Link Banana

Though Douglas Prasher’s research was an important step in the work that recieved this year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry, he’s unacknowledged and earning $10 an hour driving a shuttle for a car dealership.

(via SEED)

Steven Levitt points to a rather absurd study: scientists used Google Earth to determine that cattle — and other large herbiovores — are more likely to graze while standing in a north-south direction. They think it has something to do with magnetic fields.

Click the link. I dare you not to laugh.

Also, click on the picture there for information about it.

A few weeks ago, Jon Stewart said that he no longer found it possible to hate the president. I agreed then, and I still agree after seeing this. An explanation and more is at The Lede. As it describes the video:

The video is grainy, and Mr. Bush isn’t visible on most of it. But the lyrics, which poke fun at some of the most controversial moments in the Bush administration — the prosecution of vice presidential aide Scooter Libby, the collapse of his nomination of Harriet Miers, former White House counsel, to the Supreme Court — are almost entirely clear, over the laughter.

Or so says Susan Blackmore. That title, by the way, means that humans serve no purpose than to propagate trends and ideas, or “memes“ — which, by the way, is a word I’ve never liked much.

What culture is doing, what the memesphere is doing, is taking a human being and infecting it with masses of new information and exploiting its tendencies. We are being turned from ordinary old-fashioned meme machines into what I call “teme” machines — machines for copying technological information, spreading photos and printed words and digital files.

(via kottke.org)

“This Peanut…” is a curious and short assemblage of objects that, well, look like ducks. Not much more to say than that.