Daily Blend: Saturday, September 25, 2010

USAF Maj. Margaret Witt [source]

• The Earth’s volcanic pulse.
  (via The Daily Grail)

• The Titanic sank as a result of numerous human errors (including forgetting to equip the lookouts with binoculars, ignoring ice warnings and steaming too fast in dangerous waters, reversing the engines upon spitting the ’berg and thus preventing the ship from turning effectively, etc.). This is common knowledge, has been ever since the time of the disaster. So why is it now being treated as some grand shocking revelation?

• Titanium foam for your bones.
  (via The Daily Grail)

• Fox News host Brian Kilmeade spreads more lies in claiming that President Obama didn’t mention North Korea in his UN speech – despite him clearly and explicitly singling NK out as an example of “tyranny” as a “regime that enslaves its own people”.

• Scientific American’s new poll results showing that scientists are the most trusted authority figures (and religious authorities, the least) would be more heartening if they hadn’t taken these results from their own, much-more-informed-than-the-hoi-polloi readers.
  (via Pharyngula)

• Very weird report: Process server tries to hand divorce papers to a woman, woman runs him over and severely injures him, he gets charged with “harassment” and “criminal mischief”.
  (via The Agitator)

• Libertarians get all hot & bothered thinking about British governmental reform.

• Federal judge Ronald Leighton rules that Maj. Margaret Witt [pictured], a lesbian flight nurse who was kicked out of the US Air Force under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in 2007 is “constitutionally entitled” to return to her job. If that’s “judicial activism”, I want more of it.

• Fox News’s Megyn Kelly outraged over Stephen Colbert’s in-character testimony before Congress. Which would surely matter very much if she, herself, well, mattered.

• Good write-up on The Washington Post about Stephen Colbert’s in-character testimony before Congress yesterday.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Tags: Earth • volcanoes • Titanic • inventions • Brian Kilmeade • lies • Barack Obama • UN • North Korea • Scientific American • scientists • libertarians • England • Ronald Leighton • Margaret Witt • DADT • Don't Ask, Don't Tell • Megyn Kelly • Fox News • Stephen Colbert • Congress