Toldjaso

Great Santa on a Screaming Harley….

It’s been HOW long?

Great Santa on a Screaming Harley…. (saw that yesterday, actually; pic to follow when rights revert)  it’s been 15 months since I posted anything here.

Rumor notwithstanding I am NOT dead.  At least not entirely.  Braindead, I dunno.

Will be fixing this soon. SOON soon.

Charles Darwin’s ecological experiment

Yet another of those just excessively cool things to learn about…..

Charles Darwin’s ecological experiment on Ascension isle.

A lonely island in the middle of the South Atlantic conceals Charles Darwin’s best-kept secret.

Two hundred years ago, Ascension Island was a barren volcanic edifice.

Today, its peaks are covered by lush tropical “cloud forest”.

Excessively useful and cool link.

News, research, and information libraries trust | AccessMyLibrary – Promoting library advocacy.

History. It’s everywhere.

Even in that old closet no one’s looked in for like a hundred and thirty years.

Clerks Find Papers From 1881 Gunfight At OK Corral

Yet more nifty tech.

Paralyzed Graffiti Artist Draws With His Eyes.

A group of artists and hackers have crafted a gadget that lets a paralyzed graffiti artist continue making art using only his eyes. And it costs about as much as an iPod shuffle.

I’m not getting into the argument about what this guy does with his talent. I’m not hugely a fan of graffiti as such, but I don’t see it as The End of Life As We Know It either, and some of those guys are just incredibly talented, so..

but the tech, and the price… yow. That’s good to know.

The road goes ever on… but the truck’s out of gas.

Hmmm. The future IS going to require a great many paradigm shifts, assuming we can get there. I wonder how things like this might work as part of a global energy and technology mix. There are two things of which I’m fairly certain: the future is going to be science fiction like we never dreamed, even as kids, and if we could come back to see the world in 2300 or so, we wouldn’t recognize 95% of it.   (In my less optimistic moments that’s because by 2300 humans won’t be part OF it in any meaningful way. My futurist ramblings tend to the highly dystopian.)

ScienceDaily (2010-02-21) — Scientists may have just made the breakthrough of a lifetime, turning discarded fruit peels and other throwaways into cheap, clean fuel to power the world’s vehicles.

Once again: More Science, Less Fiction

ScienceDaily (2009-04-30) — The idea of isolated communities of dinosaurs surviving the catastrophic extinction event 65 million years ago has stimulated a great deal of literary and cinematic drama. Today the fiction seems just a little closer to reality. New scientific evidence suggests that dinosaurs may have survived in a remote area of what is now New Mexico and Colorado for up to half a million years.

I’m obviously a little slow finding this, but still…

But how far back does A1 go?

Steak Dinners Go Back 2.5 Million Years : Discovery News:

A new fossil skull of a bull confirms that beef has been “what’s for dinner” since the dawn of humans.

The discovery of a new “missing link” species of bull dating to a million years ago in Eritrea pushes back the beef steak dinner to the very dawn of humans and cattle.

Liking This

Andrew Witty, Glaxo’s C.E.O., Takes a Role in World Health .

Andrew Witty is not quite as young or as buff as Anderson Cooper, but he does do interviews in shirtsleeves from the slums of Nairobi and rural hospitals in Uganda.

What makes that unusual is that Mr. Witty is not a roving CNN anchor, but the chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, the world’s second-largest drug company.