North Carolina has some kick-ass aquariums. Split into three separate locations down the Carolina coast, they each have fabulous displays of the NC wildlife that can be found at each stage – mountains, plains, coastal plains, tidal pools, and ocean.
Up to this point we’ve only ever gone to Ft. Fischer as it was the closest, but this year we took the extra 1/2 hour drive up to Pine Knolls on the Emerald Isle of the Outer Banks. It was well worth it. They have a giant tank recreating the sunken U-boat 352 complete with most of the sea life you’d find around it. Big fish, eels, sea turtles and sharks.
If you are ever in North Carolina it’s worth visiting their aquariums – and the admission prices are easy on the pocket book too.
I’d almost forgotten – a while back it was announced that Fright Night, the seminal ’80′s horror flick was being remade and the star is none other than former Doctor Who, David Tennant.
io9 has the latest scoop, check it out! I’m rarely big on remakes, but David Tennant can bring a whole lot to a role!
The BBC has an intriguing article on a little known project that Darwin and his colleagues had worked on – Ascension island.
In short, this volcanic island in the middle of the Atlantic was a barren rock.
What happened in the interim is the amazing story of how the architect of evolution, Kew Gardens and the Royal Navy conspired to build a fully functioning, but totally artificial ecosystem.
By a bizarre twist, this great imperial experiment may hold the key to the future colonisation of Mars.
Hurricane Earl is bearing down on my beach house (well, mine for a week). Right now it’s a category 3 storm. That’s bad. In less than 24 hours it’ll be raging off the Outer Banks, and at that point it could either be a category 4 (we’re screwed) or with any luck it’ll have weakened or even swung out to sea a little bit and just give us a nasty day of rain and high winds.
In all, we’ve been lucky for the many years we’ve been coming to Topsail Island as we’ve never had a major storm come near us. So this particular storm seemed mighty fishy, almost like something was sending it this way on purpose.
Luckily I purchased our very own super hero for the trip. This is probably his 7th or 8th version of his armor. It’s freaking wild what you can buy at Costco now-a-days. Your own god damn Iron Man.
So, we sent Ironing Man (as he is known by the wee ones) aloft to survey the skies and determine what was behind this foul storm.
Using his advanced sensors, state-of-the-art velco and aluminum bar design, and a washed-up bag that served as a weight on his tail he was able to do some serious reconnaissance of the beach and spot the neer-do-wells.
Jellyfish! It was their fiendish plot to storm the beaches and sow terror among the populace. Riding the large waves and heavy surf created by Earl they flung themselves without mercy upon the beaches… and promptly stopped, forgetting their jellied bodies were no match for dry land. Fools!
On September 1st Apple is holding a press conference. It’ll most likely be talking about iPods and there are rumors of other items being released (like an updated Apple TV).
Onto the choice bits. Apple said it will be live-streaming the event using ‘open standards’. But the catch is you can only watch the live-stream on an Apple product running iOS 3 or 4, in the Snow Leopard operating system running Safari.
WTF? Why even bother saying “open standards” if you are employing it in a fashion that a vast majority of the internet connected populace can’t use? I can’t even watch this live-stream on my Mac Book Pro because I ONLY have OSX 10.5. I might be able to watch it on my iPhone if the 3G connection down here in the OBX works for me than two minutes.
In all, it’s contrived double-speak of Microsoft proportions.
They really should run for some government positions at this point given the shit that dribbles out of their mouths.
September 7th is right around the corner. For the past two seasons SOA has been some of the best television around. It’s pure motorcycle/violence porn. Perfect!
Of course the political news is all ablaze with the ramblings of Glen Beck’s rally in Washington. I was keen to hear the attendance numbers and ensuing vitriol that would be spat from all sides on said numbers. In a mud put like this how does one separate fact from fiction?
Ah science – even the sketchy, fuzzy science of crowd counting delivers better numbers than the biased squint and pull a number out of your ass routine that we’ve seen come from all sides of the media.
My estimate is that about 80,000 people were at the rally. Ryan Shuler, an Airphotoslive image analyst, used the same images and a different grid-density method to produce an estimate of 87,000. Considering the error margins around our separately-calculated estimates, they are statistically identical.
Of course he’s taken all kinds of heat for publishing this from the same right-wing groups that lauded his numbers on the Obama inauguration.
Do numbers really mean anything? Not always. In fact, often it becomes a crutch, a logical fallacy - argumentum ad populum, that because a lot/too little people were there an idea is good/bad. How many news stories will fill the airwaves balanced on this exact crutch rather than addressing the issues that were presented? Too many.
I fully expect one of the few, if only place that will actually dissect the messages presented at the rally will be the Daily Show. Then again, throughout all of man’s history comedy and satire has always delivered the truth.
If you are not a PC gamers than this won’t hold much interest for you outside the realm of two industry giants battling it out for market supremacy.
For almost two decades the graphics card market has been a hotly contested place. It’s been a race of pure horsepower, and the winner is always the customer. A few giants have come and gone, and this last decade has mostly seen ATI and Nvidia duking it out for the crown.
They’ve alternated turns at the top, and in this last round it looked like ATI was down for the count. They surged back with their 4000 series and 5000 series of cards to beat Nvidia and take back the crown. In return customers saw graphics cards more powerful than ever before, and ultimately delivering better gaming experiences.
And now ATI is going away – at least in name. They were bought back in 2006 buy chip maker AMD (another giant who regularly trades blows with Intel – and again we win because of it), who has now decided to dissolve the ATI brand completely.
While AMD gives reasons for this change but it still seems… foolhardy - especially given the amount of pixel-ass-kicking ATI has delivered over the past year. It’s like DC Comics renaming the Joker as ‘heinous villain owned by DC Comics’.
Pseudoscientists often reveal themselves by their handling of the scientific literature. Their idea of doing scientific research is simply to read scientific periodicals and monographs. They focus on words, not on the underlying facts and reasoning. They take science to be all statements by scientists. Science degenerates into a secular substitute for sacred literature. Any statement by any scientist can be cited against any other statement. Every statement counts and every statement is open to interpretation. - Science and Unreason, Radner and Radner
(thanks to abb3w on Fark for turning up this awesome quote).
North Carolina has some kick-ass aquariums. Split into three separate locations down the Carolina coast, they each have fabulous displays of the NC wildlife that can be found at each stage – mountains, plains, coastal plains, tidal pools, and ocean.
Hurricane Earl is bearing down on my beach house (well, mine for a week). Right now it’s a category 3 storm. That’s bad. In less than 24 hours it’ll be raging off the Outer Banks, and at that point it could either be a category 4 (we’re screwed) or with any luck it’ll have weakened or even swung out to sea a little bit and just give us a nasty day of rain and high winds.
probably his 7th or 8th version of his armor. It’s freaking wild what you can buy at Costco now-a-days. 
Your own god damn Iron Man.
