Cool Links

I like coffee but I love coffee makers.  I currently own 14, though only four are allowed on the counter at any one time.   They're not all elaborate.  One is an electric percolator while one percolator goes on the fire pit outside when I am smoking a cigar.  There are two French presses and a small, 4-cup Mr. Coffee.  Aside from those, they are all rather distinct and have their own special features which make me cherish them.

But there are limits to features I require and costs I will incur.  It is a hobby, not a need to be cutting edge.
You might think Romania is famous for vampires (and in the later part of the 20th century, hot female spies) but witches are getting some attention too.

Just not the good kind.   First, they started getting taxed.  Yes, to practice witchcraft they have to pay a fee but now they can be fined if they make predictions that do not come true.
A few months back we highlighted a review which examined the actual neuroscience effects of love, at least what fMRI shows.   The study (Neuroimaging Love - Romance Is More Scientific Than You Think) noted there are different cortical networks and cognitive factors than just subcortical dopaminergic reward-related brain systems (dopamine and oxytocin receptors) and instead said different types of love involve distinct cerebral networks.
The last time AOL made big news is when its CEO, Steve Case, managed to use its pretend Internet money to buy a real company, Time-Warner, and pull a fast one on basically the world.

Now Huffington Post has learned that game, managing to get a whopping $315 million out of AOL for its blog site.    If you're wondering how that valuation happened, it doesn't matter, $300 million of it is in cash.

Congratulations, HuffPo.   We're going to be on the phone with Prodigy in the next few minutes and see if we can get a little something also.
Julian Assange has never liked having to abide by the same conditions he demands of the rest of the world (read: American government and military, since he long ago stopped leaking documents from anywhere else) - he didn't want his address disclosed in a British court because it put him at risk, he claimed, though the many he put at risk by disclosing them in secret documents had 'no proof' they were in peril, he said, and he certainly did not want any details about his sex changes(errr, charges, as noted in a comment below - anything else is his own business) released without careful editing.
While Americans may be concerned that China or India could take over the high end of science due to sheer numbers of graduates, culturally they are a lot less scientific.

Don't think taro cards, astrology, feng shui and reiki are science?  Too bad, the High Court in Bombay says they are - and so they are.  In India, anyway.
German anaesthesiologist Joachim Boldt was fired last autumn from his job as head of anesthesia at the Klinikum Ludwigshafen after concerns about a 2009 paper surfaced - namely that the study was completely made up.   Boldt has published numerous articles about the safety of a type of surgical fluid replacement called hydroxyethyl starch and now concerns about his research may may mean up to 90 retractions.

See Retraction Watch.
Based on the 1966 Batman TV series, a very young Bruce Wayne takes on the famous, pint-sized villains of Gotham City.

Part 1 of 3 below.  Parts 2 and 3 at the links.   Hat tip to Internet Fount Of All Cool Stuff, Andrea Kuszewski.

If you're a Steampunk fan, you are not used to seeing hot girls.   Oh, and you think it's 1995.

Just kidding, there is no better time than going to a local coffee house and seeing a Steampunk club meeting.   It's creative stuff.   But the girls do need work.  So this month at Antarctic Press, Ben Dunn, teaming up with fellow illustrators Fred Perry and David Hutchison, release "Victorian Secret: Girls Of Steampunk" - to maybe teach Steampunk girls how to look.    The site is designed for true Steampunk fans, in that the first page is a useless shockwave Enter button that serves no purpose and after that no modern human could actually figure out how to order anything.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal tackles logic for those of you who don't like Latin:

It wasn't easy to like "Superman Returns".   Certainly, it was designed to reboot the franchise after "Superman II" but it ended up needing a reboot of its own.    There were a few good sequences but overall it fell flat.

Movies from comic books are big.  Really big.   Too big to let the most recognizable superhero in the world sit on the shelf for too long so, like Batman after the George Clooney fiasco, or even Hulk, which Marvel tried to reboot, with limited success (yet another actor will play him in the Avengers movie) after Ang Lee's flop, Superman is getting another makeover.
Usage-Based Billing, where users pay for access by the Giga-Bit, hasn't been around since the 1990s - we think, anyway.  It's been a long time since AOL was able to use that business model to become so large they could acquire Time-Warner in the biggest transfer of pretend Internet money ever.

It's still around in Europe, where they don't mind paying more for stuff, but if it's going to be resurrected in the America's, the best place to try is where no one ever protests - Canada.  
David Weisman separates himself from the too-prevalent Psychology Today quackfest by noting that the thing we take as our unified mind doesn't really exist, "it is easily fractured into separate parts, in which the subject maintains subjective unity through the use of confabulation" something Buddhism has long contend.

But, as we all know, "When science supports a particular religious teaching, you can expect members of that religion to become strict empiricists, telling themselves and the world that their belief is grounded in reality."
An escaped convict from an Arizona prison intended to overdose on heroin at Yellowstone National Park and let bears eat him.   It didn't work, police caught him and took him back to jail.  Looks like Yogi will need a different picnic basket.
Yes, the humanities get a free pass today because California State University, Northridge math professor Tihomir Petrov was arrested for peeing on another professor's door.   So math professors are not above being ridiculous either.    

43-year-old Petrov apparently had a squabble with a colleague, whose named has been withheld to protect the ridiculous.   
Linhenykus monodactylus has been identified as the first dinosaur with just one finger

The new dinosaur belongs to the Alvarezsauroidea, a branch of the carnivorous dinosaur group Theropoda. Theropods gave rise to modern birds and include such famous dinosaurs as Tyrannosaurus Rex and Velociraptor.


This specimen is the only known dinosaur with one finger, and highlights the wide variety of evolutionary modifications of the hand that existed in different theropods.  

Homeopathy is under fire because, in a modern world where evidence is easy to find, people can easily learn that duck liver diluted in trillions and trillions of gallons of water will not actually cure the flu.
Talk about a quandary; science writers across the board have been critical of Andrew Wakefield and his linking of vaccines and autism, which set off a decade of concern before being laid to rest.  But in a world where every person who feels oppressed by Big Science claims they are just like Galileo, prosecuting a researcher for bad data needs to be done with caution.

Yes, though prosecuting someone who falsifies patient histories is another matter entirely.
In the Valley of the Moon, high in the Andes, a team of paleontologists and geologists have announced the discovery of a dinosaur ' at the root of the dinosaur family tree'  which roamed South America as the age of dinosaurs began approximately 230 million years ago.

It had a long neck and tail and weighed only 10 to 15 pounds.  They have aptly named the new dinosaur Eodromaeus - the "dawn runner."
Neuroscientists at MIT say they have uncovered why relatively minor details of an episode are sometimes inexplicably linked to long-term memories.     Even irrelevant information that follows the relevant event (rather than precedes it) is more likely to be integrated into long-term memory.