A similar event happens regularly along the coast of California. Inversion layers are common in summer, and you end up with hills that are hot, but valley floors which are cool, and covered in overcast. There's a description I'd read fromt he 1800's of a traveler coming over the Santa Cruz Mountains down toward…

You're welcome! Madhuri Dixit has some of the best dance numbers I've seen. This is another one, she's dancing with Aishwarya Rai in a pretty spectacular piece from Devdas:

My absolute favorite number is "Choli Ke Peeche". I love the whole choreography and Madhuri is such an expressive dancer.

The Hellbound Heart is one of my favorite books. It's interesting how different it is from the movie (particularly the opening scene with Frank... there's much more of a ritual there). Anyway, I would really love seeing Barker have this film re-done but more closely to the book.

LOTS of luck. Peterson has said this in the past that it was pure luck that he was chosen and that was what opened all of these doors. There's really not a career path in constructing languages, but the Language Creation Society does post job announcements for members.

Tarantula hawks are pretty incredible to see. The males are often found on hills hovering around the tallest plants they can find waiting for females. The bodies are an incredible metallic blue-black and they have russet colored wings. The guide with me and my group when we saw three males told us to not get too…

"Who looks around a plant nursery, at the violets and roses and birds-of-paradise and snowdrops and thinks, "I think I'll take the dumbcane. Got a good feeling about it."

Except that every single plant you just described doesn't do well indoors. All of those plants require high light conditions which you can't get…

Orchids are the masters at making their flowers smell like other things. I've got one (Dendrobium kingianum) that has the scent of honey but when the whole thing is in flower it's bordering on "too much".

Exactly. People can appreciate flowers because "oh, pretty!" but when you're talking about plants that don't really do anything special, people zone out. This is why people love to save the rainforest but you rarely hear a "Save the soft chaparral!", it's not as interesting to most people as the rainforests are.

Yes, and a lot of flowers are pollinated by flies and carrion beetles. Some flowers actually look like rotting moldy pieces of meat. An easy one to grow that does this is Stapelia which are also called "Starfish flowers". The smell can be strong, but the flowers are pretty impressive. A number of aroids also produce…

I find people respond better when you tell them about all the shady things plants do to get ahead of other plants or force insects and animals into fertilizing them. I have a friend who is a new botany major who was blown away by the fact that Rafflesia lives entirely inside the stems of its host plant only to burst…

Hey now, that's a horror movie. Mutant giant sperm spewing toxic enzymes at people. Sort of like those dinosaurs in Jurassic Park but well... ah.. uh... sperm.

The Romans essentially got the alphabet from the Etruscans who used three different characters for the "hard c" sound: K, Q, and C. C actually is actually gamma, but the Etruscans had no voiced stops (b, d, g), and so they repurposed gamma into a C sound. A book I have on writing systems says that for the Etruscans,…

Considering Spurius Carvilius Ruga took the letter C, added a short vertical line at the tail end to create G...

Oh, I'm in total agreement. Ultimately, I don't care what others do in terms of MMO gaming but like you say, don't go and play only to find all the faults that reinforce your opinion and then shit all over the game. I didn't do that with WoW and I kept those opinions to myself. It reminds me of people who went over to…

It's a strange thing I hear from some hardcore WoW players: "It's not WoW so why would I bother?"

Oh dear, I know Canada is cheaper to film in than California, and they've got their crews within minutes of Vancouver, but the woods there look *nothing* like the redwoods do. Muir woods looks nothing like the forests of Vancouver.

Here's the thing. They *did* try gibberish.