Mount Mabu and its wildlife. "It was one of the few places on the planet that remained unmapped and unexplored. But now Mozambique's Mount Mabu has started to yield its secrets to the world." [Via]

Posing as a Bidder, Utah Student Disrupts Government Auction of 150,000 Acres of Wilderness for Oil & Gas Drilling. "He didn't pour sugar into a bulldozer's gas tank. He didn't spike a tree or set a billboard on fire. But wielding only a bidder's paddle, a University of Utah student just as surely monkey-wrenched a federal oil- and gas-lease sale Friday, ensuring that thousands of acres near two southern Utah national parks won't be opened to drilling anytime soon."

SVG is the Future of Web Application Development. AJAX brought us web 2.0, but scalable vector graphics and javascript will bring us the next generation of web-based, fully interactive applications. Pay special attention to Sun's Lively Kernel, which gives you a good glimpse of what this technology can do for the web. Note that the Lively stuff will not work in IE, which still doesn't support SVG. Safari works best, FF almost as well.

Richard Cheese Lounge Singer Extraordinaire, with his backup band, Lounge Against the Machine. Interpreter of divergent songs such as NIN's Closer, Snoop Dogg's Gin and Juice and a delightful Mambo of U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday. His albums are available thru the iTunes store as well as via the above link. Finding his music made my weekend, I hope it brightens your Monday.

The Art of R.S. Connett. [Via]

Curious Snowed-in George: How about that weather, eh? On this, the first day of winter in the Northern Hemisphere, nearly all of Canada and most of the northern US is experiencing wild storms and record low temperatures. more inside

The Jesus Christ dinosaur hypothesis for the evolution of flight. [Via]

Curious, George: Why does Firefox hate jpgs? Usually if there's a link to a jpg image, Firefox just opens it in a tab for me. But periodically, only for some specific jpgs, it prompts me whether I want to save the image or choose a specific program. Only some images, not all. This happens both in FF 3.0 in XP, and in FF 3.1 beta on OSX. What the hell, man?

In Repeat of Milgram’s Electric Shock Experiment, People Still Pull the Lever.

Curious George: Santa hacks. What's the best way for Santa to give a bird as gift? more inside

Ice: A Victorian Romance is an exhibition of fifty-five rare books and journals, which were originally displayed at the Linda Hall Library, May 1-September 13, 2008.

Fugly-Ass Christmas Sweaters Of The Day Is it ok to say "ass" on the new, kinder, gentler MoFi?

Sketching the Earliest Views of the New World. "The watercolors that John White produced in 1585 gave England its first startling glimpse of America". [Via]

A day's worth of mothering in 2 minutes

Majel Barrett Roddenberry: 1932-2008 She played Nurse Chapel in ST:TOS, Lwaxana Troi in TNG, and the voice of the computer in every variant. She was also married to the Creator, and was cast in the role of Number One, when Star Trek was originally proposed. I, for one, am very saddened by her passing.

2008 in pictures A repository thread for end-of-year news photo links. more inside

Could it be that Microsoft has mole engineers who intentionally plant security holes? Or else, how could EVERY version of IE be so flawed? Every single version, every time?

Once again, Slate's explainer has its annual list of questions that it dare not answer, for fear of a massive drop in IQ, EQ, and quality of readership. How many can be answered here instead?

Earth Atmosphere "Breathes," Thanks to Solar Winds.

The New York Times 8th Annual Year in Ideas. ...including Goalkeeper Science, Minicattle, the National Ten Percent Off Sale, Positive Deviance (not what it sounds like) and the Rising Tide Tax System... more inside