I fear that Sherri Shephard, a co-host on The View, has once again shown that there is no limit to her own stupidity. My brain nearly exploded after seeing the following clip from yesterday’s show:

Did you hear what she said? Shepherd just attempted to assert that Christians existed in classical Greece, and that the Greeks threw them to the lions. When confronted on this point, she further claimed that “Jesus came first” (before Greeks and Romans) and stated “I don’t think anything predated Christians”.*

This wasn’t the first time Sherri has been so ridiculously inane: a few months ago she said that she wasn’t sure if the world was flat or not. I’ll give you a second to process that one. Sherri isn’t sure… if the world… is flat. Holy f*ckbuckets, Batman.

How do people like this exist, much less appear on broadcast television? Never before has this speech from Billy Madison been more relevant.

Sherri is so willfully ignorant it’s painful. I would feel sorry for her if she wasn’t so damn sure of her own infallibility.

via Huffington Post

The Tasmanian Tiger (or Thylacine) was a fascinating animal that went extinct during the early 1930’s. It was technically a carnivorous marsupial and looked like a strangely wonderful combination of a wolf, tiger, and kangaroo. Even at their peak population the tiger was rarely seen, and was most likely driven to extinction by dingos.

You can see a video of one of the last remaining tasmanian tigers alive in captivity. When I watch these clips I feel both sad and fascinated; it’s like seeing a home movie of a dinosaur or dodo bird.

Scientists have found soft tissue in a fossilized Tyrannosaurus Rex thigh bone:

[Cutting the bone in half] revealed a startling surprise: soft tissue that had seemingly resisted fossilization still existed inside the bone. This tissue, including blood vessels, bone cells, and perhaps even blood cells, was so well preserved that it was still stretchy and flexible.

Mmmm - am I the only “baller” who thinks this looks like bar-b-que?

(edit: whoops, this isn’t really recent news - the original discovery story happened over 1 year ago)

My father and his twin brother recently visited a small piece of Kansas farmland (approximately here) that has been in the Barron family for decades. In the past the land had been rented out to local tenant farmers who grew wheat. The family now wants to sell the land (hence the reason for their visit), as few people are interested in trying to be a landlord from several thousand miles away.

While in Kansas the brothers visited the last remaining Barron (a 75-year-old second cousin of theirs) still living in the area; they learned a lot about the history of the land and our family. I won’t bore you with the details (of which there are many), but I do want to share a funny story about the twin’s birth that even they didn’t know about before this trip!

When the “twins” were born in 1948 (William and John), the second was a surprise to the doctor and to our parents. As a consequence, the name for the younger of the two twins had not yet been decided. In a telegram sent to our uncle Lloyd on the day announcing the birth of the twins, this is apparent as our father cited the names of the twins as a “William Clark” and a “John Doe”. John Doe is a term used for someone whose true name is unknown. When our parents finally picked the name for the younger of the two twins, they apparently decided to keep the first name “John”.

You can see a larger image of my father, aka “John Doe”, at our (soon to be sold) wheat farm here.

I just read a fascinating article about the square root of -1 (or commonly known as i) over at one of the more geeky blogs I read: Good Math, Bad Math. History + Math + Complex Concepts That Make Me Feel Smart = Happy Mike:

It got its name as the imaginary number as a result of a diatribe by Rene Descartes, who believed it was a phony artifact of sloppy algebra. He did not accept that it had any meaning at all: thus it was an “imaginary” number.
…
Once the reality of i as a number was accepted, mathematics was changed irrevocably. Instead of the numbers described by algebraic equations being points on a line, suddenly they become points on a plane.

I’m not sure if I understand i any better, but I certainly enjoyed reading about it.

Yes ladies, the hair is real. I guess this explains my lacking powers of seduction during the eighth grade. But damn, looking back, don’t I look sexy with that big blonde tidal wave of hair?

The Class of ‘97 is just beginning to prepare for our ten year reunion. As a result, Claudio has been kind enough to send out some scans of past yearbooks and school newspapers. It’s a bit funny looking at all those old photos, and quite humorous.

The F-14 Tomcat is finally being retired. The plane has been around since 1970, but it was made famous by 1986’s Top Gun (sidenote: this was the movie where Shannon really solidified her crush on Tom Cruise, before he went bat-shit crazy).

Ever wonder what you grandparents listened to when they hung out with their friends? Click on over to 20 songs from 1901-1920 for a list of the top songs from that era (freely available to download).

The recordings sound muffled due to their age and the fact that the original performances were sung directly into an “acoustical horn” whose vibrations transcribed the sound, carving circular grooves into a revolving wax cylinder.

(via foldedspace.org)

In 1961 John F. Kennedy gave a speech entitled “The President and the Press” (listen) that is surprisingly poignant in today’s political and social climate:

The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.
…
The newspapers which printed these stories were loyal, patriotic, responsible and well-meaning. Had we been engaged in open warfare, they undoubtedly would not have published such items. But in the absence of open warfare, they recognized only the tests of journalism and not the tests of national security. And my question tonight is whether additional tests should not now be adopted.

That question is for you alone to answer. No public official should answer it for you. No governmental plan should impose its restraints against your will.

Check out this animated image showing the evolution of our alphabet, starting from 900 BC and working it’s way up to the present. To save time I’ll quote:

The multistroke characters such as vanished in favor of new characters such as S and V.
…
Todays characters can be generated by a combination of horizontal vertical and diagonal lines at approximately similar angles (W,A,V,X, M, K and Y).

Not sure what the root cause behind these changes has been - efficiency, changing mediums (tablets -> scrolls -> paper -> printing), or political forces? - but it is always interesting to learn a little more about our civilization’s history.

(via Digg / CoMagz)

current twc: 20,648 (89 pages)