but now I have a strange yen to look at them.

Too late. They're gone. She either lost a considerable amount of weight or had them reduced.

Oh my God, I just learned about the emerald cockroach wasp.

The female wasp paralyzes a cockroach and disables its escape response, leads it into a burrow, and traps it inside with an egg. When the larva hatches, it feeds on the roach for days and then chews its way inside and feeds on its internal organs for days.

The roach is alive the whole time.

Michael Whelan is the Pern guy. Not the porn guy. Don't talk about him that way.

Submitted without comment: [link]

Submitted without comment: [link]

Not commenting either.

*tryingtonotcomment*

Dresses made from almost anything and everything

Our designers these days are very creative and innovative when it comes to dresses and gowns. Literally, we have outfits made from anything and everything! Be it the balloons, chocolates, your favorite candies, money and even condoms! So, the next time you want to adorn something different, don’t worry, you name a thing and I am sure a dress will be available in it. Below are some attires from the weirdest things possible. Some are quite good while the others are just not wearable. But I guess this is what we call as freaky fashion! Have a look.

Of course, mom has just gotten into J.R. Ward and paranormal romance erotica in the last couple of months -- there are MOUNDS of them beside her chair -- and I just have to kind of...blank out that part of my mind.

I shouldn't have given my mother my JR Ward stuff. I try to ignore that.

Applying Quantitative Analysis to Classic Lit

If Google has its way, all of English literature will one day exist as searchable digital text. Franco Moretti, a Stanford English professor, wants to be ready for the deluge with new kinds of questions and new tools to answer them — things like computational linguistics, data mining, computer modeling, and network theory. Moretti is already famous in bookish circles for his data-centric approach to novels, which he graphs, maps, and charts. Until recently, though, he’s been able to crunch only a few novels at a time, doing all that quantitative stuff by hand. Now he’s going digital, building searchable databases of old books, working to write software that can mine for patterns. Instead of diving deep into a few beloved titles, Moretti aims to zip across the creative output of entire eras. He calls it distant reading, and if his new methods catch on, they could change the way we look at literary history.

Take one experiment. Moretti decided to test the idea that Victorian writers, through their choice of adjectives, might reveal their belief that moral qualities were indivisible from reality itself and that physical traits reflected a person’s virtue. So he assembled a database of 250 novels and sent the file to computer scientists at IBM’s Visual Communications Lab, who turned the books into a series of word clouds. “Boom! There were exactly the adjectives I had hoped would pop up!” he says. “Adjectives like strong, bright, fair, in which the physical and the moral blend.”

For another project, he looked at the titles of 7,000 books in 18th- and 19th-century England and discovered a correlation between shorter titles and the growth of the book publishing industry. (Moretti theorizes that more concise titles made books easier to promote in a crowded marketplace.) He is also working with a programmer to test new software that can “read” terabytes of obscure, mostly unread fiction and classify the books by genre.

My sister works for Borders, bon bon. I place the blame squarely on her shoulders.

I tsked her about it, and she just shuddered and said "I KNOW! But what can you do?"