In short: John Scalzi takes a day trip to the Creationism Museum, and mercilessly mocks the stupidity therein. The photos he took are amazing, and includes what may just possibly be the coolest photo ever:
This just in – feminism wiped out Neanderthals!
Among Neanderthals, hunting big beasts was women’s work as well as men’s, so it’s a safe bet that female hunters got stomped, gored, and worse with appalling frequency. And a high casualty rate among fertile women – the vital “reproductive core” of a tiny population – [...]
Beautiful – Dusty Springfield, via the medium of sign-language
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20Xb9pORFRk]
According to new research presented at the American Public Health Association’s Annual Meeting & Exposition in Washington, D.C., 33 percent of the most popular songs of 2005 portrayed substance use. The study, in which researchers analyzed 279 of the year’s most popular songs according to Billboard magazine, also found that allusions to substance use varied [...]
Writer, poet, journalist, boxer, chauvinist, and beat generation lynch pin, Norman Mailer, died yesterday of renal failure.
Norman Mailer, the combative, controversial and often outspoken novelist who loomed over American letters longer and larger than any writer of his generation, died today in Manhattan. He was 84. (more from the NY Times)
Judith Kleinfeld’s written a wonderfully skeptical overview of the “small world”/seven degrees of separation myth:
The idea that people are connected through just “six degrees of separation,” based on Stanley Milgram’s “small world study,” has become part of the intellectual furniture of educated people. New evidence discovered in the Milgram papers in the Yale archives, [...]
Michelle points me towards a handy list of Latin phrases. Some of these will be very useful -
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
– I have a catapult. Give me all your money, or I will fling an enormous rock at your head.
Happy birthday to the most gorgeous Helvetica!
…designer Mark Simonson explains why Arial is a poor imitation of Helvetica, calling it a “parasite.”
Simonson also includes a guide to spotting the differences between the two typefaces, detailing Arial’s flaws like a judge on Next Top Model. Arial might be guilty of minor ocular transgressions, but [...]
They’re after our children now: Socialization between toddlers and robots at an early childhood education center:
A state-of-the-art social robot was immersed in a classroom of toddlers for >5 months. The quality of the interaction between children and robots improved steadily for 27 sessions, quickly deteriorated for 15 sessions when the robot was reprogrammed [...]
Intelligent Design is not science, and shouldn’t be classified in the evolution section. Go and sign the petition to fix that here.
I noticed that there were a lot of these intelligent design books in the evolution section,” says Shaw, who’s researching the evolution of sloths, anteaters, and armadillos as she works on her [...]
