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Marshawn Lynch is maybe not the prettiest of football players, but he sure has the most demon-looking headshot on his Yahoo! player profile page.

Tags:   Berkeley · demonology · marshawn lynchNo Comments.

Some dude named Ed Whelan offers this fantastically inane idea on the National Review’s website:

Barack Obama may actually believe, as he stated yesterday, that Roe v. Wade “was rightly decided.” But it may be very lucky for him, as the son born of that woman, that it hadn’t been decided a dozen or so years earlier.

Yes, Whelan is claiming Obama is lucky not to have been aborted.

Remember, these are the Republican “intellectuals”.

Tags:   abortion · republicanismNo Comments.

Sometimes the world gets a tiny stranger by such small degrees as to be unnoticeable. Othertimes, the strange arrives in station blaring the Albanian national anthem. This PLOS One article on “worm grunting” is the latter:

For generations many families in and around Florida's Apalachicola National Forest have supported themselves by collecting the large endemic earthworms Diplocardia mississippiensis. This is accomplished by vibrating a wooden stake driven into the soil, a practice called “worm grunting”. In response to the vibrations, worms emerge to the surface where thousands can be gathered in a few hours. Why do these earthworms suddenly exit their burrows in response to vibrations, exposing themselves to predation?

The paper specifically mentions a “worm gruntin’” festival in, presumably, sunny Wakulla County, Florida.

This video’s actually pretty cool:

Tags:   Science · the south · wormsNo Comments.

Ross Douthat must think there is some award for most damningly ironic counterfactual:

Whereas in a world in which George W. Bush hadn’t invaded Iraq, or a world in which large stockpiles of WMDs had been found after he did invade, or a world in which the occupation of Iraq hadn’t been mismanaged into a bloody botch for three long years, I suspect…

If only Republicans weren’t in power there wouldn’t be so much resentment against the the things Republicans do when in power.

Tags:   counterfactuals · Politics · republicanismNo Comments.

Felix Salmon on the TED Spread:

A hardy perennial in sci-fi movies is the scene where people start firing ever-larger weapons at some alien object, only to see it wobble a little instead of getting obliterated as expected. I’m beginning to see the TED spread (432bp today) as one of those alien objects.

Tags:   crash · finance · money · panicNo Comments.

An article in PLOS ONE provides a useful masking hierarchy:

All types of masks reduced aerosol exposure, relatively stable over time, unaffected by duration of wear or type of activity, but with a high degree of individual variation. Personal respirators were more efficient than surgical masks, which were more efficient than home-made masks. Regardless of mask type, children were less well protected. Outward protection (mask wearing by a mechanical head) was less effective than inward protection (mask wearing by healthy volunteers).

Conclusion. Always be a healthy volunteer.

Tags:   masks · plosone · public health · ScienceNo Comments.

I guess a journal called Bioscience Hypotheses should contain hypotheses. But this article by Irish seems to contain mostly ill defined musing.

The sentence that struck me as most undercooked was:

Next to thinking, the brain’s most important task is managing information.

I certainly have little idea what the proper definition of “thinking” might be, but I’m guessing it is of a different species from whatever the author has tagged and bagged.

Tags:   philosophy of mind · ScienceNo Comments.

The url for the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging is:

http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/

компютри
Brings to mind one of those business cards for pro-fessional folks with all sorts of letters after the title.

Tags: No Comments.

The muxtape.com source opens with this little gem:

I enjoy the minimalistic design. Hope enough music gets bought to cover all the s3 costs and inevitable law suits.

I would enjoy a more multi-upload and reconfigure type interface, but the one-song-at-a-time instills an ideal of effort and discrimination.

In conclusion, my taste is questionable, while Bobby Cupp’s is inimitable.

Tags:   music · ui · webdesignNo Comments.

Ginsberg‘s Howl can be turned into a strangled love song with some noun -> pronoun substitutions.

Original:

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
ned governments!

Fake:

Her! Her! Nightmare of her! She the
loveless! Mental she! She the heavy
judger of men!
She the incomprehensible prison! She the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! She whose buildings are judgment!
She the vast stone of war! She the stun-
ned governments!

And, no it doesn’t make too much sense.

Tags:   allen ginsberg · Literature · poetry · substitutionNo Comments.