Internal Monologue

I suspect it's staged, but who knows? (Via Feministe )

Mitt Romney Defends Himself Against Allegations Of Tolerance

You can do so at speedtest.net . Here are my results from home: At work, both values are about 8000 kb/s.

The D&D Miniatures game, of which I am a big fan, has a new set of rules (based on the 4th edition D&D rules coming out in June). I haven't read them yet, but will do so at my first opportunity.

From Bad Astronomy blog, an image of Mercury by the Messenger spacecraft on a recent flyby. This image reveals parts of Mercury that have never been seen close-up before: the Mariner 10 flyby in 1974 missed those parts of Mercury that were in shadow at the time.

This figure is definitely in the uncanny valley. Photo from Wikipedia . Something is in the uncanny valley if it is human enough to trigger our "that's a person" reaction, but missing enough human traits that it comes across as very creepy. From the Wikipedia entry : The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that, if an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is "almost human", then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of "strangeness" in the human viewer. In sum, a robot stuck inside the uncanny valley is no longer being judged by the standards of a robot doing a good job at pretending to be human; but is instead being judged by the standards of a human doing a terrible job at acting like a normal person. Here's a graphical representation, again from the Wikipedia

From this fun series of " moneygami " (via Sullivan ).