Megan is reading the first book in the Warrior Series, a fantasy series about clans of cat warriors, and I asked her if, when she finished the first book, she was going to start the second one right away or if she was going to read one of the new Bella Sara horse books she just got.
She said, “I already started one of the Bella Sara books. I’m dual-wielding books.”
[...]
I’m so proud.
Twitter: The Criterion Collection
What if Twitter… came to life?
We asked some of our friends to film their favorite tweets. We didn’t care how they did it. They could read it. They could act it. They could do it with puppets. Whatever they wanted. The only rules were it had to be a tweet written by someone else and it had to contain the entire tweet and nothing but the tweet.
This is what they gave us.
We hope you enjoy it.
(via Moltz)
In the Iain Banks book Transition, where the characters can evidently shift, at will, to alternate realities (I gotta read this book!), one of the main characters, Mrs. Mulverhill, defines one of the forms of government she has encountered.
“Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.”
I find that amusing, mostly because I know some people who claim to be libertarian who fit the description. I also know some who don’t. As with any attempt at group labeling, the bullet points don’t always apply.
…but sometimes they just do.
(via Pharyngula)
About twenty years ago, Voyager 1 looked back toward it’s launching point and took the now famous “Pale Blue Dot” photograph. The arrow points to us. That’s Earth… from about 3.7 billion miles away, which is just a little bit outside our solar system. In the grand scale of the universe, that’s hardly any distance at all. Given that our sun is one of about 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy which is, in turn, one of an estimated 125 billion galaxies in the universe, Voyager 1 was sitting virtually on top of Earth when it took this picture.
We live on an mind-bogglingly tiny speck of dust.
Carl Sagan was much more eloquent than I, of course. His words in 1996 (from Wikipedia)…
Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who [...]
We just purchased some new furniture this past weekend and my favorite piece is now comfortably situated in front of the big TV just inviting me to come watch movies until… well… until I fall asleep, actually.
Here it is, swamping Megan in its giantness.
It’s doubly awesome (no pun intended) because it will easily hold two people (hence the name), so now when Megan and I want to watch My Neighbor Totoro again, we don’t have to fight over who gets the comfy chair.
The only problem is reaching the remote on the side table.
Amazingly enough, there are still people who claim to understand the science behind global warming, yet make the mistake of thinking localized cold temperatures, such as the recent snowstorms in the Eastern United States, are somehow a refutation of global warming. It’s almost as if they don’t understand the meaning of the key word “global.”
Jon Stewart captures it (and mocks it) perfectly in this Daily Show clip.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c |
| Unusually Large Snowstorm | |
Jerry Coyne, of Why Evolution is True, linked to a video today of a pack of orcas hunting together and working cooperatively to get a seal off an ice floe. There’s more info at his article (and the info originally came from the book Here Be Dragons).
I imagine that seal is a bit freaked out.
I played BioShock and was completely enthralled with the entire game… the playability, the graphics, the interface, and most dramatically, the atmosphere. The creepy, art-deco look and echoing underwater sound was so immersive that the already-engaging storyline was transformed into what was, if you’ll pardon the cliché, an experience.
The trailer for BioShock 2 (which I have already pre-ordered) looks like the game will perfectly continue the legacy of it’s predecessor.
I drove to work this morning with my car running mostly on fumes. I think my “miles you can drive before you have to call your wife to come bring gas because you’re stranded like an ass on the side of the highway” were around nine when I stopped to put two gallons of gas into my tank… plenty to get me home to the gas station where I could get a huge discount (and pay only $1.29 per gallon).
After work, I hopped back in my car, expecting my “miles left” estimate to be somewhere around fifty but, to my surprise, it was at nine.
Nine?
Didn’t I add two gallons this morning… about a mile from the office? I started to doubt that the morning’s brief fuel pump stop had actually occurred, but then realized that yes… yes, it had. The fuel gauge needle looked suspiciously higher than it would if the “nine” was justified.
So I started to drive to the gas station near my home (about thirty miles away), secure (somewhat) in the knowledge that I had put enough gas in the car to get me home. To my amusement, the mileage estimator counted down dutifully from nine… to zero… [...]
