I’ll be boarding a plane very shortly and going totally incommunicado until I land in Bucharest sometime tomorrow morning…so I’ll leave you something pretty to look at. This is Rosa canina, the dog rose, and the national flower of Romania.
And just because I like it, here’s Salvia transsylvanica, or the Transylvanian sage.
My destination is looking gorgeous already.
Damned monkeys. Stop gawking, put the cell phone away, and flee.
We get these things up here in Minnesota, too, and one thing you will not get from me is a video showing it off. I’ll be in the basement, hiding under a mattress.
It’s the lovely Pink Dragon millipede — it’s bright enough to belong in the girls’ aisle at the toy store.
It also squirts cyanide at you if you annoy it.
Moore, Oklahoma has been completely flattened by a tornado. Homes and businesses have been destroyed, but also a couple of schools and a hospital.
And here’s a time-lapse video of this monster ripping through the countryside.
What can we do? I mentioned it to Foundation Beyond Belief — go to the “Crisis Response” link and tell them you want to contribute to the relief efforts. If enough of us do that, they’ll set something up to take your godless donations and send them to where they’re most needed. And then send them money!
Zingularity also has a post on the catastrophe.
Foundation Beyond Belief now has a crisis response page. You can make charitable donations there.
The death toll is at 51 and rising, with at least 20 dead children.
Science does make gods look ridiculous, as the illustration below illustrates. (I’m putting it below the fold because it’s a big image.)
Wow. Jolie is a beautiful woman who makes a living as an actress, where looks can be important, and she discovered that she carried an allele of BRCA1 that puts her at a very high risk of coming down with breast cancer sometime in her life. She looked at her situation rationally — she is an atheist after all — and made the decision to get a preventive double mastectomy. She chose to maximize her chances of living a long life over preserving a secondary sexual characteristics.
That’s strong and smart. She hasn’t lost anything of any importance.
Jolie also took an important next step and came forward with the news to encourage other women to make good choices.
I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be able to get gene tested, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know that they have strong options.
Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.
The only glitch in this story is that this is America: if you’re not a mega-millionaire movie star, you’re not likely to be able to afford the expensive genetic testing, or the extensive surgeries. But maybe Jolie’s openness will encourage politicians to correct that, too.
But that membrane hanging off of it is just plain weird.
Maybe the video will help make sense of it all.
(via ZooBorns)
Here’s one. Mark Zuckerberg is pushing for more oil drilling and pipelines.
Two major tech leaders have resigned from Mark Zuckerberg’s new political group, FWD.us, in protest of the organization’s controversial decision to bankroll ads supporting Keystone XL and drilling in the Arctic National Refuge.
The Zuckerberg group publicly says its top priority is immigration reform. But through two subsidiary organizations it has quietly spent millions on ads advocating a host of anti-environmental causes. The ads were created in support of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Mark Begich (D-AK), and although neither ad mentions the issue, both support immigration reform.
I can understand the importance of political compromise and coalition building, but sleeping with the devil is just going too far.
