Here are the directions Google suggests to get from Toronto to London, UK.

Notice anything odd about direction 26?  lol… 

Google, you guys are hilarious!

Heroic Secret Service Agent Takes Question Intended For Bush

WASHINGTON, DC—Agent Anthony Panucci dives in between the president and a hostile reporter.

And now they have live news too!

Click the image to the right to see why!

This is some guy’s mechanics exam. Professor’s comments are in red pen. Note that his answer received 4 out of 10 points.

Wow! Today is beautiful!  Nice temperature, lots of sun, easy breeze and hot women stripping down into their lingerie while having sexy mud/pillow/feather/oil fights on front campus! Ok, I might have imagined that last part, but a man can dream can’t he??

Unfortunately, there is a downside to this amazing weather.  It’s something we often try not to talk about, always putting it out of our minds.  However, I refuse to let us not acknowledge the the mental anguish to small children and the psychological damage to us all.  We need to prepare ourselves, face it head on.  As this weather gets better and better we’re only going to have more and more instances of it.  Fear grips me everytime I think that it’s probably unstopable and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. 

I can’t delay any longer, take a deep breath and prepare yourself. Click here.

God save us all.

The more I read about genetics and the manipulations that we are becoming capable of, the more I am amazed.

By splicing our genes with those of animals, it could be possible to finally have a purpose for all those multi-coloured dog toys you keep buying for your black and white seeing companion.

Give this a read:

Aside from primates, most mammals are largely colorblind. Now researchers have found that transgenic mice can acquire the ability to detect new color differences if given a gene for making an additional light-sensing eye protein. The findings have implications for understanding how color vision evolved.

Primates can distinguish the colors of the rainbow better than other mammals because their eyes contain three photopigment proteins. Each photopigment is sensitive to light of a particular wavelength, and the primate visual system detects colors by comparing the relative activity of cells in the retina that bear each of the three photopigments. Most other mammals, however, only make two photopigments, limiting their color discrimination. Scientists have suggested that trichromatic color vision arose in primates when one of the two photopigment genes they already had mutated to produce a third photopigment.

A sudden mutation like this could have given primates an instant advantage when it came to finding food–but only if their visual system were able to make sense of the new information. Certain differences in retina anatomy between primates and other mammals led many researchers to suspect that only primates had the right kind of wiring to make use of a sudden addition of a third photopigment.

But perhaps not. In the new experiment, vision scientist Gerald Jacobs at the University of California, Santa Barbara, teamed up with geneticist Jeremy Nathans at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, Maryland, and other colleagues to add a human photopigment gene to mice. Electrical recordings from the retinas of the engineered mice indicated that the added photopigment had enabled their color-sensing cone cells to respond to long wavelength red light, which normal mice can’t see. Next the team gave the mice a battery of behavioral tests that required them to poke their nose at panels in their enclosure to indicate which of three panels was a different color than the other two. Right answers earned a tiny drop of soy milk (”It’s kind of hippie-ish, but they really enjoy it,” Jacobs says.) The engineered mice passed with flying colors, so to speak, making distinctions that regular mice cannot, the researchers report in tomorrow’s Science.

The work supports the idea that a single gene mutation could have produced trichromatic color vision and immediate changes in behavior, says Daniel Osorio, a vision scientist at Sussex University, U.K. At the same time, Osorio says, it creates a mystery about why such color vision didn’t evolve in other mammals, too.

Link to Seeing the World in a New Light — Miller 2007 (322): 2 — ScienceNOW

Today I’m going to give you something insightful.  Unfortunately it’s not me inventorying more things in my house and comparing my Spartan ways to my roommate’s uhh…non-Spartan ways.  Instead, I bring you an article that will make you think! 

I know, I know…you’re thinking to yourself right now, “Damnit Mike, I don’t come here to think! I come here to laugh and pass some time, and here you are, trying to push your ‘knowledge’ crap on me.  I wont stand for it, that’s it, starting tomorrow I’ll give you a piece of my mind, a piece so fierce that you’ll wish I hadn’t given it to you! And when I do, you’ll be all like ’Oh no! That was a fierce piece of mind!’  and then I’ll be like ’Yeah that’s right, it was wasn’t it, you greek mofo’.  That would learn you.  Hey did I wash my dishes yesterday?” 

Wow, you guys think some wierd things…so moving on…anyways I’m going to push the things on you I find fascinating anyways and today’s is a really awesome one.

If you can get the 20 mins to spare or so, give this article a read.  It’s the start of the next level of understanding oh how environmental conditions can change hereditary traits without affecting the actual DNA of a person and all sorts of other interesting ideas.  This goes beyond looking at only DNA, it’s into the the realm of lesser understood epigenomes, the results of which can lead to a number of breakthroughs in numerous areas.  It’s from Discover Magazine, so that should convince you of its quality.

I promise an interesting and thought-provoking read.  So check it out here.

So, I decided today to give our shower a really good clean, you know the one where you scrub the grout between the tiles to get all the black and pink mold out (you all have black and pink mold in your shower tile too right??)  So, I’m taking everything out of the shower so I can do a good job, and I think to myself “Jesus there is a lot of crap in here!”

Now keep in mind I live only with one other person and I thought it would be interesting to inventory the shower for what was mine, and what was my roommates (I’m weird like that and needed something blog about).  I’ll be the first to admit I sometimes complain that my roommate has too much stuff, be it shoes in the hallway, stuff in the bathroom, or a giant cardboard box on top of the TV with a fake rat attached to it (don’t ask)…but I live with these things, it’s adds personality to the house (or so I tell myself), and none of the issues are really major to warrant any type of actual face-off, and having a roommate is about compromises.  Compromises such as me eating his Fugee-O’s in payment for allowing him to live with me hahahaha

Now what was the point of this? Oh yeah, right, the shower inventorying.  Ok so I went into the shower with a pen and paper (b/c there’s no way to actually remember everything by name) and wrote down who’s stuff was who’s.  So here we go, keep in mind this is ONLY from INSIDE the shower:

Me:

1. Irish Spring Soap
2. Shampoo

A normal amount, perhaps a bit on the bare side, but I pride myself on my Spartan ways.  And really, do you need anything more than shampoo and soap? Really?

Sam:

1. Floss
2. Toothbrush (no toothpaste)
3. Mouthwash
4. Shaving gel
5. Plastic Shaving blade cover (no razor)
6. Bar of Ivory Soap
7. Old Spice Body Wash
8. Dove Deep Moisture Body Wash
9. Herbal Essences Shampoo
10. TRESemme Healthy Volume Shampoo
11. Biore for Men
12. Clean and Clear Daily Pore Cleanser
13. Small Mirror
14. Fluffy Body Wash Scrubber thing (you girls know what I’m talking about)
15. Hard Scrubber with giant wooden handle

Now, call me crazy, but a 2:15 ratio, doesn’t that seem a bit crazy to anyone else?  I don’t know, maybe I’m just old fashioned with my soap and shampoo only, but it seems a bit nutty to me!  Am I way off base on this one or right on the money?  Please, comment on this, I really would like to hear some other opinions.

*Sigh*  The funny part is, my roommate shaves his head, so he doesn’t even have hair to shampoo!! 

I definitely wouldn’t want to get hit by one of these!

This composite image at infrared wavelengths shows the Orion “bullets” as blue features and represents the light emitted by hot iron gas. The light from the wakes, shown in orange, is from excited hydrogen gas.

Astronomers just got their most detailed look yet at supersonic “bullets” of gas piercing through dense clouds of hydrogen gas in the Orion Nebula.

Each bullet [image] is about ten times the size of Pluto’s orbit around the Sun and travels through the clouds at up to 250 miles (400 kilometers) per second—or about a thousand times faster than the speed of sound.

The bulk of both the bullets and the surrounding gas cloud [image] consists of molecular hydrogen. The tip of each bullet is packed with iron atoms that are heated by friction and glow bright blue in the new image, taken by the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii.

As the bullets plow through the clouds, they leave behind tubular orange wakes, each about a fifth of a light-year long. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).

The Orion Nebula is a young stellar nursery located about 1,500 light-years away. Scientists think our Sun was born in a similar environment some 4.5 billion years ago.

The Orion bullets were first spotted in a visible-light image in 1983, and followed up by infrared observations in 1992. Astronomers think the enormous clumps of gas were ejected from deep within the nebula following some unknown violent event about a thousand years ago.

“What I find stunning about the new image is the detail it shows, which was blurred out in any previous studies,” said Michael Burton of the University of New South Wales, one of the scientists who first suggested the origin of the bullets 15 years ago.

“This level of precision will allow the evolution of the system to be followed over the next few years, for small changes in the structures are expected from year to year as the bullets continue their outward motion,” Burton said.

The latest image of the Orion bullets was created with a new technology, called adaptive optics, which uses a laser guide star as a reference and a rapidly deforming mirror to correct image distortions from the Earth’s atmosphere in real time.

Seriously, the universe is truly amazing when you try to grasp how vast and ancient it is compared to our whopping 80 year life-span.

 Link to SPACE.com — Cosmic Bullets Pierce Space Cloud

Looks like our next night of drinking and debauchery is going to require horseplay and rough-housing so that we can have better sex and horde more food for ourselves!

Playground roughhousing has long been a tradition of children and adolescents, much to the chagrin of several generations of parents who worry that their child will be hurt or worse, become accustom to violence and aggression. But animal research may paint a different portrait of rough and tumble play; one that suggests that social and emotional development may rely heavily on such peer interaction.

In an article published in the April issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, Sergio and Vivian Pellis of the University of Lethbridge reviewed multiple studies involving animals, and found a link between rough and tumble play and social competence.

For example, adult rats deprived of peer interaction, (and thus rough and tumble play), reveal an inability to comprehend the hierarchy of social structures. In the rat kingdom, when a young male attempts to establish residency in a colony, he is promptly targeted for attack by the dominant male rat. Rats that have been reared with peers quickly learn to remain crouched and motionless in such an instance in order to avoid the dominant male’s attention. Play deprived rats, on the other hand, continue to scurry about which ultimately invites further serious attacks.

Coordinated movements appear to suffer in the absence of rough and tumble play as well. Rats, as most other mammals, rely heavily on coordinated movement for both cooperative (e.g. sex) and competitive (e.g. defending a piece of food) situations. Rats that are reared in isolation have impaired ability to coordinate their movements appropriately with opponents. This coordination, say the authors, can be learned through the constantly shifting body motions that take place during playfighting.

Deprivation from peer interaction appears to have neurological consequences as well. Juvenile play fighting has been found to stimulate the release of certain chemical growth factors in the cerebral cortex, an area the authors describe as the “social brain.” Among the structures in the social brain is the orbitofrontal cortex, an area known to be involved in social discrimination and decision. As logic would tell us, the less growth is promoted in this area, the greater the likelihood of impaired movement coordination, perception of social cues, and the like.

But the does the behavior of rats provides any insight into our own, seemingly more complex development? Apparently so, say the authors, who cite evidence that there is considerable overlap between animal and human play, particularly for play fighting.

“The knowledge thus gained,” writes Pellis “can provide the clues to the correlated consequences of those processes that can be studied in humans.”

Source: ScienceDaily: Your Mom Was Wrong: Horseplay Is An Important Part Of Development

I’ll be straight up with you, I’m pretty music illiterate.  I don’t really know artists, my favourite song is that one that goes like “dum dee dumm dee dumm” but I couldn’t tell you the name of it.  I don’t really have a favourite genre, I like pretty much everything, it all just depends on mood I find!

This is where Pandora comes in.  For those odd times I find out the name of an artist or song, and like that style of music, I just head over to Pandora put in said artist/song name and it will automatically play a bunch of songs from different artists that are similar, be it through genre, general sound or some other relation.

It’s a damn sweet program.  Right now I have my Norah Jones radio on in the background.  So it mixes in a bunch of other songs that are from other artists as well as Norah Jones and achieves a constant stream of sweet sweet melodies.  At this exact moment it’s playing Aimee Mann (if that means anything to anyone, it doesn’t to me…but it sounds good!)

So check it out!  You won’t be disappointed.