Internal Monologue

Just for the record, I urge all federal legislators to support a comprehensive health care. I think health care should be separated from employment, and I think there needs to be a strong public option. And most importantly, health care must be available to everyone in this country. Taxing the highest income Americans (who have done quite well for themselves recently) to pay for this is a very good idea. Make this happen.

I'm embarrassed to say that I only recently learned what "Rickrolling" is (yeah, -20 geek points for me). " Rickrolling " is an Internet prank that's been going on for the past couple years. The prank involves posting a link which seems to be to something of great interest, but is in fact a link to the video for Rick Astley's 1987 hit "Never Gonna Give You Up" . It's quite a popular prank: that video in the previous link has over 23 million views as of this post. ADVERTISEMENT Click HERE to get an iPhone 3GS and one year data plan free!

xkcd rules.

Via Mad Latinist from the comments on this post , here's Wired.com's Danger Room , posting what they call "the most incredible press release of all time": POMPANO BEACH, Fla.– In response to rumors circulating the internet on sites such as FoxNews.com, FastCompany.com and CNET News about a “flesh eating” robot project, Cyclone Power Technologies Inc. (Pink Sheets:CYPW) and Robotic Technology Inc. (RTI) would like to set the record straight: This robot is strictly vegetarian . On July 7, Cyclone announced that it had completed the first stage of development for a beta biomass engine system used to power RTI’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR™), a Phase II SBIR project sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( DARPA ), Defense Sciences Office. RTI’s EATR is an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling. RTI

If you didn't know this, you should: violence per capita has been on a downward trend throughout human history, on both a macro and micro scale: [...]if we consider the evidence, we find that the decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon: We can see the decline over millennia, centuries, decades, and years. When the archeologist Lawrence Keeley examined casualty rates among contemporary hunter-gatherers—which is the best picture we have of how people might have lived 10,000 years ago—he discovered that the likelihood that a man would die at the hands of another man ranged from a high of 60 percent in one tribe to 15 percent at the most peaceable end. In contrast, the chance that a European or American man would be killed by another man was less than one percent during the 20th century, a period of time that includes both world wars. If the death rate of tribal warfare had prevailed in the 20th century, there would have been two billion deaths rather than 100 million, horrible as

I know how we'll repair that intestinal perforation! We'll use severed ant heads : An interesting procedure [described in the Sushruta Samhita , an Indian text from the sixth century BC] is the use of the heads of certain ants for the suturing of intestinal perforations: . . . large black ants should be applied even to the perforated intestines . . . and their bodies should be separated from their heads after they had firmly bitten the perforated parts with their claws [jaws]. After that the intestines with the head of the ants attached to them should be gently pushed back into the cavity and reinstated in their original situation therein. This procedure is also mentioned in the Caroka Samhita [probably third century BC]: And if there is a perforation of the intestines, the part should be made to be bitten by big black ants and seeing that the perforation is welll closed by the firm bites taken by the ants, their bodies must be cut off. Then putting the intestines back in thei

This is the bathroom off the master bedroom.