Life and Death in the Late Cretaceous

67 million years ago a snake coiled in a nest of dinosaur eggs and ate the babies as they hatched. A landslide buried the scene and time and conditions fossilized it.
 
The discovery and identification is described in a Wired Science article:

"Geologist Dhanajay Mohabey of the Indian Geological Survey first unearthed the fossil 26 years ago in a rocky, limestone outcropping in the northwestern Indian village of Dholi Dungri. He thought all the bones at the site were those of dinosaur hatchlings.

But in 2001, University of Michigan paleontologist Jeff Wilson, took a second look at the fossils. The team then recognized they had actually found a snake coiled around a broken egg, with a hatchling and two other eggs nearby."

Linkage

Why we dream.

The joy of mephedrone.

Vix doesn't seem to be worth much.

Electromagnetic armor.

Where's the missing oil?

Why we're fat.

Cold Fusion still coming back.

What you can do with all that data.

Statistics isn't so good. The experts should take a look at this.

The top prospects in energy stocks.

Occasional Links

Bad stuff coming out of China.

Google's delusional arrogance.

Chinese jets for Chavez.

Travel like a human.

Grant redux.

Why surprises blind us.

Is China spoiling for a fight?

Your mind and your money.

Incentives rule the world.

Once bitten....

CNN Basically Prints a Press Release

Described as a "huge success" folks sat in coffee shops to talk politics. Turnout was higher than expected with an overwhelming 60 people showing up in Decatur, GA (suburb of small town Atlanta). One hates to ask how many they were expecting. A Political Movement is Brewing reads the headline. In Asheville, NC, 35 people gathered. Thirty showed up in Raleigh, NC. (about as many who are in the bathroom at any one time during one of Duke's preseason basketball games-- too much coffee). Coffee News Network. Res Ipsa Loquitor.

Occasional Links

Atrazine emasculates frogs.

It's raining men fish.

How to solve health care.

All your news are belong to us.

Grandma in Hubei.

Behind every great fortune....

"The only way you build an economy is through savings and investments."

Jihad Jane.

Seeing through the opaque—they do it with matrices.

The spread of goodness.

Unsurprising perhaps

This morning, while driving to work, some blather coming out of the radio clued me in to the fact that the Oscar awards happened last night. Not that it matters to anyone or anything but I got an odd, if momentary, sense of wellbeing from the fact that I'd been blissfully unaware of the Oscars. Not that I ever pay much attention to them, but ZERO attention was a new high water mark.

Pride may cometh before the fall, but may I be proud for this?

Occasional Links

Why the recession is lasting so long.

Communicating through touch.

Revolution in China?

Fairness is hard-wired into the brain.

What makes unemployment go down.

Noah's Ark was round.

Evolution is driven through constant warfare, not adaptation to the environment.

The rise of Asia.

Data über alles.

"The British are our friends."

Occasional Links

Real lives in North Korea.

Quark soup at 4 trillion degrees Celsius.

Japan's Mengele experiments.

The mathematical formula for movie shots.

How to watch the Olympics live.

How to deal with the recalcitrant public-sector unions.

Don't even think about having an abortion.

Finding the lowest fares.

The scale of the universe.

Europe is made in the USA.

Let me count the ways...

Retort

Thou art a fool," said my head to my heart,
"Indeed, the greatest of fools thou art,
To be led astray by trick of a tress,
By a smiling face or a ribbon smart;"
And my heart was in sore distress.

Then Phyllis came by, and her face was fair,
The light gleamed soft on her raven hair;
And her lips were blooming a rosy red.
Then my heart spoke out with a right bold air:
"Thou art worse than a fool, O head!"

The poem is by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The sign amidst the painted flowers of Big Johnson Bail Bonds' window says, "Get me out of the slammer and I'll be your Valentine." Valentine's Day is over, but I suppose it is too good of a slogan to waste.

Occasional Links

The oil export crisis has already arrived.

Iran will punch Western powers.

China starts to dump.


Is the Sahara blooming?

Spray-on liquid glass.

The social graph of the United States.

Two cheers for insensitive bosses.

We've misjudged China.

Why California is in trouble.

Is Beijing vacant?

The Sound of English

Adriano Celentano, an Italian singer and comedian, sings his song Prisencolinensinainciusol. The lyrics are gibberish, but are meant to sound like English. It is a quite convincing attempt, and an English speaker's ears end up struggling to put the syllables together to form coherent words. Very odd.

It is from the post What English Sounds like to People in other Countries,  which has several other clips of people simulating the sound of English.

Another entertaining clip at that post is a woman, on the Bulgarian version of American Idol, singing Mariah Carey’s “Without You”. The phonetic subtitles of what she is actually singing are a hoot.

What might have been

Ah, the grand future we were promised...

 

These pictures of our glorious future, and more that follow after the jump,

are from Black and WTF which has an extremely eclectic collection of old pictures.

By the way, I wonder why the woman is holding a chicken in the first picture?

Occasional Links

Life among the Taliban.

20 reasons why the US economy is dying and will not recover.

Four crashes, inflation adjusted.

Vegetative patients may be able to think after all.

The future of music?

Darwin's genetics uncovered.

Kill all the subsidies.

Natural gas for all.

What's the matter with Microsoft.

iPad, Take 3

The Two Charts That Explain Where We Are

Red is spending, blue is income.

Total US debt as percent of GDP.

H/T Henry Blodget.

Another View of the iPad

Hitler responds to the iPad

Yeah, I know these things are getting old, but it's the scene that keeps on giving. It's the thousand year rant.

Foot in Mouth Disease

Occasional Links

Peak oil? No, but expensive oil, yes.

What the Google fiasco tells us about China.

Not a single oil company trusts Chavez. Who woulda thunk it?

Paying people not to work—does it extend the recession?

270 earthquakes in 2 days--bad news for the caldera?

15 books every entrepreneur should read.

The theory of conjoint measurement.

Just a little shade can kill your solar cells' output.

But who will save them from Jeffrey Sachs?

Time to learn Mandarin.

She just needs to make lemonade out of lemons

Oooops. I guess that coronation campaign didn't go according to plan.

My advice to Martha Coakley is that she just needs to look at the bright side. Turn that frown upside down. At least now she'll have plenty of free time to catch a ball game or two at Fenway next season.

We do also need to give props to Kerry for his inadvertent role in this Democratic fiasco. Had the Democrats never changed the law in anticipation of his Presidential win a Democrat would have been appointed to the Senate seat instead of giving a concession speech.

I guess God, or the universe, or whatever, does have a sense of humor after all.