Magnolia Sitter

Speaking of my zombie book... I was a pretty big fan of it. Feed by Mira Grant turned out to be a rollicking little read. It opens decades ...

Oh, the horror of working Valentine's Day in the food industry, especially the slightly rarefied version of such that I now inhabit. Mos...

I haven't done anything with this in a long, long time. When I read advice about blogs I consistently hear people advising you to focus ...

Solar powered blimp ! That is all.

The drug war may be finally losing support in Mexico , but it's happening when there is finally some evidence that marijuana is addictiv...

There are some encouraging updates coming out of Iran while everyone's attention has been focused elsewhere this weekend. The clergy see...

Are you seriously telling me that someone in the intelligence community couldn't explain how Facebook works to his wife? Also, Penitent...

The strangeness and sporadic nature of my blogging continues. I have grown so addicted to GoogleReader in the last year that I tend to just ...

Ars Technica has a massive and absolutely gorgeous rant on e-books . I'm not going to tell you that you really do want to read a novel o...

It seems unlikely that an Egyptian scientist has discovered an ancient bacteria that was used by pharaohs and sterilizes sewage in seven mi...

Scientific American has a whole article on the growing evidence that unstructured play is incredibly important to mental and emotional grow...

Oh yes, today Muammar Qaddafi was elected Chairman of the African Union .

It turns out that the usefulness of peer pressure for regulating behavior extends to driving .  In low-income countries, road traffic accide...

A newly designed green gadget uses coffee grinds to print from your computer (it also requires you to move the ink cartridge back and forth...

My blogging has been light to non-existant for quite a while now, but I am trying to write again. I'm sure things will be moving slowly;...

I've been away for a while. Once again life sort of caught up with me and my life has been somewhat frazzled. This became more annoyin...

Should we be boycotting Amazon ? Rushdie is annoyed : The events depicted in the pieces I have seen are either completely invented or so dis...

Okkervil River has set up a YouTube channel and put out a session giving a glimpse at their upcoming album. Of course, the jamming includes...

Out in Australia, a dolphin who spent only a few weeks in captivity around trained dolphins appears to be teaching the females in her wild s...

The silicon used in solar cells is quickly getting cheaper . The price may drop 43% in the next year. Hope fights depression and meditation...

Matt Steinglass disputes the idea that privately-run entities are clearly better than their government-controlled peers . I am going to quot...

Timbuktu has turned out to be a treasure trove of ancient manuscripts that date back to its heyday as a cultural center sometime between 80...

Britain's lady linguist has won gold in the 400m .

Dogs and cats get along after all (but only if the cat is there first, because dogs are cute, but don't deal well with change). Also, i...

Pandora may be a casualty of the new laws about royalties for internet radio, while the internet is challenging copyright on the very old ...

There's been some interesting information in the past few days that I am dealing with all together here. Statistics are finally being ga...

Uh, Alyssa Rosenberg is filling in at Ezra Klein's blog and she just wrote a post entitled "Star Wars and Parenting" linking ...

I waded into the deep waters of ranting about the way interest in education in a renaissance manner seems to have waned the other day and no...

Anyone reading this blog is aware that I love stories about women who have done (or are doing) amazing things. Well, it turns out that the o...

So the post that came just before this was quite depressing, but I have links to funny things, mostly this comic from xkcd (love): The rel...

There was an incident last week that was horrifying , but I assumed everyone had already heard about it because Reason has had incredible ...

That is a favorite picture of mine (I'm in the black and my sister is in red) and my family was not alone in finding this a picturesque ...

There are amazing cool women in the world and this one is in China now: If you're watching track and field events in the coming Olympic...

Finally, someone agrees with one of my long-cherished rants. Inside Higher Ed has published an article bemoaning the tendency for people i...

Coffee rocks . I am at peace with this addiction.

Visualizations of the world's geology are coming online.

Egypt is DNA testing its mummies . Mummies long assumed to be the children of Tutankhamun (my spell checker and Nature appear to disagree ...

The rumor on the web is that IKEA is about to start selling decently priced home solar panels . This would be so awesome. If I ever get a ho...

I spent a while today listening to my sister vent her frustration about people who express doubts about her plan to raise a "nature bab...

The last blog post I wrote was about stupidity in news sources, but the scale is completely blown away by the NYT's little oops that ma...

Slate has published an article about the horrible dangers of night residents who have no clue what is going on with their patients rather ...

The EFF rocks . Go get your ISP testing program. That is all. Hat tip: Boing boing

It's nice that the Brits are looking towards awesome musicians from our side of the pond, but I am especially thrilled that the US musi...

I wish streetlights looked like this and were solar powered.

Overcoming Bias has a long and interesting post about behaviorism , (blah, blah, it sucked, but it spawned the application of actual scienc...

Here is an art installation that ventures well into creepy territory. For his Faces of Evil project , Hans Weishäupl made composite photogra...

An incredibly important bill is wending its way through congress . The "publish what you pay" concept is this: a country has oil (...

My favorite Indian design blogger just did a post on decorating for Indian weddings and she gorgeously evokes memories of friends' cele...

Some cities are built on financial markets or rock 'n' roll. Apparently, Atlanta is built on guns and marriage.

The confusion of interpreting Žižek's wild swings between brilliance and nuttiness is the real subject (especially as it relates to the ...

A new study in rodents seems to show that spending time in a wheel chair after an injury dramatically impedes recovery. This is very prelimi...

A new site is allowing people to visualize how dangerous roads are. The maps are a bit difficult to read, but it seems like a great idea.

The NYT has a really great article about the recurring problems with hip replacement hardware and the power registries of health informati...

We have a jet-pack !

This is your regularly scheduled Inhabit update: Yes, that is a pre-fab ewok house . As one of the many women who grew up simply desperate ...

Two wonderful things (both of which should have occurred a long, long time ago) happened yesterday. The FCC has finally made the decision to...