Humor

They laugh now, but within 10 years the city's entire criminal class will have quit to work on space research. See more excellence at xkcd.

There was an interesting article "'Significant Amount' of Water Found on Moon" which was also followed by "Water on Moon Propaganda". While the former is interesting, the latter is quite entertaining.  I tried to see if it was related to the phases of the moon (it wasn't).  I thought perhaps it could be linked to Friday the 13th (it couldn't). This left only one thing.  Smaller brains. In any case, it's going to be difficult to not find many more things to attribute to this new phase of human evolution.  Pint-sized brains are obviously the future.

An article entitled "Humans Still Evolving as Our Brains Shrink" was simply too good to pass up.  At first I looked for a correlation with news reporting (thinking about a station named after the genera Vulpes). Of course, one of the comments referred to a movie called "Idiocracy" which may well turn out to be prophetic.  Kurt Vonnegut's "Galapagos" also comes to mind.  In any case, I suspect this is an unexpected turn in natural selection that we can all have some fun with.

*Laws that should be formally on the books but sadly are only known in the collective Geek conscious. Matt Blum of Wired writes, "There are many, many laws having nothing to do with government, that are useful to know because they tell you something about how the universe works. There are Newton’s laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics, Boyle’s law, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, among dozens more." It is unfortunate, Blum says, that there aren’t more widely-accepted axioms to help geeks define the characteristics of our world. For example, if you’ve ever been involved in a…

I don't know what it says about me that I love this stuff. Probably nothing good. Perhaps Weird Al Yankovic could do a rendition of CCR's Fortunate Son. Some folks are born to test emission spectrumsOoh, those flames are red, white and blueAnd when iPod plays "The Elements" songOoh, they point the platinum wire at you, Lord It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no laboratory rat, sonIt ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no formaldehyde son, noYeah! Etc... H/T to TFD.

A friend, John Kovalic, once quipped "I now have more social networks than I have friends."  So for today, a trio of social media webtoons.  The first is Cat and Girl, the other two are from ThisIsIndexed.com.  Enjoy! Alex, the Daytime Astronomer Tues&Fri here, via RSS feed, and twitter @skydayRead about my own private space venture in The Satellite Diaries

Carl Sagan conjectured that early diurnal mammals feasted on the eggs of nocturnal dinosaurs. He remarked whimsically that a modern breakfast of chicken eggs is among the few relics of our immemorial joust against the dragons. So I think he wouldn’t mind that I spoof his book’s title for this nonsense column. When you carve that other relic, the Thanksgiving turkey, be sure to ask your physicist guests whether they want light matter or dark matter. Gaah, can you get over the fact that they’ve lost more than 90% of the universe’s mass? (I'll need to lose some mass after Thanksgiving dinner;…

For chemists For ID and IT For Josh (and other Ohio natives) H/T to TFD.

Today I was dewildered (or belighted) to discover that visits to my blog had skyrocketed overnight. But why? What could thirteen hundred and forty-one visitors have found so riveting about yesterday's post? Was it the zombie fungus? The carrion plant? Well, obviously it had to be the vampire squid. Shy as they may seem to me, they must have a following. Maybe a cult. Maybe there are secret enclaves all over the world, where people gather to paint cirri onto their arms, tuck slender yellow tentacles into their armpits, and flash luminous organs at one another in the night. (Never mind that…

Awesome. H/t to The Daily What and the huz.