Ugh!

It's really hard to envision a candidate more at odds with our beliefs than Sara Palin. Both the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria-grade rantings of her Bishop, and the 'death of the Goddess' intentions offered up by her church were excellently covered over at Wild Hunt (here and here). Palin seems to delight in the desecration of just about every element of earth-based spirituality or science, so I guess she should be given credit for consistency.

The Human Society has recently come out in support of Obama/Biden. Although McSame's record in regards to wildlife is ambivalent at best, Palin's is horrendous:

...Gov. Sarah Palin’s (R-Alaska) retrograde policies on animal welfare and conservation have led to an all-out war on Alaska’s wolves and other creatures. Her record is so extreme that she has perhaps done more harm to animals than any other current governor in the United States. ...Palin engineered a campaign of shooting predators from airplanes and helicopters, in order to artificially boost the populations of moose and caribou for trophy hunters. She offered a $150 bounty for the left foreleg of each dead wolf as an economic incentive for pilots and aerial gunners to kill more of the animals...What’s more, when the Bush Administration announced its decision to list the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, Palin filed a lawsuit to reverse that decision...

Ramses II head uncovered

In Egypt, a 3,000-year-old find

More signs that Horus, the son of Egypt and Africa, will soon ascend the throne:

...CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Egypt's antiquities council says that archaeologists have unearthed a 3,000-year-old red granite head believed to portray the 19th Dynasty Pharaoh Ramses II...the 30-inch-high head belonged to a colossal statue of Ramses II that once stood in the area. Its nose is broken and the beard that was once attached to the king's chin is missing...the site at Tell Basta was dedicated to the cat-goddess Bastet and was an important center from the Old Kingdom until the end of the Roman Period...

Aliens: just add water

Hardygrades: Space survival

Tardigrades (aka: 'water bears' or 'moss animals')are the coolest animals. There ability to resist one of the plagues of corporeal life--namely dying--boarders on science fiction:

...Most living things cannot survive in space, though a few hardy bacteria and some lichen can do so for a while. Now, however, an animal has been found that can venture outside without a space suit. Ingemar Jonsson at Kristianstad University in Sweden, and his colleagues, have managed to send tardigrades, a small invertebrate animal less than 1mm long, out into space and back again...They exposed some to the vacuum of space. After these animals had been brought back and rehydrated, scientists found no difference in their survival and reproduction rates compared with tardigrades that had stayed back at home...

There's lots of good Tardigrade links out there. My fav tells you how to collect them. You do need a low-power microscope, 30-40 is a good mag. You'll be really able to study them at about 100x.

Keep Watching the Skies...keep watching the skies...

From SpaceWeather.com for Sept. 9, 2008:

...FIREBALL OUTBURST: This morning, Sept. 9th, a surprising flurry of fireballs lit up the sky over eastern parts of the United States. All-sky cameras at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, recorded 25+ meteors, most as bright as Jupiter or Venus. A preliminary analysis by NASA astronomers suggests this is an outburst of "September Perseids," a little-known shower that has erupted this way three times in the past century. Although the show is almost certainly over, sky watchers are advised to be on the lookout for more fireballs tonight and in the nights ahead; the September Perseids are not well understood and they could surprise us again...

More Greek art returns home

Greece Welcomes Return of Antiquities

I previously blogged about the return of a krater and two acroliths. It's great to see this happening more and more:

...On Wednesday Greece celebrated the return of two rare antiquities, Reuters reported. The items, a bronze vase from the fourth-century B.C. and the upper part of a marble tombstone, have been put on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens...Archaeologists previously feared the pieces would never be reunited. “Fortunately, the archaeologists’ prediction was wrong,” Michalis Liapis, the culture minister, told reporters at the museum...