Eivind

"Slab City, or The Slabs, is a free campsite and alternative living community located near an active bombing range in the desert city of Niland, California. Previously an old WWII base, Marine Barracks Camp Dunlap, the campsite earns its name for the concrete slabs that remained long after the military base had been bulldozed and abandoned." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

"You all know this song, but it is unusually affecting when sung by a child:" - Eivind

Unless that book is the HGTTG - Edward Zwart

*liked* a second time - Heather

Looks like Boca Grande or Vikings Beach, Bahai Honda 30 years ago - Eric Logan

True ... I don't do economy, so thank God I don't have to worry about it. - Kittyburgers from IM

"With a global pandemic afoot, the last thing many people want to do is put their hands in water that many other people have already touched, even if it happens to be holy water. But in Italy, where about 30 people have already died from swine flu, many Catholics will soon be able to get untainted holy water as part of church sacrament. Catholic churches around Italy are scrapping their traditional water fonts in favor of new automatic, motion-activated holy water dispensers invented by Luciano Marabese." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

How do they make holy water anyways? Is it blessed by a priest? How much chlorine is allowed? - David (slumrig)

"The “Long Count” calendar system tracked “Great Cycles” of time. The beginning of the current cycle — date 0.0.0.0.0 — corresponds to Aug. 13, 3114 B.C. on the Gregorian calendar. Here’s how to read a date…" - Eivind from Bookmarklet

The Aztecs are probably right ===> Aztec calendar ends in 2027. - Eric Logan

The Battle of Santa Clara was the last battle of the Cuban Revolution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Eivind

"Here I am getting the H1N1 vaccine. With a four-month-old infant I am in the high-risk group that Health Canada recommends should receive an earlier dose as flu season kicks in. After all of the concern about debilitating side effects or even getting the virus from the vaccine (which would be impossible), I can report that I only experienced a brief feeling of light headedness and a mild headache." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

"But wait, according to FOXNews, the H1N1 vaccine is worse than swine flu itself? What's going on here?Why would Wall Street executives be getting the vaccine early when it's clearly going to kill them? Then it hit me, the swine flu vaccine must be Obama's secret plan to further poison the economy and I fell for it. After his first attempt to destroy capitalism actually ended up helping... more... - Eivind

I doubt the FF bot cares? :-D - Alexander Kruel

Just thought I'd bypass the most common opening question in GTalk :) - Eivind

Christopher Moore is AMAZING. This is as great a meditation on death as I've seen. That man got me through a really rough path not just without stabbing myself, but with laughter :) - Friday Lo is Friday!

It mostly cheers me up, but I identify a bit to much with the beta males (you know the ones with the stealth charisma; undetectable by women :) ). - Eivind

"Yawning is contagious. So too, it seems, are being fat, being sad, and a host of other things that we social creatures tend to pick up from each other. In a study published this week in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, scientists picked out one more trait that could be contagious among connected people: making bad business decisions." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

"If your God was going to drop down from the heavens for a stroll around your town, what form do you think he or she would choose? A turtle, perhaps? According to Reuters: Hundreds of poor Hindu villagers in eastern India have refused to hand over a rare turtle to authorities, saying it is an incarnation of God, officials said on Tuesday. Villagers chanting hymns and carrying garlands, bowls of rice and fruits are pouring in from remote villages to a temple in Kendrapara, a coastal district in eastern Orissa state." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

For a god to be worthy of my worship he would have to know more tricks than just longevity :) - Eivind

"It is one of the finest and most stirring pieces of oratory in history. And its inspiring rhetoric came to symbolise the indomitable British spirit. But Winston Churchill's famous speech on the eve of the Battle of Britain would fail as a school essay under a new computerised marking system, it has been revealed. His speech, known as 'Their Finest Hour' and made to the House of Commons in June 1940, was marked down due to repetition and the misuse of certain words. As a result, Churchill was marked as below average in the equivalent of an A Level exam. The bizarre results were revealed at an education forum yesterday , where the role of e-assessment was under discussion." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

"A passage from Hemingway's The End of Something was marked down as lacking 'care and detail' and he was also rated below average. And a particularly dramatic excerpt from William Golding's classic Lord of the Flies was described as 'erratic' by the computer programme. Both scored low marks because the marking computer did not understand the tone and emotion. The opening passage of... more... - Eivind

"Thank you for not provoking my uncontrollable lust" - Eivind from Bookmarklet

"At a dance marathon, 1930 As the Great Depression descended, dance marathons were all the rage in America during the early 1930's. Ann Lawanink holds her partner, Jack Rirof as he sleeps during a dance marathon at the Merry Gaedon Ballroom in Chicago, May 29, 1930. There are eight couples and one single left on the floor after 1,145 hours of the marathon. We don't know who won." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

"A 4,500-year-old circular city has been found on the banks of the Euphrates. Archaeologists need to work quickly though, because the area is set to be flooded due to a dam project. The other is some 200 kilometres from these ruins, and it was thought that the circular plan was something out of the ordinary. The results of the expedition, defined as a historic find, will soon be presented in Madrid. According to Montero, the concepts that we take for granted in the history books could be rewritten. It is not Pompeii, but according to the archaeologist, it is comparable proportionately. The objective of the expedition is to determine what the concept of border was from the IV millennium to the Byzantine period. The city could represent the passage from the rural cycle to the urban cycle, in other words the first cities in history and show the border of the Mari kingdom, the ancient rivals of Babylonia. The Galician archaeologists will continue to work in the area next year. The... more... - Eivind from Bookmarklet

"We’ve been having a lot of fun this week talking about Tom Bethell’s anti-Einstein views and how they may or may not relate to modern American conservatism. And inevitably, the dialogue has also dredged up a lot of context about all the other areas in which Bethell challenges a firmly accepted scholarly or scientific body of knowledge–including one I hadn’t even recognized yet. But first, let’s review: Bethell questions the link between HIV and AIDS. He is also, as I have noted, a climate change “skeptic” and an evolution denier. And then there is the whole Einstein business." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

"But even I didn’t know that he was also an “Oxfordian”–e.g., adherent to the theory that William Shakespeare was really the Earl of Oxford, and not from Stratford-on-Avon (the mainstream “Stratfordian” view). The Oxfordian “theory” is most emphatically not the view held by the vast bulk of Shakepeare scholars…but hey, if you’re willing to throw out Einstein and Darwin in favor of some dubious contrarian view, why not go for the trifecta!" - Eivind

"The deepest living fish ever spotted in the southern hemisphere have been caught on camera. The bizarre-looking pink creatures were photographed at a depth of 7,560m (24,800ft), swimming in the Kermadec Trench off the coast of New Zealand. An international team has been studying this area using a submersible, built to withstand immense pressures. Last year, the same team recorded another fish at 7,700m (25,300ft) - the deepest ever filmed. These were found in the Japan Trench, which is in the Pacific, north of the equator. Both expeditions form part of the Hadeep project, which aims to expand our knowledge of life in the oceanic trenches, the deepest parts of the ocean floor." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

"In 1888 an Egyptian farmer digging in the sand near the village of Istabl Antar uncovered a mass grave. The bodies weren't human. They were feline—ancient cats that had been mummified and buried in pits in staggering numbers. "Not one or two here and there," reported the English Illustrated Magazine, "but dozens, hundreds, hundreds of thousands, a layer of them, a stratum thicker than most coal seams, ten to twenty cats deep." Some of the linen-wrapped cats still looked presentable, and a few even had gilded faces. Village children peddled the best specimens to tourists for change; the rest were sold in bulk as fertilizer. One ship hauled about 180,000, weighing some 38,000 pounds, to Liverpool to be spread on the fields of England." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

"If you ever find yourself in the forests of Ecuador, you may have the good fortune of spotting a club-winged manakin. The closest the rest of us will probably ever get will be to watch this video. But don’t just watch it. Listen. If you said to yourself, “Hold on, is that bird singing with its wings?” the answer is yes. As I wrote in this 2005 article in the New York Times, ornithologists have long known that a few species of manakins can make sounds with their wings. The sounds are produced by the males, as part of their courtship displays. Some make firecracker pops, and some make whooshing sounds. Darwin pointed to the sounds of manakin wings as evidence of just how much sexual selection could transform male animals as females were attracted to some mates over others." - Eivind

"Regular readers will know that I'm not exactly a fan of the idea - discussed here and there in the technical (Russell & Séguin 1982, Russell 1987), popular (Hecht 2007, Socha 2008, Naish 2008) and speculative literature (McLoughlin 1984, Magee 1993) - that non-avian theropod dinosaurs might have evolved into humanoids had they not bought the farm 65 million years ago [image below by Matt Collins].The hypothetical (emphasis: hypothetical) evolution of big brains, intelligence and so on among imaginary post-Cretaceous deinonychosaurs is not (in my opinion) all that unreasonable, and I base this assertion on what birds have been doing over the past 65 million years. Look at parrots and corvids. Parrots overlap with primates in brain : body size ratio, intelligence and abilities, and evidence suggests that they (and corvids) have sophisticated emotions that aren't much different from ours (or from those of other primates; humans are not magic animals different from all the others, but part of a spectrum). You probably heard the recent reports about funeral rites in magpies." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

"According to legend, when Genghis Khan died in 1227 in what is now northern China, his lieutenants wanted to keep the death a secret from the Mongols’ enemies. So as the party accompanying his body made its way back to Mongolia, they killed every person they saw on the way - more than 20,000 - so news of the death wouldn’t spread. Then, when they buried Genghis, they either redirected a river to cover the site, or set horses to trample the ground so no trace would be seen, or killed all the people who buried him, and then killed those killers." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

ewwww - Janice

"If you'd like, you can skip past all the political snark to the 4:47 mark to watch Jon bring cognitive psychology into prime time (or at least latenight cable)! That's right; you saw it: Jon Stewart mentioned the psychological concept of "object permanence" on national TV. Object permanence was introduced by Jean Piaget as a way of measuring the growing cognitive ability of children. Three-month-olds don't have it; most 6-month-olds do. More recently, researchers have investigated similar milestones in animals. Parrots, it turns out, have object permanence, as do chimpanzees. Insects don't." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

"Semper Fi is a phrase well known to those that are familiar with the Marine Corps motto, but this shortened form of the Latin for “Always Faithful” has roots that stretch far back. Still, everything is history, and today we will be exploring the rich history of this very familiar phrase. While Semper Fi (short for Semper Fidelis) is most famous as the motto of the United States Marine Corps, the Marines are actually late-comers when it comes to using this phrase. Semper Fidelis has actually been used by families as either a motto or on their coat of arms, as the motto for cities such as Exeter and White Plains, and for other military organizations like The Republic of China Marine Corps and the Canadian Forces Base Valcartier (yes the Canadians do ACTUALLY have a military force) to name a few. So what was the first use of this phrase? Believe it or not the first use actually came from one of the 14 Tribes of Galway, the Lynch family. The Tribes of Galway dominated nearly all of... more... - Eivind from Bookmarklet

"Without a doubt, Philip Henry Gosse's Omphalos is one of the strangest books I have ever read. Published in 1857, two years before Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species would cause the public and academics alike to take evolution more seriously, Gosse's book was an attempt to rescue Creation itself from the perceived threat of science denuded of Christian authority. Gosse fervently believed that God's word and works were in accord, but if there was any conflict between the two it was because naturalists had been looking at the world in the wrong way. Gosse attempted to mend the increasing tear between a literal reading of Genesis and the facts of geology in a very peculiar way. If you found the skeleton of an extinct animal, Gosse proposed, you would naturally assume that the bones must have given form to an animal that lived at some distant period. But what if you were mistaken? What if, instead, the bones had been created already in place in the ground and had never been clothed in flesh and blood?" - Eivind from Bookmarklet

"For Gosse fossils were just components of the earth that implied history without actually possessing it. God, in other words, had created the world " already in progress." The first plants and animals were all adults, ready to reproduce "after their kind" and bearing the marks of age that they would be expected to bear. This rule applied to the first humans, too; Adam and Eve had been... more... - Eivind

"Known to most Chinese as Ghost City, Fengdu is an ancient necropolis perched on the banks of the Yangze River. For centuries the city's ghostly reputation drew the pious and curious to its hillside shrines and temples. More recently, Fengdu was a common stop for Yangze River cruise boats on their way downstream from Chongqing." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

*puts on 'to visit' list* - Friday Lo is Friday!

"While today we're pretty darned certain there is no intelligent life on Mars, in the early 20th century, it was still an open question. So-- about four decades before the publically known Project Ozma search-- the Navy stepped up to find out. Well before SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), Project Ozma, Area 51, or even the 1938 radio hoax 'War of the Worlds', the Navy was looking for Martians. The DC Examiner reports that the Navy,Chief of Naval Operations Edward W. Eberle requested, via telegraph, a 3-day listening period to seek out Martians." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

Thanks. Some great ones from this time and even before :) - Véronique Rabuteau