Blogs

Fans of NotAlwaysRight.com will enjoy the Twitter handle @GuestsFromHELL, a collection of purportedly real quotes from real tourists in New York City.  You'll note that I use the word "real" in the vein of "someone really just asked that question?"

I learned a little trivia while watching the film Answer This in preparation for today's interview with writer and director Chris Farah.

For one, I learned that the chemical symbol for Potassium is "K." I also learned that one should never, ever forget the lyrics to any song by the New Seekers, and, most important, I learned this:

Those little Trivia Pursuit tokens are not called "pies," or "pie pieces." They're called "wedges" And apparently, that is a really, really important thing to know.

Today's story on resurrected proteins developed by Australian scientists to fight superbugs pointed to the wallaby as the source for their idea. You see, when that teeny wallaby baby climbes into its mother's pouch to finish cooking, that pouch is a pretty icky place...sort of like if we put our preemies to bed on used kitchen sponges. So the wallaby, as it turns out, has some genes for super-immunity that go far back in evolution..we're talking tens of MILLIONS of years back.

Let the sun shine! Or not. Spain's Gemasolar plant will generate electricity either way.

Say what?

I wanted to wait a few days to see if there were any notable tributes to Apple's Steve Jobs on the web, and there were plenty - GeeksAreSexy has a pretty good roundup of Jobs tributes you might not have seen yet.

Let's slow things down a little bit here. Ok, a bit more. A bit more... and a little bit beyond that. Perfect. We're now going to watch little ripples of oil at 1000 frames a second.

Next up, we'll watch a sloth waking up at 6000 frames a second. Hope you don't have any plans tonight!

[Presurfer] 

The Occupy Wall Street protests have been fueled by a lot of web activity, but even the webbiest trends can and must be remixed. Thus, the Occupy Sesame Street hashtag, with tweets like "The Counting Vampires are destroying America" and "Why isn't Reporter Kermit covering this?"

Tauntrcom ups the ante with photoshops. Elmo in handcuffs. A very grumpy Bert being led away by the authorities. 

Thanks, @JohnSellers, for blowing my mind. While responding to his Twitter confession of his former Wham! love with my own (somewhat current) Wham! love, I asked the only logical question, #WhateverHappenedtoAndrewRidgely ??

Well, tweeted @JohnSellers, here's what happened: (see photo)

Looks like someone's ready to be our father figure, no?

Thanks, @JohnSellers!

/RL

This month’s installment of our 11 for '11 series of big picture conversations on the issues of our times. Today, we talk with Harvard experimental psychologist Stephen Pinker about his new book, Better Angels of Our Nature, about the history of violence, and why it's declined. 

Links:

Crowd That Lifts a Car to Rescue Guy Is Basically Like Voltron, Minus the Colorful ArmorBy Brady Carlson on Friday, September 16, 2011  

Remember Voltron, where these anime characters would merge their robots together into one super-powered "defender of the universe"? Faced with a man trapped under a car - one that happens to be right next to a burning motorcycle - this crowd in Utah lifts in sync and saves a motorcyclist's life.