Some days, I just have to get the cephalopod obsession out of my system with a quick purge of links from the mailbag.
Robot tentacles (via Amygdala)
Ancient octopus cartoon (via Holbo)
I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news for Clara Jean Brown.
Worried about the safety of her family during a stormy Memorial Day trip to the beach, Clara Jean Brown stood in her kitchen and prayed for their safe return as a strong thunderstorm rumbled through Baldwin County, Alabama.
But while she prayed, lightning suddenly exploded, blowing through the linoleum and leaving a blackened area on the concrete. Brown wound up on the floor, dazed and disoriented by the blast but otherwise uninjured.
She said ‘Amen’ and the room was engulfed in a huge ball of fire. The 65-year-old Brown said she is blessed to be alive.
The bad news is that God hates her and is trying to kill her. The good news is that he’s gotten incompetent in his dotage. I mean, lightning and a fireball? And both missed? Hey, God, here’s a suggestion: next time, use Magic Missile. It doesn’t do as much damage, but it never misses, and heck, she’s a little old lady—she probably doesn’t have much in the way of hit points.
(via Phil)
Call me perverse, but my first thought on seeing this kid was that I desperately want to see an x-ray of the pectoral girdle. It looks to me from this one picture that the lower arm must lack a scapula or a clavicle, or at best have fragments with screwy and probably nonfunctional connections. I don’t understand why the doctors are even arguing about which arm could be more functional, if the article is correct. Or why they’re even considering it important to lop one off: if there aren’t circulatory defects or it isn’t impairing the function of the ‘best’ arm, why take a knife to him?
Poor kid. It does look like a very weird and fascinating developmental aberration, though, and it sounds like there are other internal asymmetries that are going to make life rough for him.
Lots of people have been sending me the link to the Vintage Octopus Pulp Covers site. It’s very cool.
It makes me wonder why so many people are infatuated with cephalopods, though. Weirdos.
Here’s a applet that traverses the html of a web page and turns it into a pretty graph. There is an online explanation and examples, too—and here’s Pharyngula.
The dots are color coded specific classes of html tags. That red flower at the top, for instance, is a table—the Friday Random Ten turned into a kind of carnation.
(via BioCurious)
This is an X-ray of a sick duck with something unusual in its gut.
Aaaaah! It’s an alien! Or a demon! Or a run-of-the-mill instance of apophenia. The bird rescue center that discovered it is playing it up as an alien for PR purposes (hey, it’s California), but we know better, right?
My metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology is all discombobulated now—Dave has found an artificial enhancement of the spectacle perch that implies that perhaps this is not the best of all possible worlds.
Just wait—I have an inside scoop on amazing insights into biology that will definitely win me a Nobel prize. I have to thank Eve for leading me to this incredible prophetic knowledge.
My schedule for the first 3 weeks of June was looking hectic, so it was actually with some sense of relief that I flipped open the PDA and scribbled in the fact that a comet will smash into the earth on 25 May.
I haven’t yet been confident enough to erase all my post-apocalyptic appointments, though. I figure the cataclysm will do that for me.
Ken Cope sent me this link to Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006.
He did not tell me to drop acid before watching it, and he could have at least warned me about the epileptic seizures I’d be having near the end (the ending itself, though, is beautiful).
And what’s with all the hostility towards cephalopods?
