Which drugs are most harmful? According to this, heroin's worse than cocaine, which is worse than alcohol, which is worse than cannabis, which is worse than LSD. Some results you'd expect, and some surprises. (From The Lancet, free registration required.) more inside

The City of Hope is a shelter in Dubai for abused women and children of all nationalities – and one of the few shelters in the Middle East. Run by Sharla Musabih, an American married to a UAE national, the safe haven has come under increasing criticism and attack. Sharla sets the record straight.

An ancient theatre filters out low-frequency background noise. The wonderful acoustics for which the ancient Greek theatre of Epidaurus is renowned may come from exploiting complex acoustic physics, new research shows. The theatre, discovered under a layer of earth on the Peloponnese peninsula in 1881 and excavated, has the classic semicircular shape of a Greek amphitheatre, with 34 rows of stone seats (to which the Romans added a further 21). Its acoustics are extraordinary: a performer standing on the open-air stage can be heard in the back rows almost 60 metres away. Architects and archaeologists have long speculated about what makes the sound transmit so well. more inside

Celaphopodfilter: More Giant Killer Squid "On deck, a fisherman lurches forward as his rod dips seaward. Another fisherman is jerked against the rail, then another. It can only be the same bizarre denizen that has been turning up in large numbers throughout Southland waters: Dosidicus gigas, a.k.a. Humboldt, or jumbo, squid. It is a colossal cephalopod that reaches 7 feet long, can weigh more than 100 pounds, and jets through the water at speeds up to 25 mph." LA Times Article, registration required.

Seattle Meetup Anyone here in the Emerald City area want to meet up? more inside

CyberBullied Off Line Kathy Sierra, blogger of Creating Passionate Users, has been harassed and stalked online via posts to her and others' blogs to the point that she is too afraid to leave her house and attend the workshops she normally leads, much less lead her daily life.

Recycled tintype images - strange and lovely rearrangements of bits of very old photos. Seen at Ample Sanity more inside

Contemporary Daguerreotypes

The Create A Comic Project Give little kids comics with blank word balloons. Let the hilarity ensue.

How to take a nap. For those otherwise useless periods between hiking your pants up to your nipples and complaining about the government.

Calculate Your Caffeine This handy-dandy website sorts out caffeinated beverages by name and as you click the green "plus" sign, it adds caffeine mg into a total amount. Afterwards, you may want to quit the caffeine habit. Or, perhaps just quitting soda pop is more for you. via the latter referenced lifehacker more inside

U. G. Krishnamurti is No More!

The Lorax by Dr. Seuss (25 min Google video.)

Techno Tuesday A comic strip about techstuff, with a twisted bent. Hysterically funny.

Pancake Art Delicious and enlightening.

A painting recently attributed to Caravaggio can be seen at a London exhibition of the Royal Collection. Here's a gallery of all (I think) Caravaggio's paintings. And a monkey.

Beatboxing has been covered here before but all of the links are dead. It has been called the fifth element of hip hop. It is old skool, it is new skool. It is performed by clowns, the Dutch, the French, and the New York Philharmonic (wait for it 1:30 in to the video).

UFO Evidence is a large depository of UFO related photos, sightings, and other curiousities. Are you a believer?

Hill of Crosses. Apparently it's more of a faith shrine rather than a cemetery or a memorial. There are some 55,000 plus crosses on a hill in Lithuania somewhere out in the bush from Riga.

Stop the Falsiness! We're putting Stephen Colbert on notice. For almost a year, his ceaseless falsiness -- disguised, shamelessly, as truthiness -- has gone unchallenged. No longer. more inside