Southeastern Social Cobweb Spider – Anelosimus studiosus (Hentz, 1850)
This web was first found about three weeks prior to the photo and has been spreading slowly.
It’s out on a point by the lake, probably less than 50 yards from the water.
It continues along the park’s nature trail for some 200 yards! Now CNN has publicized it and Natalia Collier forwarded it to us.. This link is to the original photos or click the picture to see the full size version. But the record might go to a 60 acre Canadian Spider Web!
Month: August 2007
Greek Fires View From Space
The extent of the unprecedented fires raging in Greece is evident from this picture from NASA’s Aqua satellite. Click on the picture to enlarge. 
Ooops! – Server Worth $1.5 Million Wrecked by Forklift
PC World – Server Worth $1.5 Million Wrecked by Forklift
The accident happened in October, 2006. The server destined for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, was being transferred from a delivery truck to T.R. Systems’ warehouse in Alexandria, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. It was packaged in a crate on a pallet and held on a fork-lift truck’s prongs.
A report said that the rear wheels of the fork-lift truck encountered a step at the warehouse entrance. The truck rocked and so did the pallet: “the base of the pallet and the crate broke and the crate fell onto the curb, damaging the server packed inside.”
Tornado of Starlings
Adam Brown writes…This is a crazy google video on starlings coming into roost at dusk…they make some incredible formations. It gets really good at three minutes in…..
Kids’ Food Fussiness May Be Inherited
Kids’ Food Fussiness May Be Inherited – Forbes.com
Wardle said food preferences appear to be “as inheritable a physical characteristic as height.”
Unlike nearly every other phobia, neophobia is a normal stage of human development.Scientists theorize that it was originally an evolutionary mechanism designed to protect children from accidentally eating dangerous things – like poisonous berries or mushrooms.
Neophobia typically kicks in at age 2 or 3, when children are newly mobile and capable of disappearing from their parents’ sight within seconds. Being unwilling to eat new things they stumble upon may turn out to be a lifesaver. While most children grow out of the food fussiness by age 5, not all do. For parents of particularly picky eaters, experts encourage them not to cave in when their children throw food tantrums
Block YouTube Ads
TubeStop :: Now I Have a Blog Too
Now that Google is trying to generate money from YouTube with embedded ads, you can stop them with this plug0in for Mozilla’s FireFox Browser. TubeStop simply swaps out the site-based player for the embedded player, the ad-blocking feature is really just a happy coincidence. TubeStop is an extension for Mozilla-based Web browsers that disables the autoplay on YouTube videos. This means that you can open multiple YouTube videos in tabs in the background without them all starting to play at once. TubeStop also disables the autoplay on YouTube videos embedded on non-YouTube.com sites (MySpace, for example).
Why Study War?
Why Study War? by Victor Davis Hanson, City Journal Summer 2007
Military history teaches us about honor, sacrifice, and the inevitability of conflict.
A wartime public illiterate about the conflicts of the past can easily find itself paralyzed in the acrimony of the present. Without standards of historical comparison, it will prove ill equipped to make informed judgments. Neither our politicians nor most of our citizens seem to recall the incompetence and terrible decisions that, in December 1777, December 1941, and November 1950, led to massive American casualties and, for a time, public despair.
For a therapeutically inclined generation raised on Oprah and Dr. Phil—and not on the letters of William Tecumseh Sherman and William Shirer’s Berlin Diary—problems between states, like those in our personal lives, should be argued about by equally civilized and peaceful rivals, and so solved without resorting to violence. Yet it’s hard to find many wars that result from miscommunication. Far more often they break out because of malevolent intent and the absence of deterrence. Margaret Atwood also wrote in her poem: “Wars happen because the ones who start them / think they can win.” Hitler did; so did Mussolini and Tojo—and their assumptions were logical, given the relative disarmament of the Western democracies at the time. Thanks to Chad Brisbane for this prescient article. Continue reading “Why Study War?”
Head of PC Mag Dumps on Vista
Passing the Torch – Columns by PC Magazine
After five years at Ziff Davis Media and nearly 16 years in editorial content—the last two at the helm of this terrific magazine—I’ve decided to try something new. I’ve jumped over to become CEO of Revision3, the leading Internet television network focused on developing programming for the on-demand generation.
Maybe it was something in the water? I’ve been a big proponent of the new OS over the past few months, even going so far as loading it onto most of my computers and spending hours tweaking and optimizing it. So why, nine months after launch, am I so frustrated? The litany of what doesn’t work and what still frustrates me stretches on endlessly
Are We Failing Our Geniuses?
Are We Failing Our Geniuses? – TIME
To some extent, complacency is built into the system. American schools spend more than $8 billion a year educating the mentally retarded. Spending on the gifted isn’t even tabulated in some states, but by the most generous calculation, we spend no more than $800 million on gifted programs. But it can’t make sense to spend 10 times as much to try to bring low-achieving students to mere proficiency as we do to nurture those with the greatest potential.
Hurricane Dean Picture of Roseau River, Dominica
Thanks to Kelvin Felix sending this from Edith Benjamin in Dominica.
