Goodnight Dune, bats, etc; fried food centrifugation degreasing, flyting

Stumbled across this smashup called Goodnight Dune via facebook the other day. Awesome and creepy.

i've had a brain full of bats lately (things have been a little batty?); i came across these impossibly cute collections of bat gifs. Part one, and part two (mostly baby bats). Also awesome is this winged lizard.

Bryan was kind enough to prepare fried chicken for a large group of people on Halloween. It was delicious. In his honor, i present this insightful review of a paper (from The Annals of Improbable Research) wherein a centrifuge is used to remove grease from schnitzel. Best line? " Two freshly deep-fried schnitzels were purchased from the cafeteria at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. The schnitzels weighed 128.46 and 129.67 grams, suggesting that a highly precise manufacturing process produces these schnitzels. "

i'm certain you saw this on various other media platforms, but some folks synched up their Halloween-decorated house to Ylvis' tune, What Does The Fox Say. Apparently, most of the lights are LED-based and they estimate their electric bill for the Halloween season to be $25-35 for the display. No word on what the neighbors say.

(sigh.)

Turns out, mostly between the 5th and 16th centuries there were ritual poetic insult matches termed 'flyting' (not to be confused with 'flirting, 4th grade style'), with plenty of references in Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature. Additionally, wikipedia states that , "The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie records a contest between William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy in front of James IV, which includes the earliest recorded use of the word shit as a personal insult".

Moreover, a 'thing' can officially refer to a governing assembly in Germanic societies, both in per-Christianity as well as today. i'm pretty amused by the idea of a 'legislative thing' being it's proper title.

from Jack, regarding the helmet-cam mountain biking video i blogged about a week or two ago:

J:  I think I just crapped my pants watching that mt bike video

I am 99% sure that individuals up to the intense of experiences that often have that D4DR mutation thing

The mutation to which she refers is the Dopamine receptor D4, and mutations to this receptor can be insertions/repetitions, amino acid mutations, and other mutations of sections, though perhaps the "novelty-seeking behavior is probably mediated by several genes, and the variance attributable to DRD4 by itself is not particularly large". Interesting.