Big gay beatdown in Moscow

from cnn:

Russian police detained gay protesters calling for the right to hold a Gay Pride parade in central Moscow on Sunday while nationalists shouting "death to homosexuals" punched and kicked the demonstrators.

Cypripedium acaule

Cypripedium acaule
Originally uploaded by bd2k+

The pink lady slipper requires a rare symbiotic fungi to grow:

"It takes years for the new plant to develop leaves for supplying its own energy. The plant requires low pH, nutrient poor soil and other special conditions for successful establishment."

links from reddit

Man who stayed up for 266 hours awakes to bad news
150 points | 26 comments

Bullet vs Knife 1/50,000 of a second later. [pic]
303 points | 36 comments

Ohio lethal injection takes 2 hours, 10 tries
9 points | 6 comments

A Friend in Seattle Saw This While Working
572 points | 106 comments

Straight Dope scoop: The truth about the boy with "two spiders living in his ear."
235 points | 20 comments

links from reddit

Nearly 75% of US households forbid smoking, up from 43% ten years ago
3 points | 0 comments

reCAPTCHA: A new way to fight spam - it also helps to digitize old books
647 points | 105 comments

Your power supply is only 60â€"70% efficient. Google's are 90% efficient, which cuts energy loss by a factor of four, and they want you to have the same technology.
433 points | 49 comments

Airline with $10 one-way fares debuts in the US. The catch? $5 to check a bag, $8 blankets, $15 pillows, $5 beers, $10 to jump the line...
85 points | 24 comments

FDA decides to keep lifetime blood donation ban for gay men
18 points | 4 comments

links from reddit

A bored mathematician discovers an unusual numerical pattern while doodling
594 points | 49 comments

How Aphex Twin hid pictures in his music
477 points | 44 comments

Excessive precision
185 points | 44 comments

One is only micrometers wide. The other is billions of lig ht-years across.
401 points | 43 comments

So what really is in a McDonald's Chicken McNugget
365 points | 71 comments

A bored mathematician discovers an unusual numerical pattern while doodling

The "Ulam sprial" reveals diagonal patterns in prime numbers plotted in a spiral. Isn't this what you're supposed to run through a supercomputer that folds it into a shape that reveals alien plans to build a trans-dimensional gateway?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulam_spiral

Rocky

Kitty
Originally uploaded by bd2k+.

Station nightclub fire leaves more victims than just the dead

As the first sentence is delivered in the 2003 nightclub fire which left 100 people dead, it's worth noting that there's even more to the tragedy than the dead victims, whose families finally got their day in court this week. New research indicates that even the survivors, burned or not, continue to experience ongoing suffering as a result of the tragedy.

On February 20, 2003, an 80's hair metal band played a roadhouse bar south of Providence. Part way through the set, the band's manager, Daniel Beichele, set off pyrotechnics which quickly ignited foam packing material surrounding the stage. Within seconds, the foam, mis-used as a sound-deadening device, caused flame to spread throughout the club. Minutes later, the club was engulfed, doorways were jammed, and 100 people were dead or dying.

Research conducted by Dr. Jeffrey Schneider of Boston's Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital underscores the impact of the fire on the 330 survivors, and represents the first study on a large group of people surviving a fatal fire.

Burn victims in the study, who averaged 42 days in the hospital, live with a wide range of problems: chronic pain, depression, loss of work, disfigurment. But even those who weren't burned are suffering, Schneider found.

Non-burned survivors scored significantly higher on an index assessing post-traumatic stress, and had slightly higher rates of depression than burn victims. And while their overall quality of life ratings are higher than those who continue to suffer the effects of burns, for the first time a body of research is indicating the need for continued treatment of all survivors of a major fire.

So while relatives of the dead can at last try to achieve some closure, 330 survivors whose stories are glaringly absent from court proceedings and newspaper coverage continue to live with the outcome of this disaster.

Constitutional convention on gay marriage deferred

The Massachusetts Legislature enters into constitutional convention today to debate a ballot initiative on banning gay marriage, but the whole affair is likely to be delayed until at least July due to a pending Supreme Judicial Court decision on the certification of the petition that got the whole thing started. Oh, and also due to the fact that local politicians are loathe to stick their necks out on this one. For them, today is like having that college exam you never studied for cancelled at the last minute.

For ballot proponents, this has got to be a disappointment: every day that the sky doesn't fall on Massachusetts means a few more votes slipping away from their side.

Lesbians smell like straight guys

Following up on similar research on gay men last year, scientists find lesbians' brains react similarly to straight men when exposed to female pheromones:

Heterosexual women found the male and female pheromones about equally pleasant, while straight men and lesbians liked the female pheromone more than the male one. Men and lesbians also found the male hormone more irritating than the female one, while straight women were likelier to be irritated by the female hormone than the male one.

[...]

In heterosexual males, the male hormone was processed in the scent area, but the female hormone was processed in the hypothalamus, which is related to sexual stimulation. In straight women, the sexual area of the brain responded to the male hormone, while the female hormone was perceived by the scent area.

In lesbians, both male and female hormones were processed the same, in the basic odor-processing circuits, Savic and her team reported.

If pro-lifers were serious about preserving life...

...they would take this news very seriously:

American babies are three times more likely to die in their first month as children born in Japan, and newborn mortality is 2.5 times higher in the U.S. than in Finland, Iceland or Norway, Save the Children researchers found.

Only Latvia, with six deaths per 1,000 live births, has a higher death rate for newborns than the U.S., which is tied near the bottom of industrialized nations with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with five deaths per 1,000 births.

Unfortunately, that would involve tackling tough problems like the roots of poverty and dealing with scary minorities, rather than trying to legislate what women can do with their wombs:

The report, which analyzed data from governments, research institutions and international agencies, found higher newborn death rates among U.S. minorities and disadvantaged groups. For African-Americans, the mortality rate is nearly double that of the U.S. as a whole, with 9.3 deaths per 1,000 births.

WWJD, as they love to say...

News of the weird: Murdoch [heart] Hillary

Drudge super-duper exclusive:

Rupert Murdoch has agreed to host a political fundraiser for Hillary Clinton this summer!

Murdoch's surprise decision to raise money for Clinton in July, on behalf of NEWS CORP., parent company of FOXNEWS and the NEW YORK POST, underlines a dramatic turn of relations between Murdoch and Clinton, who in 1998 coined the phrase “vast rightwing conspiracy” to denounce critics of her husband.

Some say the move by Murdoch reflects approval of her Senate career. Others note his record for picking future national leaders. Last century, he threw over the British conservatism he'd long supported to back longshot Tony Blair