Friday, October 13, 2006

ö Evolution, Ice Cream, and The Goddess of Chopped Liver Just the chapter synopses in Pickover's new book are inspiring:  A Beginner's Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Alien Brains, and Quantum Resurrection Chapter 7 Evolution, Ice Cream, and The Goddess of Chopped Liver In which we encounter Sylvia Weinberger, chopped-liver, God's laryngeal nerve, Reuben Mattus, "prochronic" events, Häagen-Dazs ice cream, the Reese Candy Company, livers in myth, foie gras, Liver-Eating Johnston, Silence of the Lambs, Attack of the Liver Eaters, "Merrye Syndrome," liver evolution, liver divination, intelligent design, creationism, molecules in space, the emergence of life and new species, monkeys typing the Bible, Robert Ardrey's killer ape, mosquitoes, flowers, polyploidy, beetle engineering, poodles and wolves, fecund enclaves of subterranean creatures, the Omphalosian view of reality, Philip Henry Gosse, John C. Whitcomb, Arkansas Act 590, abortion, escape ovulation, zygotes, hepatoscopy, Etruscans, haruspimancy, the liver and the "butterfly effect," divination, and Shakespeare.  permanent link #     ^ TOP ^  what is this place?

ö SURVIVOR: Galápagos Islands, The Rapture will be next One day I went looking for photos of iguanas at Google Images, thinking it might make a great wallpaper. Iggy, over at Ocean 444 Field Experiments In The Galápagos - Tamra Dickson was the best I found. Incredible! Then I decided I'd like the upper background in black instead of bright white, so I fiddled that. It took a bit of work. The black fill bled into his "horns" where sunlight glinted, so I had to give some of them a more definite edge. Then, there remained a lot of stray gray jpg artefacts to fill in. It came out perfect very nice. Anyway, I resized it down from 2592x1944 and now I have it as my 1152 desktop. Thanks, Tamra. You can see and grab my version here, it's only 225k. But Caveat Emptor, I did have an alligator-infested nightmare two nights ago... maybe I'm seeing my desktop too much? Then, this morning, this shows up in my bit bucket: What would happen if humans disappeared from Earth today? I have a feeling that if nuke-you-lar war broke out, or some apocalypse (The Rapture?) Iggy would be fine... permanent link #     ^ TOP ^  what is this place?