I remember there being some story on how some subspecies of fox that had always been found north of the Golden Gate migrated across the Golden Gate Bridge (which honestly sounds like something you'd see in a Miyazaki movie) and started showing up in San Francisco parks and on the Peninsula. Meanwhile, California…

An ominous telecom. One that racks up mysterious charges and routes you through endless computers when you try to dispute them.

Okay, now that one really is in a class by itself. Oh what I've been missing over by the eastern Pacific.

Yep, there is a problem with NDE research in that I think those drawn to it really tend to have a desired outcome—so, definitely needs someone else with another set of beliefs to do some studies. See if it holds up.

Rendering judgment—ominous chords sounding.

Yep. I'd almost forgive the guy if he were 80 and from a time where that really was kind of the assumption, but he has no excuse for not being a tiny bit more aware that excluding 51 percent of the population based on sex and 70-80 percent of the world's population by race does not a default make.

The world's default…

Okay, Vongfong is an awesome name for a storm. It's like the best—way better than, say, Emily or Julio. Vongfong sounds ominous and sort of roaring.

Well, there's the Balinese style of cremation—first you're buried for a few years and *then* you're cremated. At which point, you're presumably decayed enough to not be aware. Or maybe you've zipped off somewhere at the point.

Oh, they'll do that no matter what, but I think it's important not to be overswayed by that issue—it's important not to reject information simply because some annoying people will interpret it to their own ends.

And, hell, maybe stuff like this will get the anti-science crowd off the government's back a bit about…

Which makes sense—we tend to think of the brain as cut off and distinct, but it's not really—our eyes connect directly to it—to the point that their essentially brain appendages, while the brain is a big central station that's part of the central nervous system.

Well, isn't the curious thing in the study the picking up auditory stuff that only occurred while the brain was not showing activity? In other words, the brain wouldn't have been functioning (as we understand it) at the point the sounds occurred—so the question is how did the person recall something that happened…

Well, if you get to float away, though, that's not quite so bad, right? So cremation for you, then?

Seriously? Awesome—bureaucratic mix-ups are clearly a deeply embedded meme in China then. Time for me to rewatch Brazil.

Yes, it does seem to be saying that and it is quite a jump—which makes it worth further study. But paradigm shifts do happen and it's possible, likely even, that we don't know everything about how "life" works. I, for one, still find broadcast television pretty wild conceptually—a bunch of invisible waves get…

Oh no. I've not seen the movie. The book's not a horror story, more of a pop anthropology text—his theory's controversial, but interesting. I think he claimed more than he proved, but the idea of there being some factual basis to "zombies" strikes me as having some merit.

No one's saying that there's life after death, but more that what constitutes dead—i.e. life is over, over, over—needs to be re-examined.

I don't have a favorite octopus, but for some reason, the idea of octopus day makes me happy—take it that it's the Octo/Octo combination of the date?

Here you go, the conflict in the Middle East from stone age in less than four minutes.

Pssst! I got some tulips.

Yes!!! As a middle-aged type, I'm always sort of stunned by how little people younger than myself know of the past—and how problematic it is. There's no learning from mistakes if you don't know what the mistakes were. There are all sorts of major misconceptions out there.