Daily Archives: 4 Feb 08
Big Brain Theory
Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?: “It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science…” I love it. (New York Times )
The 5 Most Horrifying Bugs in the World
“There are about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects on earth at any given moment. Seriously, that’s a real number. For every one of us, there are 1.5 billion bugs. But some of them are so horrifying, just one is too many. Here are five you want to avoid at all costs.” (Cracked)
I can’t believe this was posted on a humor site! (And I can’t believe I’ve blinked about both Mad and Cracked, neither of which I have thought about in more than forty years, on the same day.)
Periodic Table Printmaking Project
“Ninety-six printmakers of all experience levels, have joined together to produce 118 prints in any medium; woodcut, linocut, monotype, etching, lithograph, silkscreen, or any combination. The end result is a periodic table of elements intended to promote both science and the arts.” (Azure Grackle)
Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC?
Mad Magazine Uses Pulitzer Winners to Tweak Bush
“The ‘usual gang of idiots,’ as the editorial staff of Mad magazine lovingly describes itself, produces cultural and political parody every month. For the next issue, however, the gang has recruited some very special help.
‘Why George W. Bush Is in Favor of Global Warming,’ a two-page spread that the magazine calls an exposé, has been illustrated by 10 Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonists. They try to offer reasons why environmental apocalypse might be a good thing for President Bush, with observations like, ‘His worries about how future generations will remember his presidency won’t matter if there are no future generations.'” (New York Times )
Culture Jamming in the Czech Republic
In a long tradition of Czech tomfoolery: “The film documentary Czech Dream chronicled an audacious prank in which a fake superstore was created, working a bunch of shopaholic Czechs into an opening-day frenzy. Now a different bunch of Czech tricksters, the art collective Ztohoven, has seized the limelight by hacking into a public TV weather broadcast and inserting a mushroom cloud into a panoramic shot of the Krkonose mountains….” (Utne Reader)
Living Kaddish
The mourners’ kaddish is one of the most powerful prayers in Jewish liturgy, recited by the grieving to reify their loss before the rest of the congregation. The writer yearned to join the other mourners and recite the kaddish for her father, but could she? He had not died, but, she felt, had been just as lost to mental illness. (Tikkun)
U.S. close to decision on polar bears
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“The Bush administration is nearing a decision that would officially acknowledge the environmental damage of global warming, and name its first potential victim: the polar bear.” (LA Times)
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