Given that year-end lists are something of a useless cliché, we figure it works just as well to do a junkpile and clear out a bunch of links waiting for some more useful deployment than sitting in a badly-punned directory (URLenmeyer) on the desktop. Thus, in no particular order:
• Timestacking.
• Why certain Chinese cat fossils are so fascinating.
• Synaptogenesis is a word you will start hearing more often in the near future.
• Sure, it’s a bit old, but A Citizen’s Guide to Understanding and Monitoring Lakes and Streams, from the Washington Department of Ecology, is still relevant.
• There really is a holy grail for dystopic, embittered, supervillainous math geeks.
• Suffice to say, the link file for this one was actually a bad casserole joke. No, really.
• Celebrate the saola, a Vietnamese ox confirmed to still exist after fifteen years out of sight.
• We all heard the cool news about India shooting for Mars?
• The tortoise and the Lego, that’s all you need to know.
• Dinosaurs are human, too. Er, I mean … ah … right. Something about a clumsy dinosaur.
• Apparently, the Milky Way wobbles and flutters. (If you like the technical stuff, the arXiv file is available.)
• Ultraviolet … Imaging … Spectrograph; maybe not a band name, but certainly worthy of being an album cover. Vinyl. Twelve inch.
• Spiders. Might as well get used to ’em.
• Have you met Juno?
• Ice, water, steam … how about plasma? And no, plasma water is not a sports drink … yet.
• Here there be monsters.
• Uranus Trojan Lagrange is not a band name. It’s something even cooler.
• Then again, Martian eclipse would be a good band name, too.
• xkcd on ice.
• Various processes more complicated than explanations are worth keep bringing to mind an old episode of Radiolab, about laughter.
novus advocatus scientiae 