cover your mouth!

ever wonder what a cough looks like?

a Pennsylvania State University professor has come up with a way to capture images of the shock wave a cough creates; the colours represent differences in air pressure, i.e. the speed at which your germs are spreading, just like the Hubble etc. pix show different elements, gases or radiation frequencies

I wanna see a sneeze!

more next time

Blessed Be

what if … ?

… death really is the end?

do you know when you fall asleep?

how would you know you were dead?

in the October issue of Scientific American, Jesse Bering [director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen's University Belfast in Ireland, where he studies how the evolved human mind plays a part in religious thinking] suggests the concept of an afterlife is critical to construction and maintenance of social and cultural systems; that’s why we create religions, to promote concepts of an afterlife as foundations for our societies

but if those social and cultural systems are based on a false concept, how valid are those systems?

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Blessed Be

we are (will be) god(s) (?)

humans are on the verge of creating the first computers that may be able to reproduce, i.e. to create new computers, perhaps recreating or improving upon themselves

since reproduction is one of the criteria for whether an entity is alive, these replicating computers could, technically, be a new life form

I wonder if the new species will think of us as The Divine Computer as they create new e-gods in their own image?

more next time

Blessed Be

Full Moon fallout

• some election victory, eh? a larger slice of a smaller pie
  
  
• just like the old days; why can’t these guys play king of the cold war hill on a deserted island somewhere and leave us out of it?
  
  
• and what’s attacking Pakistan about? would they bomb London or Ottawa? if that’s not bullying …
  
  
• aw, they’re all nuts!

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Blessed Be

beyond money

now that they’ve saved the moneylenders [and why the hell did our ‘leaders’ do that anyway, eh?], is anyone up for bailing out Mother Nature? WARNING: it’s going to cost a lot more than the banks bailout

more next time

Blessed Be

misc. linx

this guy does work with monkeys
wanna banana with that latté?

technology’s not going to save us
but have faith! the Goddess really does take care of her own; first she gave us pot, and now superworms!

pots & kettles
Google CEO Eric Schmidt thinks the Internet is a cesspool, as far as the quality of content and the amount of false information

wonder what he thinks of the people who facilitate e-dumpster diving?

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Blessed Be

what to do when The Big One happens

40 years ago, the ‘big one’ was thermo-nuclear warfare

this is what the BBC was ready, in the 70s, to tell their listeners and viewers if it had happened then

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Blessed Be

watching the US vote?

check out the weekly update from AlterNet, a 10-year-old, award-winning e-zine that combines original journalism with the best from hundreds of other independent news sources

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Blessed Be

cat fight costs zoo nearly CDN$10 million

they should have known: arranged marriages are a bad idea these days

more next time

Blessed Be