Found a cool new real-time blog, like the Dracula one but non-fiction.
Lolz, we're gonna pwn the Antarctic!
Dog 'saves' sleep condition woman
Ooh, here's one for the wishlist next to Cold Reading by Ian Rowland...
And now, Windows tips via someone on Yammer.
Clicking Start > Run (or pressing Windows key + R if, like me, you are a keyboard man) and typing the abbreviation "clipbrd" will bring up the clipboard viewer.
Clicking Start > Run and typing "flipbrd" will bring up a picture of Bill Gates giving you the finger.
View the original post at Black Dog Blog
Pet labrador which 'knew train timetable' dies (shut up, it is not a slow news day!1!)
Read the original story too, linked in the sidebar. That signalman is after my own heart.
Police making arrests 'just to gather DNA samples'
Colours, sounds and moving objects
HIV infections and deaths fall as drugs have impact
The worldwide stats are really interesting.
Grandmother monkeys care for baby
I bet this guy is the new football sex symbol. Ladies?
This article also wins for coining a slightly more disturbing variant of "it's not rocket science":
"We're not building an atomic bomb," he points out. "You just have to use the right quantities, and the right ingredients."
View the original post at Black Dog Blog
(If someone were to give me a Wave Bubble for Christmas, chances are high that I'd wuv them forever for months.)
Mussolini's 'brain and blood for sale on internet' – presumably to frustrated commuters for vodou purposes
Astronaut on space shuttle Atlantis becomes a father – more impressive if it was "becomes a mother"...
Galileo gives Church the finger from a Florence museum. Wait, did I read that right?
Iraqi children attend a pretend maths class
(Hel yes I went there.)
And finally, fabbydabbydoo pictures of nature pwnage.
View the original post at Black Dog Blog
(Picture = cutest brindle mastiff EVAR TODAY.)
Dog survives 65ft plunge into sea, looks nervously at RNLI rescuers licking their lips.
Shackleton's whisky to be dug up
Bitter divorcees 'using children'
It's arseholes like this who should be stopped from marrying, not them scary scary gays.
Megaloceros giganteus (giant deer) starved to death during ice age. Clearly they didn't think of storing their booze in a nearby glacier.
"That means that mainland giant deer had some sort of refugia from the Ice Age before they met their ultimate extinction; they were able to move to a better environment and survive later," says Ms Chritz. BBC
And that, my UK friends, is why moose go to Iceland.
View the original post at Black Dog Blog
Rare Barbastelle bat found on the Isle of Wight
White hind caught on camera in Scotland; Queens Susan, Lucy, Kings Peter, Edmund, seen rushing to site
This article can't make up its mind whether the hind (which is a female deer) should be referred to as "it" or "she". Come on, folks, language guidelines should state that if an animal's sex is known, he or she should be referred to appropriately. Possibly non-sexually-dimorphic arthropods and small fish could be exempt, but it's stupid to refer to a queen bee or ant drone as "it".
Dog lost in Afghan battle returns. Again with the "its"! What is this rudeness? To a war veteran, no less! (Oh, sorry, Sabi, I meant to say war experienced person.)
28,000 people in the UK have black and white television sets.
Nu Labour in a nutshell:
The superstitions around opening an umbrella indoors apparently date back to the Ancient Egyptians.
Nurse shark? This one's a midwife.
Smart wife launches her own entrapment operation to catch her paedophile husband in the act. Also, they live in Pantygog.
Chile says "thanks but no thanks" to statue of authoritarian paedophile-abetting misogynist with creepy Virgin Mary fixation. Sadly not on those grounds, just because of an underground car park.
This one's fascinating: Traditional African rulers should apologise for the role they played in the slave trade, a Nigerian rights group has said.
'I agreed to become a suicide bomber' – after days of beatings and being shouted at, poor kid. I admire him.
Greek Church throws a hissy fit about a ban on "the compulsory display of crucifixes" in classrooms.
Darwin foiled by ambulance service
Lion is taken on midnight safari. Disapproves of stop signs but enjoyed drive-thru.
View the original post at Black Dog Blog
Forest pursues 'dark sky' status. Galloway is in the south of Scotland. This would be the first certified 'dark sky' place outside the USA (which you'd think would have a natural advantage in the sheer amount of less-populated space over there).
Dolphin football off north coast
Massive killer whale pod sighted
"I'm utterly lost for words" – well shut up, then; your yapping isn't adding to the moment here!
Royal award for fold-up bike man
Swedes divided over bunny biofuel
Slightly misleading picture of a pet bunny. We're talking about dead wild rabbits. Given a bunch of dead rabbits after a cull that would have happened regardless, you can incinerate them, toss them into a mass grave or try to put them to some kind of use. Left up to me, well, somebody's doggies would have some very nice gourmet cooked meals.
Dogs who attacked child will be destroyed
I wonder how many of the roughly 50% of UK inhabitants who oppose the death penalty for humans (I know, frighteningly low number) would also oppose it for dogs.
Delay formal lessons 'to age six'
I dunno. If we can trust parents to teach and engage their kids in the meantime, that'd be good. And then there's the question of if parents can afford to stay at home and teach their kids (and in an ideal world the answer to this should be absolutely yes). Not necessarily formal lesson-style learning, but socialisation, zoo, finger-painting, all the stuff a kid needs to experience.
My concern (as usual) is about gifted kids especially, and stunted potential all around. I needed to start reading at age two, and if I hadn't had a minion on hand to teach me, it would've been rubbish.
"Everybody is used to science fiction featuring science that seems, well, not very scientific."
Er, if we're being pedantic, I beg to dub that 'science fantasy' or soft SF, not cool hard sci-fi. But continue.
Welcome to the world of sci-fi science
View the original post at Black Dog Blog
In today's "won't you walk into my parlour" news...
Cat Party to recruit mice, Nazi party to admit Jews, Roma, disabled people, and: BNP to consider non-white members.
Vatican to host Galileo exhibit. Sounds fabtastic. I'd like to see it.
Nice try, kid, but no cigar. Of course, he will have learned much from this preliminary attempt.
Israel taking a leaf out of the Bush administration's books. I'll be interested to see if Obama takes action on this kind of thing. America's about the only country to whom they're remotely likely to listen, and at least the "We Take the Book of Revelation Literally, Roll On Battle of Megiddo" loon squad are no longer in power.
Seal pups: look cute, but don't approach or you could cause them to starve.
Beautiful microscopy photos of blood cells and nerves.
Adults with autism 'cast adrift' in England
This, er, wow. So what are Auschwitz's five favourite singers and which Heroes character would Auschwitz be? Now we can find out. Er.
RIVAL CHILD OVERACHIEVER! It is so cute pathetic that at age 27 I still feel threatened by this kind of brat... oh man... issues. ;D
These poor kids, on the other hand, are lucky if they can learn at all.
Finally, I have to post this for you lot for the name alone. North Korea's Hotel of DOOM.
(Not to be confused with Latveria's Doctor of Doom or Disneyland's Tower of Terror, of course.)
View the original post at Black Dog Blog
"I felt I'd test my hypothesis and I did that by getting my cat certified by a number of the most prominent lay hypnosis organisations in the United States. It was a frighteningly simple process."
Cat registered as hypnotherapist
Look at the picture of the cat, though. That's an intense expression – every bit as convincing as Derren Brown. And less trustworthy.
'Lying down' NHS staff reinstated
Honour killings given Bollywood flavour
Uruguay approves sex change bill, jubilant blogger tries desperately not to type "You mean Uragay lol lol :D"
Cut them off with a rusty butter knife.
I don't celebrate Hallowe'en, but that Methodist minister has just caused me to drink some water as a proxy libation to Bau and Anubis (which I reasoned ought to count as Satan in his book). Self-important arsenoses like Rev Jonathan Campbell make Satanism look more attractive than do 19-year-old skinhead trick-or-treaters or noisy drunk people having fun.
Yes they should – why don't they already?!
Berners-Lee 'sorry' for slashes, fanfiction writers up in arms
New flying reptile fossils found
View the original post at Black Dog Blog
Egypt to become den of vice and harlots with visible eyes
Saudi to become den of vice, mixed-sex conversations and literate car-driving harlots
Witch schools. I wonder why this upsets me so much less than Christian missionaries doing the same. Probably some ill-defined idea of cultural naturalness.
World's oldest POWs returned home
These people are spawning 10+ mini-mes and imbuing them with their Invisible Magic Friend disease while Brits raise one or two apiece and teach them about things like open minds. Something's going wrong here. Something's going very wrong.
In shock news, several gay Conservatives have been found to be able to live with themselves.
The latest craze to hit New York: Text My Beaver.
View the original post at Black Dog Blog
I wish this clip were on YouTube. I was dipping in and out of Channel 4's 9/11 documentary this morning because someone else was watching it on tape. Really nice filmmaking, incidentally – letting their good selection of clips speak for themselves. Nevertheless, one moment more than others made my blood run cold and my bloodlust run hot.
It's around 01:14:53, if you're able to watch it on 4OD from your location.
It's a soundbite/interview with a sane-looking (as far as anyone can judge) American chap in Times Square during the Twin Towers attacks – filmed before the second tower fell, while people were just standing watching it broadcast live on various screens. "My personal opinion is, we should go to Finland and all those Arab countries and just blow them up. Kill them. That's it. Honestly. Kill them."
Yes, I ran it back and I'm sure he said Finland. This fellow wasn't alone among those filmed in immediately demanding that somebody be invaded (and there were clips of women as well as men saying so), although he was the only one I saw who demonstrably thought Finland was in the Middle East.
Honestly, America, sometimes you make it hard for me to think you didn't deserve Dubya.
Don't get me wrong, though, I'd be out for someone's blood if anyone did this in my country, but I'd wait until I knew it was 'Arabs' – and perhaps even find out which particular Arabs – before invading them.
Well, I just found that an interesting and chilling insight.
View the original post at Black Dog Blog
Newly-elected British National Party MEP Nick Griffin inflamed racial sensibilities once again this afternoon when he insisted that protesters not throw eggs at him unless they had first separated the yellows from the whites.
People in the audience vocally disapproved of this, and as a result Griffin was hit by a boo meringue.
edit: OK, this is nuts. If this joke ends up on t' telly – 8 out of 10 Cats, recording Thursday evening for broadcast Friday night – it's all down to one of my colleagues retweeting it on Twitter. It will be stolen rather than credited to me, but I can confirm that I originated the joke over email and that I am awesome, and that you should all buy my book (chapter 1 free to read on the web). ;)
I've finally given in and started tweeting. @suitov
edit2: Didn't make it into the show, apparently. Hee. Clearly I'll have to start broadcasting witticisms to the world more often.
View the original post at Black Dog Blog
118 118 man seen in Marmite
It may not be immediately obvious to everyone, but one family is convinced they can see the mascot of a directory enquiry service on the lid of a jar of Marmite.
Claire Allen, 36, said she was the first to notice the image on the underside of the lid as she was putting the yeast spread on her son's toast.
Her husband Gareth, 37, said he could not believe his eyes when he saw it.
Mr Allen, of Ystrad, Rhondda, said: "The kids are still eating it, but we kept the lid."
He explained: "Claire saw it first and called her dad to come and take a photo of it.
"When I first looked at it I wasn't sure, but when I moved it away from me it started coming out. I thought yeah, she's right - that's the moustache bloke from the adverts.
Mrs Allen told the South Wales Echo: "Straight away Jamie said "that looks like 118″, and my other boys (Robbie, four, and Tomas, 11) even said they could see a face.
"People might think I'm nuts, but I like to think it's 118 118 looking out for us.
"We've had a tough couple of months; my mum's been really ill and it's comforting to think that the jogging man from a commercial directory enquiries company advert is watching over us."
Read the original story here. Doesn't make much more sense than my parody, does it?
So I've been was agonising with colleagues about how this was ever considered to be 'news' within the BBC's remit to inform (no), educate (...no) and entertain (?).
Other text services are available, including AQA, which has sexy goffboi harlots working for it.
And now it's time for....
Psalm or Marmite advert?
Marmite advertisements use the attention-grabbing tactic of claiming you may hate their product.
But are the following quotations prophecies from the psalms associated with Jesus, or adverts for the goopy black stuff? You decide!!!!
- "More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause"
- "You either love it or hate it"
- "All who hate me whisper together against me"
Marmite's next campaign: "For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. Some of whom will eat peanut butter. Shun them. Shun them."
View the original post at Black Dog Blog
Certain brain areas could be linked to sociability, or so a study suggests.
I don't see how a study on just 41 people could possibly be valuable.
Go ahead, speculate that autistics' brains are underdeveloped, that's fiiiiiiiine. Just don't impugn our taste for chocolate, please.
edit: Good dog.
View the original post at HellHound.net
US teacher broke law by describing creationism as 'superstitious nonsense'.
Creationism is superstitious nonsense. So are most religious beliefs. I live in the UK and am not a government employee, or indeed anyone with editorial responsibility, so either live with it or tell me my atheism is superstitious nonsense. Atheism1 is a treasured part of my identity too, but the law and I give you express permission to whinge about it all you want.
I don't know if this is the teacher's actual words being quoted, but if he truly said he had an "unequivocal belief that creationism is superstitious nonsense", how can that be attacked under the First Amendment?
If we're getting petty, this judge's ruling breaks the First A. Emphasis mine:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
So there. Anyway—I'm not particularly bothered by the finding represented by the headline.
The most interesting part for me is that most of the teacher's comments were protected. They include, in appropriate contexts, "when you put on your Jesus glasses, you can't see the truth", "conservatives don't want women to avoid pregnancies - that's interfering with God's work" and "[there's as much evidence that Jehovah created the world] as there is that there is a gigantic spaghetti monster living behind the moon who did it".
Those statements are now protected by law or precedent or something, which gives the good guys some kind of framework within which to work.
Should we care about animals? Discussion of animal ethics.
From Julian Baggini's answer:
The simplest and clearest motivation for taking animal welfare seriously is the recognition that pain is in and of itself a bad thing, and that to inflict significant amounts of it unnecessarily is wrong. Of course, until you cash out "significant" and "unnecessarily", the principle remains vague, but without these qualifications, the rule is a clearly nonsense.
From HE Baber's answer:
In fact there is no principled way to sort all and only humans into one moral category and everything else into another, so we face a moral dilemma. Either we hold that there is no objective criterion grounding moral consideration or we hold that when it comes to common practice we fall short.
They may post more responses; I'm not sure. Just those two at time of writing.
If I had a Retriever, I'd admit to kissing him or her good morning.
So here's a thought. When it comes to ethical choices regarding companion animals, if in any doubt, substitute "my infant child" for "my dog" and see how you feel about it then.
Following that principle, and if we allow (although I realise some (particularly in parts of the US?) don't) that debarking and declawing are not defensible, you won't find much that's morally taxing or lifestyle-inhibiting until we get to neutering. Because I wouldn't permit an infant child in my care to be sterilised, I'm forced to adopt the view that spaying and neutering companion animals is wrong. Putting that into practice, of course, as Baber points out, is difficult.
Our dogs weren't spayed, although Bracken had a hysterectomy in adulthood to cure a bad infection. Our male cat, however, is neutered. I do think if I ever own a cat I still would have it sterilised, albeit with qualms, but not a dog. Handling bitches in season is fine; we had doggy equivalents of panty pads for ours, and most people in suburbia these days don't let their entire males roam the streets. Males are easy to control, although that seems to have escaped my father, whose entire male Labrador regularly drags his bedding outdoors after meals and copulates with it.
I have seen neuters and spays performed on cats, and noted the enormous difference between the operation on a tom (literally 30 seconds. Slash, snip, snip, done) and the operation on a female (much longer and more invasive). For that reason alone, given that I would have a cat neutered, I would be much more likely to own a male cat than a female.
1 Actually, technically, that treasured part of my identity is better described as "intelligence" and "freethinking cynicism with a generous helping of Occam", because I don't define myself by negatives. Except perhaps that I'm not blond. And, of course, that I'm not the werewolf/saboteur/traitor/cylon.
If you think it's funny for a self-described neuter (-gendered individual) to be arguing about neutering, I agree.
View the original post at HellHound.net
Even now, in the stillness of death, the huge jaws seemed to be dripping with a bluish flame and the small, deep-set, cruel eyes were ringed with fire. I placed my hand upon the glowing muzzle, and as I held them up my own fingers smouldered and gleamed in the darkness.
"Phosphorus," I said.
"A cunning preparation of it," said Holmes, sniffing at the dead animal.
Glow in the dark pups aid science
("Critics argue it's playing god, but scientists point out that what we're looking at is in fact playing dogs.")
View the original post at HellHound.net
Oh Buddha, not... effeminately-shaped eyebrows!!1onetynine11!!!
Children's Laureates choose best books of all time. Just William ++, Treasure Island of course, Harry Potter nowhere on the list.
Also, I want a Psammead. They're rewarding companions. Just don't get them wet or feed them after midnight.
Israel renames unkosher swine flu
View the original post at HellHound.net
'Ill' worker fired over Facebook
The death of 100% (mostly-stupid article about something that truly annoys me)
Appeal for chocolate volunteers gets - surprise! - 1,500 replies
If I have this right, the choice was between compulsory school ethics lessons (the current policy) and the option not to attend ethics lessons and to take religious lessons (already exist as voluntary, occur out of school hours, poorly attended) instead. I find the idea of opting out of normal life and taking a closed scripture study group instead slightly disturbing.
So, Berlin, even though it was actually rejected by default because none of you turned up to vote, have a sanity cookie on me.
Rare albino buffalo seen in Kenya
h4x! A /b/ user explains (and claims credit for) their flooding of the Time Magazine 100 poll.
Oh for a personal army of these guys. In before not.
Twitter your prayer says Cardinal
Post your tweet ideas in the comments. 140 characters or less, must begin @our-father (or @anubis, @suitov, @narasimha or other deity of your choice. Can't speak for the others, but I don't monitor my Twitter account).
Currently enjoying this Easter-themed radio interview [MP3] from Landover Baptist Church. PTL!
edit: Saw this advert on TV and liked it (what, an arrangement of This Little Light of Mine that I didn't hate?!), and the Vimeo page adds something special to it.
View the original post at HellHound.net
Artist sculpts massive sand tiger
Sewing machine hoax hits Saudi Arabia (I suspect Snog of involvement.)
I never knew real wombats were so cute...
New limits to Antarctic tourism
Parties to the Antarctic Treaty agreed to limit the size of cruise ships and the number of tourists taken ashore at a meeting in the US city of Baltimore.
That's... great, but I'm not sure what it has to do with Antarctica.
Obama to regulate 'pollutant' CO2
Oh Obama, we all wish you'd got in 8 years ago when there was still some kind of hope. At least thank to you our ecosphere may yet leave a good-looking corpse.
Cult author JG Ballard dies at 78
View the original post at HellHound.net
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