Skeletons in our closets

How English sounded 500 years ago.

One of my favorite comic artists Kate Beaton who illustrates and writes Hark! A Vagrant!

Medieval skeleton found when large tree is uprooted in a storm.

Why 80,000 rape kits have been ignored.  A Quaker talks about helping protect those who need abortions.

Homophobia leads to death threats.  I think the gay is buried deep in this one.  And speaking of forced submission and obsession about dominance, this article suggests 43% of Republicans would favor a military coup.

Put solar cells on everything!

Windows 10 is on your computer... even if you don't want it there.

Trying to explain Donald Trump.

Friday to Friday creeps in its petty pace ....

Ways to avoid being eaten by mosquitoes.

What climate change means to polar bears.  And to bring back to life ancient pathogens which may or may not be virulent.

Building a sailboat and the love of woodcraft.

The opposite of hoarding... being too clean?

A necessary and informative timeline from the New York Times (takes us only to April 2015) to show how long it took to get the Iran nuclear agreement and why it is a big effing deal.  And why Cheney wants Iran to be all Obama's fault.

How to catch liars.

A designer for Silicon Valley.  She's over 90.

A scientist's doubts over GMOs.  French court finds Monsanto guilty of chemical poisoning.

Harvard linguist points out the 58 most commonly misused words and phrases

Dealing with depression.

9/11 conspiracies list.

We're having a heat wave.... *wheeze* ...

Hot enough for ya?  Apparently hot enough to melt cats.....

Prairie dogs have a complex language with nouns and adjectives.

Guns! 2016!!

Jeb Bush: ‘Taking Out Saddam Hussein Turned Out To Be A Pretty Good Deal’ and then hear about what actually happened.

Ben Carson and the fetal tissue issue.

Graphene will save the world... if we don't self-destruct first.  (Corn is part of the problem.)

Fukushima'd Monday

The horror of Fukushima keeps on giving.

Immigrant children who were sent back are being killed.

How lizards regenerate their tails: researchers discover genetic 'recipe':

By understanding the secret of how lizards regenerate their tails, researchers may be able to develop ways to stimulate the regeneration of limbs in humans. Now, a team of researchers from Arizona State University is one step closer to solving that mystery. The scientists have discovered the genetic “recipe” for lizard tail regeneration, which may come down to using genetic ingredients in just the right mixture and amounts 

Lizards?... might want to be careful...

George Bush.

Bank of America gets to pay back 17bn over questionable mortgages.  Do they get to go back and help those people they drove out of their houses and into poverty, too?

Bigger spiders a good thing?  I don't think so....

A cop discusses Ferguson and the behavior of the police.

Oh please, let this be true! The Twilight of Antonin Scalia

One half-hour to change a governor's mind about climate change.  And they don't think it worked.

How much you can save when you stop buying shit.

How amazingly transparent the CIA is....

How do you pronounce pecan?

California drought, before and after comparisons.

The Power of Recycling and of Words

One woman changed the way we throw out our trash.

First amendment.

Women, grammar, and exercise!

What women were wearing when they were sexually attacked... debunking one myth about rape.  And myths about birth control.

English, the language of oopses.  And grammarphobia.

We're drinking the wrong kind of milk?  And look!  We've made a superbug to eat the supercorn!

What do you still do now that you did when you were poor?

Scars (nsfw)

No wonder I feel like California didn't have a winter!  We didn't!  And:

A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution. 

Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."

Fukushima fallout.

Elizabeth Warren and what she has done for you.

US Government to Deregulate Meat Industry

Scary scientist is scary.

Underwater archaeology.

Why this runner runs.

Tidbits

How you guys talk gives away where you are from....

Diplomacy is better than genocide, oddly.

Cats and engineers.

A cube.  That can stand on a point.  And jump.  And I need to beat it to death...

Pharmacies deliberately misinforming teenagers about emergency contraception.

Parenting done right.

Voices from prison.

How shocking. I never would have imagined....

I am shocked — shocked— to find that gambling is going on in here!



Denial-of-service tool targeting Healthcare.gov site discovered

Dad Calls Cops on Son to Teach Him a Lesson, Cops Shoot Son Dead

Fracking Victim Sued for Defamation After Proving Drinking Water Flammable

Republicans don't speak for women's rights when they try and deny abortion access.

Teachers aren't actually the problem.

It must be the language that divides us.  And our totally different ways of life and histories across our nation.

This and that

Because reasons.

Ted Rall for president ... of France!

What fracking does.

Who owns your food.

Transparency in corporate campaign cash.  And Congress sells out again for cash.

The Civil War was about slavery.  No matter how many times you try to revise history.

Speak to the hand... Dr. Hand.

Taking away women's right to vote.  Because women can't be trusted.

Hillary Clinton answers a question about abortion.  Anti-rape garments for women because US men can't control themselves?

How many days the Congress plans to 'work' next year.

How to disappear completely.

Friday froth

6 Baffling Discoveries That Science Can’t Explain

Healthy tips for surviving our chemicalized world

Fixing the climate.

Learning a new language is good for your brain.

Monsanto's unapproved wheat found in Oregon is affecting the export of wheat to those countries who have said no to GMOs.  Too late.... so the farmers are suing Monsanto.

One girl in a village.

Everything you ever wanted to know about ticks.

19-Year-Old Develops Ocean Cleanup Array That Could Remove 7,250,000 Tons Of Plastic From Oceans

Roman Seawater Concrete Holds the Secret to Cutting Carbon Emissions

High Fructose Corn Syrup is addictive....

From fossils to ... fossils.

Oldest primate skeleton unveiled

Americans speak differently across the nation.

Heracleion Photos: Lost Egyptian City Revealed After 1,200 Years Under Sea

Perspective from a dwarf on the character Tyrion in the TV show Game of Thrones

Chinese company cleaning up US pork?

The sugar beet is entirely GMO at this point.

Rebranding the Republican name is superficial fakery and people can tell.

Cats, the Moon and everything in between

Reddit asks:  What is something your current or past employer would NOT want the world to know about their company?  The responses about banking, food service, recycling, chemical waste, crony drunks on the job... makes one want to dig a hole and hide in it....

Hell cat.

Mars had water.  But does that mean it had life?  And how about a super computer on the MoOOooon!?

Bees, birds and butterflies:



Reasons to vote Republican:



Who will stop the gun violence?

Stephen Barton survived the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado. But 12 others didn’t. Watch his personal message asking President Obama and Governor Romney to offer their plans on how they will end gun violence, and join him by signing our petition.

Like... you know...



The worm from the CENTER OF THE EARRRRRRTH.....!1!!1!1!

Lions and volcanoes and Brits

Lions and tigers and ... LIONS!

Rapidly Inflating Volcano Creates Growing Mystery

Uturuncu is a nearly 20,000-foot-high (6,000 meters) volcano in southwest Bolivia. Scientists recently discovered the volcano is inflating with astonishing speed.

[snip]

Researchers realized about five years ago that the area below and around Uturuncu is steadily rising — blowing up like a giant balloon under a wide disc of land some 43 miles (70 kilometers) across. Satellite data revealed the region was inflating by 1 to 2 centimeters (less than an inch) per year and had been doing so for at least 20 years, when satellite observations began.

"It's one of the fastest uplifting volcanic areas on Earth," de Silva told OurAmazingPlanet."What we're trying to do is understand why there is this rapid inflation, and from there we'll try to understand what it's going to lead to."

The peak is perched like a party hat at the center of the inflating area. "It's very circular. It's like a big bull's-eye," said Jonathan Perkins, a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who recently presented work on the mountain at this year's Geological Society of America meeting in Minneapolis.

Scientists figured out from the inflation rate that the pocket of magma beneath the volcano was growing by about 27 cubic feet (1 cubic meter) per second.

Mississippi tries to retreat to the Dark Ages with their 'Personhood Amendment'.

Delightful review of the upcoming Sherlock Holmes Part 2.

Trying to understand the British.

Dammit. I didn't know some grapes and kiwi fruit were being treated with a growth hormone.

Word play

Adjust the number of words you want compared, and look at the graph. I think my favorite word embranglement wins the prize!

Say you,

Say me....

Foreign jokes.

Foreign profanity.

And then there are those to whom English is a second language....

Bristol Palin went on official Palin family blog “The Facebook” today to attack Keith Olbermann and rouse the pity of the conservative faithful, just as her mother would. Touching. Instead of using the standard teenager speak she and her sister usually employ on Facebook, however, she translated her message to Olbermann with some interesting selections from a thesaurus.

Blog sprinkles

The Brits are being droned?

Two official safety inquiries took place into the military use of drones over southern England after near-collisions with helicopters, the Guardian can reveal.

The investigations are the first of their kind involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are increasingly being flown in British civilian airspace after extensive use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obviously the drone operators were distracted by eating cheetos or something. Gotta get real gamers to operate the things, they would know how to avoid collisions!

How many accents can you do?



The GOP will not.. no they won't! ... WON'T eat their evil nasty green ugly vegetables. So there!

Was Christine O'Donnell going from A to Z with her religious quest to see which one would offer the best way to make money?

Two hope blogs for the price of one!!

We could have predicted that all the gay bashing that has gone on would lead to youthful gays killing themselves in despair. Hate speech leads to hate crimes.

And GOPs will claim when caught that they were only joking!

Why we have wars

Bad translators!

Original text:

"She loved her tiny little dog although it squeaked instead of barked. Taking it for a walk was easy. She just chased it about the house until it was exhausted."

...10 translations later we get:

"She loved her dog, but the sound of a miracle. The picnic is easy. She said she only saw the house until it was sold."

I read the news today, oh boy....

Harassing three year olds for gender bending.

Well... the one family, one child thing really really worked, didn't it? Estimated 96 million women missing from the population of Asia.

Redefining Capitol Hill speak.

Romney says his Massachusetts health care isn't like Obama's even though it is.

Dinna go to warp speed, Scottie!! It'lla kill yeh!

Growing low-oxygen zones in oceans worry scientists. ... It concerns a lot of regular citizens, too, you know.... as well as fish, crabs, shrimp....

Love wins.

Impress your friends and relatives!!

Important Latin sayings such as: "Carpe Denim" (Seize the Pants)

From one English as a second language person to another

Start with the simple words first...