Here's a nice selection of nature's finest three-eye, two-headed, two-tailed, and five-legged lizards, snakes, and frogs. Link (via Geisha Asobi)

Justin Ried of TheFeature has good things to say about a neat-sounding application called Salling Clicker that turns a Bluetooth device into a remote control for your Mac.

One of the really amazing features is that you can see not just ordinary information about the track you've got currently playing in iTunes - artist and song name, track length, etc. - but also the album art, directly on your mobile device.

Link

Interesting story in The Star (Canada) about this weekend's launch of Telesat Canada's new Internet broadcast satellite:

Canadians should care about this moment -- about this particular satellite. Anik F2 is more than just the largest and heaviest of commercial satellites in the world, it's also the first to combine cutting edge Ka-band technology with older and less powerful Ku- and C-band transponders. The latter two will continue to carry Canada's television and telecommunications signals, but the powerful Ka-band "spot beams" will, for the first time, let an Anik satellite deliver two-way, broadband Internet service to any location in North America at a price that's competitive with residential cable or DSL high-speed services.

Link (Thanks, JP!)

This mystery animal is traipsing around the Baltimore suburb of Glyndon.

"The beast is not shy, and visits most often under bright sun. While no one here knows what it is, they do have a name for it -- the hyote, a combination of a hyena and a coyote."

Link (via Fark)

UPDATE: Numerous readers have written in with reports that the "hyote" is actually a fox, dog, or bear with terrible mange. No matter the origin of the mysterious beast, I agree with this posting from the Fark forum: "We must catch it and learn from it."

California's AGW (Actor-Governor-whatever) derided his opponents in a speech this weekend as "girlie men," and asked his supporters to "terminate" them at polls in November if they fail to approve his >$103 billion budget. I read this headline on a copy of the LA Times at a neighborhood Hollywood espresso filling station early Sunday morning -- and had a hard time believing my own baggy, sleep-deprived eyes.

The governor used the "girlie men" reference twice in a 16-minute speech aimed at pressuring the Legislature to pass his budget, now 17 days late. The remarks were apparently references to an old "Saturday Night Live" skit parodying Schwarzenegger. Comedians Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon played "pumped-up" bodybuilders with Austrian accents who dismissed anyone without a muscled torso as a "girlie man."

Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco) said he was "nonplused" by Schwarzenegger's comment. "I don't know what the definition of 'girlie man' is. As opposed to his being a he-man?" Burton asked. Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) said, "Those are the kinds of statements that ought not to come out of the mouth" of the governor. "He says he's going to 'terminate' members in November? I really don't know what he means by that. That's not funny any more," Nunez said.

Link

Update: The inevitable "Sacramento Girlie Men" T-shirts have arived. link

This most unusual weblog is a father's daily documentation of his prematurely-born child's struggle to survive. Eric was born at only 24 weeks' gestation. He was twelve inches long, and weighed only one pound, seven ounces. BloggingBaby.com describes the online journal the infant's dad is maintaining:

His dad has been blogging the whole thing, complete with photos, video and all the "tearability" you can handle. The content ranges from detailed medical discussions of the conditions a premature infant suffers, to more spiritual musings on what it's like to give skin-to-skin "kangaroo care" to a child born 15 weeks premature. In one passage we discover that "his neutrophils ( his "big gun" immune cells as wendy, his nurse practitioner, likes to call them ) are down and his bands ( immature neutrophils ) are up," while another passage has us visiting the NICU in the middle of the night.

Link

Fourteen lines, 28 total breasts, 6 characters maximum per line. Link (via Fleshbot)

OK, best Hollywood lede *evar*:

The remake of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory was thrown into chaos on Wednesday when a worker dropped a $540,000 camera lens in a vat of chocolate.

Link to IMDB news, and link to a fine upstanding tabloid's account. (Thanks, Mara! Thanks, Defamer!)

If you liked this morning's link to a music video made from captured sequences from the game Soul Calibur, you'll love these stunning, massively coordinated dance numbers from the Star Wars Galaxies universe, where dozens of players and their familiars rock out in Bollywood-scale, beautifully edited sequences. I Get Knocked Down Link Fett's Vette Link Ice Ice Baby Link (Thanks, Raph!)

I just finished reading my first issue of Seed Magazine, a science-culture magazine that is the best new magazine I've read since I picked up my first issue of Wired.

The writing in this magazine -- mostly by scientists -- is stellar, and there's a fantastic mix of long features and short factoids about science. The approach to the subject is like the very best science fiction, coming at it from the intersection of the social and the scientific, going for the cultural stories behind the science. There's even a fiction department, something that tech-oriented magazines have been sorely lacking since Omni folded up.

This is almost a Maxim for science, something that makes science cool and relevant and edgy. The mag's been around for quite a while, but it wasn't until my cow-orkers Seth and Annalee turned me onto it that I discovered it. Now that I have, I'm taking out a subscription.

I really can't gush enough about this: it's the best subway reading I've had in months. Link

The winner of a contest to invent a MacGyver-style invention using Altoids tins is a peach: make a set of iPod speakers out of two Altoids tins, two playing cards, and a set of headphones. Link (Thanks, Vidiot!)

My friend John Curley played bass in the dark soul-rock band Afghan Whigs, the first non-Seattle group signed to Sub Pop records. For more than a decade, the Whigs released consistently stunning albums, concluding with 1965 on Columbia records in 2000. The following year, the group disbanded. Singer Greg Dulli continued with his Twilight Singers, guitarist Rick McCollum became Moon Maan, and John Curley focused on his recording studio Ultrasuede in Cincinnati. Now John has formed a new band, The Staggering Statistics. Here's an article about the group from the Cincinnati Enquirer.

"It spirals away from you," Curley says. "Even if your goal is informal, sooner or later you begin writing songs that you want to play for other people. Then there's a little thought in your mind: we could get signed (to a record deal). You stand in the room with ether long enough and you start getting overcome by the fumes."

I was thrilled to hear that John and the Staggering Statistics have released their full-length debut recording for free online. Link

My latest issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley is now online. While my Lab Notes site highlights interesting engineering research, ScienceMatters explores the physical sciences, biology, and chemistry. Inside this month's issue:

* The Cellular Mechanic
* An Explosive Theory About Volcanoes
* The Mathematics of High-Tech Highways

Link

In September, The Hospital gallery in London will display items belonging to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, including a blood-stained "Never Mind the Bollocks" poster collected from the Chelsea Hotel room where the couple lived (and she died).

"The collection of artefacts, including original T-shirts, posters and handwritten lyrics, has been assembled over 15 years by art dealer Paul Stolper and Andrew Wilson, deputy editor of Art Monthly. They told The Independent on Sunday that the hotel items were sold at auction by Sid Vicious' mother, Anne Beverley."

Link

In other Sex Pistols news, plaque were ceremonially unveiled in north Norfolk to honor two venues where the Sex Pistols had played important early and late gigs. Link

Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle surveyed the most exclusive clubs in San Francisco, from the San Francisco Golf Club (with an alleged "no Jews, no people-of-color" policy) to the shadowy Bohemian Grove, a frat party playground for the conservative rich white guys running our shadow government:

"In 1971, President Richard Nixon, a member (of the Bohemian Grove) since 1953, was to be the lakeside speaker, but reporters had finally raised a ruckus about a sitting president giving an off-the-record speech at the Grove. Nixon sent sugary regrets in a telegram that hangs in the city clubhouse today, saying that anyone could be president of the United States, but only a few could aspire to be president of the Bohemian Club.

Privately, he said to domestic affairs adviser John Ehrlichman and Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman (and the hidden tape recorder) in the Oval Office that May: 'The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time -- it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco.'"

Link

Wonderful gallery of scanned-in vintage monster trading cards. Link (via Waxy)

The current issue of First Monday has a thorough academic article on reputation systems.

The sharing of observations and opinions builds up a picture in each person’s mind of the reputation’s subject, which we might call the "Invisible Eye" — the distributed formation of reputations, and consequent increased ability to distinguish better from worse. To the degree that you have access to and trust the experience of others, it is almost as if you yourself had been there watching that previous situation, thus increasing your base of experience from which to judge future reliability — and increasing pressure on the subject in question to behave responsibly. The analogy to Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand is not accidental; just as selfish local actions with market incentives can lead to collectively efficient behavior, locally maximizing actions with reputation incentives have the potential for similar guided emergent behavior that exceeds what might have been designed by a conscious planner.

The ultimate aim is to increase the level of collective wisdom through sharing our separate experience and expertise. This will enable a "division of experience" — instead of each of us personally suffering through scams, cheats, and mediocrity, we will be able to leverage each other’s experiences. Collectively, aided by astutely networked reputation systems, we stand the best chance of overcoming our dark side and bringing out the best in us.

Link (Thanks, Alex!)