Flying Spaghetti Monster gingerbread cookies look fun and tasty, but I didn't see a recipe.
fsmcookies8 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
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.
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.
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!”
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."
Since scientists in Svante Paabo's team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig started looking into the DNA of Neanderthals, they have made some new and astonishing discoveries. Just last week, the Leipzig scientists published their discovery of the human variant of the FOXP2 gene in our nearest relatives. And they have now revealed another interesting detail: at least one percent of the Neanderthals in Europe may have had red hair,
How has the geography of religion evolved over the centuries, and where has it sparked wars? Our map gives us a brief history of the world's most well-known religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. Selected periods of inter-religious bloodshed are also highlighted. Want to see 5,000 years of religion in 90 seconds? Ready, Set, Go!
Since reporting Monday that Nine Inch Nails had dumped its record label and was to offer future albums direct to the public, Oasis and Jamiroquai have also joined the move away from the record industry, but the biggest announcement of all is news today that Madonna has dumped the record industry.
Hear that? It's the RIAA quaking in their diamond-coated boots as yet another A-list band gives labels the finger: Pretty hate machine Trent Reznor announced today that "as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label." Instead of futzing through the hapless middleman of an inept label, Trent's promising "a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate,"
I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.
If the original Mars estimate was accurate, that means that instead of going to Iraq, the USA could have funded somewhere between 5 and 11 independent human missions to Mars! By "independent", I mean Mars mission programs that start from the ground up, and do not leverage each other's technology, research, or manufacturing.
Close analysis of a velociraptor forelimb unearthed in Mongolia in 1998 reveals that quill knobs were present on the fossilised bone. Quill knobs, which are found on many modern bird species, are where the flight or wing feathers are anchored to the bone by ligaments.
A new study of a skeleton of a member of a race of three-foot-tall ‘hobbits’ who lived 12,000 years ago in Indonesia shows that they were a species of human—and that the evolutionary path to Homo sapiens has been tortuous indeed.
In many respects, the well-preserved fossils resemble Homo erectus, a species from the genus Homo that first appeared in Africa some two million years ago and quickly spread throughout Europe and much of Asia.
The National Library of France (BnF) has an amazing collection of prints from 1910 which depict life in the year 2000. They are credited to Villemard.Here's a preview of a podcast:
His daughter Sandy quotes Will Crowther as saying, “You know I've done all sorts of wonderful things in my career, it's funny that the one thing I'm remembered for is ‘Adventure’” (Lawrence 2002). Before he coded his legendary game, Crowther had helped map the complex network of caverns on which the game is based; and before that, he had already secured a place in history due to his contributions to a different network. As a member of the team of programmers at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), he helped create the ARPANET, the immediate forerunner to the internet.Get the original FORTRAN code....
For more than a week, account holders have been demanding their money back in what some folks are calling a bank run.
Set off by high interest rates and a recent ban on in-game gambling, the bank run could ultimately have a major effect on the game's economy.
Whether or not SoundExchange's lobbying efforts prove to be illegal, its presence as an advocate in this debate undercuts its role as neutral administrator of royalty fees set and approved by the Copyright Royalty Board.
First-time webcasting fees proposed by recording industry royalty-administration group SoundExchange took effect last month, setting off a wave of protests and last-minute negotiations aimed at reducing the hit for smaller webcasters and capping rates for sites that support hundreds of customized stations.
Negotiations are ongoing, but chances of broad legislative relief in the form of the Internet Radio Equality Act, or IREA, are fading fast, according to several people familiar with the effort. Rather, Congress appears resolved to let SoundExchange and the various strata of webcasters negotiate individual settlements.
And yet, you know, not everyone has a 'sense of irony', which is by no means the same as a 'sense of humor'. I firmly believe that one can have one, but not the other.Indeed. So this category will post the unfortunate attempts at irony.
But something is bugging SoundExchange, and falling CD sales is probably it. CD sales fell 15% in the first half this year compared to the same time last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and that's an ongoing trend, says Van Dyke.
Falling CD sales are causing the labels to push for revenue from play services rather than product sales,
Using methods derived from our work on instrumentation for particle physics we have investigated the problem of audio reconstruction from mechanical recordings. The idea was to acquire digital maps of the surface of the media, without contact, and then apply image analysis methods to recover the audio data and reduce noise.
The SoundExchange executive [Jon Simson, executive director] promised -- in front of Congress -- that SoundExchange will not enforce the new royalty rates. Webcasters will stay online, as new rates are hammered out.
"SoundExchange continues to demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of the Internet radio industry. SoundExchange is unable, or perhaps unwilling, to recognize that performance-based royalty rates and looming threats of billion-dollar minima inhibit investment and growth of royalty-paying music industry business models," the group said in a statement. "What has been proposed falls well short of even the lowest standard of a temporary fix."
The guys running the labels are pretty stupid -- most are just dirtbags who started out as band managers or promoters -- but now at long last they are kinda sorta finally vaguely getting clued in to the fact that both parts of their business model are fucked.
The expedition will focus on eastern Marquette County, said Matthew Moneymaker of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization.
I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues:
Two U.S. car thieves failed to make their getaway in a car they had just stolen because they couldn't figure out how to use its manual transmission, a witness said on Wednesday.
To help girls struggling with the complexity that comes with seventh-grade math, McKellar has penned Math Doesn’t Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail, which hits shelves this August. The book hones in on middle school’s trickiest points-––like fractions, ratios, and percentages
The bottom line was that the T. rex's biological signature was most like a bird's, at least based on the first fragmentary data. "It looks like chicken may be the closest among all species that are present in today's databases for proteins and genomes," Asara said.
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore take a swipe at the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson supermarionation TV shows.
Another funny video, this time
sent to me by CeasarsGhost.
A 500 year old helpdesk call.
I thought this would make a nice
first video post. In a couple hundred million years, this guy might be pretty important.