Tale of Caution

As long as we’re talking about relationships, one of the things I look for these days, right off the bat in any prospective relationship, plutonic or otherwise, is a pattern of evasiveness. Can that woman answer a simple question, like ‘do you want to go out this weekend?’ Most girls can answer that, they may say no and make themselves unavailable, but they can answer it. The evasive person will never quite say yes and never quite say no, and this pattern will persist. They’ll answer with “Maybe, I’ll let you know” and then they never let you know and repeat this same speil over and over. [Read more…]

Say “Cheese” to Cassini

PaleBlueBlot

“From its perch in the Saturn system, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft took pictures of Earth from nearly 900 million miles (nearly 1.5 billion kilometers) today. To celebrate the first time the public has had advance notice that Earth’s portrait was being taken from interplanetary distances, scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other Earthlings elsewhere gathered to wave at Saturn on July 19. Cassini took pictures of Earth between 2:27 and 2:42 p.m. PDT today.”

Like anyone needs to read this

The headline screams, minor memory lapses could be early sign of Alzheimer’s! Jebus fucking Christ, no one needs to read this. And I don’t mean no one over age 30, because we all know people over 30 if if we’re not, and we all have memory lapses. And yes, minor lapses do get worse over time. But if you want to read some of it and be very afraid, go below: [Read more…]

Earth’s gold may be much, much rarer than we think

Update — Guys I’m having all kinds of fits with WP and the edit screen all of the sudden. I don’t even know if you can see this update, I can’t — DS

Carl Sagan was fond of saying gold is only made in supernova exploisons. An elegant and relevant way to bring the beauty of cosmology fown to earth. But some Harvard scientists are right, earth’s gold came from a cataclysm rarer than supernova, and every bit as violent if not more so: [Read more…]

Are we still numero uno in scientific illiteracy?

EvoNevo

With all the former tobacco shilling one time defense scientists turned global warning deniers, and a few scattered young earth creationist nuts buttressed by our friends looking for cosmic aliens in various physiological mechanisms, AKA Intelligent Design, you’d think the US still sports the most willfully ignorant subset of purportedly educated human beings in the western world. Perhaps we do — there is national pride to consider after all, so perhaps we do. But cast the eye of shame down south, way south, where our friends down under are giving US illiterates a run for our dumb money: [Read more…]

Yet another reason not to watch The View

I’ve often preached to friends and family that, if you want to have good relationships, you must reward good behavior, or at the very least not reward the bad stuff. Admittedly it’s always easier to tell others to do this than to consistently practice it yourself, but it’s not exactly controversial either. This is common sense we all learned by 1st grade and spend the rest of lives trying to unlearn with varying and often miserable consequences. I hope the latter happens to ABC network executives, who just signed vaxxer nut and former playmate Jenny McCarthy to cohost The View: [Read more…]

For they so love America that they want to leave it

pigfuckers

Remember all that bullshit during the run up to the Iraq War about love it or leave? A lovely holdover from the Vietnam clusterfuck, carefully designed and tested to silence anyone who points out a policy happens to be both insane and deadly on a mass scale. Not to mention an economic super-massive black-hole. Secession compares with the best of that compartmentalized genre and, once again, rears its ugly head, this time in northern Colorado, where locals are whining they should be allowed to become a land-locked, insular state in the middle of the US — I dearly that wish could be granted as an example and warning to all future confederate wanna-bees.

Thankfully, I don’t have to link it, because Mistermix did that and succinctly summed up this nasty intersection between Teabilly politics, wealthy sociopaths, and traditional media dutifully posting some rotting online-chum: [Read more…]