So Iran got elected to the Commission on the Status of Women.

Really?

What are they smoking over there?

When even Fox News gets it:

handing a four-year seat on the influential human rights body to a theocratic state in which stoning is enshrined in law and lashings are required for women judged “immodest.”

you know you’ve seriously fucked up.

At least sanity was flouring somewhere. Belgium is close to passing a ban on the burqa. I know it infuriates me personally just because there’s no ‘u’ after the ‘q’.

The President of France said it better:

“In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity. The burka is not a religious sign. It’s a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement”.

You tell ‘em Sarkozy!

How I love the first amendment and its ability to let you convey things, especially with humor, in conversations that normally wouldn’t make it past the first 15 seconds.

Thanks to PZ for reminding me that NonStampCollector puts out some amazing satire and critiques.

After all these years this game still haunts me.

I never knew Randi did a TED talk. Thanks Bad Astronomer.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is live and the first images are back. Built to observe our sun in a number of ways, the images and videos that are coming back are beyond words. Head on over to NASA’s site to see more pictures and videos of that awesome star that powers our planet.

"A full-disk multiwavelength extreme ultraviolet image of the sun taken by SDO on March 30, 2010. False colors trace different gas temperatures. Reds are relatively cool (about 60,000 Kelvin, or 107,540 F); blues and greens are hotter (greater than 1 million Kelvin, or 1,799,540 F). Credit: NASA"

And I had forgotten about this

" What's happened to our Sun? Last week, it produced one of the largest eruptive prominences ever seen. Pictured above, the prominence erupted in only a few hours and was captured in movie form by NASA's twin Sun-orbiting STEREO satellites. A quiescent solar prominence is a cloud of hot solar gas held above the Sun's surface by the Sun's magnetic field. Unpredictably, however, prominences may erupt, expelling hot gas into the Solar System via a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). As pictured above, many Earths would easily fit under the expanding ribbon of hot gas. Although somehow related to the Sun's changing magnetic field, the energy mechanism that creates and sustains a Solar prominence is still a topic of research." Picture credit: STEREO Project, NASA

Always awe-inspiring anytime you realize ‘many earths’ could fit under something.