theweaselking | Jun. 6th, 2005

Jun. 6th, 2005

This made me laugh:
Image hosted by Photobucket.com

So, because I had to, I went and found this guy:
Image hosted by Photobucket.com

"Dude. These aren't my pants!"

A Bouncer's Guide to clubgoing etiquette. Funny as hell, possibly not work-safe - no pictures, no bad words, but there are some unpleasant images and discussion of all the things clubgoers get up to.

On my trip to the Savage Foreign South, I got a chance to play Deadlands for the first time in five years.

I'm addicted again.

I only own cards to make one playable deck, since I never actually spent money on 'em.

I need help: Anyone who owns a stack of old Deadlands cards and wants to get rid of them? Give me a call. I'll buy 'em off you. I'll pay decently, for, y'know, a card game that's been dead for five years. If you've got a working deck built, BONUS, I'll take it, too.

For the locals: If you've got an email address handy for Tony Christofaro, Jon Delowsky, or Jeremy Saint, I'd definitely love to get a hold of them about it. And, hey, if you don't want to sell your cards but share my addiction and want to play, call me. I loves my mutant undead meatgrinder deck, I does.

If you and

flemco don't watch

comicstripicons, you should. Two Lumps is a favourite there, and they make some goooood shit.

(also, the creator/maintainer of the community introduces her favourite strips as "Bloom County, Doonesbury, Two Lumps, The Far Side..." - I figure you'd appreciate that.)

Altering a single gene in a fruit fly can turn its sexual orientation around, causing male flies to lose interest in females, and females to display male mating rituals to other females.

The research by Barry J. Dickson and Ebru Demir of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences into the workings of a "switch gene" touched on the scientific debate about whether genes or environment determine human sexual orientation.

Male courtship in Drosophila is an elaborate ritual and largely a fixed-action pattern easily identified by the researchers. The male taps the female with his forelegs, sings a specific courtship song by extending and vibrating a wing, licks her genitalia, and then curls his abdomen for copulation.

Through gene splicing, they were able to swap the orientation of male and female fruit flies they studied in an observation chamber. "Forcing female splicing in the male results in a loss of male courtship behavior and orientation," the study said. "More dramatically, females ... spliced in the male mode behave as if they were males: they court other females. "A complex innate behavior is thus specified by the action of a single gene, demonstrating that behavioral switch genes do indeed exist."

Courtesy of (translation: Stolen from)

crisper

"When they came for the pitbulls, I said nothing, because I didn't have a pitbull.

When they came for the german shepherds, I said nothing, because I didn't have a german shepherd.

When they came for the dobermans, I said nothing, because I didn't have a doberman.

But when they came for my rottweiler, I opened the door and said KILL, BRUNO, KILL EM SIC EM YEAH YEAH FUCK YEAH HIS EYES TOO YEAH YEAH HELL YEAH! GOOD DOG!"

Earth, as seen from Mars

Way too elongated to hotlink, too much work to resize.

Ontario MP leaves government over his unwillingness to not be a bigot.

For those of you keeping score at home, that leaves us at 133:98:54:19 - or, 152:152:1:1:1:1, depending on how you look at it.

An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level, was launched on Monday.

The "Blue Brain" project, a collaboration between IBM and a Swiss university team, will involve building a custom-made supercomputer based on IBM’s Blue Gene design.

The hope is that the virtual brain will help shed light on some aspects of human cognition, such as perception, memory and perhaps even consciousness.

It will be the first time humans will be able to observe the electrical code our brains use to represent the world, and to do so in real time, says Henry Markram, director of Brain and Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytecnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.

It may also help in understanding how certain malfunctions of the brain's "microcircuits" could cause psychiatric disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and depression, he says.

Until now this sort of undertaking would not be possible because the processing power and the scientific knowledge of how the brain is wired simply was not there, says Charles Peck, IBM's lead researcher on the project.

"But there has been a convergence of the biological data and the computational resources," he says. Efforts to map the brain's circuits and the development of the Blue Gene supercomputer, which has a peak processing power of at least 22.8 teraflops, now make this possible.