Earthquake in Eastern North America

Ontario Geofish notes the first earthquake in Eastern North America (ENA) in a couple of years. It was centred in southern Illinois in the U.S. It would be nice to monitor quakes from more places than just Hamilton, Ontario, since there’s a major fault in the New Madrid seismic zone.

LOLcat subculture

“I can has cheezburger? Kthxbai.” LOLcats now have a subculture, language, humor trends, Bible, and even their own programming language. Go read the article.. but here’s a quick sample:

These images usually consist of a photo of a cat with a large caption characteristically formatted in an uppercase sans serif font such as Impact or Arial Black. The image is, on occasion, digitally edited for effect. The caption generally acts as a speech balloon encompassing a comment from the cat, or as a description of the depicted scene. The caption is intentionally written with deviations from standard English spelling and syntax, featuring “strangely-conjugated verbs, but [a tendency] to converge to a new set of rules in spelling and grammar.” These altered rules of English have been referred to as a type of pidgin or baby talk. The text parodies the grammar-poor patois stereotypically attributed to Internet slang. Frequently, lolcat captions take the form of snowclones in which nouns and verbs are replaced in a phrase. Some phrases have a known source while others seem to be specific to the lolcat form.

The real Expelled

The real victims in the Intelligent Design creationist war against evolution are teachers and administrators who insist on teaching evolution or even mentioning it favourably. Blake Stacey, OM, at Science After Sunclipse has the story: “Creation, Power, and Violence.” It seems that the movie Expelled has that wrong, too.