A Japanese scientist has found some micro-organisms in panda scat that is very efficient at producing fuel from garbage.

Baghdad Bob, aka Skippy, aka Mohammad Said Al Sahaf, apparently survived his previous attempt at suicide, and is trying, unsuccessfully, to get arrested. Well, I’m glad to hear he’s not dead, but of course, I never really believed that he was, and won’t until I hear him deny it from his own lips.

He’s reportedly hiding in his aunt’s house, but they won’t come to get him because he’s not one of the playing cards.

Sure he is. He’s the joker…

Baghdad Bob, aka Skippy, aka Mohammad Said Al Sahaf, apparently survived his previous attempt at suicide, and is trying, unsuccessfully, to get arrested. Well, I’m glad to hear he’s not dead, but of course, I never really believed that he was, and won’t until I hear him deny it from his own lips.

He’s reportedly hiding in his aunt’s house, but they won’t come to get him because he’s not one of the playing cards.

Sure he is. He’s the joker…

Baghdad Bob, aka Skippy, aka Mohammad Said Al Sahaf, apparently survived his previous attempt at suicide, and is trying, unsuccessfully, to get arrested. Well, I’m glad to hear he’s not dead, but of course, I never really believed that he was, and won’t until I hear him deny it from his own lips.

He’s reportedly hiding in his aunt’s house, but they won’t come to get him because he’s not one of the playing cards.

Sure he is. He’s the joker…

An Italian X-ray observing satellite is about to enter uncontrolled. If you live very near the equator, a chunk of it could theoretically bonk you.

The ASI calculates the chance that a person will be hit by falling debris to be one in 2000. The probability of a strike on an aircraft is one in 10 million, they estimate.

BeppoSAX carries solar panels that are 18 metres wide. It is expected to break into around 40 fragments as it re-enters and much of its mass will burn up. Fragments that survive to hit the ground are expected to have a combined mass of up to 400 kg.

This should be clarified. The chances of it hitting someone are one in 2000, not the chances of it hitting any particular person, which are millions of times lower. It would be like winning (or in this case, losing) a superduper lottery. That is, it’s not very likely to hit anyone at all, and of course, if you live above or below a few degrees of latitude, your chances of being hit are nil.

[Wednesday morning update]

It fell safely into the Pacific Ocean, near the Galapagos Islands.

Sometimes-blonde Ashleigh Banfield opened her mouth the other day, perhaps to relieve the air pressure in her head. It got her (not inappropriately) in trouble with her bosses at MSNBC.

Among her many whinges, she complained that:

…the networks had portrayed the Iraqi war as “glorious and wonderful” because they had failed to show the bloody horrors of the battles.

Of course, here’s the reality:

Reporters who have returned from Iraq have defended the networks’ lack of blood-and-guts video, saying it was impossible to film much of it because of logistical reasons. They also noted that embedded reporters did not see action much of the time in Iraq.

“In my situation, I didn’t have the occasion to videotape many bodies or anything,” said Don Dahler, an ABC News correspondent embedded in Iraq who was interviewed April 16 after returning to the United States. “I don’t think I would have shied away from shooting dead bodies or injured Americans…”

…correspondents have said it was impossible to film the damage because tanks and artillery were firing at targets miles away from them.

As far as I can tell, assuming that she’s not a complete idiot (not a safe assumption, of course), she would have preferred for the press to be embedded with the Iraqi forces, since that would have been the only location from which one could have seen all of the carnage that she apparently craves.

Rod Dreher says that we should make that name stick to Dominique de Villepin. I agree.

Rod Dreher says that we should make that name stick to Dominique de Villepin. I agree.

Rod Dreher says that we should make that name stick to Dominique de Villepin. I agree.

There’s an interesting article over in the newly-liberated NYT today, on the origins of the dragon myth (found via Jonah Goldberg and Andrew Sullivan), which seems to be an almost human universal.

Synopsis: we’ve always believed in dragons because of fears going back to the dawn of man, when we were still in the trees–they’re an amalgam of the primary predators for tree-dwelling primates: snakes, raptors and cats. The myth was aided in its persistence by things like dinosaur fossils, which were mistaken by the ancients as dragon bones (even including mineral encrustations in the skulls taken as signs of jewelry in the head).

Interesting, but the article doesn’t address in any way what’s always been one of the most fascinating features of the dragon (other than to note it in the standard bill of dragon particulars in the opening grafs)–the fire breathing.

No snake, raptor or cat of which I’m aware belches flame, at least not on a regular basis, given a non-incendiary diet, and like the old Warner Brothers cartoon, if it did, it would likely be a trick that could only be performed once. So what’s that all about? Is it just based on ancient memories of the extreme version of halitosis that a carnivore might display up close and personal?

And is it a universal dragon trait? I’m not a dracologist, and don’t know all the ins and outs of dragons world wide, but perhaps my readership does. Do Chinese dragons breathe fire, or is it a habit only of the European variety?

The article also points out that the ancients never really doubted that dragons once existed–for them, the main question was, “why don’t we see them any more, and what happened to them?” Given their state of knowledge, it was a perfectly reasonable question.

But here’s a point on the improbability of dragons that pre-Darwinians wouldn’t have been bothered by. Most, if not all dragons have four legs and a pair of wings. They’re kind of like lizards with wings on their backs (and in fact, many dragon hoaxes were constructed in exactly that way). That is, they really had six limbs, since wings are considered limbs.

All flying vertebrates of which I’m aware (invertebrates are a different story, of course) only have four limbs. The wings have always evolved from the front legs. This is true for both avia (all birds) and mammals (both the conventional bats, which are rodents, and the flying foxes, which seem to be primates).

Evolution is capable of amazing feats, but it has its limits, and it has to work with the material available. There really is no plausible structure available from which to build large, articulatible wings, capable of lifting the body of such a creature, that come out of the shoulder, yet still leave separate, fully-functional forelimbs. In fact (ignoring the fire-breathing deal), this modern evolutionary observation is perhaps the strongest reason to believe that dragons truly are only mythical, and have never existed.