[Found here.]

These are the kinds of pictures that make me smile. It is also irrefutable proof that not all bears shit in the woods, and that some bears sing while taking care of business. Then it occurred to me to follow some of the links on SG’s site, and I found a map.

It is intuitively obvious to the casual observer that the original version was missing some critical information, so I took the liberty of enhancing it, just to post it here.

[Top image via Soylent Green and crossposted here. Everyone is hereby invited to link the crap out of it.]

How hot was it? Nope, that’s not Photoshop. That’s Google Earth. [Link found here.]

Makes all kinda sense to me. She’s one of those folks who believes that if all the Chinese jump into the air at the same time the Earth’s orbit would be changed forever and we’d, um, have to do something about it, like tell her to stop. [Image found here.]

Yep. Already viral, but so what. [Found here.]

Very cool polar bears destroy some very cool spy cams.

Doesn’t make any sense to me to have high-tech spy cams when the ecologists obviously have the capability of filming the bears destroying the custom expensive equipment in the first place. Cut the research budget in half or more by giving the bears boxes to tear up. Better yet, just quit pestering them. A polar bear’s job is to hunt, kill and eat fish, seals, sea lions, etc., and not to waste precious energy messing with electronics. [via]

Funny, creepy and disturbing.

Ever hear of Hubert Sumlin? No? Then check this out.

From the Utoobage comments:

Before there was Jimmy Page, before there was Angus Young, before there was Jimi Hendrix, before there was Stevie Ray Vaughn…

…there was Hubert Sumlin.

Have a great weekend, folks.  See you back here tomorrow.

This is the very essence of hope: scraping all the ice and snow off with a credit card and hoping you can drive it out of the drift. We all know why he’s going to all that trouble, too, don’t we?

Pretty picture, nonetheless. [Found here.]

The second foto is of an Ohio lighthouse on Lake Erie after a recent storm. I’m not sure about the others. [Found in here, here and here.]

Oh yes. Oh no. OMG.

[Found in here.]

One reason the sea levels are rising.

[Found in here.]

It’s a house. It’s a very ugly house. It’s a very ugly house created for a competition by people who have no concept of aesthetics, let alone standard construction practices. Here’s a partial description justifying the brilliance of the design:

DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE
Faced with the typical house model of a “box construction” made up of standard industrialized components, we chose to build a clever house with systemic logic components, rising into what we call a distributed intelligence. This means that each component of the prototype contains the same level of technology, energy, structural, etc… With this we say that the logic of all is found in each of the parts, and not vice versa.

That is, distributed intelligence can be understood as the development in fusion research systems and materials, implying a change of procedures, multi functionality in the construction field. Opening the possiblities of digital parametric design from the traditional assembly of standardized industrial components of the home-computer.

In other words, they’ve not only designed one of the ugliest dwellings ever imagined, they’ve invented a brand new lexicon to justify it. Archibabble at its worst. Phew.

To be fair, the design is clever in one respect, that the shape was generated based upon solar tracking, that is, a computer model engineered a shape that maximizes the amount of surface area that receives direct sunlight throughout the day and throughout the year, thus determining the configuration of the solar panels. Win.

Unfortunately, the maximum efficiency is compromised by site orientation, its global latitude, and, um, unpredictable cloud cover. And it’s ugly. Fail.

[More info and images here via here.]