Not-quite-current events

• The best election headline
• I don't know if I believe this or not, but apparently Sarah Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent. I mean, Sarah Palin isn't the sharpest crayon, but I trust the McCain campaign as far as I can throw them. If McCain himself said it, I'd buy it; he's been struggling to hold on to his honor and integrity all campaign. In fact, that's part of why he did so badly. You can win with a clean campaign, and you can win with a dirty campaign, but there's not much hope for "clean — no, dirty — no, clean — no, dirty — but not that dirty!"
  
• A comic on the banking crisis

A sense of scale

If you shrunk the earth down to 1 meter in diameter, the difference between the highest mountain and the deepest sea trench would be 1.5 mm. The International Space Station is 1.2 inches up, and the Space Shuttle can't go higher than about 3 inches. Geosynchronous orbit is 9.2 feet from the surface. The distance to the moon becomes 100 feet, give or take about 5 feet depending on where it is in its orbit. Mars never gets closer than 2 2/3 miles, and the sun is 7.2-7.4 miles away (we're closest Jan. 3, and furthest Jul. 4). The nearest star, Alpha Centauri? It's more than 8 times the (actual) distance to the moon.

Welcome to the internet, where the men are real men, the women are real men, and the little girls are real FBI agents.

Linkety-link-link-link.

• Bash.org is a collection of funny (often NSFW) quotes from IRC users.
• Kiva.org lets you loan small amounts of money to would-be entrepreneurs in third-world countries. You don't get any interest, but these days that's better than the stock market.
• I wanna be a Sesame Street Martian for Halloween next year. I won't get around to making the costume, though, so I won't.
• Using your TV as a radar. Awesome.
• Just how unlikely your vote is to matter, and why (pdf) you should vote anyway.
• When restaurants are more clever than clean.
• A crazy pastor has a crazy plan to keep Obama from becoming president.
• Fundies Say the Darndest Things is a collection of other crazy religious people being crazy.
  
• A silly song about believing silly things. Could be offensive, as you may believe in one of the things deemed silly.
• Finally, an odd glitch in most text editors.

On having a blog

I find that, now that I have a blog, I feel obligated to post stuff in it periodically. The fact that I know very well that nobody but me reads it has little effect on this. This results in my putting up posts that are just lists of links, out of a lack of anything worth saying. This does have a nice side-effect, though--now I can find that cool link I saw the other day, even if I've forgotten where I found it.

They're doing something right.

Have you considered moving to Iceland?

Here's to Mississippi

I just saw this which led me to this which reminded me of this.

Bwahahahaha!

Science is cool, but mad science is even cooler.

• Dr. Horrible is a 45-minute musical by Joss Whedon (of Buffy, Angel, and Firefly). It will probably get its own post later.
  
• Narbonic is a (finished) comic strip about the adventures of a mad scientist and her henchmen.
• A Miracle of Science is a (finished) graphic novel: She's a psychologist, and a member of a group mind. He's a detective, hunting down mad scientists and bringing them to justice (or at least therapy). Together, they fight crime! 435 pages of mad science, space battles, robots, and true love.
• Girl Genius is a (ongoing) graphic novel set in a steampunk Europe. The artwork is just beautiful.
• Wikihistory is a short short story about time travel, in the form of message board posts. It doesn't quite fit the theme, but what the hey.
  
• Casey and Andy is a (finished) comic strip about two mad scientist roommates who periodically die. It's not really up to the standards of the rest of this list, but it is funny.