A bit late but…

Still a good one.

 

Cool biology is cool

If there’s anything you can depend on nature for, it’s to occasionally surprise you. Sometimes it’s a flash flood. Sometimes it’s an all white blackbird.

It is leucistic rather than an albino, which means that it does produce melanin but the melanin doesn’t reach its feathers. Apparently this has been an ongoing process over the years for this bird, until it is now entirely white. How cool is that?

I have a fondness for blackbirds since some tend to hang out in the trees outside my kitchen and bedroom windows, and a couple of years ago one nested on the ledge outside my kitchen window. I have an excellent picture of the mother feeding the chicks that I’m going to have to dig up and post. That one’s made all the better because I was only taking a picture of the chicks when the mother showed up just as I pressed the button.

Who ya gonna call?

Bill Cosby, apparently. This just made my day slightly weirder and better.

 

PIPA down out there

I need some sleep dammit! Go look at some interesting statistics instead of bothering me.

Hilarity

It made me laugh out loud, so I feel an obligation to share.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Must be SO PAinful

We all know that you don’t mess with the Internet, or the Internet messes with you right back. Well, add another data point to that bit of folk wisdom. According to the BBC, eight alleged politicians have withdrawn their support of the proposed anti-piracy pro-censorship laws after the Great Internet Blackout of -12. Go Internet, this was one of those instances where you made me smile (rather than wince at the existence of smurf porn). It’s genuinely heartening to see that it’s possible to make a difference and take a stand against narrow business interests with deep pockets. Just read the whining comments from the MPAA spokesman in the BBC article and try to keep a smile from your face. Let’s hope this is enough for a win.

Of course I can’t escape the dreadful feeling that in the long run all this is, is hurriedly building a wall of sand to keep the tide out. But that’s just my cheery disposition peeking through.

Courage of their convictions

So Wikipedia is blacked out for the day in protest of SOPA (that article is still accessible). Which is a powerful gesture, or would be if it still wasn’t damn easy to bypass, as they themselves tell you how to do on the info page accessible from the blackout screen. It is true that I, along with most of the Internet I suspect, am too lazy to actually deactivate JavaScript to get at Wikipedia; I can wait a day. If the site had been truly inaccessible then I believe their point would have had much more force behind it. The world can go one day without Wikipedia. As Justicar points out Google is whimpering even more feebly in protest. Google actually shutting down for a day, now there would be a protest with impact. Because the world really couldn’t go a day without Google. Well it could, obviously, but it’d be a shock akin to a severe nicotine addict finding themselves marooned in Antarctica with nary a contraband dealing penguin in sight.