Tag Archives: miscellaneous

Tab Sweep

How did the mutation that prevents lactose intolerance become so widespread so quickly?

Joss Whedon endorses Mitt Romney.

Camile Paglia endorses Jill Stein. And Revenge of the Sith. Really.

Additional evidence for the grandmother longevity hypothesis.

A recent conference asks if programmers can be artists. If so, they should start with processing.

Learn Git with the Git Immersion guided tour.

Tweak Unity with unsettings 0.08 and get rid of those pesky web results!

A new version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein (co-op edition) has been released.

On the other hand, if you’re fighting the headwinds of history, here’s a guide to installing Windows 8 with just an upgrade license. (Microsoft is fighting the headwinds too, and won’t let you easily make a clean install.)

Google Ngrams are now even awesomer.

In twenty years the number of planets outside our solar system has gone from zero to almost a thousand. But now there’s an exoplanet next door:

It turns out there’s more than one way to smash the earth and build the moon.

Concerned about Genetically modified organisms? Worried about all the land mines scattered all over the world during the past century? Maybe you can pick which one worries you more: a GM mouse has been created to detect land mines. (Apropos the above, consider this piece on GMOs and pesticide use.)

Tab Sweep

Charles Murray talking to Reason Magazine about his book Coming Apart. (My link is to a point 20 minutes in that I found compelling.)

The Institute for Justice asks if you should need the government’s permission to work?

A dozen extremely disappointing facts about popular music.

There’s a vulgar expression about pulling one’s head out of someplace else. But the anatomy doesn’t really work. In fact, the brain began to grow 2.5M years ago, when our ancestors started walking upright. Scientists now think that we solved the problem with our flexible skulls.

Appropos the previous item, in The Lost World, Michael Crichton once likened humans to marsupials. What do you think?

This USGS illustration shows how much water there is on earth. (“How deep is it?” “Deep enough to drown in.”)

Tab Sweep

Here, with minimal comments, are some things I ran across on the internet that I thought were amusing or interesting.

Depressed Darth: Stay on Target.

Alternate History: What if “Star Wars Episode 1” was good?

Top voice talents: 5 Guys in a Limo.

The Lives of Others. (I’ve seen this. A great movie. It’s my favorite German-language film, except possibly Downfall.)

Joss Whedon: why does he kill the characters we love? And what does that forebode about Tony Stark in The Avengers?

Tripp and Tyler’s Rad Sk8 (featuring Tony Hawk).

Life on earth prospers during certain seasons in the galactic year. When the solar system passes through regions with a lot of star formation going on, things get better here:

[The fossil records] tended to be richest in their variety when continents were drifting apart and sea levels were high and less varied when the land masses gathered 250 million years ago into the supercontinent called Pangaea and the sea-level was lower. But this geophysical effect was not the whole story. When it is removed from the record of biodiversity, what remains corresponds closely to the changing rate of nearby stellar explosions, with the variety of life being greatest when supernovae are plentiful.—via /.