Due to my exceeding cleverness and the backup he sent me, my dad’s blog is restored to its previous glory. Chaos Leaves Town is up and running once more! (Now with more boxiness!)

Our very own Adie has recently rolled out her very own store on eBay, where she sells her luscious, hand-made, extra fabulous (and warm!) scarflettes to just any ol’ body who is smart enough to purchase one.

She sent me a prototype for Xmas, and I wear the hell out of it. I don’t know that I’d ever have purchased one without wearing it first because they look so little, but it’s amazing how much of a difference such a wee bit of scarf around your neck can make to your overall comfort. Adie’s scarflettes are painfully stylish and they really do keep you warm.

Yay, 80! (Visit her blog, Squirrelville.)

I am super pleased to announce that Buzz finally has a blog: BuzzBlogger. Yay! (Go comment him to death.)

The recently discovered “Hobbit man” has us realizing that man’s ancestry wasn’t staid and orderly, but messier. More like a bush than a ladder. Perhaps Hobbits and Yetis exist in our consciousness because we remember meeting them? Check out this awesome coverage in the Flores man special at news@nature.com.

If you’ve got a few thousand CDs you don’t need – maybe AOL can’t seem to lose your address, or you’ve been getting MSDN updates since you worked in that one company eight years ago – you could build yourself a spiffy CD Entertainment Center too! Imagine – you’d the envy of annoying-CD recipients everywhere! CDs are pretty, in their own way. Kinda like Christmas trees.

Fossil Fuels Made without Fossils proclaims that the pressure of deep Earth has been found capable of creating hydrocarbons from inorganic matter. Which means that perhaps fossil fuels aren’t the rare resource we’ve always believed them to be. If they’re ubiquitous enough, they become almost meaningless. Can you imagine what would happen to the world if the bottom dropped out of the oil market?!

You know how everybody “knows” that DDT is toxic to humans? That it’s a terible carcinogen? Perhaps its not. Perhaps banning DDT causes unnecessary human deaths.

“In 1956, a group of human volunteers ingesting DDT for periods of from 12 to 18 months at 1,750 times the average amount for the U.S. population showed no adverse effects either at the conclusion of the trial or in follow-up studies 5 years later. A 1964 study of the incidence of different forms of cancer from all areas of the U.S. from 1927 to the early 1960s showed no correlation with the use patterns of DDT, nor with its presence in food or human body tissues.
Continue reading DDT: Myth busting →

St. Helens is erupting again. Take a look: Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam, Special Conditions and Current Update.

And then talk about it in the St. Helens’ thread on Rants!

From Zone Alarm, an Internet Exploder online pest scan. Lovely.