Links for 2009-12-16

"By morning, the mass of mewling fluff had become quite suffocating"

"With his boyish good looks and wry delivery, Dave Foley was pegged as the breakout star of beloved Canadian sketch-comedy troupe The Kids In The Hall. He followed the group's eponymous show and its 1996 spin-off movie Brain Candy with a leading role in the beloved comedy NewsRadio, which ran from 1995 to 1999. In 1998, he voiced the lead character in the Pixar hit A Bug's Life. Since then, he's alternated between voiceover work and supporting roles in television (Will & Grace, The New Adventures Of Old Christine, Scrubs, Robson Arms) and films like Monkeybone, Sky High, and Uwe Boll's notorious 2007 comedy Postal. Foley recently appeared in the slice-of-life observational comedy The Strip, which is currently in theaters, and reunited with his Kids In The Hall troupe-mates for the eight-part miniseries Death Comes To Town--Foley was having lunch and drinking Bloody Caesars with fellow Kid Kevin MacDonald during the interview."

"Jeff: Lemmy doesn't wimp out with any of that two-minute crap. TWO guitar solos!

Jason: He's probably having sex with somebody during the guitar solos. There's overdubbed hand claps in here, too!

Jeff: That was the producer, trying to clap Lemmy away from sticking his tongue in a power outlet."

""I do not understand," reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. "A booming voice is saying, 'Let there be light,' but there is already light. It is saying, 'Let the earth bring forth grass,' but I am already standing on grass."

"Everything is here already," the pictograph continues. "We do not need more stars.""

"For some young professors, any evaluative tool called the "Tenurometer" (i.e. tenure-o-meter) is sure to turn some heads.

Which is the point, says Filippo Menczer, associate professor of computer of informatics and computer science at Indiana University and co-creator of the Tenurometer, a cheekily named tool (still in beta phase) designed to measure scholars' impact on their fields by counting how much they have contributed to the literature and how frequently those articles have been cited. "

""To carry one or more shells, this octopus manipulates and arranges the shells so that the concave surfaces are uppermost, then extends its arms around the outside and walks using the arms as rigid limbs," write the researchers.

"We describe this lumbering octopedal gait as 'stilt walking'. This unique and previously un-described form of locomotion is ungainly and clearly less efficient than unencumbered locomotion."

The resulting movement is so bizarre one of the scientists who discovered it almost died laughing."

"[E]very year the flood of imagery takes longer to sort through, and far longer to choose from. And the choices were really tough! This year leans a bit more toward planetary images than usual, but that's not surprising given how many spacecraft we have out there these days.

I don't pick all these images for their sheer beauty; I consider what they mean, what we've learned from them, and their impact as well. But have no doubts that they are all magnificent examples of the intersection of art and science. "