Linkdump: Buttonfly Zipperpull
Kind of dumb to post this now, Friday before Memorial Day Weekend, but whatever—the queue needs clearing:


··· Yootoob: Neat little video on open-mindedness as it applies to the conflict between science and the paranormal. Now, I'm kind of the wrong guy to ask on this subject, because while I do believe in rigorous science, I think that the scientific community in general has been irresponsible for many years with regard to the study of the paranormal. I think that it has been written off to quickly, too often, before any study is even conducted. Worse, I think that legitimate findings have been ignored or minimized. I don't think we have adequate tools to really understand what causes paranormal phenomena, but I believe that some exist, that some of those can at least be detected, and that they will all eventually be explained and probably exploited for the benefit of humankind, like any other natural phenomenon. I'm pretty confident it won't happen in my lifetime. The only thing I know for sure, however, is that this video has made me reevaluate how I talk about these views of mine, and I'll certainly change some things for future conversations.


··· Stegosaur-esque animal in a 600yo+ Kmer temple carving? The head is wrong for a stegosaurus and looks more like a later evolution of the animal's line, if it did evolve into, say, a porcine something or other. Was there an animal back then in that part of the world with bony fanlike backplates like those of a stegosaur? I can easily imagine such an animal being hunted to extinction by humans of the Kmer era, so the fact that it's not around now proves nothing. I really want to see a plain old razorback-type pig in that carving, but it's tough.


··· Your brain is defective. Neat little optical illusion up on Boingboing.


··· Also on Boingboing, Lovecraft fans, rejoice, because, following a stroke, a woman has developed a "pale, milky-white and translucent third arm," visible only to her, that she can use to scratch itchy parts of her body. The arm cannot pass through solid objects, she says, and MRIs confirm that her brain behaves like it's actually moving a limb.


··· Decent and loooong page of jokes on author John Varley's website. See especially the entry for 1/21/09. I think I might have already posted this.


··· Well this is kind of neat. Yootoob: Music and Life, Alan Watts (visuals by Tre Parker and Matt Stone). Via herince_emyn.


··· Oneword.com does recognize line breaks, but doesn't display them in the main page. You have to click the little ellipsis "show all" link on your entry after you're done. I guess this actually could be a useful poetry tool. It's already a good prose tool.


··· Yootoob: Hot, hot mountain bike parkour, or at least that's the paraphrase of how Kottke put it, but I recall this sort of thing going on long before parkour hit it big. And this guy is eighteen different kinds of badass.