Grunt Work: Scientists Re-Create Neanderthal Speech — Cool anthropology.
Evernote: Software to help you remember everything, forever — Externalizing your mind. Apple's Spotlight + gmail already do a significant amount of this for me. The ability to freely and powerfully search unstructured data has significantly improved some important aspects of my life. (Thanks to my Aunt M.)
The sign of the long now — The art and science of making a 10,000 year "keep out" notice. (Thanks to
danjite.)Video: Water Balloon Exploding at 2,000 Frames per Second — This is pretty darned cool. Story is a brief squib about high speed cameras, not the properties of water, fyi.
Ringing the Stellar Bell — Centauri Dreams on astroseismology and overmetallicity. Worth reading for any of you hard sf or science geek types.
The $100 Genome — If that's not a story title, I don't know what is.
De-debunking the recent NASA asteroid collision story — Maybe they can keep English and metric straight. Rocket scientists...sheesh...
Talking Points Memo with an interesting letter from a conservative reader — One of the underlying arguments is that conservatism is not equivalent to support for the Bush administration, its policies and actions. I find this argument grossly self-serving. Much like moderate Christians silently riding the Evangelical political wave over the past 25 years, moderate conservatives (such as they are) have remained silent on the election fraud in 2000, the wholesale assault on civil liberties post-9/11, the disaster of the Iraq war, the siamese twin disasters of the budget and the deficit. Somehow the last eight years would have been worse with Democrats in charge, I guess. This is another version of the nascent "But Bush isn't a real conservative" meme. Confidential to conservatives in America: Tough shit, guys. You got in on the cult of Bush when the getting was good, you can fucking live with the consequences now. The rest of us are sure as hell stuck with them.
4/17/08
Time in saddle: 19 minutes
Last night's weigh-out: n/a
This morning's weigh-in: 271.4
Currently reading: Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon [ Powell's | Amazon ]
