Winter really is coming..
The iron throne.
“You may not have my name .. but you have my blood.” Jon Snow on the Iron Throne already? I guess they’re gonna bring in the L+R=J conspiracy in full swing in the first season. Not enough Tyrion. But I can never get enough of Tyrion… he will be the fan favorite for sure. (again)
This looks so good. Once again I’m so glad HBO is doing it. A movie wouldn’t do it justice, and neither could another network. I know they will change some things, but it looks perfect so far. Impeccable.
Fun Fact: When GRRM started writing A Game of Thrones, he decided to make a multitude of characters because he had been recently writing for TV and was tired of all the limits they put on him concerning how many characters he could have. So it was sort of a novelty and a contest for him – to make the least adaptable story ever. Regardless, the first book is really beautiful and the rest pick up the pace and continue the fantastic story. I still think they will do an okay job with adapting it. There is ALOT of content – all they have to do is pull the good parts, and they will end up with an awesome show.
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America is a democracy, not a shooting range
Images Sarah Palin took off her website after the shooting this morning of a congresswoman and federal judge:
Liberal targets are literally in cross-hairs. A bit creepy, no? At least she took it down. I’m sure she meant that these candidates needed to be VOTED out, but the imagery and rhetoric .. who knows, maybe it incited someone? Ick ick ick.
Update: Lol wtf
I hate oversimplified, ugly RSS feeds.
I use Google Reader and I find it frustrating that I can’t use RSS for some of my favorite blogs (which I’m slowly reading less of) because the RSS is ugly. Here lies my standards for the ideal RSS feed:
- At least one image, but no more than 2. I like visuals, and alot of the blogs I follow are mostly about the visuals. Even the one’s that aren’t – I like to see the photo on the post. So many feeds strip the photo. This is annoying. I’m not going to go to the website to see a picture for every single post.
- Too much shortening. I’m gonna have to see more than 2 sentences. I find that mostly news sources are guilty of this. This is tolerable, if the article seems interesting I’ll go ahead and click & go to the website. I wish there was a built-in RSS thing to expand however, so there would be less clicking, tabs & pages involved.
- Not enough shortening. I don’t shorten my posts at all but I feel like my posts aren’t big enough to clog up your feed. When you have a post with 10 paragraphs and an image between each paragraph, it’s annoying to scroll down through the stuff I’m not interested in. Google Reader also doesn’t have an easy way to close/hide/mark read an item. You usually have to click the preceding item to hide it. I write a long post from time to time, but what annoys me with this is blogs that have consistently long posts without a more tag.
I admit that when I did PinkZap I had alot of readers through RSS, and I never took care to make sure my RSS looked good. I was mostly focused on the look of the website. I’ve heard recently that RSS is dying. But I hope RSS doesn’t die. I like using it.
Have something to say about this post? Contact me.Clever new Fringe promo – Reanimating Friday
Considering the poor ratings and change it might get canceled, FOX marketing sent out a new promo showing that they are being bullish about keeping the show. Fridays do generally kill shows like Fringe, I guess we can only hope.
Have something to say about this post? Contact me.Arsenic, a building block of life?
All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. We assumed that was true, until today. In Mono Lake, about a year ago, researchers began testing a bacteria known as GFAJ-1. Today, their published study came out that this bacteria could survive using arsenic instead of phosphorus. There are many birds and other organisms that can “tolerate” arsenic, but this bacterium actively uses it in it’s cells.
Have something to say about this post? Contact me.Many of these bacteria are known to be able to tolerate high levels of arsenic, but GFAJ-1 can go a step further. When starved of phosphorus, it can instead incorporate arsenic into its DNA and continue growing. By introducing radioactive arsenic into the growth medium of some of the microbes, Wolfe-Simon learned that approximately one-tenth of the arsenic absorbed by the bacteria ended up in their nucleic acids. Within the DNA extracted from GFAJ-1 cells starved of phosphorus, arsenic bonded to oxygen and carbon in the same way phosphorus bonds to oxygen and carbon in normal DNA, and found that when cultured in arsenate solution it grew 60% as fast as it did in phosphate solution — not as well, but still robustly.
While some of the key properties of phosphate such as its thermodynamic instability as well as its kinetic stability make it advantageous for Earth’s biological life; Arsenic may be more thermodynamically realistic for life on other planets or moons such as Saturn’s moon Titan
Plugin for easy WP updating for non-iPhones
looks like this on my phone:
