deep

The Lost City:

In 2000 a remarkable discovery occurred. Cruising over a large mountain west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge scientists using underwater cameras sighted strange 90 to 200 foot white towers. This was the discovery of a completely new kind of underwater hot spring environment unlike any seen before. We now call these springs the Lost City Hydrothermal Field (LCHF). This expedition will explore LCHF 24-hours a day for 10 days using IFE's Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV's) Argus and Hercules and immediately transmitting that data to scientists on-shore.

Carbage

More cars I really respect and enjoy.

Hummers suck

F**k You And Your H2.

now that's one very bad kitty cat

yeah, right

The HurriCraft.

at least our drinks will be cold

Ice found on Mars.

chris jordan photography

Intolerable Beauty — Portraits of American Mass Consumption

(these are cell phones)

groundbreaking scientific report

Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass

Abstract: The exponential dependence of resistivity on temperature in germanium is found to be a great big lie. My careful theoretical modeling and painstaking experimentation reveal 1) that my equipment is crap, as are all the available texts on the subject and 2) that this whole exercise was a complete waste of my time.

good lord

This is the largest digging machine in the world.

why you be up in mah grill?

I gots ta get me some of dese hoopty spinnaz fo' my bicycle.
(thanks, jim)

I agree

Hillary vs. the Xbox: Game over.
This fellow has had enough of Hillary's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas witchhunt, and I'm inclined to think he's right.

Kids have always played games. A hundred years ago they were playing stickball and kick the can; now they're playing "World of Warcraft," "Halo 2" and "Madden 2005." And parents have to drag their kids away from the games to get them to do their algebra homework, but parents have been dragging kids away from whatever the kids were into since the dawn of civilization.

Spiral 115-story skyscraper designed as tallest building

Fordham Spire would twist into the sky over Chicago’s lakefront like an oversize birthday candle, surpassing Sears Tower and the planned Freedom Tower in New York as the nation’s tallest building.

and that's why grandpa ended up in jail

survival of the cruelest

This is an incredible video of a few hornets wiping out an entire hive of bees.

if I was a train, I'd be late, again

Pardon me, but I just found out that It was Shel Silverstein that wrote Boy Named Sue. Suddenly it all makes sense.

In the Pleistocene era, this was TV

Ancient phallus unearthed in cave.

quote of the day

"The biggest downside to a war in Iraq is what you could do with that money. What does a war in Iraq cost a week? A billion? Maybe a billion a day? The budget for the National Cancer Institute is four billion. That has to change.

Polls say people are much more afraid of cancer than of a plane flying into their house or a bomb or any other form of terrorism. It is a priority for the American public."

- Lance Armstrong, speaking after his victory yesterday in the Tour de France

chopper desktops

This guy takes computer design VERY seriously.

Make this your home page

Google Advanced is a collection of all Google's search features on one page. Quite handy.

36111

Very, very well done zipcode map page.

nice coding

Great interactive way to search flickr photos.

quote of the day

"One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our fathers used in the great struggle for independence."

--Charles A. Beard

wayback

The history of the internet.

funny, I think

If World War Two had been an online Real Time Strategy game, the chat room traffic would have gone something like this.

wow

this should cut my shower time in half

This is a pretty cool video showing a liquid very much like water that is being used to put out fires, yet doesn't get anything wet.

quote of the day

"The rifle, effective as it is, cannot replace the effect produced by the speed of the horse, the magnetism of the charge, and the terror of COLD STEEL."

British Cavalry Manual, 1907

this scene from The Family Guy gets it right

active denial

Scientists worry about Pentagon's new ray gun. The "Active Denial System" involves a microwave beam that causes heating and intolerable pain, which the military hopes to use on rioting crowds.

search the lunar landing sites

In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, here is Google Moon. There's a surprise if you zoom in close.

figures

Einstein's take on telepathy experiments, which reported that psi-forces did not decline with distance, unlike the four known forces of nature.

"This suggests to me a very strong indication that a non-recognised source of systematic errors may have been involved."

the man, the hour.

Here's the skinny.

is that laughter with Bush or at him?

From yesterday's press conference with the Indian Prime Minister:

Q: Mr. President, you said you don't want to talk about an ongoing investigation, so I'd like to ask you, regardless of whether a crime was committed, do you still intend to fire anyone found to be involved in the CIA leak case? And are you displeased that Karl Rove told a reporter that Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife worked for the Agency on WMD issues?

PRESIDENT BUSH: We have a serious ongoing investigation here. (Laughter.)

link

you know it's good when..

I've been listening to a fair bit of Fela Kuti lately, after stumbling across his album Up Side Down/Music of Many Colours a month ago. I had forgotten that I saw his son, Femi Kuti, open up for the String Cheese Incident back in 2001, who rocked. Fela rocked as well, pioneering the "afrobeat" sound of the 1970s with an ethnic James Brown groove that still sounds fresh today. I just ran across this delightfully odd review: "This is a fierce collection of afrobeat jams, highlighted by the almost 15 minute long title track, focused on the dancefloor with politically incisive commentary."

We should all spend more of our lives focused on the dancefloor with politically incisive commentary.

too bad I don't wear one

This is an amazing watch.

Adam and Ticla have a shortie!

Please welcome Zoe Wilson into the world, folks. Zoe arrived at 1:56 a.m., Friday, July 15. She weighed in at a healthy 8 lbs, 2 oz, and was 20.5 inches long. Congratulations Adam and Ticla!

(Adam, do you realize that you're a dad? Whoaaaa.)

the architecture of ice

These are pictures of snow crystals scanned under an electron micrsope at magnification levels varying from 100x to over 400x.

lil feller

Two interesting pics and story about an albino white-tailed deer.

old weather

Top ten storms of the century:
1. 1935 Labor Day Hurricane
2. 1974 Tornado Super Outbreak
3. 1993 Superstorm
4. 1900 Galveston Hurricane
5. 1938 'Great New England' Hurricane
6. Hurricane Camille
7. 1925 'Tri-State' Tornado
8. 'Great Appalachian' Storm
9. 'Ash Wednesday' Storm
10. Hurricanes Agnes and Andrew

nice

Hilton opens the world’s first all-glass undersea restaurant.

"Ithaa" will sit five meters below the waves of the Indian Ocean, surrounded by a coral reef and encased in clear acrylic offering diners 270-degrees of panoramic underwater views.

news flash

I can't reveal my source, but the next Supreme Court Justice might possibly be: Paula Abdul.

wilderness

In celebration of the fact that I can, I'm heading to the Smokies tomorrow for a couple of days with Eartha and Zack. I'm meeting them at around midnight at Big Creek campground, which is tucked back in the hills off highway 40 near Asheville, so if any Asheville folks read this please do not hesitate to call and join. It will probably rain, but rain puts hair on your chest. Unless you're female. Nevermind.

Because they don't allow dogs in the Smokies, I post this photo for Scout, who will be missing out on all the fun.

Dual View LCD Display

I can't imagine this catching on.

"Sharp will begin mass production of the display, billed as the world’s first dual-view LCD, by the end of the month, with the product hitting the shelves later this year. This LCD if used in a TV would allow viewers sitting to the right and left of a screen to watch different channels by simultaneously displaying different images into the right and left sides of the screen through a backlight."

that appears to be a large kangaroo

Planarity

Arrange the vertices such that no edges overlap.

levers

This game is clever.

why thanks

The University of Pennsylvania offers over 20,000 free downloadable books at The Online Books Page.

GUI history

Screenshots of Windows 1.0 to XP

good NYT article

A Church-State Solution.

McSweeney's

Five People Just as Doctrinaire and Tiresome as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Speculate on How He Got That Way.

guys, dolls... wait

There's something very, very strange about all of these models.

self-effacing

The folks at Turn Your Head will take your profile and cut it into one of these shapes. No unicorns allowed.

Two gigs and a hardrive to go, please

Well, call me a geek (you're a geek!), but I love me some USB drive action. This little feller is one of the handiest things I've used in years, other than, well, the computer itself. Which is funny because the USB drive may soon replace the traditional computer. What am I talking about? I'm talking about lightweight programs that fit on your USB drive and can be taken with you from computer to computer. Right now I've got 22 separate programs on my USB drive, which combined offer all the functions I'll ever use: image editor, email client, browser, word processor, antivirus, you name it. And together they only take up 20MB of space. Now I realize that this is virtually useless for people who only use one computer, but if you use another at work or on the road, there you go. Save space on your hard drive and run the programs off of your USB drive. It is not hard to imagine this sort of trend affecting the CPU market, either. One day you may be able to buy just a monitor, plug your USB drive into it and have access to any program you want, no bulky and expensive hard drive needed. If you're interested, go here and here for a multitude of sites that host free lightweight programs you can use.

Dennis the Menace, redux

This is a webcam located at Pensacola Beach, where hurricane Dennis is expected to land in about two hours. In this photo, taken around noon, you can already see the flooding. This is about a mile away from my aunt's house on the beach, which luckily survived hurricane Ivan. Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers.

(click to enlarge)

i see

The human retina adapts to seek the unexpected, ignore the commonplace.

Researchers at Harvard University have found evidence that the retina actively seeks novel features in the visual environment, dynamically adjusting its processing in order to seek the unusual while ignoring the commonplace. The scientists report in this week's issue of the journal Nature on their finding that this principle of novelty-detection operates in many visual environments.

"Apparently our thirst for novelty begins in the eye itself," says Markus Meister, the Jeff C. Tarr Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Our eyes report the visual world to the brain, but not very faithfully. Instead, the retina creates a cartoonist's sketch of the visual scene, highlighting key features while suppressing the less interesting regions."

excellent

Free advice from a lawyer on how to avoid identity theft.

um

The all-new Sesame Street.

makes sense

Baseball rejected as Olympic sport in 2012 Olympics. None of the best players, i.e., the American professional players, can play, so it gets the boot. I think it's also a good decision because baseball is more of a profit-fueled franchise these days anyway.

3d

Great panoramic photo of the flowering of Titan Arum, the largest flower in the world, at Sydney Botanic Gardens.

Also check out this guy's panorama blog.

yes

Finally, someone tells the truth about file sharing and piracy.

got shoes?

This is a good idea, though they need to work on the designs a bit more.

um..

i think 'mocking' is the operative word

Birds now mocking cellphone rings.

fat man walking

This guy is walking from San Diego to New York City in oder to lose weight. Hope he makes it.

"If I had a drug or alcohol addiction I would go to rehab. Well, what I have in mind is rehab for the fat guy. "

Dennis the Menace

Oh great.

i am the lord of the house. you shall all worship me.

Buddhism's answer to Jack Chick

must have one of these

Introducing the iPod Flea.

i don't remember this from Property class..

A New Orleans lawyer sought an FHA loan for a client. He was told that the loan would be granted if he could prove satisfactory title to a parcel that was being offered as collateral. The title to the property dated back to 1803, which took the lawyer three months to track down. After sending the information to the FHA he received the following reply:

"Upon review of your letter adjoining your client’s loan application, we note that the request is supported by an Abstract of Title. While we compliment the able manner in which you have prepared and presented the application, we must point out that you have only cleared title to the proposed collateral property back to 1803. Before final approval can be accorded, it will be necessary to clear the title back to its origin..."

Annoyed, the lawyer responded as follows:

"Your letter regarding title in Case No. 189156 has been received. I note that you wish to have the title extended further than the 194 years covered by the present application.
I was unaware that any educated person in this country, particularly those working in the property area, would not know that Louisiana was purchased by the United States from France in 1803, the origin identified in our application.
For the education of uninformed FHA bureaucrats, the title to the land prior to U S ownership was obtained from France, which had acquired it by Right of Conquest from Spain.
The land came into the possession of Spain by Right of Discovery made in the year 1492 by a sea captain named Christopher Columbus, who had been granted the privilege of seeking a new route to India by the Spanish monarch, Isabella.
The good queen, Isabella, being a pious woman and almost as careful about titles as the FHA, took the precaution of securing the blessing of the Pope before she sold her jewels to finance Columbus’ expedition.
Now the Pope, as I am sure you may know, is the Emissary of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and God, it is commonly accepted, created this world.
Therefore, I believe it is safe to presume that God also made that part of the world called Louisiana.
God, therefore, would be the owner of origin and His origins date back to before the beginning of time, the world as we know it and even the FHA.
I hope you find God’s claim to be satisfactory.
Now, may we have our damn loan?"

The loan was approved.

(thanks, mom)

Please pray

excellent

"gmap pedometer is a great little hack that uses Google's mapping application to help record distances traveled during a running or walking workout."

right on

A Letter To The Terrorists, From London

People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid

"Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. From the invisible strands of fungi waiting to sprout between our toes, to the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts, we are best viewed as walking 'superorganisms,' highly complex conglomerations of human cells, bacteria, fungi and viruses."

Archeologists discover another Stonehenge in Russia

It is estimated that the construction is 4 thousand years old.

really simple syndication

Here's a rather comprehensive list of RSS news aggregators.

know any of these folks?

Collection of old mugshots on Flickr.

grokster who?

Rodi is a small-client P2P application, written in Java, that improves on BitTorrent by allowing both content searches and full anonymity. It's released under the General Public License (GNU).

Even your IP address can be hidden using Rodi through a process called 'bouncing.' That is, if A wants a file from B, they get C to agree to stand-in on the exchange. B gets C's IP address, not A's. Through IP Spoofing A can even hide their identity from C.

Rodi can also be used from behind corporate firewalls.

start bidding now

You have one day to buy this.

music

Pink Floyd, 1967-1995. And all that that entails.

change is good

In order to keep this site at the highest aesthetic and functional levels for the millions of enthralled readers, I've implemented changeable style sheets so things are easier on the eyes. Just choose the 'white' page style and it should change. If you like the old style better, choose 'default.' Your computer will remember which one you chose, so when you come back it should be in the style you like. Enjoy.

Now we can start making gold from lead

Lost Newton manuscript rediscovered at Royal Society.

Hypotheses anyone?

Science journal ranks the top 25 unanswered science questions. Some highlights:
What Is the Universe Made Of?
What Is the Biological Basis of Consciousness?
How Long Can Human Life Span Be Extended?
How Does Earth's Interior Work?
Are We Alone In the Universe?
How and Where Did Life on Earth Arise?
Is an Effective HIV Vaccine Feasible?
How Hot Will the Greenhouse World Be?
What Can Replace Cheap Oil? When?

(I'm sure the Creationists have all the answers to these)

quote of the day

"Hunger is the best sauce in the world."

no, it's not photoshop

After browsing around the site posted below, I found this most, most, amazing shot. Click to enlarge.

so cool it must be photoshop

Spectacular Mammatus Clouds over Hastings, Nebraska

unnormal

I thought this was weird, but then I saw this. Then I saw them both.

excellent

House votes to undercut Supreme Court on property

The House voted yesterday to use the spending power of Congress to undermine a Supreme Court ruling allowing local governments to force the sale of private property for economic development purposes. Key members of the House and Senate vowed to take even broader steps soon.

Last week's 5 to 4 decision has drawn a swift and visceral backlash from an unusual coalition of conservatives concerned about property rights and liberals worried about the effect on poor people, whose property is often vulnerable to condemnation because it does not generate a lot of revenue.

not so supreme

Interesting interview with author Mark Tushnet on the topic of why the Supreme Court matters less than you think. This guy spoke at my school this year and had a lot of interesting things to say about Rehnquist, some of which he repeats here.

"The Court is a factor in where society’s going, but it generally reflects our ambivalence more than it directs us."

exactly

no thanks

This puzzle would take me hours to figure out.

windows as web

This is some impressive use of CSS.

stranger than fiction

Phillip Warnell posted the images taken from a miniature camera as it traveled through his body. The image time line represents Phillips 9 meter long GI Tract.

nice

Great photos of sparklers! And if you plan on taking photos of any fireworks this weekend with your digital camera, you may want to check out these tips.

Mary Pat, don't attach any importance to this post (well, maybe a little)

Don't ask how I got here, but this page on chastity belts is rather alarming.

figures

Apparently California has been thought of as a separate country since long ago. 1622 to be exact.

you're welcome

Here's your own personal PDF Library.

were they noodling?

Thai fishermen catch 646-pound catfish.

Packing up the Lute

I ease you down, your strings set loose
    A tone or three, all twinkle gone,
Into this snug case shaped like a goose
    Or casket for some crook-necked swan,

Your body wrapped in satin cloth,
    Head nestled between blocks of foam,
Lid latched against woodworm and moth
    Then stacked in our attic catacomb

While I, who used to warm and tease you
    Thumbing your belly's deepest cords,
Keep wondering couldn't we deepfreeze you
    Or lift you on some rocket towards

The icy waste space beyond Mars
    Unfingered by earth's atmosphere
To shine out with the clearcut stars
    In some show-stopper of the spheres.

Just keep cool, love; no fault of yours
    Consigns us to this long exile;
Medical science may yet find cures
    For age and carpal tunnel. Meanwhile,

There's not too much left up this sleeve.
    I growl like Melchior, lingering
On stage to ask: 'When's the next swan leave?'
    And what's left now I could still sing?

Go lie with lovenotes and snapshots. You
    Were just too fine a vice to last.
Condemned to virtue, we thumb through
    The evidence of our misspent past.

W. D. Snodgrass