Blank Verse

Papua New Guinea Teen Beheads Father After Rape: Report

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 21:33:06 -0400

Papua New Guinea Teen Beheads Father After Rape: Report:

Community leaders are protecting a teenager accused of beheading her father after he repeatedly raped her in their Papua New Guinea village from the police, according to reports.

Girl gets raped by dad, cuts his head off with a bush knife, and the community DEFENDS her. When does that ever happen? Kind of awesome.

Happy Birthday, Mick Ronson!

Sun, 26 May 2013 06:00:31 -0400

Happy Birthday, Mick Ronson!

“If you kiss a man, it should be for your own pleasure and...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 23:09:53 -0400

“If you kiss a man, it should be for your own pleasure and not to reward him.”

propaedeuticist: At NASA’s Drawing Board - J R Eyerman

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 01:47:08 -0400

propaedeuticist:

At NASA’s Drawing Board - J R Eyerman

Bees. Source

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 14:41:35 -0400

Bees.

Source

"My particular vantage point is Grizzly Peak Boulevard, from which you can look down on the whole of..."

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 02:57:57 -0500

“My particular vantage point is Grizzly Peak Boulevard, from which you can look down on the whole of the bay area, and see San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. I remember this view on a particular summer morning when the sun was striking the white terraces and tower blocks of the city, and I had a huge sense of the wonder of what man and woman have built. It was a moment of epiphany, something akin to Wordsworth’s revelation on Westminster Bridge.”

- Seamus Heaney, on looking at SF from North Berkeley.

"Ayn Rand was a writer of no value whatsoever, whether aesthetic or intellectual. The Tea Party..."

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 07:00:10 -0500

“Ayn Rand was a writer of no value whatsoever, whether aesthetic or intellectual. The Tea Party deserves her, but the rest of us do not. It is not less than obscene that any educational institution that relies even in part on public funds should ask students to consider her work. We are threatened these days by vicious mindlessness and this is one of its manifestations.”

- Harold Bloom

"From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding:..."

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 06:00:15 -0500

“From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!””

- Whittaker Chambers

Flannery O'Connor

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 05:00:13 -0500

The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail.

Terunobu Fujimori, Teahouse Tetsu, Kiyoharu Shirakaba Museum,...

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 15:51:45 -0500

Terunobu Fujimori, Teahouse Tetsu, Kiyoharu Shirakaba Museum, Nakamaru, Hokuto City, Yamanashi (Japan)

Other cool treehouses.

theimpossiblecool: Delon & Faithfull. Anyone know who...

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 03:17:47 -0500

theimpossiblecool:

Delon & Faithfull.

Anyone know who makes the sunglasses Alain Delon is wearing?

California’s marijuana boom is wreaking havoc on the environment

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 01:26:02 -0500

California’s marijuana boom is wreaking havoc on the environment:

thenoobyorker:

From berksbiology.

How hilarious would it be if you lived in Northern California and only ate “natural”, organic produce because of fears over genetically modified organisms or pesticides but weren’t aware that the marijuana you smoked is grown using an insecticide that is lethal to humans in small doses, requires a special permit from the EPA and is banned in other countries?

Answer: Not very hilarious.

"Nicotine, that addictive drug in cigarettes, protects from Parkinson’s disease, found a study..."

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 23:01:04 -0500

“Nicotine, that addictive drug in cigarettes, protects from Parkinson’s disease, found a study in the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.”

- First coffee, now cigarettes. Parkinson’s has no place amongst the wicked.

There's no Prayer like Desire

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 20:48:04 -0500

There's no Prayer like Desire

My dream bike is something like this. Minimal and geometric. I...

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 01:45:18 -0500

My dream bike is something like this. Minimal and geometric. I just with shaft drives that were so prevalent 100 years ago would make a comeback.

Hiroshi Sugimoto for Hermès. If I were a rich kid on Instagram,...

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 01:22:00 -0500

Hiroshi Sugimoto for Hermès. If I were a rich kid on Instagram, I would buy all of these.

"For a long time, right-wingers — and some pundits — have peddled the notion that the “real America”,..."

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 12:08:27 -0500

“For a long time, right-wingers — and some pundits — have peddled the notion that the “real America”, all that really counted, was the land of non-urban white people, to which both parties must abase themselves. Meanwhile, the actual electorate was getting racially and ethnically diverse, and increasingly tolerant too. The 2008 Obama coalition wasn’t a fluke; it was the country we are becoming.”

- Paul Krugman

defacedbook: Thomas Galler AND WE WON! Also, so proud of...

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 00:32:58 -0500

defacedbook:

Thomas Galler

AND WE WON!

Also, so proud of America and all the states that legalized gay marriage and marijuana!

"That is the best part of beauty, which a picture cannot express…"

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 15:09:23 -0400

“That is the best part of beauty, which a picture cannot express…”

- Sir Francis Bacon

thenoobyorker: By way of joshbyard, Mice Genetically...

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 18:22:52 -0400

thenoobyorker:

By way of joshbyard,

Mice Genetically Engineered to be Super-Sensitive to the Smell of TNT, Will Be Used to Clear Landmines

A Belgian organization called APOPO already uses giant African pouched rats as a cheaper way to sniff out landmines. The rats are not genetically modified, but their sense of smell is sharp enough to detect TNT.

…While the furry minesweepers are effective (with two handlers, they can cover a field in one hour that would take two full days for metal detectors), they need nine months of training to become reliable, a process that costs around 6,000 euros per rat.

The genetically engineered mice, however, are so sensitive to TNT that encountering the molecule is likely to change their behavior involuntarily, so they would need little to no training.

[Molecular Neurobiologist} Charlotte D’Hulst… used genetic modification to ensure that the mice have 10,000 to 1,000,000 odor-sensing neurons with a TNT-detecting receptor compared with only 4,000 in a normal animal, “possibly amplifying the detection limit for this odor 500-fold,” she says.

Each odor-sensing neuron in a mouse’s nose is spotted with one kind of odor receptor. Usually, each specific receptor is found in one out of every thousand odor-sensing neurons, but about half the scent-detecting neurons in D’Hulst’s mice have the TNT-detecting receptor.

(via Genetically Modified Mice Could Be Tiny Landmine-Sniffing Heroes | MIT Technology Review)

We’ve been doing this to animals for as long as we’ve been around, the technology is different but the game remains the same. I’m interested in seeing where this ends up and mice become an avenue for potential technological fixes for other problems.