Swans on Tea

The Quantum Pontiff on Occupational Arrows of Time
Time goes up, damnit, and that’s all there is to it. Or so say the physicists writing on their blackboards.
Oh I hear you. Yes there are physicists for which time doesn’t always go up, but which can also go up but also in a circle. Yes, Virginia, general [...]

File this under “What were they thinking?” Someone has to be exceedingly innocent or stupid to have approved Dora the Explorer Aquapet

In silliness.
Now it’s the biologists’ turn. Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature
An, um, taste of the offerings
Dorcus titanus Boisduval, 1835 (stag beetle)
Doryctes fartus Provancher, 1880 (braconid)
Enema pan (Fabricius), 1775 (rhinoceros beetle)
Eremobates inyoanus Muma and Brookhart, 1988 (solpugid) Inyo is the county where it was first found.
Fartulum Carpenter, 1857 (tiny caecid gastropod) It is rather like a [...]

Roundest objects in the world created
[A]n international group of engineers and craftsmen has . . . built a pair of nearly perfect spheres that are thought to be the roundest objects in the world.
The unusual balls, discussed last week at the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference in France, were created as an answer to [...]