Linkalicious

Time to give a nod and some applause to my fellow bloggers. I've caught some neat waves in the last few days, and thought I'd pass along a bit of the fun to you.

First of all we've got some weird news from Cyrus Farivar: Weird food news includes Star Spangled Ice Cream with flavors like Choc & Awe, Prale to the Chief, I Hate the French Vanilla, and SmallerGovernmint. He also pointed out W. Ketchup, whose slogan is "You don't support Democrats. Why should your ketchup?" Non-food bit: "Weird news: While researching a story for B2, I came across Adopt-A-Sniper. Kinda like Adopt-A-Child around the Holidays, but slightly different."

On a happier note, from Panda's Thumb, a fascinating look on how river dolphins might have evolved. I probably almost tipped over the boat as an eleven year old because I was so excited to see dolphins (dolphins! dolphins!) leaping in classic parabolas against the setting sun in the emerald-banked Ganga. (Or "Ganges" as it was mystifyingly renamed by the Brits.) River dolphins appear to have evolved before sea dolphins, and the question is why are they then similar, given that their three areas of population aren't connected. The paper cited here uses a combination of computational biology and geophysics to attack the problem. Of course I don't really know enough global geology to comprehend a "shallow epicontinental sea" that connected the Amazon, Ganga, and Yangtze, but I sure like thinking about those fascinating phylogenetics.

Speaking of science, Chris C. Mooney at Intersection points out that there's a Senate hearing on stem cell research today. Over at Felix Salmon's blog, Rhian Salmon has posted amazing pictures of the sun beginning to return to the Antarctic.

Stefan at Memefirst gets a little carried away in imagining that this year's will be the last Olympics because of terrorism. I hope he's wrong, but I find the idea of virtual athletic gatherings kind of interesting. Matthew Yglesias celebrates Bastille Day by taking a look at the two deleted, gorier, verses of Le Marseillaise.

Not Blogs:

I just found the magazine Mental Floss, and am totally tickled by it. It's a lot of fun! Check it out if you can find it.

My friend David Goldweber recently wrote this great opinion-piece for the LA Times about how minority writers in college textbook anthologies almost always write about being minorities. This touches on a number of issues I've been thinking about for a while, and I hope to write about them further soon.