know your spock

via boingboing

how to knit a dissected rat

link (via something changed)

death star over san francisco

if h.p. lovecraft wrote descriptions for chocolates

from mcsweeney's 'Selections From H.P. Lovecraft's Brief Tenure as a Whitman's Sampler Copywriter':

White Chocolate Truffle

What black arts could have stripped this chocolate of its natural hue? The horror of the unearthly, corpselike pallor of this truffle's complexion is only offset by its fiendish deliciousness.

Toffee Nugget

Few men dare ask the question "What is toffee, exactly?" All those who have investigated this substance are now either dead or insane.

link (via poor mojo newswire)

the rapture index

christians have been tracking signs of end times (false christs, satanism, financial unrest, and so on) for a while now. over at rapture ready, they've created an index of 45 signs we're approaching the rapture. we're at 160 this week, down from 161 last week. it's a swing away from rapture, to be sure, but anything over 160 is aparently a sign that it's time to, as you put it once, stand up on the roof so you don't knock a hole in the ceiling. i quote from the site: behold!

The Rapture Index has two functions: one is to factor together a number of related end time components into a cohesive indicator, and the other is to standardize those components to eliminate the wide variance that currently exists with prophecy reporting.

The Rapture Index is by no means meant to predict the rapture, however, the index is designed to measure the type of activity that could act as a precursor to the rapture.

You could say the Rapture index is a Dow Jones Industrial Average of end time activity, but I think it would be better if you viewed it as prophetic speedometer. The higher the number, the faster we're moving towards the occurrence of pre-tribulation rapture.

link

the large hadron collider is hott

the large hadron collider is nearly ready. it's pretty sexy. (click on the pictures to make them more awesome.)


did you know there's a bunch of folks trying to stop it? they're worried it will form tiny black holes which could get out of control.

'bah!' say their opponents. 'those black holes will be so tiny they will cease to exist in an instant!'


..which you may notice doesn't deny the black hole thing, just pooh-poohs its significance. yes, the old 'black holes? ha! i'm not afraid of black holes and if you are you are soft in the brain' defense.

i heard on the radio some science magazine like nature surveyed its readers and two-thirds of them agree there's no chance we will get swallowed up by a runaway black hole as a consequence of large hadron collider experiments. i don't know about you but a 1/3 chance of being swallowed by a black hole as a result of human activity seems pretty fucking high, if you ask me. fortunately

a) no-one has, and
b) nature readers are not the ultimate arbiters of the world. but then again, you'd think they had, on aggregate, the best chance of predicting the outcome of any given experiment on the physical world.


anyway, i guess we'll find out when they switch it on. sure is pretty, anyways. you couldn't ask for a better-looking agent of apocalypse.

link, via kottke

the earth with the surface removed

according to the british geological survey this is what the earth would look like if you took the soil and the water and cities off to reveal the pure geology under it all.

(found via bldgblog, which i think you would also like.)