One More Detour on the Writing Road

Atheist-based business offers fundies adoption service for dogs left behind by The Rapture.

While it makes a sort of sense, I am surprised that a person of strong convictions would leave their pet with a non-believer. But, circumstances make odd bedfellows, apparently.

The Onion really is slipping more and more into real life.

I swiped the story from digby.

America Blog finds the weirdest stories.

ROME (Reuters) - Italian researchers believe they have found the remains of a female "vampire" in Venice, buried with a brick jammed between her jaws to prevent her feeding on victims of a plague which swept the city in the 16th century.

So I've started watching The Daily Show instead of the local news. One of the stories discussed how Burmese pythons that escaped from pet stores and homes during hurricanes are now invading the Everglades and other areas and competing with local fauna. A spokesperson for the Nature Conservancy estimated that there could be as many as 30,000 pythons in Florida, and that they could migrate as far north as the DC/Maryland area.

Burmese pythons can grow 15 feet (5 meters) or more in length. They are strong enough to fight alligators.

And I thought the water moccasins were bad.

From the National Geographic website:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0603_040603_invasivespecies.html

Someone took their robotic/animatronic baby dinosaur to Sea World, and set it in front of the dolphin tank. The dolphins spot it about 1:46 in.

It's sweet. But as John Aravosis said in his AmericaBlog post about the dolphins: "These guys are starting to freak me out."

A Finnish computer programmer who lost one of his fingers in a motorcycle accident has made himself a prosthetic replacement with a USB drive attached.

Mr Jalava says he is already thinking about upgrading the finger to include more storage and wireless technology.

"I'm planning to use another prosthetic as a shell for the next version, which will have removable fingertip and RFID tag," he wrote on his blog, ProtoBlogr.net.

My word, this fish is bizarre:

Researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute recently solved the half-century-old mystery of a fish with tubular eyes and a transparent head.

The things at the front of its head that look like eyes are actually nostrils. The green bodies inside its head are the eyes.

It's possible that they may have found Atlantis.

The aerial photos are so cool. The squared-off area is about the size of Wales, The network of criss-cross lines is 620 miles off the coast of north west Africa near the Canary Islands on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

Fudgenuts--it's already been debunked.

The gridlines were apparently an artifact of the data collection process.

By way of shadowhelm, via Facebook:

A beam of white light is made up of all the colours in the spectrum. The range extends from red through to violet, with orange, yellow, green and blue in between. But there is one colour that is notable by its absence.

Pink (or magenta, to use its official name) simply isn’t there. But if pink isn’t in the light spectrum, how come we can see it?


Rest of article here. I pondered how Jani Kilian perceived color as she hybridized, and wish that I had played with that a little more.

A fascinating article, courtesy of crowleycrow. My favorite of the terms is Intermittant Explosive Disorder--I wonder if the IED acronym was coincidence. Then there's Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Disorder, which just seems so specific. Next up, Leaping Chemists of Illinois Syndrome.

Maybe with vampires, maybe not.

MADRID, Spain – A new kind of silent hero has joined the fight against climate change.

Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a gritty, working-class town outside Barcelona, has placed a sea of solar panels atop mausoleums at its cemetery, transforming a place of perpetual rest into one buzzing with renewable energy.

Flat, open and sun-drenched land is so scarce in Santa Coloma that the graveyard was just about the only viable spot to move ahead with its solar energy program.

In row after row of gleaming, blue-gray, the panels rest on mausoleums holding five layers of coffins, many of them marked with bouquets of fake flowers. The panels face almost due south, which is good for soaking up sunshine, and started working on Wednesday — the culmination of a project that began three years ago.

There's something here. I can't put my finger on it--maybe someone else can.