wwjd w/t forgotten umbrellas?

This sacrelicious Tokyo subway poster shows Jesus and his posse confronted by the awful spectacle of umbrellas forgotten on the train. It's part of a larger (and equally delightful) series linked below

NASA Discovers New Life! Arsenic Bacteria With DNA Completely Alien To What We Know

NASA is holding a press conference today at 2pm to announce a major finding in their research in the field of astrobiology and speculation has reached a fever pitch after the agency said the finding "will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life."

The news has leaked now, and while the discovery is not extraterrestrial life, NASA has indeed uncovered an entirely new life form on our planet that "doesn't share the biological building blocks of anything currently living" on Earth, Gizmodo reports.

Discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. While she and other scientists theorized that this could be possible, this is the first discovery. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don't have to be like planet Earth.

One of the scientists set to speak at the conference today, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, had written a paper "Did Nature also choose arsenic?" earlier this year wondering if that element could also be a foundation for life:

We hypothesize that ancient biochemical systems, analogous to but distinct from those known today, could have utilized arsenate in the equivalent biological role as phosphate. Organisms utilizing such 'weird life' biochemical pathways may have supported a 'shadow biosphere' at the time of the origin and early evolution of life on Earth or on other planets.
Such organisms may even persist on Earth today, undetected, in unusual niches.

It would seem her theory is correct. In March of this year the London Times had a fascinating report on Wolfe-Simon's research at Lake Mono:

She points out that Mono Lake arsenic life, if found, may only go as far as proving the extreme adaptability of life on Earth billions of years ago. It is generally agreed that on early Earth the chemical soup was very different because of the material being thrown out of the planet's depths by volcanoes and hydrothermal vents and the lack of biologically derived oxygen. If arsenic was around in far greater concentrations then, perhaps "arsenolife", as she calls it, in Mono Lake is evidence of that ancestral life, a finding that would deepen our understanding of how life on Earth got started.

There will be other scientists at the news conference. Jason Kottke gives a rundown on each of them and their expertise here.

Hikikomori

Hikikomori is a term used to describe individuals who have chosen to withdraw from social life, often to an extreme degree of isolation. The word literally means “pulling away, being confined,” and was first used by Japanese psychologist, Dr Tamaki Saitō in his study of sufferers. Dr Saitō believes the cause of the problem lies within Japanese history and society, as there has been a cultural tradition that celebrates the nobility of solitude. This together with the fact that until the mid-nineteenth century, Japan had cut itself off from the outside world for two hundred years.
Dr Saito points to the relationship between mothers and their sons, and has shown how most hikikomori sufferers are male, often the eldest son. “In Japan, mothers and sons often have a symbiotic, co-dependent relationship. Mothers will care for their sons until they become 30 or 40 years old.” This dependency causes the sufferer to be unable to interact with the outside world, and often he will escape into the fantasy world of computer games and on-line activities.
According to Dr Henry Grubb, a psychologist from the University of Maryland, hikikomori is specifically Japanese, as there is “nothing like it in the West.” Part of the problem stems from Japan’s subservient and passive/aggressive culture. Most consider hikikomori a problem within the family, rather than a psychological illness.
Recent Cabinet Office statistics in Japan, put the number of hikikomori at some 696,000 nationwide, making it a national social problem.

The Cabinet Office recently announced that an estimated 696,000 youths nationwide are hikikomori, shutting themselves inside their homes for six months or longer. According to the same report, 1.55 million youths claimed they could sympathize with the inclination to isolate oneself from society. It looks like for the time being, the government will claim the official figure for hikikomori as approximately 700,000.
In reality, the estimated population of hikikomori varies from year to year. According to Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry surveys conducted between 2002 and 2005, the number of affected households was an estimated 410,000 in the first year. The number continued to fall in subsequent years, with a 2005 figure of 260,000 households.

Over the years, there have been many reports of Hikikomori sufferers becoming violent. In 2000, “a 17 year old hikikomori sufferer left his isolation and hijacked a bus, killing a passenger. Another kidnapped a girl and held her captive in his bedroom for nine years.”
Hikikomori - The Silent Sufferers looks at a selection of hikikomori sufferers, examining their lives and how they and their families cope.

Someone has too much time on their hands....

Ah, Lego for Adults - there’s an idea to get older males playing with their bricks, even though this stuff might be on the top shelf of the local toy store.



 …

Iran PSA "How to stone a woman"

Canada's National Post created a two-page spread to explain the procedure for stoning condemned adulterer to death.

Since 1980, at least 150 men and women have been stoned to death in Iran, said Farshad Hoseini, head of the International Committee against Execution, who has compiled a report on the practice from media reports and human rights organizations. However, he cautions in the report, "It should be pointed out that obtaining a true and complete list of the victims is extremely difficult, if not totally impossible, due to the regime's systematic censorship of such news."
He added, "Stoning in Iran is a political tool in the hands of an Islamic regime to oppress the society as a whole in one of the most savage ways. The overwhelming majority of the victims of stoning are women. Stoning in Iran is therefore a tool, among many such religious, oppressive tools, for keeping women in their

LIFE DOES NOT = MOVIES

What we see in the movies:
It seems to happen in about a third of the action movies/TV shows ever made: Someone jumps our hero from behind, and the screen goes to black. Hours later, he wakes up in some strange place and has to think on his feet to make his escape.
We see it in Casino Royale, after Bond survives a car accident but before he gets smashed in the nuts over and over. It also happens in Pulp Fiction, when Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames are knocked out by the owner of the pawn shop and wake up bound and gagged, right before the guy decides to "bring out the gimp."

Quentin Tarantino has some issues.

When they wake up, the guys aren't happy about it, but they're otherwise immediately alert and aware -- Willis is even able to orchestrate a violent escape a minute later.
It also happens to Marty McFly at least once in every Back to the Future movie: He knocks himself unconscious and inevitably wakes up a while later in bed with his mother (or, in one case, a paternal grandmother who looks disturbingly like his mother).

But that's nothing compared to the repeated head trauma suffered by some TV characters -- you would see it happen repeatedly on Lost (usually with the butt of a gun) and Heroes (usually right before every commercial break). The character Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer was known for being a) super-smart and b) extremely prone to head injuries. These two things are not as compatible as you might think.
What would really happen:
We've all seen boxers and football players get knocked out for a few seconds and then jump up and continue playing the game (hell, it's happened to some of you reading this). But it's all about how long you are out. Experts say if you're ever out for more than five minutes, call a goddamned ambulance. There's a really, really good chance you have severe damage. A hit hard enough to keep you down that long means concussion or, worse, a traumatic brain injury or your brain may be goddamned bleeding on the inside.

But hey, it's just your brain.

And that's talking about being out a matter of minutes -- think about all of the movies you've seen where the character wakes up into some wacky misunderstanding hours later. In Pulp Fiction, the guy from the pawn shop has enough time to carry the characters to his basement one at a time, tie them to chairs and wait for his friend to arrive. By the time they wake up (not on their own -- they only wake up because their captor sprays water on them), Willis and Rhames can probably say goodbye to such helpful abilities as standing, walking, talking or maybe even waking up again.
And when you start talking about those TV show characters who are getting knocked out in every other episode, you're dealing with realism on the level of Elmer Fudd surviving getting flattened by a boulder. Concussions -- even mild ones -- have cumulative effects (as every football fan now knows). The more times you get knocked unconscious, the more severe your dizziness, disorientation and nausea will be each time. So, by the end of Back to the Future Part III, after being knocked out so many times in a period of like two weeks (or 125 years, depending on how you look at it), Marty McFly should be reduced to a drooling idiot incapable of walking by himself, let alone driving a DeLorean through time and space

Happy Thanksgiving

The Tin Man gets in on illegal organ trafficking

Sneaky, wrong, and brillant.....

Designed to steal air from car tires for bicycle tires..

Did Texas Execute Another Innocent Man?

David Grann’s New Yorker story about Cameron Todd Willmingham asked whether Texas executed an innocent man in 2004. Willmingham may not have been the first: Claude Jones was executed in Texas 10 years ago for a liquor-store murder, based on a single hair that was found at the scene of the crime. But a recent DNA analysis has shown that the hair did not belong to Jones and it may have belonged, in fact, to the murder victim. Jones was a career criminal who never admitted to the crime. As his execution neared, he pushed then Governor George W. Bush for a DNA test on the hair, but Bush’s office never brought Jones’ request to the governor’s attention. During Jones’ trial, a forensic expert looked at the hair under a microscope and said it could have been Jones’, but not the victim’s; a DNA test was never performed before Jones’ execution

If you have ever been to Kentucky. This would not surprise you...

Harvey Westmoreland and his brother got into a fight with James Hill and Troy Holt in May.

The dispute was over a tractor Westmoreland was trying to sell to one of the men.

Westmoreland said the men felt like they were being ripped off and that's when the fight started.

"Troy offered to buy it from me for $250 dollars. I paid twenty bucks for it. He thought I was trying to cheat him," One thing led to another, and before I knew it, there were knives and guns and everything just went haywire."

"(Then) they cut my beard and forced me to eat it," he said.

Hill and Holt pleaded guilty. It's expected they'll be fined and sentenced to supervised diversion

Very F**kin cool!

New factory in Mojave to produce White Knight spacecraft for Virgin Galactic space tourism

The Los Angeles Times today reports that The Spaceship Company, or TSC—the joint venture owned by Burt Rutan's Mojave-based Scaled Composites and Richard Branson's space tourism company Virgin Galactic—are building a production facility at the Mojave Air and Space Port where the world's first fleet of commercial spaceships will be built.

TSC plans to finish the 68,000-square-foot facility by September, 2011. "It expects to build three White Knight aircraft, which resemble massive flying catamarans, and five smaller SpaceShipTwo rocket planes," according to the LA Times

Happy,happy. Joy,joy

MarketWatch:
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says people in Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands are the most content with their lives. The three ranked first, second and third, respectively, in the OECD's rankings of "life satisfaction," or happiness.
There are myriad reasons, of course, for happiness: health, welfare, prosperity, leisure time, strong family, social connections and so on. But there is another common denominator among this group of happy people: taxes.
Northern Europeans pay some of the highest taxes in the world. Danes pay about two-thirds of their income in taxes.

There is hope....

If I had a dollar for evertime this happened to me.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!

Foreskin restoration devices

Passing of a icon.....

Bob May, Jan. 18: The man in the 'Lost in Space' robot suit, usually photographed in costume, posed here with co-star Billy Mummy. May died at the age of 69.

I think that this is a valid line of reasoning..

signs of the apocalypse.

This spring news broke about a bizarre form of entertainment in Thailand where orangutans are forced to wear boxing gloves and fight each other in the ring. During the match female orangutans in bikinis parade around the ring displaying the round numbers

I dig it......