Fun Holiday Cookies

Flying Spaghetti Monster gingerbread cookies look fun and tasty, but I didn't see a recipe.

fsmcookies8 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

When screen size matters.

Here is a good article that makes it easy to determine the screen resolution that makes sense for your room. Handy chart and calculation spreadsheet supplied.

There be whales here.

The Loom : Return to the Dawn of Whales: Cousins Versus Grandparents

Last week I wrote about a new study that identified a fossil mammal as the closest relative to whales, helping to shed light on how whales moved from land to sea. The mammal, Indohyus, was a small four-legged creature that probably spent a fair amount of time in water and ate vegetation.

Songbird 0.4 (developer) available

I was surprised at how usable this was compared to the last release (for Mac, at least).


Ring in the new year with Songbird 0.4! | Songbirdnest.com

Ring in the new year with Songbird 0.4!

Us birders have been giving Santa’s hardworking elves a run for their cookies this holiday season, and we’re ready to release a final Songbird 0.4 for Developers just in time to ring in the new year.

Download it from the Songbird Developer Center.

Absinthe Returns

Not a new story, but getting some play

Here is an article on some legal absinthe from Lucid

Here is a Scientific American article on the history of absinthe.

And here is a NYT writeup of the drink.

NASA's piece of the pie

The defense department is allocated 21% of the US budget, while NASA gets less than 1%. Nevertheless, the public is pretty sure that the same amount is spent on both.

The Space Review: Sustaining exploration: communications, relevance, and value

Americans in general have no idea what NASA’s “cost” is ... What we do know—and have recently documented—is that the public perception of NASA’s budget is grossly inflated relative to actual dollars ...

In other words, respondents believed NASA’s budget approaches that of the Department of Defense, which receives almost 38 times more money (see “Putting NASA’s budget in perspective”, The Space Review, July 2, 2007). Once people were informed of the actual allocations, they were almost uniformly surprised. Our favorite response came from one of the more vocal participants, who exclaimed, “No wonder we haven’t gone anywhere!”

FSM on CNN

Religious scholars mull Flying Spaghetti Monster - CNN.com

It was the emergence of this community that attracted the attention of three young scholars at the University of Florida who study religion in popular culture. They got to talking, and eventually managed to get a panel on FSM-ism on the agenda at one of the field's most prestigious gatherings.

The title: "Evolutionary Controversy and a Side of Pasta: The Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Subversive Function of Religious Parody."