Sunspots 50

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Bonnie has a great essay on why she takes pictures.

The Poetry Archive is an archive of poetry readings, some by the poets themselves. There are notices of upcoming live readings.

Journey to Wellness is an on-line health magazine aimed at African-Americans.

CNET has an article about the latest security threat, namely botnets. These are used, among other things, as fake on-line stores. (This is not phishing, it's something else.) It's a scary read.

Dory has a good post on how to deal with criticizing and complaining.

There is evidence that whale songs have a sort of grammar. There is, so far, no evidence that they refer to abstract concepts.

Joe Carter recycles a good post on what conservatives really do to governing. His claim (overly simplified by me) is that political conservatives don't know much about governing, but they do know when some things aren't right.

I am not making this up. Researchers from Europe claim that they have been able to genetically modify rat nerve cells so that it is possible to communicate with them by way of a computer chip.

A web page discusses C. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet. It says, among other things, that the races of Malacandrans that Lewis invented have been used (after Lewis) by other writers of fantastic fiction, one of them Larry Niven.

Newborn babies are attracted by human speech. Researchers have some evidence that this attraction is innate, not because the newborns were exposed to human speech while in the womb.

There was an eclipse of the sun visible in some parts of the earth today, but not here. (I chose this Flickr photo because the photographer posted more than one shot of the eclipse. He has some other nice photos, too.)

This week's Christian Carnival is here. (For information on locating these Carnivals, see here)

When I don't tell where I found an item above, I either found it directly, or was probably pointed to it by the Librarian's Internet Index, SciTech Daily, or Arts and Letters Daily. All of them are great.

Image source (public domain)