Easterbrooked

Posted on September 28, 2007 by Paul — No Comments ↓

Gregg Easterbrook is a… well, journalist is a bit strong, so let’s go with writer. His main topics seem to be religion, football (the sort played with Americans, not feet) and popular culture/economics/politics. His sports column, Tuesday Morning Quarterback, appears each week at ESPN (I’ll let you work out what day it’s published on). It’s quite amusing, if a little repetitive and way too long, but worth a read every now and then. Except that now you don’t need to, because Kissing Suzy Kolber has a parody so awesome it renders the column itself superfluous. I’d quote from it, but really you should just struggle through one of his columns and then read the whole thing.

(HT: Pharyngula)

Sunfish

Posted on September 27, 2007 by Paul — No Comments ↓

I’ve seen a couple of documentaries recently that mention Ocean Sunfish, seriously huge fish prone to parasitic infection. They deal with this by going to special cleaning stations where smaller fish pick the parasites off. So ordered is this behaviour that the sunfish line up and wait their turn for a cleaning. As impressive as that is, I’ve just learned that if they have a particularly irksome parasite they’ll swim to the surface and find a seagull that can use its beak to dig out the problem. I just love evolution.

Low-Level Smiting

Posted on September 26, 2007 by Paul — 3 Comments ↓

Almost every day for over 3 weeks I’ve driven through the same set of temporary traffic lights due to some roadworks. That’s at least 36 trips through these lights. I would guess that there’s a 60% chance of hitting the light on red (50:50, minus the time when both sides are red to allow traffic to clear the roadworks). For someone to hit the lights on red EVERY SINGLE FREAKING TIME has odds of around 1 in 96,951,601. Now this could be a coincidence, of course. I’m just saying that, as an atheist, I could feel a little picked on. If there was something to do the picking, of course.

Hiro’s

Posted on September 25, 2007 by Paul — 1 Comment ↓

Proof, yet again, that some people are just more talented than you or I. Masi Oka, who plays Hiro on Heroes (and is my favourite character) also works for ILM. Amongst other things he’s (jointly) responsible for the coding that generated the water in the film The Perfect Storm.

Oh, and he’s also a black belt in kendo, is fluent in English, Japanese and Spanish, and is a stallion in bed. OK, so I don’t know that last bit for sure, but it’s probably true.

Acoustic

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Paul — 1 Comment ↓

It’s Monday. Here’s something to get you started.