Oh Hey There

via deathlord, mesialdrift

via deathlord, curlywhirl

Pushing Back Against the Methane Tipping Point →

via azspot:

A piece in the latest issue of Science shows that there’s a considerable amount of methane (CH₄) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There’s as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.

Here’s why: methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, significantly more powerful than carbon dioxide. There are billions of tons of methane trapped under the permafrost, and if that methane starts leaking quickly, it would have a strong feedback effect — warming the atmosphere and oceans, causing more methane to leak, and on and on. The melting of methane ice (aka “methane hydrates” and “methane clathrates”) is probably the most significant global warming tipping point event out there. If we see runaway methane from underneath the Siberian permafrost, we could see temperatures increasing far faster than even the most pessimistic CO₂-driven scenarios — perhaps as much as 8-10° C, very much into the global catastrophe realm. To put it in context: rapid methane releases have been implicated in extinction events in Earth’s geologic past.

Super Mario Bros. 2 Lost Levels

My roommate Peterson Jones and I downloaded this game on the Wii virtual console. The story goes that it never hit America because it was “too hard”—there are mushrooms that hurt you—which is bullshit, because we could have internalized the game’s many lessons and been a stronger nation for it.

Cluster - Sowiesoso (1976)

OM NOM NOM NOM AMBIENT

COLORS: “PACKET of SUNSHINE”

The Chans [4chan and its sister sites, the other “Chans”—7chan, 420chan, 711chan, etc. al.] are like a particularly huge toxin processor for human consciousness. They are also, I suspect, our best preview of where human consciousness is going.

— Lost in the Filth Simulacrum | h+ Magazine (via elsi) — I dig the first half of that statement.

tristn: Our relationship is like the singing dog. Do you want me to finish this thought?
marykgo: ...sure.
tristn: It's not that it sings well, but that it sings at all.
marykgo: *closes eyes, obviously rolls closed eyes*

thebardsociety:

tristn:

bmichael:

A garden path sentence is a sentence  for which the responder’s most intuitive interpretation is an incorrect one, ultimately luring them into an improper parse. (h/t @tjmahr)

It’s missing my favorite garden-path: The horse raced past the barn fell.

I’m pretty sure that many of these are not grammatically correct:

• First one is okay;
• Second one ought to be ‘The man, whistling, tunes pianos’ or ‘The whistling man tunes pianos’;
• Third should be ‘The cotton that clothing is made of grows in Mississippi’ or ‘The cotton, of which clothing is made, grows in Mississippi’;
• Fourth is surprisingly solid;
• Fifth: ‘The author wrote that the novel was likely to be a best-seller’ or ‘The author wrote “the novel was likely to be a best-seller”’;
• Sixth: ‘The tomcat, curled up on the cushion, seemed friendly’ or ‘The tomcat that was curled up on the cushion seemed friendly’;
• Seventh: ‘The man, returned to his house, was happy’ or ‘The man that was returned to his house was happy’; and
• Eighth is pretty solid (‘government plans’ is a reasonably common subject) but could be ‘The government’s plans to raise taxes were defeated’.

Nice to get some grammar exercise once in a while.

Orthography is not grammar. All of these sentences are perfectly grammatical and can be easily understood when said aloud with appropriate intonation.