Hot volcano-on-volcano action

Gotta interrupt the profundity to bring you a link to some BADASS photos of the new volcanoes being born out of the sea near Tonga. Science here and here, volcano porn here (photos) and here (video--hell yeah!).

Happy holidays from Hubble

If you've never had one, an advent calendar has 25 little boxes to open, one for every day of December through Christmas. Boston.com has a virtual advent calendar of Hubble's greatest hits. This is a ring galaxy, from Dec. 6.

Hat tip to Jarrod, and Merry Christmas to all!

Bidaily linkpost: Earth from above

Go here. Hat tip to Carl Zimmer.

The daily linkpost: Lovecraftian horror filmed at deep drilling site

Video here, pix here. Hat tip to Mike.

Whale dissection

Not one I was in on, sadly. Nope, this is just the latest example of me using this "blog" as a dumping ground for links to cool stuff. Get yer gore on.

When dinosaurs won the Civil War

I've been out of the country and off the net for two weeks, so this is probably old news. Still, I felt the need to commemorate a disturbing episode in our national history. Full story here.

The sandworms of Arrakis

...have little to do with the substance of this post, other than that this microscopic bug part reminded me of them. It's one of about 30 awesome pictures of microscale weirdness to be found here.

Your daily dose of "Holy living crap!"

Stolen from Zooillogix, which has become one of my favorite blogs ever since they announced E.O. Wilson's upcoming book, Suck It!

The long-promised, oft-delayed Lick refractor post

...is not here. I ended up saying everything I wanted to say when I put the photos up on my Flickr page. If you have no idea what the heck I'm talking about, see here and here and here. The upshot is that on Sept. 15 last fall I got to put my eyeball on the end of this 57-foot-long telescope, and saw some stuff that is still blowing my mind four months later.

The observatory is open to the public. If you get a chance, go.

Super-heated science

Okay, this post is just a dummy repeater for this awesome Onion article, "Scientists Ask Congress to Fund $50 Billion Science Thing."

I'm not proud of that, but it had to be done. It's science.

Hat tip to Julian Hilliard, who was a fellow grad student back at OU, for the term 'ion reflux pronabulator', which he applied indiscriminately to any machine more complicated than a toaster. The thing in the diagram is the Platonic ideal of the IRP.