Let's move to rural Siberia or Malawi.

The BBC has aggregated a lot of information about swine flu into a convenient map of the spread of the disease over time. Finally, an excuse to move to Siberia.

Clouds.

A new class of cloud was discovered this week: asperatus clouds (above). In honor of this surprising find I decided to completely take a posting from New Scientist and bring it over here! Check out the nine interesting cloud formations below (original post is here and includes descriptions of how each forms).

Fallstreak hole:
Roll cloud:

Pink UFO (altocumulus lenticularis):


Cap cloud:

Wave cloud:
Virga:

Mammatus:


Kelvin-Helmholtz:

Horseshoe vortex:

Best. Excuse. Ever.

During a town-hall style meeting in Green Bay President Obama wrote a note excusing an attending fourth-grader's absence from school, then walked off the stage to deliver it to her. Kennedy, the fourth-grader, will present her teacher with a note that says, simply, "To Kennedy's teacher: Please excuse Kennedy's absence. She's with me. Barack Obama." If nothing else, Obama is a pretty fucking cool president.

Most underreported story of the week?

I'm on vacation and keeping it short.

Victory?!

Nate Silver confounds me again

A pretty fascinating fivethirtyeight post from yesterday: The Palin Paradox: Women More Likely to Elected in Male-Dominated Districts.

His findings are exactly what it sounds like they are. Even when he isolates Democratic-leaning (and thus more likely to elect a woman at all) districts, "the most male-dominated from among these strongly Democratic districts elected women in 10 out of 15 instances. The 15 most female districts elected just 3 women."

So, "all told, after controlling for the district's partisan affiliation, male-dominated districts were more than twice as likely to elect a Congresswoman as were female-dominated districts."

What he doesn't have, of course, is explanation for this seemingly - counter intuitive phenomenon. But he has some interesting thoughts:

"It's possible, and maybe even somewhat likely, that there is some sort of latent variable affecting both the sex ratios and elections to the Congress that I haven't accounted for .... Perhaps in male-dominated areas, women are more likely to violate traditional sex roles including something like running for political office, which has traditionally been a male-dominated occupation -- the Sarah Palin frontierswoman caricature works well here. It would be interesting to know whether there more women actually running for office in male-dominated areas, or rather, whether they are winning more often when they do run. Or perhaps this is a phenomenon that goes beyond politics, and career growth is retarded for the dominant gender when there is an insufficient number of the opposite one. Or perhaps there is even something more Freudian: a lack of female companionship (or vice versa) triggers a yearning for it that is manifested in the way we vote."

Strangely Badass IV: Mark Malkoff.

Here are the reasons Mark Malkoff is making this list of strangely badass people:

1. Mark is the audience coordinator for The Colbert Report.

2. Mark visited all 171 Manhattan Starbucks in one day:


2. Mark lived in Ikea for one week:


3. Mark started the first-ever Guns 'N Roses tribute band composed entirely of children. The band is known as Little GNR.

4. Lastly, Mark is living for one month (June 2009) on Air Tran jets to get over his fear of flying. On his peak days he will fly twelve flights. He will sleep overnight on the planes after the other passengers have disembarked.


Mark at one point in one of the videos I have seen also claims to have started the Naked Cowboy in Times Square. I can't verify this and it seems a dubious claim.

Reshaping Earth.

Using images from NASA's Earth Observatory, Wired has created time-lapse views of regions of the world undergoing significant changes.

The disappearance of the Amazon rainforest:


The draining of the Aral Sea:


The urbanization of Dubai:

Hitler in color

Pretty amazing color images of Hitler from LIFE magazine - the craziest thing, to me, is how unreal it seems: I've seen the "Indiana Jones" movies so many times that it's tough to really comprehend that Hitler's uniform isn't a costume, the parades aren't staged, etc.

Visualizing Obama's budget cuts.

Banned cartoon.

As is described here, in this banned episode of Tiny Toon Adventures, "[...] Buster Bunny, Plucky Duck and Hamton Pig find a bottle of beer that never goes empty, then proceed to get drunk, steal a cop car, cause general chaos and collectively die by driving said car over a cliff."

Wha?

Unless I'm being duped, Dick Cheney is pro-gay-marriage.

An exclusive club.

From The Warren Times Observer, a Pennsylvania paper:


(In case you cannot read it, the ad says, "May Obama follow in the footsteps of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy!")

Shh, don't say anything - you don't want to jinx it!

Not sure how many of you have noticed, but the numbers that keep coming out on the economy are consistently pretty-bad-but-they-could be worse kind of numbers. Also not sure if you noticed, but the news has sort of just stopped talking about the economy ...

So it should come as little surprise then, even with no indication of economic improvement, that consumer confidence numbers are on the rise - and fast! It seems that without hearing bad news about the economy all the time, people are actually starting to think it's improving (even I have to actively resist this trap). But then again, people thinking the economy is better could very well be all it takes to start the recovery.

Don't screw this up for us CNN.

"Roman Catholic priestess" dragged kicking and screaming from Air Force One

pretty funny

Upgrading your outlook.

This is just one of many versions of this commercial:

Bad parenting.

"Sometimes I do better with lists," a wise man once said. To that end let's start getting some lists together and vote on who makes the best submission (à la Apples to Apples). The topic for this trial run: awful celebrity baby names. My entries (these are just the ridiculously-named children, not all the kids in each family):

• Zakk Wylde: Hendrix Halen Michael Rhoads (named after Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, Mike Piazza, and Randy Rhoads);
• George Foreman: George VI (Joe), George V (Red), George IV (Big Wheel), Freda George George III (Monk), Georgetta, and George Jr. Foreman has said he named all his sons George because, "In this career, you have to prepare for long term brain damage.";
• Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin: Apple (Paltrow discussing the name: "It sounded so sweet and it conjured such a lovely picture for me – you know, apples are so sweet and they're wholesome and it's biblical – and I just thought it sounded so lovely and … clean! And I just thought, 'Perfect!'" Bonus points because Apple's godfather is Simon Pegg.);
• Demi Moore: Rumer Glenn Willis (as in Bruce Willis) and Tallulah Belle Willis;
• Frank Zappa: Dweezil, Ahmet Emuukha Rodan (a member of the Reggie Cleveland All-Stars), Moon Unit, and Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen.

Lost. [Spoilers contained in this post!]

With only one season remaining I think it is time to make some predictions about how Lost is going to resolve the ridiculous mountain of unanswered (unanswerable?) questions the show has allowed to pile up over the years. As a quick refresher of what last happened in the Lost universe, here is the Wikipedia summary of the season five finale:

In 1977, the survivors succeed in detonating the modified nuclear bomb at the construction site of the Swan station, the finale ending when the bomb is detonated. In 2007, Locke and the Others travel to the base of the four-toed statue, where Jacob lives. Locke is revealed to be an impostor: an old acquaintance of Jacob who tricks Ben into killing Jacob. In flashbacks, Jacob visits several of the main characters.

In Lost physics the explosion of the bomb in 1977 is supposedly going to eliminate the underground source of the magnetic field so that Oceanic flight 815 will not be brought down by in the future, thereby restoring the world as it was when the main characters boarded the plane in Sydney. I have a really major problem with this logic: changing an event in 1977 alters which
of the potential futures becomes reality from that moment onward--that is, everything from that moment forward represents a different future from the one that occurred without the explosion. Here's a rough idea of what I mean:

I guess my main point is just that detonating that bomb ensures that it is not possible for the future to turn out the way it already has--expressed another way, the future that we, the viewers, have already seen cannot possibly be repeated. We have jumped from one potential future to another in which the plane cannot crash because of the magnetic field, even if everyone is on the plane as they were in the future we already know (this all assumes that Faraday's belief that the detonation will destroy the magnetic field is correct).

All that said, I think one of the consistent themes throughout the show has been the inevitability of the role each person plays. In the end all those who are 'supposed to be on the island' will be there whether the plane crashes or not; Jack will become de facto leader; Sawyer will initially rebel but become respectable when need be; Ben will connive and backstab; et cetera. This seems to imply that we should be able to piece together the basic point of the show--if everyone will fill the same role throughout this alternate future then the moral will be the same. Before I go off on another long ramble I'll ask a few questions of the floor: Is my reasoning sound? What do you think of differently? What is the moral of the show? How is Jacob's old friend inhabiting Locke's body? (I didn't even bother to touch on this just yet.)

Oh, and here's a barely-related GraphJam post that I enjoyed:

I oppose Maria Sotomayor!

And so does Mike Huckabee ...

Bacon Explosion!

In a glorious moment that will supply me with chest hair for the rest of my life, we had a "Bacon Explosion" this weekend.

http://www.bbqaddicts.com/blog/recipes/bacon-explosion/

I don't even know what to say about this

Passer-By Pushes Potential Suicide Jumper From Bridge In China

Waterboarding is torture.

Well, Hannity is too filled with hot air to follow through with his offer to be waterboarded, but Christopher Hitchens and conservative radio host Erich 'Mancow' Muller have each undergone the treatment. Both lasted less than ten seconds and have reversed their positions, stating that waterboarding is unequivocally torture. Check out the videos (and the associated articles) below (the sound on the Mancow videos is terrible).

Hitchens: "Believe Me, It's Torture"


Mancow: "Mancow Waterboarded, Admits It's Torture"

Robobama is coming for you!

Actually, this is pretty awesome.

"The Course of Human Events."

In 1972 the National Endowment for the Humanities founded the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities lecture series, which the NEH describes as "the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities." David McCullough won the honor of being the 2003 Jefferson lecturer and gave a great speech on the arc of history, the text of which can be found here.

McCullough's general point:
"The truth of history is the objective always. But the truth isn't just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth."

Random note about McCullough: He still uses a 1940s typewriter and writes only in a small shed/studio behind his house on Martha's Vineyard (seen in the above picture).

I wouldn't ever live somewhere that scores below 10,000!

Video dump.

Rather than a bunch of annoying little posts I have decided to bug you with only one longer one filled with short videos.

Fenway cameraman tells you about his camera and shows you how it is controlled:

Fenway HD Camera - Sony HDC-910 - Canon 75x from Tom Guilmette on Vimeo.

The da Vinci surgical system:


Escalator spinning:


The walking table:


LSD tested on a British army group:

The biggest drawing in the world.

Eric Nordenanker decided to draw the biggest drawing in the world by sketching a self-portrait on a world map and then paying DHL to fly a GPS tracking device around the world to these locations. But, you may be saying, what about those ridiculous loops in the middle of the ocean? Well, for any points that were un-named Nordenanker provided DHL with the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. Check out the list of locations here (.pdf). The continuous line of the drawing "[...] passed through 6 continents and 62 countries, thus becoming 110664 km long." (To save you the trouble: 110,664km= 68,763.4216 miles (according to Google's conversion mechanism).)

The video that first introduced me to this project:

Biggest Drawing in the World - Click here for the funniest movie of the week

"Bar-onomics"

[Update: Fixed source--New York Magazine, not The New Yorker]
[Note: I have simply copied and pasted the entire article (go here for original) from New York Magazine because it is so short.]

So you want to open a bar, huh? A profitable bar? We asked four experts to run the numbers on a make- believe, 1,000-square-foot neighborhood pub in the East Village.

• By Beth Shapouri
• Published May 17, 2009

Start-Up Costs
Rent for six months while waiting on a liquor license: $49,800 (assuming $8,300 a month)
Liquor license and fees: $9,000
Equipment, construction, and demolition: $60,000
Signage: $1,000
Décor and glassware: $21,000
Training for six employees: $858
Initial liquor order: $6,000 (45 percent on beer, 40 percent on liquor, 5 percent on wine, 10 percent on mixers)
Sound system: $1,000
Emergency funds: $50,000
Misc.: $2,000
TOTAL . . . . . . . $200,658

---

Ongoing Monthly Costs
Rent: $8,300
Booze: $10,000
Insurance: $500
Misc.: $1,900
Staff pay: $1,720 (assuming 100 hours a week at $4.30 an hour)
Utilities: $1,320
Taxes and fees: $1,000
TOTAL . . . . . . . . $24,740

---

The Markups
Draft beer: $3.59 a pint
Bottled beer: $3.85 a bottle
Well liquor: $4.65 a pour
Top-shelf liquor: $3.35 a pour
Wine: $3.48 a glass

---

Break-Even Point
Amount you’d have to gross in 18 months before you start turning a profit: $645,978 (monthly expenses of $24,740 for 18 months, or $445,320, plus start-up costs of $200,658)
Number of customers required per night to reach $645,978 in 18 months (assuming $5 per average drink and 1.5 drinks per person): 160

"Going Dutch"

This article by Russell Shorto (author of The Island at the Center of the World and Descartes' Bones) is a relaxed examination of the similarities and differences between the American and the Dutch social welfare systems. This is not a number-filled article, but rather a straightforward discussion of some of the pros and cons of both the Dutch and American systems. Shorto also discusses the cultural roots of the two systems and the historical forces that shaped the trends of each system.

One of the interesting points raised in the article:

This points up something that seems to be overlooked when Americans dismiss European-style social-welfare systems: they are not necessarily state-run or state-financed. Rather, these societies have chosen to combine the various entities that play a role in social well-being — individuals, corporations, government, nongovernmental entities like unions and churches — in different ways, in an effort to balance individual freedom and overall social security.

And, a hilarious summary of the Dutch personality:

'If you tell a Dutch person you’re going to raise his taxes by 500 euros and that it will go to help the poor, he’ll say O.K.,' [an American expatriate] said. 'But if you say he’s going to get a 500-euro tax cut, with the idea that he will give it to the poor, he won’t do it. The Dutch don’t do such things on their own. They believe they should be handled by the system. To an American, that’s a lack of individual initiative.'

Nobody doesn't like Tom Hanks

During Tom Hanks' interview on The Daily Show last week, a friend and I were discussing how he might be most well-liked man on planet. The interview makes it so clear what a professional entertainer he is - he knows exactly how to make everyone in a room look at him and like him. And if anyone did dislike him, you really couldn't after this:

Tom Hanks Saves Wedding



Can the man do no wrong (excluding, of course, "You've Got Mail")??

...like I need another hole in my head.

A doctor in Australia drilled into a twelve-year old's skull using a household drill (taken straight out of the maintenance room) in order to lessen pressure caused by internal bleeding suffered during a bicycle accident. The hospital had no neurological drills and no neurosurgeon, so general practitioner Dr. Robert Carson had to perform the surgery while being instructed by a neurosurgeon over the phone--this doctor told him things like where and how deep to drill (I imagine the answers to be 'the head' and 'not too deep.' Wow, those look dirtier than I realized they would.). The boy is fine and returned home on his thirteenth birthday.

Backwards discrimination.

So it turns out that wildly ignorant racism by whites can be directed at whites, and not even in that neo-Nazis-hate-non-racist-whites kind of way. Born and raised in Mozambique, Paulo Serodio, a white man from Africa (also known as a white African-American), was recently suspended from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey for TWO YEARS after insisting upon calling himself African-American during a "[...] cultural exercise in a clinical skills course" (whatever the hell that is).

Well, let's keep the spirit going: America, fuck yeah!!!

And you think Twittering is rude???

No longer will our lawmakers be obliged to voice complaints through text alone as they listen to the president! In the future these oppressed people will be allowed to use their voices without even having to physically talk. National Instruments is working on the device in the above video, which intercepts signals sent from the brain to the vocal chords and translates these electrical signals into speech. The system currently has only 150 recognized words, but the creators compare this limited vocabulary to early speech-recognition systems. Current applications focus on those who have lost the ability to speak naturally (e.g. those with severe ALS), but someday soon let's hope that our lawmakers will be able to bitch publicly before the president even finishes speaking! Think of the possibilities: Boehner could criticize Barack via Twitter while having a call-in conversation with Hannity about how poor the speech is without ever moving his lips!

Maybe the bright side of this is that soon lawmakers will wear their collars more publicly, perhaps exposing some of the currently-hidden leashes that so dramitcally impact legislation.

(Twin) brother by another father.

I am not even going to bother moving beyond fact in this case: a woman had sex with her boyfriend, and then cheated on him soon after, leading to the one-in-a-million (seriously, 1/1,000,000) outcome of a set of twins with different fathers. The boyfriend has been told of the infidelity and has agreed to raise both boys as his own, despite being biological father to only one. Of course, since modern news stories only ever seem to hamper progress toward social equality, the family is black, the parents unmarried, and the lot of them live in good ol' Texas. America, fuck yeah!

Slick Willy heads for abroad...

(Come on, that title is funny.) Bill Clinton has been named Special UN Envoy to Haiti. Two aspects of this strike me as representative of Bill Clinton's personality: 1. He truly seems to respect the importance of at least the idea of the UN (let's ignore his beliefs on the UN's execution/hesitation issues in Somalia and the Balkans for the sake of this point); and, 2. Clinton is headed to Haiti, not some posh country where he can relax and live in high-society style--Clinton genuinely loves being around real people.

It is nice that Carter works with Habitat for Humanity, but that organization only focuses on the under-served within the domestic population. To have a (popular!) former president dedicate his time to the plight of some of those who are worst-off in the world is a demonstration that society seems to be gradually coming to the conclusion that suffering abroad is as unacceptable as suffering here.

Americans are the best...

...at killing the planet through consumption! The 2009 National Geographic Greendex survey, "[...] a comprehensive measure of consumer behavior in 65 areas relating to housing, transportation, food and consumer goods" (Greendex Highlight Report.pdf), has, for the second consecutive year, given the US the worst overall score. (This must be qualified in just a few ways: the survey is only in its second year, only includes 17 countries (14 in 2008), and is based entirely on Internet-based polling data.)

A bit more about the approach: The survey measures "[...] energy use and conservation, transportation choices, food sources, the relative use of green products versus traditional products, attitudes towards the environment and sustainability, and knowledge of environmental issues" (Greendex: Survey of Sustainable Consumption), in order to give each respondent a score in each of the four main categories listed above (housing, transportation, food, and consumer goods). Based on performance in these categories each respondent is given an overall Greendex score.

One more thing: Brazil's Greendex score went down from last year to this year, so they are clearly gunning for our position at the top. We must waste as much as possible in the coming year in order to keep our crown. I hope each of you will do your part.

Stupid people.

• Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton announced that Internet is pure evil. More specifically he said, “I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet. Period.”
• Florida prison guards, in an apparent effort to keep the retirees happy and the children docile, stun-gunned 43 children last week during ''Take Your Sons and Daughters to Work Day.'' Three prisons stun-gunned children while another facility chose to tear-gas them instead. Three firings, two resignations, and sixteen disciplinary actions have resulted so far.
• The National Inquirer is stopping to (possibly?) new lows. A freelance writer working for The Inquirer checked Brooke Shield’s demented mother out of her nursing home and drove her around hoping to prompt the confused woman to tell a juicy secret of her daughter’s.
• Two Yellowstone Park workers were fired after a web cam caught them peeing into a geyser. They also face charges.

"[...] Give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour [...]"

Some really hilarious quotes come from this interview with former wrestler and Minnesota governer Jesse Ventura, including, "[Water-boarding] is torture... It's drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you -- I'll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders."

Ventura also rips on Bush 43 and Norm Coleman, the man Ventura defeated in his gubernatorial campaign.

killing time at work

I really liked this article, which is basically a roundup of thoughts on how the recession is affecting New York.

The parts I found especially interesting are about how the negative psychological effects of being laid off are carried with you for years to come, and that being laid off now hurts your income potential 10 years from now. From personal experience, I can tell you that while I’m in a MUCH better place emotionally than I was during my three months of unemployment, the depression I felt then still sorta hangs with me (the article calls it “scarring”). The piece also discusses a study revealing that kids who graduate college during a recession have a lower earning potential throughout their entire careers than those who don’t (great). In the end, though, you get to read about John Sexton being verbose, creating absurd acronyms, and – one can only assume – hugging the reporter.

Motherlover.

Another entertaining SNL digital short.

Just kill the fucking series.

I can't even begin to share my problems with this: Maggie Simpson, voiced by Jodie Foster, spoke her first complete sentence during a re-worked version of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.

Strangely Badass III

This week: Scott Altman. Altman is a Navy test pilot and a NASA astronaut who was among the four pilots who flew the military jets in the Tom Cruise movie Top Gun. Oh, and he is the mission commander of what the Daily Mail is calling NASA's "most dangerous ever shuttle mission."

The mission, known as STS-125 and scheduled to launch tonight (May 11), is intended to repair the Hubble telescope in order to make it useful for another five years. There are, as there must be with such an introduction, a few catches.

1. No ISS-cape: Unfortunately, "Due to the inclination and other orbit parameters of Hubble, Atlantis would be unable to use the ISS [International Space Station] as a 'safe haven' in the event of structural or mechanical failure" ("STS-125"). NASA's solution? Have a backup shuttle and crew ready to launch in the event that something goes wrong, a step taken for the FIRST TIME EVER.

2. Russian roulette space-walks:"During five highly risky spacewalks, [the astronauts] will clamber aboard Hubble to repair and replace instruments contained inside, upgrading its capabilities and prolonging its life for another five years" (Daily Mail). Five times is a lot of times to risk your life 350 miles above the surface of Earth.

3. The little things: "[The astronauts] will face major hurdles, such as unscrewing dozens of minute screws while wearing gloves five layers thick and removing razor-sharp circuit boards capable of piercing the $10 million spacesuits that keep them alive in the vacuum of space" (Ibid).

4. The good guys: John Grunsfeld, another of the astronauts slated for the mission, seems to be the type of guy you do not want to spend eleven days around in a cramped environment. While others are reserved and saying, "The adrenalin is certainly pumping," or, "This is really going to be tough, the toughest servicing mission we have ever attempted," Grunsfeld has chosen to pump out metaphors of difficulty allowing people to fully understand how awesome he is. So far he has said the mission is like "performing brain surgery in space" and stated that he "[considers] this the climbing Mount Everest of spacewalking missions." (Ibid)

Somehow having a guy from Top Gun save the Hubble makes me think we are getting one step closer to a real-life Armageddon. I hope Altman can complete his job as well as Bruce and Ben completed theirs.

Damn it. I hate taint.

Source: The Week

I was always angry that steroids tainted the competition of Major League Baseball to some unknown degree (I would definitely be less angry if the level of impact were known exactly), but it was always indirect for me--no important Red Sox player had ever been implicated (I say important because we did have the occasional visiting scumbag like José Canseco). Now steroids have tainted one of my favorite memories to some unknown degree as well, and there is nothing ever to be done about it. For the sake of both the quality of baseball and your (Katie and Chris, the only non-Boston baseball fans I know of who read this blog) own enjoyment of the experience, I hope that by the time the Cubs and the Cardinals next win there is a meaningful drug testing system in place.

Is this true?

A post over at The Atlantic says that the New York Times has not yet used the word torture when referring to any tactics used during the Bush 43 administration. Does anyone know if this is true? If so, what other major publications have avoided that word? Have any of them publicly stated why they do not use that word, or what, for them, would constitute torture?

One more thing: the post further says that the Times did use the word torture, but only in the obituary of an American who was tortured (using the same techniques as the Bush administration approved) while a POW in Manchuria during the Korean War.

A fascinating look at some banks.

Update: The link to the WSJ graphic is now included. Sorry about that.

The Wall Street Journal has posted a great "interactive graphic" that compares the 19 stress-tested banks on a number of criteria including new capital needed, tier 1 common capital ratio, and amount of TARP funding received.

A related aside: I love complex graphics along these lines and don't think that the value of such graphics can be overstated when one considers the graphics' ability to convey different depths of information for those of different intelligence and interest levels. Nate Silver does a great job with his graphics, for example "A Starry-Eyed Look at the 2012 Republican Field." The most cursory glance tells you nothing more than which candidates are present and which candidates might be similar to one another simply because there is little distance between them (basically the level of focus shown by someone who just wants to pretend to be smart around others, e.g. "I'd say Huckabee, Romney, Jindal, and Palin are the favorites."). The next level of information gets into actually looking at those axes and understanding what they imply. The third level takes into account the size of each bubble: the larger the bubble the greater the public support for that candidate. Finally, one can, as Nate suggests, consider the implications of the political 'gravity' exerted by each of these 'planets.' That is, one can imagine that when one politician gains support (that is, his planet grows) it must be pulling that support from elsewhere (that is, exerting a political gravity on the supporters of the other planets, pulling them away).

Honestly, this post did begin as a quick post only focused on that banks graphic; it spiraled out of my control once I started talking about the always riveting topic of graphics! I hope it all made sense.

The two worst weddings ever.

For the longest time I though that the Versailles wedding hall disaster (see video above) was probably about the worst way a wedding could end: 23 dead, 380 injured, one building destroyed.

As it turns out I really did not think hard enough about other awful ways a wedding might end. Sure, there are the obvious terrible outcomes like a no show on the part of the bride or groom, or the denouncement of the marriage by family members, or maybe a heart attack death caused by excitement. Then there is the unexpected: the wedding that re-ignites a decades-old blood feud and leads to an assault on the wedding by men armed with grenades and automatic weapons.

Known as the Mardin wedding party attack, this occurred in Turkey three days ago and led to the deaths of 44. "[A] combination of tribalism, love for guns, and tradition gone awfully wrong," the attack left the faces of the victims unrecognizable and killed six children. According to the AP (via Yahoo! News), "Two girls survived after the bodies of slain friends fell on top of them during the onslaught."

I don't know about the rest of you, but I think this was way under-reported, and I have no idea why. I only found it because of Wikipedia's news section.

Anyone know of any weddings that ended in ways worse than this?

Crows may knock the great apes down a peg.

As some of you may know, it was shown recently that magpies are self-aware (this was done using the mirror test). This put the bird amongst the small group of animals that fall into this category: "great apes (bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, humans), bottlenose dolphins, Orcas, elephants, and European Magpies" (stolen from Wikipedia).

Now crows, a relative of magpies in the corvids family ("a group that includes crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays and magpies" (BBC)), are making a run for the title of smartest animal around. Check out this article by the BBC that discusses tool use and other evidence of meaningful thought within New Caladonian crow communities. If you look at nothing else, check out the first video, in which a crow picks up a straight length of wire, bends it to create a hook on one end, and then uses this newly created tool to reach a bucket of treats at the bottom of a small shaft.

And if you are still interested in finding out more about crows check out this TED talk on the subject of useful things we may be able to train crows to do.

Interracial Marriage ... Gay Marriage ...

... what's next? Polyamorous marriage.
(I'm not sure if I used the right word)

Pakistan, anyone?

So, have I been watching too much right-wing TV, or do I have my story straight when I say that the Taliban's efforts to capture Pakistan (read: a country with a nuclear arsenal) have resulted in them so far capturing a city as close as 70 miles to its capital?

(Here's a really boring article)

Odd Day!

I can't sleep, so why not share trivia with the blog!

Today (05-07-09) is one of only six days this century in which the date (written in the form I used) is made up of three consecutive odd numbers! Odd Day even has its own website!

On a related note, check out square root day over at Wikipedia. We have to wait until April 4, 2016 for the next one of those (both the month and the day are the square roots of the last two digits of the year).

And the final two that I know of: Mole day and Pi day.