Swans on Tea

There were a few press-release pictures that went along with the ribbon-cutting ceremony I mentioned a few weeks back. Here’s one that was used in an announcement, and I can’t help imagining an alternate caption for the picture.

Something along the lines of VP restrained while attacking crowd with giant scissors
That’s the new building in [...]

Scientific illiteracy all the rage among the glitterati
[T]op prize went to the lifestyle guru Carole Caplin for denouncing a study showing that vitamin supplements offer little or no health benefits as “rubbish” – it is the third year on the run that she has been mentioned in the review. Science author and GP Ben Goldacre [...]

Get it?
I think someone could remake Spartacus as a present-day story of a huge conglomerate, corrupted by its greed, and how it crushes an attempt by some employees to split off and form their own company. The Roman Senate becomes the board of directors/senior management, who like to make the junior employees (or interns) [...]

Rock balancing
I saw rock stacks all over the place when I visited the beaches at Monterey in October. Nothing as advanced as the ones depicted in the link, though.

Foxtrot shows the importance of metric for some football players

Buzzwords of 2008
Missing from the list is blogohedron, “popularized” by … me (sort of), so really it’s not a surprise. I just happened to see Brian Switek using it at Laelaps, and acknowledging Blake Stacey for it, and Blake crediting me in the comments (and, BTW, the link is a good summary of a [...]

Mr. Faraday’s (most excellent) experimental researches in electricity (1831)
I started to investigate Faraday’s writings while working on a post about Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Coming Race, which quotes Faraday to justify B-L’s fictional source of energy, vril. This led me back through Faraday’s monumental collection of researches on electricity, a collection of over 25 [...]

It’s just 7:30. In stark contrast to just a few years ago, nobody else is up yet. There was a time when my nieces would be staring at the clock, impatiently waiting for the agreed-upon time when they were allowed to wake everyone else up. No more. They’re teenagers.
And here is [...]

Moment of Clarity at Abstruse Goose

Expect scattered posts to continue for the next two weeks. I’m off to the Great White North-of-the-Pennsylvania-Border.
My recent blogging has been light; I’m in my fantasy football league Superbowl for the first time, and these players require constant monitoring. (Two weeks ago I was way behind and implored my defense (Cardinals): rather [...]

A few years back there was an email at work announcing a winter holiday door decorating contest. I took this as carte blanche to put up my Christmas cartoons, some of which I wouldn’t have otherwise put on public display. My theme was “A not very Norman Rockwell Christmas”
There was no contest the [...]

The Periodic Table of Awesoments
In the 300 B.C., years before the birth of black Jesus, Aristole postulated that all good things were made of “win.” That was a pretty good guess, but he was drunk and probably also having an orgy. Modern day awesominers know there are actually 118 fundamental “awesoments” that compose all good [...]