w and that I don't know the code for.

specimens in formalin + deep deep holes in mars.

Oh my god.

Disturbing/fascinating/???/kind of beautiful black and white pictures of animals preserved in formalin.

I don't know WTF a lot of them are.

Also, apparently there are these really really deep holes in Mars, so deep that the sun doesn't illuminate them. I want to spelunk on mars. Actually I just want to spelunk generally, I have not done that in a while. Are there any good caves in michigan? I don't know wtf is up with the word "spelunk," but it's a pretty good word.

YAY. Mystery. We want to find out what is in places we can't see. We want to go there.

I kind of want some of these insane tights. Too bad you can't really see what they look like in full. Also the website is sort of borked, and sends you to the wrong place occasionally. It's like a maze!

I want the red snakey ones.

So many colors

I don't think I'm going to provide context for this. But look around on the website if you want some idea of what the fuck. (May not actually be any more comprehensible after doing so.)

See also the "support the troops" one.

Drinking unsupervised milk causes agnosticism.

"Canadians"

Apparently, American racists are using the term "Canadian" to refer to black people, so they can make bigoted remarks without people knowing WTF they are actually talking about, e.g.:

"He overcame a subversively good defence by Matt Hennessey that had some Canadians on the jury feeling sorry for the defendant and forced them to do the right thing," [wrote ADA Mark Trent in an office-wide memo]...

It is unusual that a seasoned attorney like Mr. Trent would not have wondered how a Harris County jury came to be stacked with Canadians. (There were no Canadians on the jury but there were some black members.) "The only way that there could have been Canadians on the jury, was if they were born in Canada and then became U.S. citizens, and then became citizens of the county in which the case was tried," Mr. Vinson noted.

Why Canadians?

Stefan Dollinger, a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics at University of British Columbia and director of the university's Canadian English lab, speculated that the slur reflects a sense of Canadians as the other.

"This ‘code' word, is the replacement of a no-longer tolerated label for one outsider group, with, from the U.S. view, another outsider group: Canadians. It could have been terms for Mexicans, Latinos etc. but this would have been too obvious," he said. "What's left? Right, the guys to the north."

Let's come up with a coded way of talking about racist bigots. How about "Morlocks?" Or does that actually have undesirable connotations of the whole social strata "evolving" into different species thing that H.G. Wells had going on in "The Time Traveller," which smacks unpleasantly of sociobiological determinism and ideas that various ethnicities are truly "different" on some biological level? According to Wikipedia, however, Morlocks "apparently have little or no melanin in their skin," for what that's worth.

In the movie at least, the Eloi were also like white as can be, though. Don't remember if Wells says that in the book.

ice

Oh. I want to go to antarctica so badly. Maybe I can get funding as part of HME. I was thinking today that maybe moving to NZ would make more sense for that than Italy, sadly.

Why is ice so beautiful to me.

Did you know that water is actually blue? For a while people claimed that it was just reflecting the sky. Which when you think about it is silly, because if that were true then the ocean would be white on overcast days. Crater lake and its ridiculous melted-cobalt blue. Thick ice, like this.

Also, these guy's sculptures are cool.

The superstition of poets and obsessive compulsives and other such people who know that things signify other things, whether you want it or not.

Tubular.

Haha, what?

"Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything."

Of course the "surfer dude" is also a physicist himself, with a degree and everything, but "Physicist without a steady university position stuns other physicists with theory of everything" doesn't sound quite as cool. I mean, I probably wouldn't have clicked on it.

This makes me want to surf.

Who am I kidding, it just makes me want to go somewhere where the water is clear blue-green and warm as a bath.

self-referential nature of language, "left"

Oh, so lately I've been tripping out about the self-referential/recursive nature of words (as you can see in dictionaries for instance) and how "normally" this is either not the case or is disguised by the constant context we use language is, with incessant tying back to "tangible referents." Thinking about all the possible implications of that, language's relationship to "the world," to itself, etc., to put it crudely.

My rather disappointing pocket dictionary (no etymology :( Anyone know of a pocket electronic dictionary thing which is good, has etymology, etc.? Etymology is vital) defines the word "left" as follows:

"of, relating to, or being on the side of the body in which the heart is mostly located."

Way fucked, eh? Not the way you'd normally learn or explain "left" and "right." You would do it with pointing, orientation to objects or surroundings, etc., in order to grok left vs. right. But you can't do that in a dictionary; you have to use just words. What do you do?

So they go to a universal asymmetry. (I don't think it's even true, by the way, I'm pretty sure the heart is central. It's just that we can feel our heartbeat more strongly on the left side, due to the way the valves and such are oriented. Because our heart is not symmetrical. We have a 3-chambered heart, right? And birds have 4? Is a bird heart symmetrical?)

I suppose "left" and "right" is only relevant or useful or even possible to comprehend if you are bilaterally symmetrical. How the hell would that be applicable to a creature that was radially symmetrical? They'd have different things, maybe, like central versus peripheral :P I will have to think of this in terms of SDN. So far the aliens are humanoid and bilaterally symmetrical but maybe I will shake things up.

Oh, I forget if I mentioned this, but I figured out what B does for a living, and also what his boyfriend does for a living. And in the airport a few weeks ago I figured out roughly how the sexes of the 2 main alien species work (one has 5-6 sexes, the other is a bit more complicated, or at least I've figured it out less, but they sort of swap genes like bacteria) I'll have to confirm that it actually sounds plausible.

Speaking of symmetricality again, my dad attended an autopsy (or maybe this was a live patient, I'm not sure) where the guy's organs were reversed. Like, he had everything he needed, but it was flipped. His heart would have been felt more strongly on the right side, his liver and intestines were the reverse right/left orientation as someone else's would be, etc. Evidently it would be pretty unusual for that to happen, to have a totally "normal" healthy person whose entire insides were just backwards. Cool.

I wonder if he was left or right handed :D

Some rather popular things that I dislike

This list may be updated.

--Lolcats. See below. I just find them dumb and annoying. It gets old, real fast. Also, how should it be pronounced? Not that that's really a source of my irritation, I'm just wondering.)

--Pirates. This needs to stop. Not just because it's tiresome, cheesy, and ubiquitous, but because pirates murdered, robbed, and terrorized people. I'm not saying there aren't some badass anecdotes about pirates; there are. But I just think the "Yo ho ho, what a quaint and amusing lifestyle" thing that's developed, thanks to stories, film, etc., is rather fucked up. I fully expect people to be dressing up as terrorist cell members in a few hundred years, after terrorism as we know it is not a pressing modern issue.

--Beer. I just don't like the taste; it's gross. I don't mind wine or liquor.

--The wearing-boots-over-jeans thing is beginning to grow on me, or to grow less intolerable at least. Probably because
a) I'm so accustomed to seeing it. Michigan! That Mark Twain thing about fashion.
b) I'm lazy, and this accomodates that. If you put on pants and then shoes, which is the typical order, they just sort of go up over your pants unless you pull them over again.
c) Slush may get your pants wet if you don't.

Speaking of boots, I think I need some new ones. Well, some new enduring-the-weather boots, as my number of dress boots seems to have expanded disconcertingly. I've had these since last year and they're sort of falling apart. Yesterday I noticed my socks were damp. I hope it's because my feet were sweating unbeknownst to me or something, and not because the seal on my supposedly waterproof boot is breaking.

Michigan D:

What are some rather popular things that you, the current reader of this blog, dislike?

Feline medical curiosities, pokemon syndrome

Mutant kitties.

Also, there is an important regulatory gene called "sonic hedgehog."

As well as "tiggywinkle hedgehog."

I don't know if I'll ever stop finding that amusing.

Sir: [not sure if this link will be visible to everyone]

The choice of a gene name can have unforeseen consequences in addition to infringement of trademark ("Pokémon blocks gene name" Nature 438, 897; 2005). The quirky sense of humour that researchers display in choosing a gene name often loses much in translation when people facing serious illness or disability are told that they or their child have a mutation in a gene such as Sonic hedgehog, Slug or Pokemon.

As with the acronym CATCH22 (from 'cardiac anomaly, T-cell deficit, clefting and hypocalcaemia') for chromosome 22q11.2 microdeletions, which was abandoned because of its no-win connotations (J. Burn J. Med. Genet. 36, 737–738; 1999), researchers need to be mindful when naming genes and syndromes.

LOL. Personally, I think that an amusing name would totally take some of the sting out of having an awful syndrome!

Perhaps it would be hurtful, though, when you tried explaining it to people and they snickered. Or, I mean, the diagnosis would be pretty surreal.

Doctor: (gravely) "I'm afraid you have... Pokemon syndrome."

Pretty bug pictures.

"Evolution explains why lolcats control your mind"

There was a study showing that, basically, we pay more acute visual attention to images of animals than we do to images of inanimate objects.

The authors of the study conclude that the reason we do so is because our ancestors would have needed to be more aware of other living creatures--for hunting and escaping purposes--than for things that aren't alive.

Okay, that doesn't sound too implausible, but it simply doesn't follow; additional evidence would be needed to help pin down exactly what it is we're reacting to and how. I'm skeptical.

As predicted, subjects were faster and more accurate detecting changes involving animals than inanimate objects. If experience were producing this bias, then people should also be good at detecting changes involving automobiles, which as drivers and pedestrians they have been trained all their lives to monitor for sudden, life-or-death changes in trajectory. Yet subjects were much slower in detecting changes to vehicles than to more rarely experienced animal species, indicating that learning is not the source of this difference.

1) Cars don't move and change the way animals do. These would have to be still images, too, and you would see any potentially dangerous car moving, and likely pay attention to its general presence, its motion, etc., than to changes in its features. I wonder what exactly the "changes" were for the car images.
2) We are animals. We empathize more and have more interest in things like us, with faces, movement, behavior, etc. This could also explain greater interest. Studies have shown that babies show much more interest in images that vaguely resemble faces, for instance, than for other images. We're attuned to ascertain things about behavior from cues like that.

That potentially could fit into the authors' hypothesis, that the reason we're more interested is that it's important to our survival to notice shit about animals' behavior (including humans). But anyway, the argument is just not all there, and it's too bad, because there's some interesting stuff involved.

What's great about this research is that it inadvertently targeted exactly what's happening in lolcat images: the animal has been changed from being just a regular cute kitty, to being a cute kitty with special attributes created by the caption. So a lolcat is an animal image with "a single change."

I don't see how this is relevant, since people generally aren't looking at the image of the cat, then the image plus the caption. They're not reacting to a "change" in the image from a previous state.

Also, I'm not sure exactly what the images in the study were like, but I somehow doubt that the kind of "changes" to the image involved text suddenly being put over them.

It would actually be really interesting to study people's reaction to image, text, and image + text, though.

Someone do that study. With both literate and non-literate people.

Also, I find lolcats dumb and annoying. Anyone else? I'd like some solidarity here, please. Or should I say, im in ur blog, hating ur lolcats.

some sort of twisted ads

Hahaha, holy shit.

Especially the Snoopy one.

The King James Version of the Bible was put together by a homosexual mason who had sworn oaths to Lucifer.

This is awesome. Some quotes:

Demons don't have physical bodies capable of being seen in this 3-D realm on earth and so they inhabit and possess men and women to work through them and influence them. Just the same, even in the 4-D realm demons are the most grotesque creatures you can imagine. Other than the black phantom types, none of them look the same. Many look like imps, orangatangs, ferets, ant eaters, just variations and as ugly a variation as you can imagine. The lower ranking demons resemble animals. The higher ranking ones are taller and can resemble Darth Vader, these types I refer to as the Black Phantoms.

Ahahahaha.

Also, the phrase "soul-scalped" (this is part of being turned into a vampire)

Also, "The King James Version of the Bible was put together by a homosexual mason who had sworn oaths to Lucifer."

The Bible today is the modern day Garden of Eden. It contains the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Which tree are you eating from? That is why we are to pray for discernment and the guidance of His Holy Spirit when we read "His Word." Because not all of it is.

Ooh, that's a cool metaphor. And it's a meta-metaphor.

Anyway, there is plenty of great stuff here.

Petakillsanimals.com

This site, Peta Kills Animals.com, is kind of WTF.

On the one hand they're saying a lot of ludicrous stuff. On the OTHER hand, that IS an exceedingly high percentage of companion animals that PETA euthanized, (e.g. 90 percent in 2005, and there's evidence of them killing perfectly healthy, adoptable animals) and I wonder WTF their policy is and what is going on with that.

The ludicrous stuff:

Meanwhile, PETA manager Dapha Nachminovitch confirmed that, yes, PETA does kill animals. That $9,370 walk-in freezer declared on PETA's 2002 federal income tax return is indeed for storing dead animals. And PETA contracts with a Virginia Beach company to incinerate the bodies.

OH HOW SHADY.

Any organization that euthanizes animals under any circumstances, including veterinary hospitals and most animal shelters, is going to need one of these freezers. So PETA does in fact euthanize animals. If you want to sound the alarms about that, you'll also need to criticize almost every animal shelter and Humane Society, as well as every vet office (and I really doubt that euthanasia itself is PKA's concern, see below). If you want to call them hypocrites, yes, it's terribly ironic and all, but I don't think that euthanasia need be at all incompatible with animal-welfare and animal-rights concerns.

The issue is simply the number of animals they euthanize, and their reasons for doing so. Which are, in fact, pretty damn shady-seeming. But it's not like the fact that they euthanize animals in the first place, or that they have a walk-in freezer or incinerate the bodies, is in itself anything atypical or especially macabre.

Anyway, this is an example of something I hate: sensationalism and fact-distorting in order to persuade an audience. Especially when they have perfectly legitimate points in the first place, buried under all the sensationalist crap. Same problem I have with, say, PETA itself. I was wondering if this site was maybe actually an animal-rights organization itself, but apparently not, they're just trying to slander and discredit PETA.

"PETA Kills Animals" is a project of the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the full range of choices that American consumers currently enjoy. In addition to malicious animal-rights activists, we stand up to the "food police," environmental scaremongers, neo-prohibitionists, meddling bureaucrats, and other self-anointed saints who claim to "know what's best" for you.

LOL @ "meddling bureaucrats" and "environmental scaremongers." Because the environment is just fine, and anyone who says otherwise is just a hippie trying to fuck with your all-American barbecue. :D :D :D (Wonder if they deny global warming. How dare you deny us our freedom to squander fossil fuels? Damn geophysicists, with their "facts" and their "evidence" and their "the polar ice is drastically shrinking." What are they playing at? What's their real agenda, eh?)

How exactly is saying PETA KILLS ANIMALS!!!!!!!!!! enhancing consumers' freedom of choice? Oh wait, it's not. It's simply a stab at an organization whose mission of vegetarianism is at odds with their own interests, on grounds which have nothing to do with their vegetarian stance, animal husbandry, etc.

Reminds me of those organizations supporting "smoker's freedom," whose indignant full-page ads you could find in newspapers around the time that Big Tobacco was taking it in the teeth, and which were sponsored by Philip Morris. How very libertarian. How much do you want to bet this organization gets hella funding from, say, people who sell meat?

We welcome your support. Click here to make a financial contribution. Donations to CCF are tax-deductible under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

YAY. Anyway, maybe I should use this as an example in class. :P You know, of shitty arguments.

human booze

Also, In one of my previous columns I mentioned that anything that was once alive could be made into alcohol.

Like... a person?

You know how you can have your ashes made into a diamond? Maybe someone should have their remains made into booze. Is this possible, and if so, how?

really big people

The World's Heaviest people. Obesity ain't just a modern phenomenon:

Dionysius of Heracleia was notorious for his appetite, and eventually grew so weighty that he could scarcely budge: he suffered from apnea or narcolepsy besides, prompting his doctors to prick his flesh with needles whenever he fell asleep on his throne. A contemporary poet has him declare that he aspired to end his days "on my back, lying on my many rolls of fat, scarcely uttering a word, taking labored breaths, and eating my fill," for of all the ways a man might die, an excess of luxury was the only truly happy death. Nevertheless, he lived to what was then the ripe old age of 55, earning a reputation for fairness and generosity that competed with his size as an object of astonishment.

Another person:

Already over 300 lbs when she dropped out of college, Bradford became an exercise instructor, running seven miles three times a week, but continued her steady gain in weight. At 374 lbs she underwent an intestinal bypass operation, which caused serious complications.

That sucks.

Michael Edelman (1964 - 1992) of Pomona, NY; Guinness listed him at 994 lbs, but his mother estimates that he weighed some 1200 lbs at his heaviest. He had already reached 154 lbs at age seven, and left school at ten because he could no longer fit into the desks. After that he spent most of his time in bed, or sharing massive meals with his 700-pound mom. Michael liked to start the day with four bowls of cereal, toast, waffles, cake, and a quart of soda, and end it with a whole pizza with the works for a bedtime snack. Mother and son tried every new diet that came along, "but after a few days, we'd reward ourselves with a chocolate cake. Then we'd call for a pizza and that would be it." When the two were evicted from their Wesley Hills home in 1988, Michael had to be moved by forklift. After his exposure in the press, dozens of hospitals and diet promoters vied to get him in a weight-loss program, but Michael was determined to get thin on his own. He appeared in three different tabloids in one week when he publicly vowed to lose enough weight to consummate his relationship with 420-lb Brenda Burdle, but the couple grew apart when they both gained weight instead of losing it. After the sudden death of Walter Hudson (below), with whom he had formed a long-distance friendship, Michael developed a pathological fear of eating. He rapidly lost several hundred pounds, taking nourishment only when spoon fed. At about 600 lbs, he literally starved to death.

Also way fucked:

Walter Hudson (1944? - 1991) of Hempstead, NY (born in Brooklyn, NY); 5 ft 10 in, measured at 1197 lbs (though the industrial scale broke in the process of weighing him). His chest was measured at 106 inches, his waist at 110. Hudson was discovered by the press in 1987, when he became wedged in the door of his bedroom and had to be cut free by rescue workers. An agoraphobic, he'd spent most of the past 27 years in bed. Hudson lived with his family, where his appetite was always indulged, and gave every indication that he was content with both his weight and his situation. "I just ate and enjoyed it," he said. Despite his massive size, Newsday reported that he was extraordinarily healthy: his heart, lungs, and kidneys all functioned normally, while astonished doctors noted that his cholesterol and blood-sugar levels "showed the chemistry of a healthy 21-year-old." Even so, activist-turned-nutritionist Dick Gregory managed to convince Hudson that losing weight was necessary to save his life...Hudson died in his sleep after years of intermittent starvation dieting, a few weeks after announcing wedding plans. His body was found to weigh 1125 lbs, and his massive coffin required twelve pallbearers.

Apparently not the only enormous person who was actually healthy, but who was made less so by attempts to shrink:

Man, name withheld (ca. 1939 - ca. 1986), of New York State; just under 5 ft 7 in, 1050 lbs. His death was due to complications following a massive panniculectomy ("tummy tuck") to remove fat tissue, performed at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, New Hyde Park, NY. His peak weight was determined by adding the weight of the tissue removed by the operation (104 lbs) to the patient's postmortem weight of 946 lbs. According to his physicians, he was healthy when he checked in, and his "past [medical] history was unremarkable except for extraordinary weight all his life."

Francis John Lang, aka Michael Walker (b. 1934) of Gibsonton, FL (born in Clinton, IA); 6 ft 2 in, believed to have reached a maximum weight of 1187 lbs. Lang had weighed only 150 lbs as a soldier in Korea. He blamed his masssive weight gain on prescription drug abuse, claiming that his narcotic of choice had the side effect of giving him an uncontrollable appetite. Though unable to walk (a handicap that kept more than one fat lady out of the side show), Lang found a unique way of capitalizing on his situation: he had a mobile home built with observation windows, and traveled the country putting himself on display at carnivals and fairs. Lying nearly nude on an oversize circular bed, he preached to the curious about the evils of drugs, using his own body as the moral lesson.

o_O

John Finnerty (b. 1952) of Amity Harbor, NY; 1012 lbs. He surfaced in the media only once, when firemen were called to take him to Brunswisk Hospital Center for treatment of bronchitis. "He was laying on a queen-size mattress, and rolls of fat just hung off both sides," said the local fire chief. "He moved like a big bowl of Jello." Finnerty was taken to the hospital on a flatbed truck, and was said to be responding well to treatment. His subsequent history is unreported.

Secret fat people.

David Ron High (1953 - 1996) of Brooklyn, NY; 5 ft 10 in, aprox. 1000 lbs. High was touted as Dick Gregory's biggest success story in 1986, when he reduced from 823 lbs to 427 lbs on a year-long fast supplemented by fruits and vegetables. (He lost three inches in height as well, shrinking from a peak of 6 ft 1 in.)

How can you lose height? Seriously, what the hell is going on there?

Ida Maitland (1898 - 1932) of Springfield, MS; 911 lbs. Mrs. Maitland reportedly had a bust measurement of 152 inches, and died while trying to pick a four-leaf clover. Guinness Superlatives labeled the story "totally unsubstantiated."

Huh?

Santiago Garcia (b. 1964) of Baytown, TX; 6 ft 1 in, aprox. 900 lbs. Garcia made the papers in 1994, when he was arrested for selling forged immigration cards. After proving too big for a cell, too wide for the shower, and too heavy for the forklift that tried to load him into a prison van, Garcia was released into the care of his family.

So in conclusion, some people are just obese for no particular reason, and dieting can kill you.

steganography

Steganography

Fictitious entry (rhinogradentia, Borges)

funereal violins

I should incorporate false documents into SDN and then have a website or something which will let people know which of the information in the book is legitimate.

Maybe stuff with deniable encryption or plausible deniability with TD:LP?

strange maps

Strange Maps (maybe my favorite site atm) and radical cartography.

hypercolor toilet seat

Hypercolor heat-changing toilet shows who's been assing it up (I think I'll just leave the title as it is.)

Also, Japanese Bug Fights and PhotoTherapy

Japanese Bug Fights. Like the link says. I feel bad for the bugs, but I do like the crayfish with the barbells. I think he lost though :(

Also, PhotoTherapy (as in photographs, not light). This is really cool.

Rebirth of the Eagle

Rebirth of the Eagle.

LOL.

Some highlights... oh hell, I'll just type the whole "transcript." It's all [sic].

1: The story of the eagle...
2: The eagle has the longest life-span of its' species
3: It can live up to 70 years
But to reach this age, the eagle must make a hard decision.
4: In its' 40's
Its' long and flexible talons can no longer grab prey which serves as food
5: Its' long and sharp beak becomes bent
6: Its' old-aged and heavy wings, due to their thick feathers, become stuck to its' chest and make it difficult to fly.
7: Then, the eagle is left with only two options: die or go through a painful process that lasts 150 days.
8: The process requires that the eagle fly to a mountain top and sit on its' nest.
9: There the eagle knocks its' beak against a rock until it plucks it out.
10: After plucking it out, the eagle will wait for a new beak to grow back and then it will pluck out its' talons.
11: When its' new talons grow back, the eagle starts plucking its' old-aged feathers.
12: And after five months, the eagle takes its' famous flight of rebirth and lives for
30 more years
13: Why is change needed?
Many times, in order to survive we have to start a change process.
We sometimes need to get rid of old memories, habits and other past traditions.
Only freed from past burdens, can we take advantage of the present.

It reminds me a lot of the parables you find in bestiaries, because it's incredibly inaccurate in the service of some sort of crude metaphorical point. And apparently a lot of people actually believed it was true, and deluged a raptor center with emails, wondering about it.

I'm not sure how you could actually believe any of that unless you were, say, a sheltered five year old, but I guess we can't all grow up reading Ranger Rick.

Count the inaccuracies! There is at least one in every slide, not counting the moral at the end. And not counting any of the its', which is at least consistently egregious punctuation.

slow-motion bullet photography

Slow motion bullet photography. This is hella sweet.

I'm really stressed out now. I will watch some arrested development. I wish I could sleep like a normal person. It is after 7 am and still night-dark.

snake swallows golf balls

Snake swallows golf balls, mistaking them for eggs.

It was really nice of the people to take him in to get operated on (this was a wild snake, not a pet). The picture is cool:

dres, shivs, calques

Apparently for some reason there is a Polish equivalent to Chavs.

Dangerous Beauty: The Art of the Shiv.

We are consummate toolmakers. This shiv might be my favorite.

Calques are interesting. Examples: flea market, skyscraper.

mushrooms

Plants with eyes and shit: an animation. Some of it sort of reminded me of Jim Woodring.

Mushrooms kind of freak me out.

Belugas with Santa hats

This is awesome.

Merry Xmas :P

How to make chickens sleep

How to make chickens sleep.

I'm sort of skeptical about whether the chicken is actually "asleep." I suppose you could test it with electrode brain-wave-reading devices.

i want a pet puffer fish and i will name it puffy.

i wonder what it is like to be a fish under the ocean down where there is no light. one of those very ugly lantern fishes with the glowy lures on their heads. and the vestigial males.

i want a pet moa but i don't know what i will name it. maybe "rainbow". i think that would be a good name for a moa.

weird animal drawings

Okay, some links:

Patricia Piccinini.

Some cool photography of places in Russia.

This is really awesome. Strange Science, "Goof Gallery." A bunch of fucked up drawings done by naturalists in times and places where, you know, they were going by like third-hand description and had never seen, e.g., a leopard or a giraffe. Organized by category, like mammal, dinosaur/dragon, sea monsters, hominids, monsters, etc. Anyway, and there is some seriously weird shit, and it's really worth a look.

I like stuff from when science hadn't quite branched off from myth, philosophy, etc.

Oh, and one more thing: footage of a pride of lions attacking an (adult male?) elephant. I'm not sure whether they kill him at the end, the footage is kind of ambiguous. There is silly melodramatic narration by Jeremy Irons for the first 3 minutes, in which nothing much happens, so skip 3 minutes in. Unless you want to hear Jeremy Irons go on about color symbolism (grey... versus gold. But the true color underneath it all...is red. Or something like that, as though any of that will somehow make lions attacking an elephant more impressive than it already is) in a hushed voice while a elephant aims a vague kick in the direction of a recumbent lion for three minutes.

What 2000 looks like from 1910

This is pretty cool. I'm sure I'd be able to get more out of it if I spoke French better. Ah well.

Somewhere in the maze of links they also have a photo of a watch from Revolutionary France, back when they tried to make everything be on a base ten system.

Also, "Balance."

Also, a maki. Carly, if you thought that sloth was creepy, you may not want to watch this.

Also, this guy (Zdzisław Beksiński) is cool.

Saxithorn

So I "misplaced" my wallet (and will hopefully find it somewhere in my apartment soon). I went to the store where I thought I might have left it, and asked if they had any wallets. They asked my name, and I told them.

They didn't have my wallet, but they did have a wallet belonging to someone named Saxithorn (first name). Or possibly Saxathorn? I asked how it was spelled, and the guy said it was "pretty much phonetic."

This may be the best name ever.

Also, a bit of overheard conversation I forgot to write down, but that has been on my mind recently:

A young woman, walking with two friends: What would you think of me if I was exactly the same, but I wore Uggs?

Alas, I didn't hear the response.

production, theological quandaries

In the last couple of days I've printed out most of the stuff that I've written over the last year and a half. Here is a picture of me holding it up. It feels weird, and it does not feel like that much. I was told that the amount I've produced is "exceptionally productive," but I dunno. Maybe if it was all poetry, because if so that would probably come to 2 or 3 times the poems I have now; about half of it or a little more is fiction. That contains only one finished story though. Apparently I have about 30 pages of SDN, which is more than I thought.

Maybe I feel weird or like it's not as much as I'd like just because I want to produce so much more, I have all sorts of ideas. I guess I should be grateful for that; it's just hard to find the time/fortitude/inspiration/etc. to finish a lot of these things.

I'm reading this really cool book, "The History of Hell." A quote:

Intelligent, educated men, who, if they had been born centuries later, might have explained the ineffable or metaphorical in terms of quarks and black holes in space, instead turned their attention to such considerations as whether food consumed during a lifetime would be part of the body at the resurrection. (Yes, was the answer, but then interesting questions of cannibalism arose.)

Hahaha.

googly breakfast

Kind of terrifying.

suicide safety smocks

Okay, so this CNN article made me google "suicide safety smocks."

And I found something incredible.

My first question is about the models. Did they coax actual deranged inmates into modeling these garments, or did they go through headshots, et cetera, and tell the guy not to wash his hair for a couple of weeks?

Some quotes:

* Safety: All of the products from Ferguson Safety are specifically designed to keep problem inmates from hurting themselves and creating more headaches for you and your colleagues.
* Security: Ferguson’s Original Safety Smock is designed to allow placement and removal of restraints, handcuffs and shackles.
* Savings: Ferguson products last years longer and are considerably more tear resistant than cheap knock-offs -- saving you replacement costs, staff time, and lowering your liability by preventing wrongful death lawsuits

Good deal.

From the FAQ:

Q1: Can't they take the smock off?
A: Yes. It's not designed to prevent exhibitionism. It's for people who wish to be clothed, which is the majority of suicidal inmates. We have given some thought to an anti-exhibitionist garment but haven't come up with a safe design. Would you let us know if you have any ideas?

Uh. Yeah, I'm thinking most inmates in general would prefer to wear clothing, which evidently has not always been an option for the suicidal:

While working at the jail a bulky gown was used to clothe their suicidal inmates. She learned that the only way that facilities could get such a garment was to make their own, and so inmates on suicide watch were often kept completely naked.

That would improve my will to live real fast. Man, wouldn't it be cold? Did they get blankets, or were those potentially something you could hang yourself with? Did they keep the cells well-heated then? Man.

Q3: Are they indestructible?
A: Have you heard about the Wisconsin inmate who tore through walls with his bare hands to pull out the wiring? How about the Wyoming inmate who bent a solid steel door in half? These actual events indicate how imprudent it would be to call anything made of fabric "indestructible". Our blankets and smocks are made of the strongest wearable, washable fabric available.

Q7: May we examine one?
A: By all means. We're happy to send you a smock or blanket to examine with no obligation (except to send it back if you don't buy it, of course).

Should I order one? I am thinking the orange is snazzier-looking.

Holy shit.

No bears named Muhammed!

Heard about the school teacher in Sudan who was facing whipping and years in prison? The kids in her class were trying to come up with a name for a teddy bear, and they picked "Muhammed." Which, you know, is one of the most common names in Sudan, and one of the most common names worldwide, period. But naturally if you name a stuffed bear that, it is an "insult to religion," and apparently in Sudan "insulting religion" can land you in jail with a lacerated back.

But fortunately the people of Sudan recognize that this would be an injustice. Ten thousand people thronged the president's palace in protest, insisting that the teacher be executed by firing squad instead.

This is ludicrous. Clearly it's the children who should be executed by firing squad, as they are the ones who picked the name. I'm sure it would set a good example. It is never too early to execute people who "insult religion," and I'm glad these fine citizens have their priorities in order.

divorce is bad for the environment, say morons

This is retarded:

People have been talking about how to protect the environment and combat climate change, but divorce is an overlooked factor that needs to be considered," Liu said.

I may use this as an example in class next term. You know, of an argument that fails.

ridiculous bento

Also, this is ridiculous.

And this is my 100th post! yay.

giant anteaters

Giant anteaters are so awesome.

"An adult anteater is capable of fending off or even killing its main predators, big cats such as the jaguar and the cougar"!

Needless to say they can also kill a person. They're so big they are sometimes mistaken for bears, and have slashy claws that can open a termite nest, which is pretty impressive because that is like being able to claw a hole in concrete. They are not to be fucked with:

"In April 2007, an anteater at the Florencio Varela zoo in Argentina attacked Melisa Casco, a zookeeper, mauling her abdomen and legs with its sharp front claws. The 19-year old zookeeper was admitted to the hospital in critical condition, and later succumbed to her injuries."

It has the best tail. I want to be an anteater when I grow up.

religion

Great Pharyngula post.

Some highlights:

82 percent of Americans believe in God, according to a poll (I would have thought it was higher, actually, so an 18% being atheists or agnostics was pleasantly surprising).

But.

Most of this 82 percent are not exactly the rational deistic sorts who deplore superstition and religious intolerance. You know, like the founding fathers. Almost all of this 82 percent believe in miracles, a literal fluffy angel land above and a literal firey demon land below, etc. 62 percent believe in the devil and hell.

And less than 50 percent believe that evolution happens.

Let's hope this turns around before we all die of antibiotic-resistant staph.

This sort of thing just makes me want to abandon the country like a rat from a burning building. Not, of course, that just getting out actually helps America, but I wouldn't be living in it.

Anyway, some more highlights:

Some dude:

I think there's a kind of a silliness to banging away at religious beliefs for their obvious falsehood, when in fact, if you're an evolutionist, the only way you would want to evaluate these beliefs is to examine what they cause people to do. Do they help people function in their communities? Then this might be an explanation for why they exist. It also makes it unnecessary to criticize these ideas, again and again, because they depart from factual reality. We should be more sophisticated in the way we evaluate beliefs.

In other words, these beliefs exist, so it's completely unnecessary to point out that they make no sense. I'm all for explicating the existence of religion in rational ways. I'm not sure I really see what the other option is, if one takes a rationalist, secular view of things. Ignoring it entirely, maybe?

My view is this: we humans are really good at finding patterns in things, at discerning cause-and-effect relationships, at creating models that explain the world. Sometimes we see patterns where they don't actually exist. There are lots of cognitive biases that keep us from discarding a view of the world, even if there is plenty of data to contradict it.

I don't think this is because cognitive biases are beneficial per se. I think this is because they are an outgrowth of other aspects of human cognition, perception, and self-perception. I can't see that continuing to adhere to cognitive biases confers any benefit which could not be countered by the benefits that come from not believing in bullshit, though if someone wants to argue the contrary i'd be happy to hear it--and it's silly to think that said biases must be helpful or they would not exist. It sort of seems like a version of the naturalistic fallacy to me, replacing "adaptive" with "moral" or something.

Is this guy even an evolutionary biologist? Sometimes traits keep existing, not because they're beneficial, but because they're not so deleterious that it makes the whole organism and/or species crash and burn. Sometimes these traits may be related to, or a more extreme version of, traits that are helpful. I immediately think of, for instance, sickle cell anemia. It sucks to have. No one would argue that it somehow confers great advantages upon the person with sickle cell anemia; it can be really painful and your life expectation is shortened. But if you are heterozygous for the sickle-cell genes, you're okay, and you've got some protection from malaria. Which is beneficial, if you live in a place with a lot of malaria.

Anyway, so apparently scientists should view religion as existing because of natural evolutionary causes. (As opposed to concluding that it exists by divine fiat?)
That doesn't mean it's not at odds with reality, and that we should nod and smile because in some vague, unsubstantiated way it might be "good for the community." I'm sure there are sociocultural reasons for the existence and popularity of Santa Claus mythology.

And a quote that makes me laugh, by PZ Myers:

If scientists won't stand up for accuracy, empiricism, and an honest evaluation of reality, who will? The priests? Wilson is plainly in denial.

Seriously. Apparently the polite and enlightened thing to do is either a) believe in religion, or, if you don't believe in religion, b) nod and smile and pretend that it's perfectly rational, or if not rational, that it's still just fantastic and is doing the world a lot of good, no doubt, and we'll just ignore all the insanity, wars, etc. that are directly because of people's religious beliefs. Those don't count. Because we all know that religion is a good thing, and it's saying anything to the contrary that is silly.

I remember reading a very interesting book, "God against the Gods," which was basically about the historical rise of monotheism and its eventual prominence over polytheism. And it's an extremely good book, and presents a convincing and devastating case to the effect that certain elements of monotheism, or at least this monotheism, are inherently conducive to intolerance.

Then the author ends the book by saying, "Uh, but despite all this, we mustn't forget all the good things that monotheism has brought to the world." Possibly because he actually thinks that, but likely to cover his ass. And of course he doesn't mention any of these good things. Because they're just so self-obvious and ineluctable that you don't need to, I guess, any more than you need to explain in what way, exactly, the sun makes it warm.

Earth sheltering

I am so living in a cob house with an extensive green roof, and no one can stop me. The icelanders have the right idea.

I am psyched. Now of course I need land. Land with lots of dirt on it.

This is not just for hippie reasons, it just seems like it would be so much cozier and right to live in the dirt. Like a hobbit. I think the neo-hippies will have to live in some kind of earth shelter, or perhaps an earthship. I can even see a transhumanist overlap there.

bouncy balls and synaesthesia

Yaaaaay, this game is fun.

Balls and physics. And it has science trivia. Reminds me of the nerdier version of that Rube Goldberg computer game I remember playing in grade school. If anyone can somehow hook me up with that I will be really happy.

Also, synaesthesia.

not like THOSE morons

LOL:

"We don't subscribe to this idea of the 'God of gaps,' meaning if you can't explain something, then blame God," Whitmore told me before describing a method that hardly seemed more scientific. "Instead, we think: 'Here's what the Bible says. Now let's go to the rocks and see if we find the evidence for it.'"

Allow me to translate: "Pssh. We don't adhere to the ludicrous logical fallacies of certain creationist morons. We've got completely different logical fallacies! Their dark-age, backwards method, you see, is founded upon ignorantly dismissing all problems and uncertainties with their theories, whereas ours is all about cherry-picking the evidence, and then ignorantly dismissing all the evidence that doesn't fit! See, evidence people! It's what science is all about!"

facial prosthetics

Oh my god oh my god oh my god



Snap-on face parts.

You heard me.



So, that's what the sinuses look like.

Hipster motifs

What is up with hipsters and the following:

--pandas
--owls
--robots
--deer
--swallows
--ice cream cones
--cupcakes
--unicorns
--fruit
--pistols
--keys and locks

(See: " Panda vs Robot wallet," for an example of several conglomerated hipster motifs. Also has a dragon on it.)

--stuff like hearts, stars, and even rainbows I understand more, if only because those seem like more generic motifs, albeit twee ones.

Of course it's interesting why/how those might have become decorative motifs, through various processes of abstraction, symbology, cultural permeation, repeat, etc.

Reminds me a bit of Egyptian hieroglyphs. How much does the heart-shape, and what it represents--love, romance, innocence, five-year-old girls, tweeness--actually resemble the tough, hardworking muscle in our chests? There have been multiple transmutations of both the symbol and its meaning, since then, whenever Then is. Similarly, some abstruse Egyptian hieroglyph might once have indicated--what, a trachea and lungs? Some sort of hoeing tool?--but they have become their universally understood symbol for something else, in a way that seems to us random and inexplicable.

But hey, if ancient dead saurians can evoke the whimsy and imagination of childhood.

(I'm not sure I want to mention octopuses or dinosaurs, because although those are also hipster motifs, the interest and value of those two seem self-evidenced to me, because I am biased. But presumably the appeal of dinosaurs is the same for us all: that lots of kids were obsessed with dinosaurs in childhood, so there's that nostalgia flavor as well as the fact that dinosaurs are just cool.)

I would also like to complain about the limited palette of insect motifs available. There seem to be basically: butterflies, ladybugs, dragonflies, and bees. But usually stylized bees that look more like smiling, striped blimps, possibly because something actually bee-looking would be too scary.

I am okay with butterflies, and I like dragonflies a lot, and bees. It's just that they are all overused. I would like to see more ants, non-ladybug coleopterans, wasps, realistic bees, and mantises, for starters.

word illusions

Word illusions. This is pretty cool. I want to figure out how to do ambigrams.

Littlewood's law

Littlewood's Law states that individuals can expect a miracle to happen to them at the rate of about one per month.

The law was framed by Cambridge University Professor J. E. Littlewood, and published in a collection of his work, A Mathematician's Miscellany; it seeks (among other things) to debunk one element of supposed supernatural phenomenology and is related to the more general Law of Truly Large Numbers, which states that with a sample size large enough, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.

I like this.

If only you could control what outrageous thing happened. A miracle quota, maybe. You could save up your smaller miracles for a larger one.

Signs!

Signs.

Hazard symbols. This is awesome. I have been thinking about sign symbols and aesthetics and etc. lately, having long been entertained by the unintentional hilariousness of cautionary signs.

Asemic writing. OMG.

DOT pictograms and "Helvetica man."

Red and Yellow Kills a Fellow.

(legal) street sign and traffic light collection.

"ing" implying diminuitive in English.

Street furniture.

Portugese pavement. Cool.

Links page of the sign museum.

We are such signy creatures. I am excited about this. Much more thought should go into this. Patterns, significance of specific concrete things to concepts, language, but so much more than spoken language; symbols as a basic aspect of human thought.

When I was little, I was really into the Smurfs. Often a smurf would read a letter out loud, and they would always say, e.g., "Signed, Papa Smurf."

So I thought that when writing a letter, you were actually supposed to write,

Signed,
So-and-So.

What do you call those little sign-off things? Yours truly, Sincerely, etc.?

Wikipedia's list of unusual deaths

Wikipedia list here. Some ones that stood out to me, organized by category. I was trying to have there be a cut after each section, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. Stupid tricksy blogger; I need something that works like lj-cut in livejournal. Ah well, you can still see what the categories are.

Lame Deaths:

1884: Allan Pinkerton, detective, died of gangrene resulting from having bitten his tongue after stumbling on the sidewalk.

1911: Jack Daniel, founder of the Tennessee whiskey distillery, died of blood poisoning six years after receiving a toe injury when he kicked his safe in anger at being unable to remember its combination.

1923: George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon became the first to die from the alleged King Tut's Curse after a mosquito bite on his face became seriously infected.

1941: Sherwood Anderson, writer, swallowed a toothpick at a party and then died of peritonitis.

1945: Anton Webern, the Austrian composer, was accidentally shot dead by an American Army soldier on 15 Sept. 1945, during the Allied occupation of Austria. Despite the curfew in effect, he stepped outside the house to enjoy a cigar without disturbing his sleeping grandchildren.

Ultra lame:

1947: The Collyer brothers, extreme cases of compulsive hoarders were found dead in their home in New York. The younger brother, Langley, died by falling victim to a booby trap he had set up, causing a mountain of objects, books, and newspapers to fall on him crushing him to death. His blind brother, Homer, who had depended on Langley for care, died of starvation some days later. Their bodies were recovered after massive efforts in removing many tons of debris from their home.

And The Lesson Is:

Hypatia was cool. Too bad she was killed by a Christian mob.

1277: Pope John XXI was killed in the collapse of his scientific laboratory.

Jesus is clearly not a fan of math or science.

1559: King Henry II of France was killed during a stunt knight's jousting match, when his helmet's soft golden grille gave way to a broken lancetip which pierced his eye and entered his brain.

Do not use golden armor, no matter how good it may look.

Kind of Cool Deaths:

1923: Frank Hayes, jockey, suffered a heart attack during a horse race. The horse, Sweet Kiss, went on to finish first, making Hayes the only deceased jockey to win a race.

1967: On Dec. 17 Harold Holt, Prime Minister of Australia, went for a swim at Cheviot Beach near Portsea, Victoria, Australia. He was never seen again. Rumors and theories include suicide, kidnapping by submarine, and shark attack; the true cause remains unknown.

Kidnapping by submarine. :D Awesome.

1975: On 24 March 1975 Alex Mitchell, a 50-year-old bricklayer from King's Lynn literally died laughing while watching an episode of The Goodies. According to his wife, who was a witness, Mitchell was unable to stop laughing while watching a sketch in the episode "Kung Fu Kapers" in which Tim Brooke-Taylor, dressed as a kilted Scotsman, used a set of bagpipes to defend himself from a psychopathic black pudding in a demonstration of the Lancashire martial art of Ecky-thump. After twenty-five minutes of continuous laughter Mitchell finally slumped on the sofa and expired from heart failure.

Ew:

4 BC: Herod the Great suffered from fever, intense rashes, colon pains, foot drop, inflammation of the abdomen, a putrefaction of his genitals that produced worms, convulsions, and difficulty breathing before he finally gave up. Similar symptoms-- abdominal pains and worms-- accompanied the death of his grandson Herod Agrippa in 44 AD, after he had imprisoned St Peter. At various times, each of these deaths has been considered divine retribution.

Oh ew wtf. What would produce that, just rot in the genital area w/ maggots?

1983: A diver on the Byford Dolphin oil exploration rig was violently dismembered and pulled through a narrowly opened hatch when the decompression chamber was accidentally opened, causing explosive decompression.

Food and Drink:

1135: Henry I of England died after gorging on lampreys, his favourite food.

Are those eels, or is it different?

1478: George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence reportedly was executed by drowning in a barrel of Malmsey wine at his own request.

That's style. If you could choose your method of execution, what would it be?

1771: King of Sweden, Adolf Frederick, died of digestion problems on February 12, 1771 after having consumed a meal consisting of lobster, caviar, sauerkraut, smoked herring and champagne, which was topped off with 14 servings of his favourite dessert: semla served in a bowl of hot milk. [citation needed] He is thus remembered by Swedish schoolchildren as "the king who ate himself to death."

Just posting this because semla sound really delicious. Mmmm.

Oops:

1687: Jean-Baptiste Lully, composer, died of a gangrenous abscess after piercing his foot with a staff while he was vigorously conducting a Te Deum, as it was customary at that time to conduct by banging a staff on the floor. The performance was to celebrate the king's recovery from an illness.

1978: Janet Parker, a British medical photographer, died of smallpox in 1978, ten months after the disease was eradicated in the wild, when a researcher at the laboratory Parker worked at accidentally released some virus into the air of the building. She is believed to be the last smallpox fatality in history.

1981: Carl McCunn, in March 1981, paid a bush pilot to drop him at a remote lake near the Coleen River in Alaska to photograph wildlife, but had not arranged for the pilot to pick him up again in August. Rather than starve, McCunn shot himself in the head. His body was found in February 1982.

Miscellaneous:

270 BC: The poet and grammarian Philitas of Cos reportedly wasted away and died of insomnia while brooding about the Liar paradox.

69: The short-time Roman emperor Galba was killed after becoming extremely unpopular with both the Roman people and the Praetorian guard-- however, 120 different people claimed credit for having killed him. All of these names were recorded in a list and they all were later themselves executed by the emperor Vitellius.

260: According to an ancient account, Roman emperor Valerian, after being defeated in battle and captured by the Persians, was used as a footstool by the King Shapur I. After a long period of punishment and humiliation, he offered Shapur a huge ransom for his release. In reply, Shapur had the unfortunate emperor skinned alive and his skin stuffed with straw or dung and preserved as a trophy.

Holy shit. I can't decide whether to say that people took their conquests more seriously back then, or that they took them less seriously. I mean, using a guy as a footstool, then skinning him and keeping him as a trophy? These days it would be all speeches and platitudes.

869: Al-Jahiz, an Arab scholar from Basra and author of works on literature, history, biology, zoology, Mu'tazili philosophy and theology, and politico-religious polemics is reputed to have been killed by his own library when shelves fell over on him.

1753: Professor Georg Wilhelm Richmann, of Saint Petersburg, Russia, was struck and killed by a globe of ball lightning while observing a storm.

Man, ball lightning is fucking sweet.

2002: Richard Sumner, a British artist suffering from schizophrenia, disappeared and was not located again until three years later when his skeleton was discovered handcuffed to a tree in a remote forest in Wales. Police investigators determined the death was a suicide, with Sumner securing himself in the handcuffs and throwing the keys out of reach.

o_O