Links

Stuff I find around the web that interests or amuses me.

Hurricane Isabel

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Hurricane Isabel from the ISS

Wow.

This picture of Hurricane Isabel was taken from the International Space Station. Just incredible.

Seems like every time the human race starts to get a little egotistical, good ol’ Mother Nature comes along to show us who’s really in charge around here. Good for her. Though, I have to admit to being glad I’m on the west coast right now — and it looks like it won’t be hitting Florida too hard, which is good news for my grandparents.

(from Yahoo! News, via MeFi [lots more good links for both info and pics on that MeFi link, too]).

Dean Seattle flashmob

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Last week I mentioned the Doonesbury-inspired flashmob at the Space Needle. I didn’t go (to be honest, I remembered it exactly when it was scheduled to happen), but pictures and a quick account have been posted by Harvey Wallbanger. If I’d remembered earlier, I’d have been there — but failing that, I can at least live vicariously through the power of the Web.

Nice tits

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A selection of beautiful pictures of Tits.

12/5/19 Update: When originally posted, this linked to a page with pictures of birds. But the domain has since been acquired by a porn site, so…no more link on this post. But at the time, it was amusing.

Opus is back!

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Penguins

(This picture has nothing to do with the story aside from the fact that it’s penguins, I’ve been looking for an excuse to use it, and it cracks me up. Anyway…)

After eight years away from newspapers, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Berkeley Breathed is creating a new comic strip called “Opus,” starring his beloved penguin of the same name.

The Washington Post Writers Group, which will syndicate the strip, is expected to officially announce Breathed’s return this Sunday. The reclusive Breathed, who rarely gives interviews, could not be reached yesterday for comment.

The new strip will appear on Sundays in The Washington Post starting Nov. 23.

(via /.)

How much to ship…me?

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Okay, so on one level, this article about a man who shipped himself from New York to Texas is kind of amusing. Wanting to save a few bucks, he somehow puts himself in a shipping crate, manages to survive two flights in cargo planes, then pops out of the box once he arrives at his parents house — at which point the surprised delivery man calls the police, who arrest the man on an outstanding warrant.

But, on another level — aren’t we supposed to have more stringent screening of airline flights, and what’s getting shipped around the country? While I’m sure they can’t x-ray or check every box that gets shipped around, it seems to me that this one might have had something about it that might have raised some questions. Apparently the guy had enough room to move in the box to use a prybar to open it when he arrived at his destination — wouldn’t that affect the balance of the box enough to catch someone’s eye while it was being moved around? I don’t know what all else, but it just seems amazing to me that this guy successfully did this, and that he’d have gotten away with it if he hadn’t opened the box while the delivery driver was still there.

Fred Phelps needs help

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Somehow until now Fred Phelps had managed to slip completely under my radar, but from what I’ve seen this evening, this man needs some serious help.

It seems that today was opening day for New York’s Harvey Milk School, a high school for GLBT teens who do not feel safe going to normal public schools. The streets outside the school were filled with demonstrators — primarily many people giving their support to the kids, because Phelps had arranged his own demonstration. Phelps and his small group of “Christians” (and I use the term very loosely here) were protesting the school and its students with signs with such warm, Christian sentiments as “God Hates Fags”, “Fags FDNY”, and “Thank God for Sept. 11” while standing on American flags.

It never ceases to amaze and sadden me the horrible things people will do in the name of Christianity.

(via the go fish)

Ecstacy or meth?

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Here’s one hell of an “oops” — a greatly publicized study detailing the harmful effects of popular drug Ecstasy has been retracted after the scientist realized that instead of Ecstasy, methamphetamine had been used in the experiments.

“We write to retract our report ‘Severe dopaminergic neurotoxicity in primates after a common recreational dose regimen of MDMA (Ecstasy)’ following our recent discovery that the drug used to treat all but one animal in that report came from a bottle that contained methamphetamine instead of the intended drug MDMA,” Ricaurte said in the retraction, to be published in the Sept. 8 issue of Science.

While I’m certainly not going to promote drug use in general, or Ecstasy in particular, that’s one hell of a mistake to make, especially for such a widely-distributed report. Truth to tell, I’ve always been a little suspect of studies on both sides of many drug issues — for every study that comes out that claims any given drug is fine, causes no problems, and should be de-regulated, another will come out claiming that said drug will cause major biological and psychological disorders for the user and their descendants for the next twenty generations, and often both studies will come from groups apparently equally well credentialed. So who do you trust?

You idiots can't drive

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Jonas posted what to me is an absolutely fascinating post yesterday:

People often ask me, what – in my opinion – is the biggest of all differences between European and US-American societies. Most expect me to answer along the lines of crooked politicians (sorry, no difference, there), or the food, beer, and wine quality, but nawp. The most fundamental of them all, the mother-lode of differential lifestyles, the one thing that gives the deepest, most sincere, look into the respective societies, is the drivers test, and the DMV in general.

He then goes on to describe the amazingly different approach that Europe takes with people before letting them get behind the wheel of a car. To sum up:

  • A six- to nine-week class (minimum).
  • Actual in-car learning doesn’t start until around week three.
  • Mandatory test driving situations, “including night-drives, driving in bad weather, and the no-hold-barred-no-speed-limits-anywhere Autobahn.”
  • First-aid and roadside assistance training and testing is madatory.
  • Final driving tests with an approximately 20% failure rate.
  • A two-year probationary period after receiving your licence. Infractions within this time send you back to driving school.

That system is so much better than the ludicrously simple system we have here in the states. We get, what, a written test that a badly-trained monkey could pass, and a driving test that usually involves going around the block a few times? Then we’re allowed to get on the road, no holds barred. It’s really frightening when you stop to think about it — or when you get cut off at 65MpH on the highway.

Jonas sums it up quite nicely at the end of his post:

We expats get to hear a lot about the Second Amendment and its application back home. “They give guns to everyone?”, my friends ask. “Don’t mind it,” I usually reply, “they do much worse. They give cars to everyone.”

The blackboard jungle

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Damien pointed to an absolutely wonderful article today: Failing at Living: It’s a blackboard jungle out there: It’s bad enough when the students don’t want to learn, but when they can’t even spell dirty words correctly, can a teacher really expect them to grasp Stephen Sondheim? It’s a rather sad commentary on the state of many inner-city summer schools, and the challenges teachers face in trying to teach those students at the bottom end of the curve. However, at the same time, it is absolutely beautifully written, and gave me quite a few laughs while reading it.

…I glanced around at my remaining students (the ones I hadn’t thrown out of class) as they scribbled away on their final. After five weeks of hearing them tell me that reading “sucked,” I’d finally followed the dean’s sage advice: Let them watch movies. Since he did not say: Let them watch movies they like, I’d made them watch Stephen Sondheim’s thorny Broadway musical “Into the Woods.”

“You are really, really going to hate this,” I’d warned them. “Stephen Sondheim is all about words and they go really fast, and he doesn’t believe in happily ever after. But please hate it silently and take copious notes so that you can pass your final exam.”

Early on in my innocent phase, I would have asked for the context clues that helped us to know what copious meant. But such is the way of innocent phases. “Now, if for some reason you don’t hate this,” I said, “I beg you to keep the news to yourself. Your peers will never stop punishing you.”

There’s also a discussion of this article on MetaFilter that has some interesting points to it.