A problem with northern New Mexico written all over it: Go organic, cause a nuclear waste accident.

The Colorado River has reached the ocean!

People say American taxes are too complicated, but I have no idea what they could be talking about. Nope, no clue:

A very estimable python

A new class of regular polyhedra?

Abominable coffee drinks matched to their corresponding heresies

HT: Dreher

Dogs poop in alignment with the earth's magnetic field

Newly discovered sarcophagi of the Chachapoya, fascinating archaeology in a spectacular setting.

Via the excellent Bones Don't Lie.

How to coax a bullfrog into winning the Calaveras County jumping competition? Mimic a predator, of course.

Oarfish in California!

What to do next time you're bored on a plane? Take 15th-Century Flemish-style self portraits in the lavatory, of course!

Holy moly! An earthquake in Pakistan just created a new island! It's a small island, but still.... Now that I'm living in a place where I can see fault scarps cutting our very small and young alluvial fans, this makes my flesh crawl a bit.

Functioning mechanical gears found in insects

Malaysian pen-tailed tree shrews subsist on "a diet roughly equivalent to 100 percent beer".

The first color photograph of red sprite lightning

This is one righteously pissed off birder. Odious and Peculiar heartily approve!

Hat tip: Chas.

What it's like to be swallowed by a hippo

Also, sweet justice: Houston teen who found himself with a slew of severe injuries after the ashes from the cigar he was smoking mixed with the “combustible mixture” in his pocket while he and a friend were going to “blow up turtles.”

Pagan wild men of Europe: they remind me a bit of Kachina costumes in this neck of the woods. More here, though you'll have to navigate within the site on your own: look for Wilder Mann.

Via Chas, of course.

A scale-less Antarctic fish with gin-clear blood

Just because: Glacier Dragon!

Hence.

Images of a giant squid in its natural habitat! Who says there's no good news these days? They did it by means of near-infrared light: beautiful images of a beautiful animal, even if it's just a little one.

De Montaigne invents craigslist.

As on many things I like, I tend to glut myself on Interactive Fiction, then ignore it for months on end. But Bee is well worth anyone's time.

UPDATE: new link.

One of the perks of living in New Mexico (and we need a few!): a low profile on this map of natural disaster risk. Tornadoes are quite rare, earthquake risk very moderate, hurricanes sound kind of nice around here. We just have some hail and a couple volcanoes to live with, and our volcanoes are the mild type that might spit up a small cinder cone every few thousand years, not looming behemoths like Rainier or Shasta. The map doesn't include forest fires, which would give the Rockies a much stronger showing, but it's really only a relatively small number of homeowners down here for whom wildfire is a serious worry. Our main afflictions are drought, wind and idiocy, which I suppose I'll take over tornadoes and earthquakes.

RIP: Maurice Herzog.

I love that some web administrator for the USDA saw fit to illustrate a rather P.C. news release from the Forest Service with an image of the, errr.... striking One-Hung-Low pictographs from the Middle Fork of the Salmon:

My larger version:

NOAA answers the question "Why don't we nuke hurricanes?"

Via What If?

Dr. Seuss illustrates Anopheles mosquitoes

How was your Thanksgiving?

From the Smithy: Duns Scotus trampling the Lutherans.

Check out this very enjoyable little educational video about Constantinople's land defenses. Of course, some of these may still be seen, walked and climbed, in the neighborhood of Istanbul's wonderful Sunday morning pigeon bazaar, among other places.

Self-healing concrete: it uses dormant bacteria that produce limestone on contact with water. Very cool!

Ia.

For Hallowe'en: the physics of Cthulhu.

Steve Bodio's radio interview on An Eternity of Eagles is playing now on our local NPR station, but you can (and should!) listen anytime here. Bateleurs, wolf-hunting Kazakh falconers, wind farm mortality and more!

Do slime molds have a form of memory? "Memory" strikes me as overstating the case, but still interesting.

Cache of 140 WWII Spitfires discovered in Burmese jungle: very cool!

... the Spitfires are buried in the original crates with their wings folded back along their bodies, covered in grease and wax paper. Their joints are even tarred and they're expected to be in pristine condition.

Via Adventure Blog.

Shark falls from sky onto golf course

Today's challenge: name a common element uniting Turkish conspiracy politics, a Muslim faith movement, American charter schools, the Poconos, and New Mexico legislative junkets.

The answer: a man named Fethullah Gülen. Claire Berlinski boldly endeavors to make it all comprehensible.

Relocating the Battle of Hastings?

What a joy to stumble across an amazing, beautiful and utterly useless talent that I've never even heard of: contact juggling!

Via Pithless Thoughts.