Maps and Mirrors

Thank you for my snowflake cookie anonymous flister! It even has those wonderful candy ball bearings on it!

I realize it was made because someone said, "Hey, let's do Tin Man but with Alice in Wonderland, but I liked Alice. As a Primeval fan it was lovely to see Andrew Lee Potts and Matt Frewer BROKE MY HEART.

Have some links that show more reasons why corvids rock:
Ravens form a wake-like gathering after 2 electrocuted
Clever ravens cooperatively hunt

And another link I've been holding onto for a while now:
How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect

Note that the New York Times has not forgotten to capitalize their article titles, even though many other news organizations, including the BBC, have. There was even a bit in the Magazine section of the BBC News site today defending their recent practice of not capitalizing acronyms, which I think is just an excuse for not knowing how to turn off AutoCorrect. Grr. Not on, BBC News.

Wired magazine has an article on Nikon's Small World photomicrography competition, featuring the winners all the way back to 1977. This year's winner:

( cut for photo )
There are also links to Nikon's gallery of all the winners and honorable mentions. For me one of the slightly unexpected neat things about this was the fact that this is a truly international competition, and I loved seeing all the different facilities the various scientist photographers were from.

A huge blob of strange black goo is floating in the Arctic Ocean.
Uh, does this make anyone else think of Stephen King's short story "The Raft"? Especially when it mentions the goose bones.

Professional snipers have been brought in to protect a colony of fairy penguins.
It's about time someone took penguins this seriously.

And in the "This is why I'm still in the honeymoon phase" category:
The Obama administration is revising policy to make it easier for foreign abused women to be granted asylum.