Marciepooh

This may be the only exciting piece of government paperwork you’ll ever read. Buzz Aldrin conquered Throwback Thursday forever last week when he shared his travel voucher from the Apollo 11 mission on Facebook and Twitter.

Read more...

A friend of mine decided to get a group of children in her care a fish tank and guppies as a “class pet.” The guppies were soon joined by baby guppies. The babies disappeared, one by one. Turns out, guppies are known for this shit.

Read more...

So, I'm out on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, enjoying my vacation with Mrs. Geotripper, and we're casting about trying to figure out what to do on this 300-mile long island. I'm doing some reading and find out that there is this place called the Saanich Peninsula Marble Quarry that offers tours. That sounds great to the geologist in me, so I talk Mrs. Geotripper into checking it out. It turns out that when you are touring an island that is mainly rainforest, rock exposures are in short supply.
I figure that a rock quarry isn't going to have a whole lot of visitors on a given day, so imagine my surprise when we reach the end of the road, and find out that the place has a parking lot, and charges admission! It was pretty steep, too, about $30 Canadian for each of us. But hey, it's rocks, and I haven't seen a lot of rocks on this trip. We pay and go on in. I'm astounded by how many people are here for the tour of the quarry.

I did some research on the rocks. The marble of the Saanich Peninsula is part of the Wrangellia terrane, rocks that formed far out in the Pacific Ocean during the Triassic Period. Around 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period the rocks plowed into the west coast of North America and became part of the continent. The rocks were originally limestone that formed in coral reefs and along tropical island beaches. The heat and pressure of the collision with North America caused the rock to recrystallize into marble. Today it is called the Quatsino formation.
So I follow the map, my anticipation rising as we reach the edge of the quarry, and I looked in. I was kind of shocked. There was vegetation everywhere! There was barely any rock to be seen at all! I did notice the smokestack from the smelter almost hidden in the forest beyond the quarry. How could they let this happen? Didn't they care enough to keep the rock exposed for us geologists? 
The hundreds of people around me didn't seem to mind all the vegetation. As far as I could tell, they were actually paying more attention to the flowers and stuff and pretty much ignoring the rock. I was a little confused. But at least the people that run the place have a sense of history. They put up some interpretive signs that showed the raw beauty of the rock before all the vegetation was allowed to grow over it.
The quarry was active from the late 1800s to around 1905 or so. I guess in this temperate rainforest environment the plants can take over pretty quickly. I was kind of surprised by how colorful the flowers and other plants were. I thought that at this latitude, the species diversity was on the low side. I guess not.
I finally found some rock exposures at the lower end of the quarry. The flowers hadn't yet covered everything. Water had filled the lowest part of the quarry, and I guess they were using a fountain to aerate the water or something.
It's almost as if they were ashamed of the rocks. Look at the picture above to see how the plants covered almost every part of the marble. I just didn't get it. In any case, we finished up our tour and found some gelato being sold at a stand in what looked like an old mansion of some sort, so we had a bit of dessert before heading back to Victoria.
So what did I think about the marble quarry tour? I was surprised by how popular and expensive it was, and how easily the visitors were distracted by the vegetation covering all the rocks. The pathways were well done, and there were lots of interpretive signs showing the glory of years past when plants didn't cover every rock, so one got a sense of history, and of loss. On the whole, it wasn't too bad, especially if you like plants and stuff like that. I don't recommend bringing a rock hammer. They got pretty upset when I starting taking rock samples.

If you want to check it out, don't go by the old name of Saanich Peninsula Quarry. They changed it, I guess when it got all overgrown. Nowadays the place is called Butchart Gardens.

The glories of the old days before plants covered everything.

Warning: A supposedly naughty cake ahead. (But good luck seeing it.)

 

"We asked for Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc."

 

 

"This was our Hello Kitty cake:"

 

 

"They told us those were flames."

 

 

"Believe it or not, it's supposed to be a penis."

 

 

 

Thanks to Amy J., Cindy P., Sara W., & Sarah H., who all knew it was bound to happen sooner or later.

*****

Thank you for using our Amazon links to shop! USA, UK, Canada.

How many adults are eating enough vegetables on an average day? Less than 10%, says the CDC—and that incredibly low number somehow manages to get even worse when you look at the state-by-state breakdown.

Read more...

The more we learn about undersea volcanoes, the more we realize that life can thrive almost anywhere. Now, an Australian research vessel has discovered a new kind of fish living in volcanoes off the coast of the continent. It’s called a scaleless blackfish and it’s adorably ugly.

Read more...

When Welsh politician Darren Mill asked economy, science, and transport minister Edwina Hart whether she had discussed UFO sightings at Cardiff airport with the Ministry of Defense, or considered funding research into the reports, a Welsh government spokesperson responded pithily, in Klingon.

Read more...

If you’d thought KFC had hit rock bottom in its quest to mine every possible acceptable use for fried chicken when it tried the Double Down Hot Dog earlier this year, you were wrong. Very wrong.

Yesterday, KFC Philippines announced the “KFChizza,” which if you haven’t already guessed and then lost your appetite for both chicken and pizza, is a pizza where the crust has been replaced by KFC fried chicken.

As BGR notes, the basic chicken parm has already set the precedent for slathering a breaded chicken cutlet with tomato sauce and cheese, but in our experience the cutlet in a chicken parm is nowhere near as distinctly seasoned as the stuff you get at KFC. Additionally, everyone knows that a good chicken parm uses a bread-crumb coating as opposed to traditional fried chicken you’d get from KFC or elsewhere.

[via Eater]

It pays to read everything carefully — or rather, you might not have to pay a fine if you’re as sharp-eyed as one Ohio woman. She ended up having a parking citation tossed by an appeals court, all because she noticed there was a comma missing in the local law.

As anyone who has ever written a sentence knows, punctuation is of the utmost importance. And in one Ohio village, English teachers are likely sighing and shaking their heads at a grammar mishap involving the local law on parking regulations.

The Columbus Dispatch reports that the 12th District Court of Appeals overturned a parking violation [PDF] for a woman living in West Jefferson. She’d been convicted in municipal court for leaving her pickup parked on a village street for more than 24 hours.

But she pointed out that the municipal ordinance prohibited “any motor vehicle camper, trailer, farm implement and/or non-motorized vehicle” from daylong parking.

Her truck, she said, is not a motor vehicle camper. It is a motor vehicle, which would’ve been covered if the law had a comma where it should’ve.

The village argued that it was just a typo and therefore didn’t invalidate her violation. The trial court upheld that view, saying that when reading the ordinance in context, it unambiguously applied to motor vehicles and “anybody reading [the ordinance] would understand that it is just missing a comma.”

Grammar won the day, however, after the court sided with the truck owner.

“If the village desires a different reading, it should amend the ordinance and insert a comma,” Judge Robert A. Hendrickson wrote.

Oh, snap.

Justice Insider: Missing comma gives judges pause [Columbus Dispatch]

The discovery of Pappochelys, a Triassic-era reptile with a set of emerging turtle-like features, is helping scientists fill in an important evolutionary gap.

Read more...

Over the last eight years and in multiple countries, Pizza Hut has been carefully developing their “hot dog stuffed in a pizza crust” concept. An early version stuffed only the ends of a regular-length hot dog inside the crust, creating a pretty flower shape. Then the frankfurters lay horizontally along the crust, like the ropes of cheese. Now the crust has finally come to America, as the Hut hinted earlier this week.

Its official name is the Hot Dog Bites Pizza. You wouldn’t think that it would take this much effort to develop such a concept, but that’s why they run the multinational pizza empire, and we run the consumer advocacy blog. So we won’t question Pizza Hut’s decision to create a pizza surrounded by what are effectively 28 pigs in blankets. The pizza will cost $11.99, and will be available starting on June 18.

Here’s the earliest version of this pizza, the blossom-like layout sold in South Korea:

This final version is most similar to the one available last fall in Luxembourg, which also included short sausages wrapped in dough. Apparently, that was the most perfect hot dog pizza creation, and Pizza Hut brought the crust home once they made the best version.

And, look, to be honest, we can’t blame them. If you had the money and the inclination, wouldn’t you do the same thing?

Read more...

“Overall, disturbing and unamerican.”

The post Thanks, Norepinephrine appeared first on Beatrice the Biologist.

Studies of sunshine-denied human buttocks help settle the matter

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

The post The basics. appeared first on Indexed.

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "Amount of Time Spent Writing your Thesis" - originally published 5/1/2015 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

A couple of weeks ago a wonderful hashtag was making its way around Twitter, with female scientists all over the world sharing photos of their feet to show a day #InMyShoes.

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com