gregladen | August 16, 2008 Elvis In 1977 I drove from Nashville down to Memphis with no particular plans regarding Memphis. It was just a place to stop on the way to Hot Springs, Arkansas. I had the name of a cheap motel and a vague idea of where it was. But I kept getting lost. Every time I came to about where this major street was supposed to be, there was a different street there. What the hell was going on?
About the fifth time I came to the right/wrong location, it dawned on me ... "Elvis Presley Boulevard" must have just recently been named as such ...
That, I realized, could also explain another…
gregladen | August 16, 2008A tiny Texas school district will allow teachers and staff members to carry concealed firearms to protect against school shootings, provided the gun-toting employees follow certain requirements.
The small community of Harrold in north Texas is a 30-minute drive from the Wilbarger County Sheriff's Office, leaving students and teachers without protection, said David Thweatt, superintendent of the Harrold Independent School District. The lone campus of the 110-student district sits near a heavily traveled highway, which could make it a target, he argued.
"When the federal government started…
gregladen | August 15, 2008But I thought I'd throw together a few of the more amazing scenes from earlier olympics.
Hey, did you see the Cuba/US baseball game? Anybody know how Nix is? Anything broken? (Boy, that was rough.... talk about the agony of rolling around on the ground bleeding....)
And now for today's closing ceremonies....
gregladen | August 15, 2008
This sweeping mosaic of Saturn's moon Enceladus provides broad regional context for the ultra-sharp, close-up views NASA's Cassini spacecraft acquired minutes earlier, during its flyby on Aug. 11, 2008. See PIA11114 and PIA11113 for the higher resolution views.
This false-color mosaic combines Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) narrow-angle camera images obtained through ultraviolet, green, and near-infrared camera filters. Areas that are greenish in appearance are believed to represent deposits of coarser grained ice and solid boulders that are too small to be seen at this scale, but which are…
gregladen | August 15, 2008
The leader of a religious group that authorities believe preys on children was released from a Pennsylvania prison Friday but won't be required to register as a sex offender, triggering outrage in the community where he plans to live.
George Feigley, now 68, was convicted in 1975 on charges including statutory rape, indecent assault and corrupting the morals of minors.
Because Feigley's 1975 conviction predated the passage of Megan's Law, he will not be required to register as a sex offender. And, having served his maximum sentence, he was not put on parole upon his release.
Feigley's Neo…
gregladen | August 15, 2008 This color image is a three dimensional (3D) view of a digital elevation map of a sample collected by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander's Atomic Force Microscope (AFM). The image shows four round pits, only 5 microns in depth, that were micromachined into the silicon substrate, which is the background plane shown in red. This image has been processed to reflect the levelness of the substrate.
A Martian particle -- only one micrometer, or one millionth of a meter, across -- is held in the upper left pit. The rounded particle -- shown at the highest magnification ever seen from another world -- is…
gregladen | August 15, 2008The much-anticipated Bigfoot press conference Friday afternoon in Palo Alto, Calif., revealed little more than two men -- introduced by a self-styled Sasquatch seeker -- claiming to possess the 7-foot "body" of a "bipedal creature" on ice in a secret location, awaiting an autopsy. *
Bigfoot finders Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer and bigfoot expert Tom Biscardi conducted this press conference. They indicated that they would not reveal any more information at this time, but would soon assemble a group of scientists.
I just realized my cell phone has been off for much of the afternoon, which…
gregladen | August 15, 2008
Assume for a moment that I've used this DNS exploit to take control of your email account. The most obvious effect is that I can now read your mail. Also, I can read your mail and continue forwarding it to you, so that you never realize there is a problem. I can add attachments to your messages, or infect existing attachments from people you trust with viruses or malware. When your best friend sends a link to you about that funny video on YouTube, well, I can rewrite that link to go anywhere I want.
Yes, folks, the DNS bug is for real and potentially serious. Here's a bit of information on…
gregladen | August 15, 2008
The 2nd Giants' Shoulders
Oekologie # 18
Carnivals of the Vanities
Carnival of Space #67: Planets, Rockets, Books and Olympic Torches
The Carnival of Cinema: Episode 87 - BVP: Bloggers Vs. Predator
Friday Ark #204
gregladen | August 15, 2008This is an exclusive repost of this exclusive post from Gawker regarding yet another "slanty-eyed Chinese" photograph from a Spanish sports team.
Read the story at Gawker. Hattip: Phil.
gregladen | August 14, 2008Especially after seeing this unbelievable display of racism and disrespect:
Spain's Olympic basketball teams have risked upsetting their Chinese hosts by posing for a pre-Games advert making slit-eyed gestures. The advert for a courier company, which is an official sponsor of the Spanish Basketball Federation, occupied a full page in the sports daily Marca, the country's best-selling newspaper.
source
This means that no one can call the Olympics a venue for enhancing relations amongst the people of the world. For, oh let's say two years. None of that talk for two years.
gregladen | August 14, 2008What they said then:
What they say now:
I'm not sure I care. But there you have it.
gregladen | August 14, 2008Stephen Jay Gould and David Pilbeam wrote a paper in 1974 that was shown ten years later to be so totally wrong in its conclusions that it has fallen into an obscurity not usually linked to either Gould or Pilbeam. However, they were actually right in ways that they could not have anticipated. And even if they were not right, this paper still has much to contribute, including the opening words of that publication in Science, which are very much worthy of consideration for many reasons:
It is no longer true that there are more practitioners than pieces. In fact, when I encountered this…
gregladen | August 14, 2008A remarkable find in North Africa is reported in PLoS. Information has just been released on this new archaeological site in a formerly much greener Sahara. This will provide an interesting physical unerpinning for the recent work on a "Genetic Map of Europe" (see this summary by Razib) and a new perspective on the movement of humans in and around North Africa and adjoining areas. Here I am passing on the press release and photos without comment, so that you can have the information right away.
TWO SKULLS. (Dark Skull, left) Radiocarbon dated at 9,500 years old, the skull of this mature…
gregladen | August 14, 2008Finally, Bigfoot has been found.
bigfoot
It is reported that Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, of Georgia, have found a bigfoot body, over seven feet tall. They've put bigfoot into a freezer, snapped a few grainy photographs, and will let the rest of us see it some time in the future.
Bigfoot expert Tom Biscardi has seen the find and assures us that it is genuine.
A limited amount of information will be released at a press conference on Friday.
This bigfoot has ...
... reddish hair and black-grey eyes. [and] flat feet - similar to a human's - and a footprint that spans over 40cm.
Mr…
gregladen | August 14, 2008On June 29th, 2008, University of Central Florida student and student officer Webster Cook was involved in the incident that has since become known as Crackergate. Mr. Cook, while trying to leave the premises of the the school's Catholic Church with the un-swallowed bread that is believed by some Catholics to be Jesus Christ, was physically assaulted and restrained. Later, Cook filed charges against the Deacon of the church who had physically attacked him, and the Church, for hazing (the most relevant available campus regulation), which prohibits the forced consumption of food by a student…
gregladen | August 13, 2008
The Four Stone Hearth #47--Unasked Questions Edition is at a most unlikely place, Almost Diamonds.
Carnival Of The Recipes is at "I've Got a Little Space to Fill"
Get scared at The Boneyard #22 at Laelaps.
The Carnival of Cinema: Episode 86 - Blogger of the Paradise is at Good News Film Reviews
Carnival of the Liberals LXXI - Talking Points Edition is at Submitted to a Candid World
93rd Skeptics Circle is at City of Skeptics
New and Exciting in PLoS ONE is at A Blog Around the Clock
Step right up to the Carnival of Education at Joanne Jacobs
Calls for Submission:
Praxis # 1. Check out…
gregladen | August 13, 2008Webster Cook, the kid to made off with a Holy Eucharist from a Catholic Church (see this and links there-outwards) was acquitted after a seven hour trial, according to an email sent by Webster's friend, Ben. Details are expected to emerge later.
gregladen | August 13, 2008This just in:
A federal judge has ruled the University of California can deny course credit to Christian high school graduates who have been taught with textbooks that reject evolution and declare the Bible infallible, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles ruled Friday that the school's review committees did not discriminate against Christians because of religious viewpoints when it denied credit to those taught with certain religious textbooks, but instead made a legitimate claim that the texts failed to teach critical thinking and omitted…