Ugly?!

Live Science has a contest to vote for the ugliest animal. I don't understand why they consider most of these animals ugly at all, and they somehow seem to have missed Senator Kennedy too. The fruit-bats definitely don't qualify. Now maybe if you were a poor defenseless peach ripening on a branch somewhere I could understand it, but these guys: ugly? They're not ugly, they're Weapon's Grade Cute!

Kitty Porn

The video of Photon & Vespers grooming has been dustbinned due to bandwidth constraints plus malfunction. In the event of need for Grooming Squee, Photon & Vespers will be happy to do live shows (in exchange for Fancy Feast).

Rita

update: From Dr. Jeff Master's blog on the Weather Underground (believe it or not, they're still around!)

The latest runs of two key computer models, the GFS and GFDL, now indicate that the trough of low pressure that was expected to pick up Rita and pull her rapidly northward through Texas will not be strong enough to do so. Instead, these models forecast that Rita will make landfall near Galveston, penetrate inland between 50 and 200 miles, then slowly drift southwestward for nearly two days, as a high pressure ridge will build in to her north. Finally, a second trough is forecast to lift Rita out of Texas on Tuesday. If this scenario develops, not only will the coast receive catastrophic damage from the storm surge, but interior Texas, including the Dallas/Fort Worth area, might see a deluge of 15 - 30 inches of rain. A huge portion of Texas would be a disaster area. We'll have to wait for the next set of model runs due out by tomorrow morning to know better.

Gravity considered harmful.

I have a new hypothesis regarding how gravity works, and why it's befuddling the unified field guys so much. Before I make an absolute jackass out of myself rewriting physics 101, though, does anyone know of a good reference on gravity that's legible by a numerate layman?

UPDATE: Nevermind folks; it appears I've re-invented LeSage Gravity. Although there are problems with this theory of gravity, it's intuitively appealing, especially if you're one of those folks (like me) who don't believe in time.

Ice your phones!

Hi y'all,

Chris said something interesting to me that I thought I'd pass around. Nationally, EMS (Emergency Medical Services) personnel are being trained, when finding an unconscious, demised, or otherwise incapacitated person, to check their cell-phones for emergency contacts by looking for the acronym ICE preceding the contact's name. ICE == In Case of Emergency.

Marking your emergency contact in this manner takes all of 5 seconds, and could make the difference between finding out your spouse died, or getting to say goodbye.

The Bricklayer's Story

After twenty years, I've finally found The Bricklayer's Story. This isn't the original monologue (which's hilarious in its own right, but lame when printed); this's the song version, which I strongly prefer.

Hearings on Judge Roberts: absolutely disgusting

Ugh: these hearings are absolutely disgusting. A bunch of the senators on the Judicial Committee (although mostly Democrats -- I won't speculate here as to why) are trying to maneuver Roberts into revealing whether or not he supports the policy positions of their constituents, and want to judge whether or not he's a member of the supposed "mainstream".

It's irrelevent! Judgements about whether someone's in the mainstream are judgements about policy decisions. It doesn't matter if a Supreme Court nominee thinks that all Catholics should be drowned at birth; it's just not relevent. Judges have same job as basketball refs: not to judge who wins or loses, but to make sure the rules are followed. This means that a correctly operating Supreme Court justice's decisions may result in injustice if the fix for the injustice is unconstitutional. SCOTUS members aren't there to uphold individual instances of justice, they're there to protect our legal system itself. Correcting particular rights & wrongs is the job of the legislature, which is the reason legislatures are accountable to the voters. This job has nothing to do with the Judicial Branch.

monster blanket accomplished

The monster blanket is finished; it's made of 3-ply Misti Alpaca bulky on size 35 needles, and is so soft that it's hard to fold (it doesn't stay square).

And yes, your eyes aren't decieving you -- those are colors. You can call me a dork if you like. :-)

It's roughly Queen-sized, somewhere in the ball-park of 5'x7'

Most importantly, though, it's kitty approved!

New Orleans flood might have been prevented

A right-wing news outlet is reporting, with the usual hyperbolic language associated with Democrats or those who hate them (note the Venn diagram so implied), that the Army Corps of Engineers tried to build floodgates in the '70s that would have protected New Orleans from a cat-5 hurricane, but was prevented from doing so by environmental groups.

If this's true, let's all whip out our Alanis Morissette song books to page 13 and start singing "Isn't it Ironic, don't you think?"

A great tool against rape

A South-African woman has invented a tool to help cut the country's rape problem, barbed endo-condoms. This is outstanding; it'll cut the risk of involuntary pregnancy and HIV infection, plus teach a much-needed lesson to the scum who perpetrate this sort of thing. Now if only they could come up with a safe-to-wear flesh-eating bacterium version. Or an enhanced Ginsu version, or ....