Researchers have developed a cloth that can absorb mercury from broken florescent bulbs. I’ve been wondering about the florescent bulb mercury danger issue recently. The old-fashioned long tube florescents contain mercury also don’t they? I have rarely, if ever, heard anyone worrying about the mercury in those. I remember when someone broke a couple of [...]

Lots of photos of Russian cheerleaders. Some of their costumes are… um… interesting. Lots of bling and apparently fishnet stockings are quite popular in Russia.

A collection of flood photos from the U.S. midwest and Asia, after two artists’ concepts.

Brilliant commentary at Stuff White People like. Found via Harleys, Cars, Girls & Guitars, a very nice blog I came across somewhere recently.

xkcd honors “the greatest commercial in teevee history.” Strange… I always hear “boom de ah da” but apparently most people hear “boom de yada”. Google confirms that I’m in the minority. 24,000 hits for “boom de yada” and only 1260 for “boom de ah da”.

Actually that should be Overlady. I wasn’t expecting to get her until at least next week when I will be seeing the person I got her from anyway but she called me last night and I brought the little one home this morning. She’s very quiet and affectionate. I haven’t made a final decision on [...]

It happens every summer – someone leaves a baby in a hot car and goes shopping. The guilty parents always claim they just forgot about the child but how could you? I really don’t see how. Anyway, it’s no excuse. It’s your responsibility to remember that you have the child with you. And you know… [...]

1968 called! They want their graphic design back! — here I don’t normally go in for swear-blogging, but there are times when only swear-blogging will do. — there Very quickly now the date approaches where the holes in the future meet the present. — here I’m not living in the moment, I’m living in September. [...]

Here’s a 1905 map of Oklahoma, available in super high resolution. Found at Dustbury.

Canadians for Global Warming Creepy illusion (via Bifurcated Rivets) Great t-shirts. Science and “Teach the Controversy”. A collection of innovative designs. The rocking chair is interesting but I’d be afraid I’d rock all the way back. Not my style anyway. The flexible cell phone is a neat idea. I like the aquarium sink. (via Dark [...]

Interview with fantasy and science fiction author Nancy Kress. I’ve never read anything by Kress but after reading the interview I am definitely interested. …very little about my career has been planned. As time went on, my “soft SF” turned to medium-viscosity, then actually hardened. What interests me now about hard SF is that this [...]

Late last week I finished reading Saturn’s Race by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes. It’s an entertaining conspiracy theory with some mystery and even a bit of romance. I noticed that several of the reviewers at Amazon were disappointed because it was nothing like Niven’s other books. That was not off-putting to me at all [...]

One of the coolest things about the Internet is all the delightfully odd things you find. (Of course there’s also a lot of gross, disgusting and sick oddness but we’re not going to talk about that right now.) Youtube is home to all manner of oddness. Among all the copyright violations, political videos, cute kittens [...]

Perfect Moments A few rain pics Ruining a good story Pickles in an alien city (Yeah, and their famous pizza is crap too.) Another clever Daily Proverb

Is everything really this bad? Really? It’s true that all those things are happening – flooding in the Midwest, high gas prices, home foreclosures and so on – but when they throw it all together that way doesn’t it make it seem worse than it actually is? Or is my family just one of a [...]

By now you’ve probably heard that comedian George Carlin has died. I’m not sure what I can add to what many others have already said. To be honest, I often found him both annoying and offensive but he did sometimes make a good point and I liked some of his observations about how we use [...]

Scott linked to this list of “Retro Kids Cereals. First of all, I want to make it perfectly clear that anything that first went on the market after I became an adult is NOT “retro” so this list is just wrong. Second, why didn’t I ever get any Pink Panther Flakes? It’s not fair! I [...]

Murphy’s Law states that, “Nothing is as easy as it looks, everything takes longer than you think and if anything can go wrong it will.” Most people, when they think of Murphy’s Law, only remember the last part but yesterday we managed to prove all three points as well as a related adage, “Every home [...]

This week’s episode of Dirty Jobs was a special titled “Brown Before Green.” It featured clips from earlier jobs related to the environment. I had seen most of it before but what was interesting to me was Mike Rowe’s narration in between clips. It’s tempting to call it an indictment of the whole “green” movement [...]

Dickensian novels should be written … about ghastly tasks like this. Dothecalls Hall, presided over by a brutal taskmaster with a truncheon who forbids any deviation from the despicable drivel in the script. — here One time I caught about 50 baby water frogs and put them in a shoe box. During the night they [...]

The Web that Time Forgot. The World Wide Web was invented in 1934. Well, sort of. In 1934, [Paul] Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He [...]

The true face of childhood And on the same blog, a knitted Cthulhu Food art – some of these are pretty weird Now this is what I would call “an inconvenient truth” Desktopography – I like both of those pictures but especially the first one. The second one almost looks like it could be somewhere [...]

Your cat will not like these. Trust me on this. Just save yourself the pain.

7 wonders of the future – real and conceptual designs. I like the Lilypad. The book I’m reading has something similar to that. (At least it’s a floating city, other than that, probably not all that similar. More about the book some other time.) Very cool idea. I expect that Japan will be the first [...]

Electric hand dryers are better for the environment than paper towels. Really. They did the math. Drying your hands on your pants is even better.