a natural object from space
A 14 year old German boy was hit in the hand by a pea-sized meteorite.
“When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself into the road,” Gerrit Blank said in a newspaper account. Astronomers have analyzed the object and conclude it was indeed a natural object from space.
ART & COPY
Art & Copy is directed by Doug Pray
Dietrich Wegner, Cumulous Brand, Sabine & Sebastian
(via marginal revolution)
know thyself
Wilhelm Hofmann and colleagues in the European Journal of Personality show that a person’s ability to accurately see himself, even when presented with video evidence, is surprisingly limited.
What was going on? Why can’t we use a video of ourselves to improve the accuracy of our self-perception? One answer could lie in cognitive dissonance – the need for us to hold consistent beliefs about ourselves. People may well be extremely reluctant to revise their self-perceptions, even in the face of powerful objective evidence. A detail in the final experiment supports this idea. Participants seemed able to use the videos to inform their ratings of their “state” anxiety (their anxiety “in the moment”) even while leaving their scores for their “trait” anxiety unchanged.
(via marginal revolution)
Meat(wad) Dress
I contemplated many ideas, including beef jerky, ham, ground beef, prosciutto… but they were all too expensive, thick, and/or runny. I chose salami because it’s thin, keeps in one piece, and is quite cheap, and bacon because it looks very, um, meaty.
Diamonds on my fingers and my toes because I’m a Taurus.
(via marginal revolution)
Such tragedy could have been easily avoided
The objective is to emphasize the high contraceptive effectiveness of the products by indicating the painful consequences of having sex without a condom. More than 100,000 people have used the condoms and the sales increased by 21%.
by HanTang Communications Group for Quzhou Seezo Trading
imageless caption
Many of the women were followed closely by enthusiastic musicians.
from the comments
Did I ever tell y’all about the time around 12 years ago when we were offering computer basics classes to doctors? And the octogenenarian female doctor called me over because something was wrong with her computer, and it turned out that she had been resting her hand on the mouse and opened about 25 windows of the same thing–a little film of Smurfs having oral sex (saved to the desktop by a dental student, no doubt). That was a fun day at work.
Those people
out on Highway 20 just before the turn as you’re heading west into town had best keep an eye on their cocks.
Scratching and pecking out on the shoulder and kicking up gravel! On a 55 mph truck route!
Dear Clusterflock
Turns out the pussy shaver just joined Twitter*. Should I pull a prank on him? If so, how?
* Thanks to Flickr Stats, I discovered a web site linking to one of my photos. This web site led me to the aforementioned Twitter page.
Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue
I wonder why this never got the cult status of Reefer Madness?
Slate has some interesting commentary on why it’s the worst anti-drug film ever made.
element 112
Element 112 is officially recognized and the discoverers are looking for a name:
Now the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, which decides on such important things as names and symbols, has officially recognised the discovery and has sent Sigurd Hofmann, the lead researcher of the team that made number 112, a formal letter asking him to think up a name for his new element.
In time-honoured and thorough fashion, sombre chemists will consider and vet the name before finally bestowing it officially upon element 112 in about six months. Hofmann has to submit a name within weeks.
(thanks, Autumn)
Dear Cindy
Can I learn to be a Mexican, too?
some thoughts on the politics of terror
Imagine if James Von Brunn, Scott Roeder, Poplawski, and Adkisson were all Muslims.
a flabbergasted Smith
Thanks to the magic of the mysterious internet, a Missouri family’s Christmas photo ended up on display in a grocery store in Prague.
About 10 days ago, one of Smith’s college friends was driving through Prague when he spotted their huge smiling faces in the window of a store specializing in European food. He snapped a few pictures and sent them to a flabbergasted Smith.
“It’s a life-size picture in a grocery store window in Prague — my Christmas card photo!” said Smith, 36, who lives in the St. Louis suburb of O’Fallon.
On a related note…. Aaron, will you send me pictures of your Christmas card photos? And your driver’s license?
Cindy, should driver’s license be possessive?
the case of the million dollar mattress
An Israeli woman says she has mistakenly thrown out a mattress in which — she? her mother? — had hidden a million dollars.
The Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot published a picture of the woman searching through garbage at a dump in southern Israel. The picture shows the woman, dressed in a white top and black pants with her back to the camera, picking through a huge pile of trash that fills the frame about 10 feet (3 meters) in all directions.
you’ve been warned!
The Earth may smash into Venus or Mars in 3.5 billion years.
The good news is that the likelihood of such a smash-up is small, around one-in-2500.
And even if the planets did careen into one another, it would not happen before another 3.5 billion years.
Indeed, there is a 99 percent chance that the Sun’s posse of planets will continue to circle in an orderly pattern throughout the expected life span of our life-giving star, another five billion years, the study found.
After that, the Sun will likely expand into a red giant, engulfing Earth and its other inner planets — Mercury, Venus and Mars — in the process.
No word on Uranus.
White Supremacist: Holocaust Museum Shooting Makes Us Look Bad
The responsible white separatist community condemns this. It makes us look bad.
- John de Nugent, a white supremacist friend of James Von Dunn, speaking about the shooting at the Holocaust Museum.
Yeah, we wouldn’t want to misrepresent you white supremacists.
via here.
Mia on Storms
We are having stormy weather in the Dallas area. Last night we had high winds, and several tornadoes were sighted.
Just before the storms hit, Mia was sitting with our next-door neighbors on their front porch, as she often does. They are lovely people, and Mia adores them. Our neighbor, Susan, asked Mia what she should do if she heard a tornado siren. She emailed me with Mia’s response:
“We usually go in our bathroom. But you have a lot of windows, soooooo, you’re probably not going to make it.”
Striking
University of the People
We have decided to waive all fees for our applicants at this stage and reserve the right to change our policy for the Spring 2010 semester. The University of the People is a tuition-free, non-profit institution. The University does not charge students to take classes. Readings and other study materials will be available online free of charge.
They charge an application fee of $15-50 and a examination processing fee of $10-$100 depending on the student’s country of residence.
The Bristol Stomp | The Dovells
And they do it right.
Combustible
Here and there. One of Phil Bebbington’s photographs.
Burned. Burning. Burned. Smoldering.
Ignition.
The New Sincerity
Which, I mean, really isn’t a new idea, but I wrote an article about some films seem to be reaching for the new sincerity.
However, let us not confuse sincerity with sentimentality. Sentimentality and nostalgia threaten to overwhelm with false affectation for memories we’ve never had, places we’ve never experienced, a constant and deluded longing for things we cannot have. Sincerity, and in particular, new sincerity, instead choose to cherish what really is and provide a way to appreciate and love the things around us.
Nox et amor | Response to Renner
I dig Renner’s picture. It set me to thinking.
