The Mind/body problem. Or how to make incorporate your nerdiness in who you physically are.

Besti flokkurinn win elections in Reyjkavik. more inside

Search facebook updates. Three SF engineers wrote a search front end to dramatize some of the April 21st privacy changes. Reload the page for random searches.

Gorgonocephaus (aka Basket Star) is a Gorgon's head in a basket somehow. Links to Star Wars too.

The half life of the teaspoons was 81 days. via

Megafauna farts could have stopped the ice age 12,000 years ago.

Israel's strategic ambiguity around nuclear weapons under pressure. Apparently it negotiated to sell nuclear armed missiles to South Africa in 1975, though the Israeli president (his signature is on the documents in his then capacity as Defence Minister) denies the interpretation.

A Caspian sea monster 310 feet long and weighing up to 540 tons . One amazing machine... with rockets! And it's just not big enough. Scroll down for lots of incredible pictures. more inside

KUNG-FU BEAR!! . This Kung-Fu bear will destroy all your muggers AND your ninjas. Amazing SLYT footage of an agile bear in the Hiroshima zoo! more inside

Ninjas foil mugging! No, really...''There was the policemen and there was the ninjas,'' he said. ''It was not something that I would expect.''

The Ball of Light.

Early 1900s in Colour. Early 20th century color photography by Albert Kahn. [Via]

Fungus and Frogs are the subject of an upcoming television special... It seems that a frog killing fungus has gotten so bad that infected frogs might need diluted Clorox bleach for deep cleaning. (Note that a previous post reported the suggested use of yet more anitibiotics to fight this fungus.) But as usual and especially also, habitat destruction with chemical and pesticide run-off into the streams needs to be curtailed if we are to hear the piping and croaking that is such a bloved part of a beautiful summer's day.

Clouds - better from space

A good retro interface is worth a whole bunch of links. Some of these click-ons are still in development, so I'll prob'ly revisit this site. Here's more on hats. And another. And then there's Mr. Monkey's hat selections (previously). Question is, should I wear my Fidel style hat anyway? Sergei Khrushchev laughed at that one when he signed his book on Nikita at a lecture on the Cuban Missile Crisis, although it turned out his father really didn't much like Fidel...

Sally Cruikshank I saw at her 1982 presentation of Quasi at MoMA in NYC. She was always the BEST, but when she actually walked through the exhibit of Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion models, I fained interest in THAT body of work for some reason...

The US senate has voted to audit the Fed - a previously impenetrable, secretive and unnaturally powerful pseudo governmental corpus. When the winding cloth lies stripped from its shrouded balance sheet, what kind of hell storm shall rise from the abyss? After all, it was Chairman Bernanke who indicated that his machinations require secrecy. more inside

Programming Language

Canadian beaver dam can be seen from space.

A brief, incomplete and mostly wrong history of programming languages, 1842 - Ada Lovelace writes the first program. She is hampered in her efforts by the minor inconvenience that she doesn't have any actual computers to run her code. 1983 - In honor of Ada Lovelace's ability to create programs that never ran, Jean Ichbiah and the US Department of Defense create the Ada programming language.