Not a burkini to be seen on any of these national assets, no sirree! It's a land flowing with babes and beaches! And after you've had a eyefull on the beach, you can knock back a few cold ones at Hooters in the Holy Land!

Tired: monolith on the Moon. Wired: Rotating Hexagon on Saturn:

"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."

At least They didn't just shoot down the Cassini probe -- that would have let us know that They know that we know where Their base is. Fellow Earthlings, be constantly on guard for Their agents among us who are spreading the meme that it's just due to natural causes.

Tired: alcohol. Wired: alcohol + Paxil = Wow! (as long as you don't mind the side effects and withdrawl symptoms).

Gonzales should be impeached? I say we waterboard the SOB on live TV.

So you pride yourself on your comprehensive knowledge of operas based on Shakespeare, eh? Put it to the test!

It's a Battle of the Paradigms for analyzing data from high-energy physics experiments: top-down vs. bottom-up. I find the debate strangely charming -- or is it charmingly strange?

A sweet little confection, with music from Verdi's La Traviata.

Was I a Good American in the Time of George Bush?:

Did I do what I could to resist the takeover of my country and the brutalisation of my fellow human beings? How much further could I have gone? Were the crimes of the Bush administration those that demand you give up your life and everyday commitments to throw yourself into maximum resistance? If not, then what were we waiting for? The questions have troubled me regularly these last five years, because I was one of the millions of American citizens who did not shut down Guantánamo Bay and stop the other atrocities of the administration.

One can at least donate to support the Troops Out Now Coalition.

My 2 favorite quotes from Richard Panek's NYT article on dark matter/energy:

• Juan Collar: "I have been looking for dark-matter particles for more than 15 years. I’m 42. So most of my colleagues, my age, we are kind of going through a midlife crisis. When we get together and we drink enough beer, we start howling at the moon.”
• Saul Perlmutter: “It’s been so hard that we’re even willing to consider listening to string theorists”.

I'd really love to see a debate between Brian Greene and Lee Smolin about what string theory vs. Loop Quantum Gravity have to say about dark matter/energy. Although after Smolin's smackdown of string theorists in "The Trouble With Physics", they're probably not on speaking terms.

And the end may be nearer than we think. From Wikipeidia's entry on the Big Rip:

First, the galaxies would be separated from each other. Arguably, this is what is happening right now, with galaxies that move outside the observable universe (approximately 46.5 billion light years away). About 60 million years before the end, gravity would be too weak to hold the Milky Way and other individual galaxies together. Approximately three months before the end, the Solar system will be gravitationally unbound. In the last minutes, stars and planets will be torn apart, and an instant before the end, atoms will be destroyed. The authors of this hypothesis calculate that the end of the universe as we now know it would be approximately 35 billion years after the Big Bang, or 20 billion years from now.

So... if we're going to do any serious paradise engineering, we'd better figure out how to get off this dimensionally-challenged braneworld and get busy colonizing the multiverse.

Gotta love Joseph Lykken's Countdown to LHC -- that's the Large Hadron Collider for those of you who are not keeping up with the state of the art in universe-devouring machines. Not to be confused with the Large Hardon Collider, which has been operating worldwide for millenia.

Flashback: ABC News, 9/16/2006: Variety of Interrogation Techniques Said to Be Authorized by CIA:

CIA officers told ABC News that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed lasted the longest under water boarding, two and a half minutes, before beginning to talk.

But, but... according to this South Asia Times article from 2002:

The FBI, still keen to take Shaikh Mohammed alive, teargassed the area [of his apartment in Karachi, Pakistan on Sept 11, 2002], and a number of people were captured. However, despite instructions to the contrary, a few Pakistan Rangers entered the flat, where they found Shaikh Mohammed and another man, allegedly with their hands up. The Rangers nevertheless opened fire on the pair. Later, the Pakistani press carried pictures of a message scrawled in blood on the wall of the flat, proclaiming the Muslim refrain of Kalma, in Arabic: "There is no God except Allah, Mohammed is his messenger"). An official who was present in the flat at the time of the shooting has told Asia Times Online that the message was written by Shaikh Mohammed with his own blood as his life drained from him. Subsequently, to their surprise, the raiders learned that Ramzi Binalshibh had been netted in the swoop. And nothing further was said of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. But now it emerges that an Arab woman and a child were taken to an ISI safe house, where they identified the Shaikh Mohammed's body as their husband and father. The body was kept in a private NGO mortuary for 20 days before being buried, under the surveillance of the FBI, in a graveyard in the central district of Karachi. The widow subsequently underwent exhaustive interrogation in the custody of FBI officials, during which she revealed details of people who visited her husband, and of his other contacts and plans. News of the death of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was intentionally suppressed so that officials could play on the power of his name to follow up leads and contacts.

So is it possible that the fellow they're trying to pass off as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is actually Ramzi Binalshibh? Or Ahmed Abdul Qadus?

Attention Douglas Adams fans: mark your calendars: Friday, May 25 is Towel Day!

Today (3.14 – get it?) is officially Pi Day! And July 22nd (which, in European date format, is 22/7 – get it?) is “Pi Approximation Day”. In honor of which, the following are submitted for your consideration:

Some musical numbers:

• Ballad
• Funk
• Choral
• Duet with cameo appearances by Euclid, Archimedes, Newton, Leibniz, Pierre de Fermat, Abraham de Moivre, Srinivasa Ramanujan and Bertrand Russell. When was the last time you saw continued fractions in a music video?

Memoir unwraps the curious mind, life of autistic savant:

[Daniel] Tammet's decision to memorize and recite the [first 22,000] digits of pi was an important turning point. Racked by nervousness the night before the recitation, he fell into a deep sleep and dreamed that he was walking through the landscape of pi -- that he was actually deep inside the number, enveloped by its sights and colors and textures.

The recitation took place at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, lasted five hours and nine minutes and was monitored by students from the department of mathematical sciences at Oxford Brookes University. Tammet made no mistakes.

"I wanted to go as far into the other place as I could go," he said, speaking of the world of numbers. "Having reached that point, I felt a kind of release because I could look back and in my mind's eye I could see all the numbers -- all 22,000 numbers in my head -- and I actually turned around in my head and waved them goodbye because I knew that I wasn't going to see them again, I wasn't going to do something like that again.

Life imitates art. Paging Pham Nuwen, Thomas Nau and Sherkaner Underhill...

Teacher sues, says fired over 'witch' allegations:

"It's been quite a long time since we've seen a witch trial in this country," defense attorney Steven Stern told the 8-member jury during opening statements in U.S. District Court.
[...]
[Plaintiff Lauren] Berrios was a "storyteller" whose tales eventually became "stranger and stranger."

Witch rumors prompt teacher lawsuit:

[School Principal Andrew] Albano began removing books from her classroom, such as Shakespeare's plays and the Goosebumps series, which Berrios claims he disliked because they involve goblins, soothsayers and ghosts.

Film at 11 -- "She's a witch!"

Students suspended for saying "vagina" at open mic night. While reading an excerpt from Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues". Well, thank God that John Jay High School Principal Rich Leprine is protecting our way of life by ensuring that those uppity bitches "received consequences for insubordination", but which, in His merciful wisdom, were "not a severe form of discipline". At least they didn't call it "Cupid's anvil"! Although they did refer to "a train entering a foreign country", so Principal Leprine clearly had to come down hard on them, or we'll all end up living in mud huts. He ought to force them to wear burkinis for a day -- just to let them know how much worse things could be.

Weird Musical Scores. I tried whistling one of them -- I think I hurt myself...

The rice with human genes. Now with the goodness of proteins from breast milk and saliva! The company's slogan: "IT'S NOT CANNIBALISM! STOP USING THAT WORD!". But if you listen very carefully to a bowlful, you can hear the little grains crying "Nooooooo, don't eeeeeeat meeeeeee!"

Dick Cheney pardons Scooter Libby from his mold-filled room at Walter Reed Army Hospital before announcing that he is stepping down due to ill health!

Ooops... wrong universe. Never mind!