These sites are completely fake, but they’re fascinating anyway.
Phil sent me a link to the Museum of Fantastic Specimens, a bizarre collection of strange creatures. It’s all in Japanese, but Pink Tentacle has a brief guide in English.
Several people let me know about this one: if you prefer your fake organisms to be the product of fake synthetic processes rather than fake natural ones, you want a GenPet.
The most amusing coverage of the Nature top science blogs article comes from The Technology Chronicles, which begins by calling scientists “sober, dispassionate, precise” and suggests that we’ve abandoned “Olympian impartiality” to compete with Cute Overload. I get the impression the author hasn’t ever met a real scientist. Nick will love being called a “budding Matt Drudge.”
We need more cute, huh? OK, I can do cute. I had to run my photo through a face transformer to do it, but here I am, rendered a bit more adorably than in real life.
Now I just sit back and wait for the fans to roll in.
(Thanks to Lindsay, who took the original photo.)
Reading some of my favorite blogs today, I can’t help but feel the looming hand of fate preparing to destroy us all.
Despite the horrible possibilities, though, I can’t help but hope that everyone keeps it up. Well, except for Diablo Cody—no one really needs to OD on fried fats in grease, do they?
It’s been three years since I visited Washington state, and Kerry of Federal Way just had to make me homesick by sending photos from the West Coast Chainsaw Carving Competition. I’ve been there before! It’s fun and noisy.
It’s just as well I didn’t go this year: I would not have been able to resist this.
I don’t think it would have fit in an overhead storage bin, either.
You can ignore the gushy science-groupie parts of this post (it just makes me blush, and wonder where all these girls were when I was single*), but the movie—which is on a completely different topic altogether—but the imbedded movie is hilarious.
*It was so long ago, they probably hadn’t even been conceived yet, I know. It’s OK, though, I found my science groupie, and I only really needed one.
Gosh, I think I like it. Grrlscientist dug up this automatic Advertising Slogan Generator, and here’s what it tells me my new website slogan should be.
Does She or Doesn’t She? Only Her Pharyngula Knows for Sure.
Yes, ladies, it’s true: I do know. Don’t blush; it’s OK, it’s perfectly natural.
I remember 1968, and I remember that I was into comic books at that age…but I sure don’t remember that the patriarchy was this dominant, and clueless.
Remember, kids, be nice to your girlfriends so that they’ll squelch any uppity feminists who threaten your dominance!
I had my credit card out and everything—doesn’t everyone want a Death Ray?
(via collision detection)
I mentioned that cringe-inducing hemipenectomy that some spiders do…well, Stan Schwarz had to one-up me and sent a link to an image of an example of full genital splitting (if you click that link, you’re probably safe; it’s a very tiny thumbnail image. Click on that, though, and all bets are off). I have no idea why any human being would want to do that—it looks like a very creepy meat butterfly in the guy’s crotch. If that description alone grosses you out, you definitely don’t want to click on that link. Move along, move along.
Quite a few people sent me a link to this Foxtrot comic with the remote-controlled squid.
They were all just trying to tease me cruelly, because they knew it would be my favorite summertime pool toy, and they don’t exist. I looked everywhere, but the closest I could get was a remote-controlled robot shark, which is only almost as good.
Although, if we could mount laser beams on their heads…
