fun
stoat | May 3, 2008"Next to Al Gore, William Connolley may be the world's most influential person in the global warming debate...". It would be nice; sadly its only the opinion of Lawrence Solomon, who is, errrrm, not very well informed.
LS's attempts to make sense of the innards of wikipedia are quite funny, for an insider - his confusion of KDP with Tabletop, for example. But I suspect thats rather in humour. If you'd like some more, then the list of cabals is good, as is WP:GIANTDICK, which for bonus points seems to be subject to a minor edit war: Replacing Nixon with a nuclear missile is a fine edit…
awild | May 2, 2008
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds is another Aussie band that has made it into my regular rotation. Nick Cave was recently interviewed by Terry Gross, where we learn that his parentage includes a librarian and an English teacher. This may explain the sophistication of his lyrics. In any case, I like it.
awild | April 26, 2008Jo-anne has made a project of reorienting me towards a more Australian temperament. Her tactics are subtle but persistent. If I send her off to the video store, for instance, she comes home with some Aussie movie or another.
The most insidious of her methods includes buying CDs of Australian bands and playing them until they sink into my subconscious. These are hit or miss. I've not become a big You am I fan. But now and again Jo-anne finds something that takes hold. One of my new favorites is Missy Higgins:
clock | April 24, 2008I wish I could have this clock:
See a series of images and the sped-up animation to see how it works.
stoat | April 13, 2008Do you realise that bufapopo doesn't get a single google hit? Its outrageous. Badger would be appalled.
[Seems pretty clear that youre not going to get it, so I'll have to tell you. Read on...]
[Yes, the answer is "bearing an unsympathetic facial aspect in the presence of a police officer"; catch-all crime used by Chief Constable Badger Courage of If... fame. I'm ashamed of you all -W]
clock | April 4, 2008This is the MySpace page of the band named Plos. They sing in German, so I do not understand a word, but somehow I doubt it has much to do with science or Open Access...
What does 'Plos' mean in German anyway?
awild | March 31, 2008via Google Trends. Blue is ants, red is beetles:
Ants win, even in the face of the beetles' 20-fold species advantage.
That seasonal pattern is striking, no?
clock | March 29, 2008From paper airplanes to IBM Typewriters, from cold war calculators to cereal boxes, from condoms to condiments, and many, many more strange collections, all found at the Museum of Online Museums, thanks to Anne-Marie.
clock | March 28, 2008
Of course, after watching them do this for a year, I find this picture (found in a number of places around the internet) particularly funny
awild | March 26, 2008
The famous Cambrian Explosion- a rapid diversification of animal groups about 550 million years ago- assumes a rather diminished significance when mapped to the full Tree of Life.
update: yes, I made the diagram myself, by modifying this.
awild | March 26, 2008This may come as a shock to my regular readers, but I agree with Afarensis that Arthropoda is clearly the best animal phylum.
clock | March 25, 2008While I don't think there is such a thing as Internet Addiction, doing this quick test is fun:
"Your Internet usage is causing significant problems in your life. You should evaluate the impact of the Internet on your life and address the problems directly caused by your Internet usage."