stroke your plants

via CBS2, "world's most useless facts" (although this strikes me as moderately useful.)

Short Night

Watch CBS News Videos Online

and,from th' Onion:"Four Or Five Guys Pretty Much Carry Whole Renaissance"

"...Our research indicates that da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Galileo basically hoisted the entire intellectual transformation of mankind onto their shoulders while everyone else just sat around being superstitious nimrods," said Sue Viero of the Correr Museum of Art in Venice, Italy. "Here's da Vinci busting his ass to paint such masterpieces as The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, while some loser like Albrecht Dürer is doing these dinky little woodcuts that are basically worthless."

Lise Eliot

The book she refers to is hers, Pink Brain, Blue Brain. Apparently she's written a bunch of stuff; the rest of the video is here.

from Fora.tv:

Dr. Lise Eliot, Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School, received her Ph.D. in Physiology and Cellular Biophysics from Columbia University in 1991. Working in Eric Kandel's laboratory, she combined electrophysiology and calcium imaging methods to analyze the synaptic mechanisms underlying learning in the marine mollusc, Aplysia californica.

The ghost of Fred Marriott and other things...

Polish folk instrument sees revival
(01:47) Report
Apr 30 - A Polish artisan has reconstructed the prototype of a cord instrument used in the Middle Ages, but long since disappeared.

Proof of massive sea monster:(02:13) Rough Cut; Peter Parker reports.
Apr 3 - Just 800 miles (1287 km) from the North Pole, paleontologists believe they have found the fossilized remains of a massive sea monster that lived 150 million years ago.
Predator X -- a new species of a Pliosaur -- is said to have been the most dangerous creature to have lived under water. The creature was about 50 feet (15 meters) long, had a head ten feet (3 meters) long and jaws armed with teeth the size of cucumbers.

Dr. Jorn Hurum, and his team of paleontologists discovered Predator X in northern Norway last October and says the new species of a Pliosaur was more fearsome in power than the land-based Tyrannosaurus Rex.

(SOUNDBITE) (English) DR. JORN HURUM, PALEONTOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF NORWAY

Cucumbers?



Steam car races toward record
(01:59) Report; Stuart McDill reports.

Apr. 24 - A British team is looking to beat a 103-year-old speed record with their steam powered car.

I'll be back

photo: Daily Mail

but I won't be any taller, as I'm unwilling to undergo a scalp implant like the one Dr De la Cruz, above, recommends. Probably around the 12th or so.

Staring at the sun

Apparently a sundog, or a parhelic circle, is an "atmospheric optical phenomenon primarily associated with the reflection or refraction of sunlight by small ice crystals."
AP photo taken in Kerala, India by S. K. Mohan



And this is a Dragon blood tree, found on the "virtually untouched Yemeni Island of Socotra, a site of global importance for biodiversity conservation, located in the Indian Ocean."
AFP photo by Khaled Fazaa.