that's a lot of fucking spiders
"Spiders weave huge natural wonder in B.C."
[...] Brian Thair of the College of New Caledonia in Prince George said he saw a silky, white web stretching 60 hectares across a field. "When you see horror movies with spider web festooned from this place to that place and so on, it comes nowhere near approaching what occurred in this field," Thair told CBC Radio's As It Happens.
A typical barbwire fence on wood posts surrounded the field about six kilometres east of McBride in the Robson Valley. Thair said it looked like the whole area was covered with an opaque, white plastic grocery store bag.
The thin, elastic coasting was not soft and fluffy like webs built by individual spiders. There were about two spiders per square centimetre laying the silk. [...]
There were "in the order of tens of millions of spiders running frantically back and forth," but they weren't interacting with each other. [...]
"Or maybe it was an effort collectively by these spiders to try and catch a sheep."
what fire looks like in freefall
Fire Behaves Very Oddly in SpaceThe flames had broken apart into tiny balls that moved around like UFOs. "I thought I had done something wrong," he recalled. Some of his colleagues didn't believe him when he described the experiment. Indeed, "it was ridiculous. No one had ever seen anything like it." [...]
"Flame balls are the weakest flames we have," says Ronney. "Compared to a birthday candle's 50 to 100 watts, a flame ball produces only 1 to 2 watts of thermal power. They burn using very little fuel. It's almost as if a hydrogen-burning flame's last line of defense as it approaches extinction is to draw itself into a simple ball." [...]
Joan Jett on Rolling Stone
Dear Rolling Stone,
I tried to find some cleverly worded way to express my disgust with your "Women in Rock" issue, but what i have to say is really quite simple: You guys are completely retarded.
<LJ-CUT text=" --More--( 5%) ">
By RS standards, Rock is no longer a style of music but a trendy costume to be whipped up by expensive stylists and slapped onto the latest pop tart barbie doll. Give a girl some tight pants and a spiky bracelet and POOF! She ROCKS!
Your poor choice of cover girls and featured artists brings to mind the Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions. There is nothing necessarily wrong with the breast-baring models inside..but we all understand that they have NOTHING TO DO WITH SPORTS--Which just might be offensive to women who are interested in sports or who might even be (gasp) real athletes.
Yes, Britney has a talented stylist and yes, somebody gave Shakira a Guns & Roses t-shirt to wear..but they ARE NOT NOW NOR WILL THEY EVER BE ROCK.
Maybe it's naive of me to expect any glimmer of rock'n'roll credibility OR respect for women from a magazine whose cover shot is regularly a naked underweight actress. The thing is , I AM a woman musician with a rock band, and as we all are I am STARVED for any little crumb of recognition that real women rockers might be thrown. So like a sucker I find myself short another five bucks ..and pissed enough to write my first letter to an editor. Avril Lavigne gets some studded accessories from Hot Topic so now she's "upholding the brazen tradition of teenage outrage"???!! Are you SERIOUS? And could someone please explain to me why people keep insisting on referring to PINK as rock? Wasn't she doing the white girl hip hop thing a minute ago? Yeah, she performed on the Aerosmith tribute show --big deal..she was on the Janet Jackson tribute show just before that--Whatever's trendy. WHO CARES. She's a Spice Girl reject...but I digress.
Jewel and Mandy friggin' Moore have full page features as Rock Icons...Meanwhile Joan Jett gets one line. ONE LINE. Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, who have never stopped touring, recently did 10 days in the Middle East playing for the troops stationed in Afghanistan. In AFGHANISTAN, Joan would come onstage wearing a birkha, which she ripped off and stomped on before blazing through the purest and nastiest rock show ANYWHERE. But even in the RS WOMEN IN ROCK issue, a story like that gets ONE SENTENCE on the bottom of the last page of Random Notes.
Britney's Rock credentials? Well, she butchers the song "I Love Rock'n'Roll" on her latest record, and when asked about it the genius replies "Well, I've always loved Pat Benatar." And SHE is your Rock issue cover girl?? You should be REALLY embarrassed.
Sleater Kinney was the only rock group listed on the cover..and they got only half a page. Ashanti, the r&b back up singer who can't seem to do anything without "featuring Jah Rule," has two pages.
What about the Donnas? The Yeah Yeah Yeahs? The Distillers? A mag like RS has the power to shine important light on groups like these--instead they are afterthoughts, and that valuable spotlight is wasted on the same overexposed pop princesses WHO HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH ROCK.
In your own letter from the editor you have the hypocritical balls to say "rock radio won't touch female artists, while the pop factory keeps churning out soundalike clones, and ambitious musicians with something to say find themselves left out in the cold."
The pages that follow those words are a blatant display that Rolling Stone magazine is happily working for the factory now too.
If the issue had been called "Women in Music"..or maybe "Some Cute Girls with Top 10 Records out Right Now"..I would have no beef with it. Corny as it may sound, ROCK is something which is still meaningful and even sacred to some of us. Use the word "rock" in bold letters next to a picture of Britney Fucking Spears, and you're turning your whole publication into a joke...and an offensive joke at that.
Joan Jett
this image is gonna stick with me for sure
WOULD you describe your girlfriend, covered in blood, as being dressed in a clown's costume? Maybe if you are on drugs.
That is probably what happened to UK couple Jason Morris, 29, and Samantha Court, 28.
After taking designer drug GHB, Morris pulled out 18 of Miss Court's teeth with a pair of pliers.
GHB, originally used as an anaesthetic, can cause hallucinations if taken in excess, reported Ananova.
Morris denies inflicting grievous bodily harm on his girlfriend.
A court heard how Miss Court was found in bed, covered in blood, in the early hours of April 16 this year.
Morris was talking about his girlfriend's body being dressed in a clown's costume and a witch taking Miss Court away through a wall.
Prosecution lawyer Paul Treble said: 'Paramedics had already been called to the couple's home and Morris had been heard saying that his girlfriend's teeth were not her own.'
The couple calmed down and the ambulance crew left.
But later a neighbour heard Morris say several times 'open your mouth' followed by what appeared to be Miss Court mumbling.
Mr Treble alleged that it was Morris pulling out Miss Court's teeth and placing them in a bowl.
look, I've invented the wheel
| Astronomy Picture of the Day | apod | I wish this one had the pictures inline, but they name the image files non-predictably, so that would be expensive. |
| Die Puny Humans | diepunyhumans | Warren Ellis |
| This Modern World | modrnwrld_comic | The comic, from Salon. |
| This Modern World | modrnwrld_blog | Tom Tomorrow's blog (I had previously added another feed of this at thismodernw_com that gets parse errors; it probably ought to be deleted.) |
| The Straight Dope | thestraightdope | Subjects only, not article bodies. |
| Examiner Bondage Files | bondagefiles | Goofy news stories. |
| Wil Wheaton | wilwheaton2 | This is a full feed; wilwheaton only has the first half sentence of each entry. |
| True Porn Clerk Stories | pornclrkstories |
If you know of other sites that I ought to be reading 5x/day but am not, please let me know. Maybe I'll hack those into Cheesegrater too.
BTW, I notice that a lot of people are subscribed to dictionary_wotd; this can only be because they don't know about wordoftheday, which is the same thing, but with inline definitions.
Update: Added redmeat_rss and webster_wotd and space_com
Update: ...and memepool2
SewerBotics!
Ever think the last mile could end in your bathroom?
A small but determined group of companies say that stringing fiber through city sewers is the answer to high-speed access. [...]
For its part, CityNet claims to use a variety of approaches to getting the cable installed, although it relies mainly on a specialized robot called SAM (short for Sewer Access Module) that's made by Ka-Te System AG, a Zurich-based vendor. SAM puts rings into pipes, then runs conduit and cable via those rings. The advantage of SAM, CityNet says, is that SAM can enter sewers that can't be accessed by humans. Once it's installed the fiber, it can be used to maintain and troubleshoot the cable as well. SAM can be used in a range of irregularly shaped pipes measuring as small as eight inches.
Ca-botics contends its technique, called STAR (Sewer Telecommunication Access by Robot), is faster than ring-based approaches like CityNet's and can work in smaller pipes. STAR works by embedding small hooks or anchors into the pipe, then threading specially designed cable through the pipeline. [...]
