Hat Tip Evolving Complexity

Don’t overlook the awful news from Germany, in which a taunted and bullied crazy person killed 15 people and self. He started out in his old High School where he gunned down 9 people, so quickly that many of the dead were students found with their head on the desk and their pencils still in their hands. He took off, initiating a huge manhunt, hijacked a car, killed a bunch more people, had a shootout with the police, ran away and finally killed himself.

The weapon was a handgun from his father’s gun collection.

Since the Germans have stricter gun ownership rules than the Americans, and within a forty eight hour period more people were killed in a spectacular shooting spree than in America (by a few), we can now argue that American gun laws should be relaxed. Or at least, that will be the logic coming from the Gun Nuts.

Gun nuts? Care to defend yourselves on this one?

Bill Gates is now (once again) the richest person in the world, even though he lost a personal 18 billion dollars since last year.

In other words, Bill Gates lost more than the GNP of Kenya, El Salvador, Iraq, Qatar and about a hundred other countries. If Bill gaes was a country, he’d be about the fiftieth richest, give or take. (For reference, there seems to be about 224 countries in the world at the moment.)

more of the gruesome details

Mother ship? No, I’m not talking about Target! I’m talking about SEEDMAGAZINE.COM, the web site of Seed Magazine, which in turn, is inextricably (much to their horror, I’m sure) entangled with Scienceblogs.com.

The home page of the venerable purveyor of Science as Culture is HERE. Have a look at, and play around with, the new layout.

Lee Yong Dae is an Olympic gold medal winning badminton player. ..

Totally stolen from Miss Cellania:

Funniest thing on the internet today.

Here in the TC, we have howling winds and sub zero temps, and the wind chill is 30 or 40 below. But we have food, at least.