A Sad Day

America's greatest living writer is no longer. Here is an interview he did a few years ago.

Carrizo Plain

The Carrizo Plain is one of those places that is not a place. I would bet that few Californians have heard of it or could say where it is. It's a 180,000 acres of land that comes from another time. This is not the California of today but the wild California of hundreds of years ago. It's a beautiful valley in between nowhere and no place and noteworthy for it's emptiness.

A mechanic and a carpenter sat on a bubble of rock at the western lip of the Carrizo Plain. The slope descended below them, grassy and empty, bottomed in the white crystalline mud of Soda Lake, then ascended to the zipper of the San Andreas Fault hazy in the east. They had sat there silent for hours.

"This is our Serengeti," the mechanic said.

Animal Farmers

Humans aren't the only farmers.

The insect farmers also use a variety of techniques to weed out unwanted fungus from their farms. Interestingly, the leaf cutters use antibiotic-secreting bacteria of the group actinomycetes to weed out other unwanted fungus growing in the garden. What is amazing is that we derive many of our own antibiotics, such as streptomycin and tetramycin, from actinomycetes.

The parallels with human farmers do not end with agriculture. There are species of ants that herd aphids in much the same way humans herd cattle and live on the sugary excretions of the aphids.

(via BoingBoing)

Proof of Existence of God

This story is like frayed blanket. You pull on a thread and it just keeps unravelling. (via Atrios)

Think about it: what are the chances that a media whore like Gannon would turn out to be an actual whore? It's impossible. It boggles the mind how infinitely unlikely this is. It's like if you found someone pirating CDs, and it turns out he actually had a peg leg and a parrot on his shoulder and sailed around the Caribbean saying "arrrrrr!" and plundering booty. You wouldn't believe it. But there it is: impossible, but true. Impossible truths are miracles, and only God can work miracles. Ergo, God exists. Q.E.D.

Mummra lives

Thundercat outtakes.

Disappeared in Montana

The journey of a Cold War tourist in Montana. (via Highways West)

It was only a couple of minutes later that I noticed the Air Force security vehicles behind me. Two dark blue Blazers or Broncos or some sort of american-built SUVs. Perfect for these gravel backroads. They had light bars on top, like cop cars, but they weren't pulling me over. They were just following me.

What's my name?

Nice visualization of baby names from the social security database for the past hundred years, (via Metafilter)

Moments that last a lifetime

This thread on AskMetafilter is the surprising result of the question, "Can you point to a single experience in your life, as a child, which you can define as having contributed to the person you are today?".