Phaedrus

Call your south, and raise you... further south! The Pogues - South Australia

These are quite awesome. A sample:

No idea on the specifics, but you might find that any of the ladies offering duos might be OK with this - there's no harm in asking! Official duos thread here might be a good place to start your quest...

Sticking with running... Kate Bush - Running Up That Hill

The world record for riding a unicycle along a line of beer bottles has been broken!

This one! Have to say, I cheated a bit 'cos I could see it in my head but I couldn't remember where the hell it was from, and it was driving me nuts. And having been born free... another Maiden classic Iron Maiden - Running Free

Happy (belated) birthday, Capitalman! Hope you had fun!

I must say, it was very good of RIM to mark the death of Steve Jobs with a three-day silence.... :)

Glass half-empty? Who needs a glass? Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (and others) - Death Is Not The End

That really made me think of Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt, which was of course recorded while he was himself waiting around to die. But, alas, someone (who shall remain nameless :) ) has already posted that not long ago. So, another Johnny Cash song about waiting around to die: 25 Minutes To Go

Made me smile...

I like that. And I'm not quite sure why, but it reminds me of this... Nick Drake - Bryter Later http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPBdFqeRbc4

Yeesh. And this was a regular client? Who ought to know better? If you'd have seen him for your usual rate without travel expenses, that would have been more than generous. Maybe next time you should take the full donation, but leave him short at the critical moment and see how he likes it...

No arguments with what others have said already. I can't really comment on your ads for two reasons: firstly that you don't seem to post that many, and secondly that I don't tend to look at ads that much anyway :) To add to what others have said, you come across as someone who doesn't suffer fools gladly, as someone who doesn't take shit from anyone but will dish it out if provoked, and as someone who will call things as you see them.

Sun? Maiden? Another nerdy subject? Iron Maiden - Flight of Icarus

Dennis Ritchie has died. "Who was he?", I hear you ask. He was a key architect of the C programming language (40 years old, which is an eternity in the world of high-tech, and still used for a great many performance-critical applications). He was also a key player in the development of the UNIX operating system, which still runs a great many systems today. Its better-known modern variants include Linux, Android, and Apple's iOS and OS X and their successors. And most of us couldn't live without our smartphones. He's probably had more impact on our lives than Steve Jobs; but since what he worked on was the unglamorous guts of the machine rather than the bit you can see and touch, he'll never get the public recognition he deserves. But he probably wouldn't really have wanted it; like most people of his caliber, what really mattered to him was the respect of his peers rather than public adulation. #include <eulogy.h>

I wasn't aware that the term had ever had any definition related to ethnicity. Did I miss something?

Speaking of things on YouTube... this is fantastic: Richard Feynman (probably one of the greatest scientists ever to have lived) talking about beauty.

New Order - Blue Monday http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyoDbX1EkPQ

Congratulations, Megan! Well deserved, and may you get many more...

Not as far as we'd like to think, I suspect :) To be honest, I'm not sure which came first. One thing that tends to be overlooked, though: in general polygamy is actually quite *bad* for the males of the species. The problem is that in order for some males to have multiple mates, others have to do without; and in order to avoid social unrest, they have to be removed from society. In days gone by, there was a very simple method for this: raiding, war, conflict. This had the dual effect of removing some of the competing males (often the weaker ones, as an evolutionalry bonus). And if you were really lucky, it would simultaneously increase the pool of available females. Polygamous societies in the modern world have the same problem, but have had to find new ways of solving it. And so if you look at the FLDS and their belief that a man must have three wives in order to ascend to heaven, they have to somehow remove 2/3 of their male children before they reach marriageable age. As far as I can tell, this is done by creating a large number of very strict rules and expelling those who fail to follow them from the community entirely. What's that? Is it like Google? :) Well... from an evolutionary standpoint, what you're actually trying to do is ensure that you maximize the number of your offspring that get to breed themselves. But there's more than one strategy to get your genes into the next generation in the first place; either you can spread your seed as far and wide as possible and hope that some of it bears fruit, or you can sow your seed less widely and take steps to ensure that the fruit that's borne is, in fact, yours. Obviously for males this requires putting time and effort into the maintenance and defense of a harem of as large a size as you can manage - but in quite a few species, the normal size seems to be one. The same considerations apply to care of the offspring once they're born. Do you have many offspring, put little effort into them, and trust to luck/statistics that a few will reach adulthood? Or do you have fewer offspring and put time and effort and resources into ensuring they reach adulthood? This is of course, a continuum rather than an either/or decision, and goes right the way from creatures that produce millions of eggs that are immediately released into the wild (many fish do this), to organisms that invest huge resources in nurturing a very few offspring all the way to the point where they're ready to breed themselves (the obvious example being, of course, Homo sapiens). And while this is always a consideration for the female of the species (which has the advantage of knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that her offspring is *hers*) it's only a consideration for the male if he can be confident that the offspring is his. And, in fact, it's even more complex than that, since what you're really trying to ensure is the continuity of your genetic material. You don't have to have your own offspring to do this; your children contain half of your genes, but your siblings' children contain a quarter of your genes each (on average). And so you can also ensure the continuation of your genes by helping your siblings raise a larger family than they might otherwise manage. This happens in quite a few species, too. Right, that's enough thinking. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to look at boobies :)