links for 2010-03-31
On 31 March 02010 with 9 comments
The sage grouse mating display is really impressive. Evolution is crazy.
The signs seen at Tea Party protests often contain creative spelling and grammar. This new dialect of the English language shall be known as "Teabonics."
I was just pondering this very question. It turns out, no; the pope is all-powerful. And the last pope to resign was Gregory XII, in 1415. That was during the Western Schism, anyhow, so there were a couple of backup popes. (Somehow, none of this ever came up in my weekly Confraternity of Christian Doctrine classes.)
This Maine Democrat believes that any appropriation request should be defensible. So she's directed any organization seeking an earmark to post a video to YouTube explaining why their request is in the best interest of the country, and she's providing all of those videos on her website. These are, in theory, basically the same presentation that the organizations would have made to her or her staff anyhow.
Famously, Igor Stravinsky's complex, primitive, and dissonent "Le sacre du printemps" was so unlike any other music of its time that its 1913 premiere ended with the Parisian audience rioting. Apparently, that's not entirely true. Some scholars say that the story has been exaggerated considerably over the years, and that, anyhow, people would have been reacting to the choreography of the dancers, not to the music—contemporary reviewers wrote entirely about the dancing, and barely mentioned the music or Stravinsky.
I'm glad Google still has a sense of humor.
This screenshot from Word 2011 for Mac OS X says it all, I think. Not only is Microsoft still using the floppy disk icon to indicate "Save" (Macs haven't come with floppy drives for a decade), but this interface is just wretched. Can you imagine somebody new to Word or, worse yet, computers in general, sitting down and being faced with this? They'd *cry*.
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