Wes Phillips

I missed Pharyngula's picture of planktonic octopus paralarva from last Friday. It's not cat-blogging, but it sure is pretty.

I'm not an economist, so I can't vouch for how accurate this is, but I loved the wild ride. First it teaches classic B-school pricing philosophy and then it tells you that everything you just learned is wrong. It does seem to explain a lot.

Seed rates 2005's science-based movies. It's a tough room.

The biggest problem with many consumer products these days is that the people who make 'em never figured out what they needed to be. That's why I have an all-in-one printer/scanner/fax machine I have never figured out how to send a fax with. I could read the manual I suppose, if I ever figure out which pile of papers it's under.

Apparently there was some sort of awards ceremony in LA last night, but news of it has only just reached Brooklyn. I stopped caring about the Oscars years ago (pretty much around the time I became a voting member of NARAS and realized how little the Grammies had to do with musical quality), but I never cease to be amazed by how much they seem to matter to other non-film-industry people. Mark Evanier has a nice essay about the post-ceremony media frenzy—and he totally pwns Tom Shales.

In zero-G, doesn't everybody?

My friend Jeff Wong sends this "Beatles Anomalies List," suggesting that it's the audio analog to other obsessions for geeks who need a life—people like me, in other words.