This picture is so fraking awesome. I can't believe they didn't include it in 'the week in pictures'! If anyone can find a larger res version of it, I would love to have it, thanks.

Quoted: New clashes take place in Tehran overnight after at least eight opposition protesters die in the worst violence for months in Iran.

"where my fuckin' homies at? boom!!!"

Quoted: Panelists discuss whether there is an epidemic among young people today who get stoked over everything from free keychains to tacos.

lol at "wind powered testicular electrocution" and "that's zero emissions right there"

Quoted: Panelists discuss ways to wage a greener war in Iraq, such as driving biodegradable tanks and shocking detainees' testicles with wind power.

come for the funny tagline, stay for the most impressive of jowls. "hey anyone in here like to play pokemon mystery dungeon?"

Quoted: Rep. Gelinas proposes an educational bill to increase the number of young people he meets in under-13 chat rooms.

Quoted: Gen. McBrayer discusses how valuable homosexuals are, and why we must never put their lives at risk by allowing them in the military.

convenient timing. i wonder what's gonna happen with this story.

Quoted: A Taliban detainee in Pakistan claims to have information about Osama Bin Laden's whereabouts in January of this year.

click to play

what a great moment.

Quoted: Deer Tick playing the song Ashamed in a kitchen at a house show in Providence. December 9, 2007.

i stole some of this stuff cause i felt like i was getting sick yesterday. it is expensive and looks cool. it was only today that i decided, 'huh, i wonder what this active ingredient actually is?' i haven't laughed this hard in a long long long time. here is an excerpt, but you should read the whole article--
"There's no logical reason to believe that anything in duck liver or heart will be an effective flu remedy. But even if there were some magic substance, the manufacturing process guarantees that it will not be in the finished product. The laws of chemistry indicate that after the 12th dilution, it is unlikely that a single molecule from the original organs will remain. Moreover, at "200C" (or "200K" or "200 CK") the concentration of the original substance would be 1 part in 100^200, which is a 1 followed by 400 zeroes. A 1 followed by 100 zeroes is called a googol. The estimated number of particles in the universe that we can see is a googol, give or take a few zeroes. So in order for one of the original molecules to be present in a container of Oscillococcinum, the mass of that container would have to be about a googol googol googol times our world, which would be incomprehensibly larger than the visible universe."

foucault and others talk about this, but not with so many examples. i always thought it was a beautiful thought--

Until the early 19th century, people generally believed in the ongoing spontaneous generation of certain forms of life from non-living matter. This was paired with heterogenesis, the belief that one form of life derives from a different form (e.g. bees from flowers).[8] Classical notions of abiogenesis, now more precisely known as spontaneous generation, held that certain complex, living organisms are generated by decaying organic substances. According to Aristotle it was a readily observable truth that aphids arise from the dew which falls on plants, fleas from putrid matter, mice from dirty hay, crocodiles from rotting logs at the bottom of bodies of water, and so on.[9]

In the 17th century, such assumptions started to be questioned; for example, in 1646, Sir Thomas Browne published his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (subtitled Enquiries into Very many Received Tenets, and Commonly Presumed Truths), which was an attack on false beliefs and "vulgar errors." His conclusions were not widely accepted. For example, his contemporary, Alexander Ross wrote: "To question this (i.e., spontaneous generation) is to question reason, sense and experience. If he doubts of this let him go to Egypt, and there he will find the fields swarming with mice, begot of the mud of Nylus, to the great calamity of the inhabitants."[10]

In 1665, Robert Hooke published the first drawings of a microorganism. Hooke was followed in 1676 by Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who drew and described microorganisms that are now thought to have been protozoa and bacteria.[11] Many felt the existence of microorganisms was evidence in support of spontaneous generation, since microorganisms seemed too simplistic for sexual reproduction, and asexual reproduction through cell division had not yet been observed.

The first solid evidence against spontaneous generation came in 1668 from Francesco Redi, who proved that no maggots appeared in meat when flies were prevented from laying eggs. It was gradually shown that, at least in the case of all the higher and readily visible organisms, the previous sentiment regarding spontaneous generation was false. The alternative seemed to be biogenesis: that every living thing came from a pre-existing living thing (omne vivum ex ovo, Latin for "every living thing from an egg").