a martial arts wizard of oz in mordor

That’s the best description I could come up with. A tip of the antenna to Scot for sharing this film (music video) by British comic artist Jamie Hewlett: Monkey Bee

death from the skies

I finished Phil Plait’s new book, Death from the Skies. He hits the twin goals of entertaining and educational and makes it look easy. Running through all the ways the cosmos might kill us, the astronomer manages to pack in a lot of amazing information about the universe. He transmits his own excitement and astonishment [...]

big gravity, little moons

I never dreamed I’d live to see images like these.
Enceladus against the backdrop of Saturn
Monstrous cloud vortex at Saturn’s south pole. (one pixel = one mile)
Moons and rings Look at the shadows of the rings on Saturn, and the colored bands of cloud.
The diameter of Saturn is  9.47 times the diameter of the Earth. It [...]

“mind” the gap

According to this article from New Scientist, creationists have a new strategy in their never ending push to get religion into science class. They are trying hard to convince people that the existence of consciousness cannot be explained by reference to the physical brain. Therefore the mind must be “spiritual” in nature. It must be [...]

horror, rocky, show

Music that once stuck a middle finger into the face of parents and civil society now cycles endlessly on oldies commercial radio. What was once shocking on stage and the movie screen is now retro entertainment for people my age and older. Gray-haired folks made up much of the matinee audience at Burien Little Theater’s [...]

gag

I saw a bumper sticker that said something like, “Burning Man is the darndest thing you’ll ever see.”
Everyone has a different breaking point with Burning Man. For some, when they stopped letting people shoot guns and drive at high speeds with their headlights off; that was the end of the event as far as they [...]

grow the pie!

I was listening to the radio on my way home from work. John McCain was saying something about how Obama wanted to re-distribute the economic pie, but McCain wanted to grow the pie. I spontaneously said aloud, “Grow the pie!” I said it a few more times; louder. Too bad I was alone in the [...]

punched in the face by carl sagan

I received my copy of Death From the Skies by Phil Plait today. (See Phil’s “Bad Astronomy” blog on my blogroll.) This is the new book in which the astronomer describes all the ways the earth could be destroyed by some sort of cosmic event, from asteroids to gamma ray bursts. Sound like fun? I’m [...]