Excellent! Someone else is in the process of doing a random trip they picked using my random spot tool. They are using a method very similar to how I picked my own spots when I was doing this. He is even doing daily diaries like I did.
Spontaneous much? I don’t think you can get much more spontaneous then this. I’ve always enjoyed traveling to different places around the world wether its new restaurants in New York City or newly recognized countries by the UN. The problems always been picking a place to go. Not any more. Thanks to a cool website I found while searching the internets this past month, I’ve come across a site that allows me to push a randomize button and I will automatically be shown a random point on the globe via Google Maps. What better way to travel the globe.
Now I had to place a few restrictions on my travel to make it both safe and time effective. First of all the destination had to be on land, had to be within 250 miles of a major airport, flyable via Orbitz.com, and not on the state departments watch list. So I got a few days off from work and got ready to throw the proverbial dart.
It only took three throws to come up with my destination. the first throw landed in the Atlantic Ocean, the second landed in the Pacific Ocean, and the third landed in a little town called Tivoli, Italy, about 35 KM west of Rome.
…
Ray is also twittering from his trip. Great stuff. I haven’t been able to do one of these in many years, with the planned next one to the Yucatan put off time and time again. But someday! In the meantime, others can have fun. :-)
It was close yesterday, but as of today based on the overall trend line for Alex’s mass…
Alex has doubled in mass!
Anyway, it looks like he is doubling every 148 days.
Assuming an exponential growth pattern…
His mass will exceed my own when he is 1.8 years old.
His mass will exceed that of the Earth when he is 32.6 years old.
Such a big boy!
(Note that this is of course dependent on the exact methodology I use for drawing the trend line, but I like how I draw the line, so I’ll stick to it! It is better than just looking at today’s reading vs the first one right after he was born… human mass fluctuates and there is non-trivial experimental imprecision, so it is important to look at trends over a bunch of data points, not individual readings. And I’ll be sticking to the idea that his growth will be exponential, even though you can clearly see that the shape of the curve is not exponential. I’m sure that is just an anomaly, and it will become exponential any time now. :-) )
Unlike my friend Reb, Torchwood is not dead to me. I actually kinda liked the last mini-series, even the ending. It was disturbing, but sometimes it is worth exploring the balance between the well being of those close to you and the greater good as it were. Like other RTD stuff, it can be pretty uneven, but overall it is fun. I will be watching when it comes back. But this idea here just has to die:
OK, I don’t care if they have RTD and even Barrowman. When they “Americanize” British shows it almost always pulls out the best parts of them and leaves them just completely blah, if they don’t just kill it completely and make it unwatchable. There are of course exceptions, but in general it is just bad bad bad. Please don’t. Just please don’t.
And don’t even get me started on how this article ended:
Tranter might try to reboot “Doctor Who” for U.S. audiences while departing “Doctor Who” star David Tennant stars in NBC’s pilot “Rex Is Not Your Lawyer.”
What’s weirder is that with further examination, it was discovered that whatever genus owned the skull also had small, childlike features — a Boskop face only takes up 1/5 of its cranium size, while a typical European adult face takes up roughly 1/3 of its cranium size.
Big head, small face? Sounds familiar, eh?
Lynch and Granger, who wrote about Boskops in their book Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence note in their Discover article that we aren’t the only ones to think of stereotypical extraterrestrials when we hear about Boskop characteristics. American anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote about this very idea in his book, The Immense Journey in 1958. “Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain. His face was straight and small, almost a child’s face.”
English Russia has assembled a collection of about 50 photos from a Russian medicinal leech farm, documenting the technology used to raise them by the millions. The reproductive process of hermaphroditic creatures is a bit complex:
As hermaphrodites, leeches have both male and female sex organs… Mating involves the intertwining of bodies where each deposits sperm in the others’ clitellar area… The clitellum secretes a tough gelatinous cocoon which contains nutrients, and it is in this that the eggs are deposited… The cocoon is either buried or attached to a rock, log or leaf and dries to a foamy crust. After several weeks or months, the young emerge as miniature adults. Studies show that the cocoons are capable of surviving the digestive system of a duck.
The photo above shows the cute little newborns emerging from a cocoon. Cootchie-cootcie-coo! The leeches are fed slaughterhouse blood until their distribution to medical clinics, where they may be stored in pretty pink jars.
English Russia has assembled a