Blogeto, ergo sum… **hum, hum, hum** Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday to Kathryn, happy birthday to me. Alas, I feel like Harry Potter, drawing candles in the dust. But if Hagrid, or practically anybody else, were to show up at my door today, and properly install my 2 window air conditioners, I’d be tickled pink, even if they’ve sat on my cake. And now, without further ado, on to my first birthday present of the day: a cornucopia of wild and woolly news.
- More about the oldest evidence of life on Earth, including photo.
- Dwarf dinosaurs? Sounds like the old George Carlin joke about jumbo shrimp: two words that just don’t go together.
- Tooth gives up oldest human DNA.
- The longest war ever fought by humans was with cavebears.
- New study shows much of the world emerged from last Ice Age together.
- Science Daily’s review of William J. Broad’s The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and Hidden Messages of Ancient Delphi. Amazon US & UK.
- Viking monuments and artefacts frequently feature three interlaced triangles known as the valknut, ‘the knot of the slain’. Designed by MC Escher in a past life?
- Natural History Museum pays £1m for Charles Darwin archive.
- Virgin Galactic plans tourist trips into the light fantastic.
- Maturity of farthest galaxy cluster surprises astronomers.
- Infant solar system is drenched in carbon.
- Astronomers figure out why space is dusty.
- New Cassini images help solve mystery of Titan’s missing craters.
- Physicists probe The 5th Dimension …err, make that the fifth dimension. When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars…
- Two body-mod artists and a grad student with a background in neuroscience implanted rare earth magnets in their fingertips – and now they can feel electromagnetic fields.
- Aches to Quakes: Sensitives who feel earthquake precursors suffer pain and ridicule.
- Robotic hands may soon be able to replicate the human sense of touch.
- Thorium oxide could be the answer to many concerns about nuclear power.
- Energy Geopolitics 2006: Welcome to the 21 Century – a world for which none of us is prepared.
- New data revises theory about earthquake aftershocks. Getting close to figuring out that bombs can cause quakes?
- Back-engineering the Ark of the Covenant turns out to be shockingly easy.
- The unethical biopharming of America.
- Oz breakthrough means organs grown inside the body could soon replace transplants.
- Researchers delve into the weird connections between pain, itching, density of nerve fibers, and gender.
- Driven to extinction: New expedition wants to know who killed the Dodo?
- Recent, rapid climate change is driving evolution of animal species.
- Crows have human-like intelligence according to Candace Savage, author of Crows: Encounters with the Wise Guys. Amazon US & UK.
- What if life on Earth did not begin on Earth? This hypothesis received support from an unlikely source: the Columbia tragedy.
- Weed! Werewolves! Wicca! What do you make of these Google Trends?
- There were giants in those days. 17 fun-filled pages on giants and related ooparts, so don’t let those Bible quotes slow you down.
- The Gospel of Judas, Barbelo and Long-Kept Secrets.
- Mind Control (part 1): The Ultimate Brave New World (part 2).
- Psychologist says Harry Potter’s female friend, Hermione Granger, is a bad role model, but Gerard Jones, author of Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, disagrees. Amazon US & UK.
- Net Neutrality Up For Vote: Follow The Money – and Misinformation.
- An explanation of net neutrality, and what would happen if tolls are imposed on the net.
- Endorsement of the concept of net neutrality by some big-name companies like Amazon.com, eBay, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo has apparently irked at least one US Congressman, who has proposed a ‘poison pill amendment’ aimed at forcing the companies to abandon their support.
- Alex Jones detained on orders of the Bilderberg Group.
- CNN’s Lou Dobbs says private voting machine companies are a ‘threat to our democracy’.
- Link corrected: Was the 2004 election stolen? The length of this list of voting irregularities rivals that of 9/11 coincidences.
- Were Germans, Arabs, or both complicit in the Oklahoma City bombing? Did you know the FBI was warned about the bombing beforehand? Was ‘the German’ a government agent, under ‘official’ protection?
- Do-It-Yourself Impeachment: An idea whose time will come on Oct. 12?
- Coming July 28: Is Aaron Russo’s America: From Freedom to Fascism the scariest goddamn film you’ll see this year?
- Atypical Strain of Mad Cow Confirmed in US.
Thanks to Greg – for the morale support. 😉
Quote of the Day:
Hey, do you know why they call it ‘PMS’ ?
Because ‘Mad Cow’ was already taken.
Joke in the TV advert for the movie A Prairie Home Companion.
(You’re darn right I’d raise hell if one of the guys had posted it! hehe)
