All text taken word-for-word from fundamentalist Christian online forums (Possibly NSFW: language)
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Tuesday coffee break: "If atheists ruled the world..."
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Writing quote of the day
"Short words . . . come from down deep in us -- from our hearts or guts, not from the brain. For they deal for the most part with things that move and sway us, that make us act." Frank Gelett Burgess, "Short Words Are Words of Might" (1939), in Weigh the Word 104, 107 (Charles B. Jennings et al. eds., 1957).
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Tuesday coffee break: the science of coffee
"After many years in grad school I think I’ve had at least as much coffee as science. Despite this devotion to caffeination, I realized recently that I know very little of the actual science behind the making of coffee."
Friday, March 20, 2009
Friday poll results
Do you plan to attend URMA 2009?
- Yes: 8 votes (27%)
- I don't know yet: 8 votes (27%)
- No: my institution has specifically frozen travel expenditures: 7 votes (24%)
- No: my institution has general budget woes and/or wants to limit travel. 6 votes (20%)
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Gadawan Kura
Check out photographer Pieter Hugo's series of portraits of the Hyena Men, a group of entertainers who wander around Nigeria with three hyenas, two pythons, and four monkeys.
Scenes from a recession
A few recent glimpses into some of the places and lives affected by what some are calling the "Great Recession." (boston.com)
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Flossin' monkeys
Kyoto University researchers think this is the first piece of evidence that wild monkeys can teach their babies how to use tools. If you can call a strand of human hair a tool.
Wednesday coffee break, part 2: complaining holidaymakers
Aroused elephant tops list of bizarre holiday grievances: Telegraph Travel has compiled a list of the 20 most riduculous complaints received by tour operators. (telegraph.co.uk)
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Tuesday coffee break, part 2: Vintage visions of the future
"Soviet and Eastern Bloc popular tech and science magazines, German, Italian, British fantastic illustrations and promotional literature -- all from the Golden Age of Retro-Future."
Tuesday coffee break: It could be worse...
...you could be part of a bait ball:
Hungry whales steal birds' dinner and Fish feast frenzy caught on film
Friday, March 13, 2009
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Science marches on
University of California researchers, on a Pentagon contract, announced in January success at rigging a live flower beetle with electrodes and a radio receiver to enable scientists to control the insect's flight remotely. Pulses sent to the bug's muscles or optic lobes can command it to take off, turn left or right, or hover, according to a report in MIT Technology Review, and the insect's "large" size (up to a whopping four inches in length) would enable it to also carry a camera, giving the beetle military uses such as surveillance or search and rescue. The researchers admired the native flight-control ability of the beetle so much that they abandoned developing robot beetles (which required trying to mimic nature). [MIT Technology Review, 1-29-09, via newsoftheweird.com]
and:
Doctoral student Daniel Bennett filed a lawsuit against Britain's Leeds University in February because custodians had mistakenly thrown out research that he had been working with for the last seven years. Bennett is studying the rare Butaan lizard of the Philippines and over the years, to examine its diet, had painstakingly sifted through jungle dirt to gather over 70 pounds of its feces, which Bennett believes is worth far more than the ($720) Leeds has offered him. [Daily Telegraph, 2-5-09, via newsoftheweird.com]
and:
"Reproduction is no fun if you're a squid," said a biologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, referring especially to the deep-sea squid. Finding a mate a mile down in pitch-darkness is hard enough, but the combination of males that are smaller and fearful of being overpowered and females whose reception of sperm involves being stabbed makes the insemination process especially traumatic. Sperm deposits can be extensive and burdensome to the female and are delivered by the reckless slashing of the skin by the male. In fact, according to a December report in Germany's Der Spiegel, in the darkness the male sometimes misses the female altogether and inseminates himself. [Spiegel Online, 12-23-08, via newsoftheweird.com]
and:
Princeton University scientists, reporting in January on research in Peru, said they observed aggressive, carnivorous behavior for the first time among dung beetles, which decapitated and ate millipedes. Dung beetles were not known previously to be fussy eaters (except for a 2006 study in which they seemed to prefer horse dung to camel dung or sheep dung). [Daily Telegraph (London), 1-21-09, via newsoftheweird.com]
Friday, March 6, 2009
Friday coffee break: Eggcorns
If you can answer yes to any of the following questions, then you may have to check your own nest for eggcorns: When you really care about a cause, do you try to strum up support? Are you a perfectionist who hates to do things half-hazardly? Do complex moral issues fill you with a paralyzing cognitive dissidence? And finally, are you tired of paying exuberant prices?
Friday coffee break: Soda, Pop, or Coke?
The Dictionary of American Regional English, a comprehensive lexicon of local language quirks, nears completion
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Time Traveler's Phrasebook
Research from the University of Reading suggests that anybody who was catapulted back in time to Ice Age Europe would stand a good chance of being intelligible to the locals by using words such as "I", "who," and "thou," and the numbers "two", "three," and "five."
From the Times Online.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
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