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The sage grouse mating display is really impressive. Evolution is crazy.
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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."
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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I'm glad Google still has a sense of humor.
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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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wow. i had no idea there were OTHER classical music riots:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_music_riot
RE: Grouse…
Did you ever watch Planet Earth? There are some super freaky things animals do like this (especially the bird dances). Also enjoying Life on the Discovery Channel.
Just check out Sir David Attenborough and the segment he did on the Bower Birds.
The pope thing isn’t surprising. It’s not a democratic institution. He is the Vicar of Christ. You can’t just revoke that title. Well, I take that back. You can and that’s called Protestantism or heresy (take your pick). =)
Re: Greater sage-grouse strut
Golly, that looked just like an Attorney General Cuccinelli press conference announcing his latest law suit against the United States of America!
I’ve hated every interface Microsoft put out for Word since the 1997 edition — it’s not just the new users who have issues with these things. The problem is that I’ve been so conditioned by the word processing programs from the 1990s that I can’t figure out any of the new programs. I switched to OpenOffice’s writing program a little while back because I hate (HATE) having to pay for a new MS Office suite to be able to open everyone else’s newer-formatted documents. Only I can’t figure out everything I want to do with OpenOffice. In Word ’97, you just had to tick a few boxes to get page numbers on a document — a third box removes the page number from your first page. I wrestled with figuring out how to do this in OpenOffice for about two days before I decided it was easier to export everything as a PDF and eliminate unwanted page numbers manually (the document in question was 115 pages long, so manually adding a page number field to each page was too much of a hassle).
Everyone who’s made a word processor in the past ten years can die in a fire for all I care.
The Planet Earth segment on the bird of paradise mating dance was great! I’d forgotten about that. I’ve never seen anything vaguely like it.
What? Why Waldo, have you never seen Ken Cuccinelli “puff up” during one of his press conferences when he’s decided to sue our own country? Frankly, the strutting grouse is a dead ringer.
Not that it’s a bird mating dance ritual, but I saw this clip of a lyre bird which can mimic any noise. It can sound like a chainsaw, a camera shutter, anything that it has heard. By mimicking all these different sounds, that apparently impresses the females.
And the rainmaking bacteria, it’s interesting, but as the article states, a lot more research needs to go into it. Similarly, we know dust/sand storms redeposit sand particulate across the globe. I would imagine bacteria adhere to that particulate. But the thought that the bacteria is driving the water cycle? I don’t know.