The excellent Big Picture blog from The Boston Globe recently published a set of photos of that lunatic leader, Kim Jong-il touring North Korea.
North Korea is so screwed up that it’s really interesting. Thank heavens I don’t live there.
Anyway, this blog has taken some of those photos and added hilarious captions to them. Kim is a pretty hilarious character to begin with (what he is doing to his people is no laughing matter).
NewScientist has an awesome headline on one of it’s stories today: “Great tits enjoying the warmer weather”. I think that one might get quite a lot of traffic…
Anyway, the article is actually about how a species of birds in the UK known as great tits have responded to global warming by laying their eggs earlier. They need to time their laying pretty precisely and over the last 30 years their laying has shifted 2 weeks earlier in the spring.
So here is that picture of some young great tits:
I don’t want to further confuse people about the concepts of evolution, but this is kinda funny…
Jeremy Clarkson is a funny guy. He is one of the presenters on a surprisingly cool car show called Top Gear – check it out, it’s really entertaining.
Anyway, he is an outspoken fellow and his blogs and books are also often entertaining. He recently wrote an article about how dependent modern society is on electricity. He got the idea while he was over here in South Africa and got some first hand experience…
From the article:
“Thirty years ago in South Africa, there was white power. Then there was black power. And now there is no power.
No really. There isn’t. The electricity-generating company over there has just announced that the power stations are not capable of meeting demand and that there will be outages for two, three or six hours a day for at least the next seven years.
So far as I can see, no one is asking why this has happened. Everyone suspects it’s because the power company, since it took over the reins from De Boer Pik Racist, has been operating a policy of only employing black people. So the whites, the ones who know how to run a power station, have left the job of generating electricity to a bunch of guys who don’t know how to.
No one’s actually saying that of course. It’s a political potato so hot that you’re going to get your fingers burned if you even whisper such a thing. And anyway, working out why the country’s run out of juice is nowhere near as important as working out what the bloody hell you can do about it.”
Later on in the article:
And if you want a generator, you’d better have nice tits and loose morals because frankly, that’s the only way you’re going to get one.
This is actually the philosophy of a remarkably high percentage of the world!
Link from Photo Basement
Here is an report about a dummy tourist in Australia who spotted a 4m saltwater croc approaching his boat. He wanted a good photo with the thing so he leaned out of his boat and started “teasing it”. Long story short, he got his good picture but almost lost an arm! Stupid…
I just love this clip (although I’m not convinced that is a lemur)
The Darwin Awards are true stories (they verify them) about people killing themselves in stupid ways. They are said to “commemorate those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it.”
The best of 2007 here and as usual they make for pretty funny reading.
Here are a couple of examples:
Wikipedia is great – I really love it. Obviously the power behind Wikipedia is that it is constantly evolving through the edits of the internet community.
A guy named Virgil Griffith has developed Wiki Scanner which allows you to partially trace ‘anonymous’ Wikipedia edits. For those who care, this works by doing a whois on the IP of the editing user.
Anyway, some interesting edits have been revealed using this tool.
Some examples from Wired:
There are lots of other examples – the whole thing is generating a lot of interest.