Good thing he never met my parrot

"The only animals I'm not comfortable with are parrots, but I'm learning as I go. I'm getting better and better at 'em. I really am. "

-- Steve Irwin

"Yeah, for some reason parrots have to bite me. That's their job. I don't know why that is. They've nearly torn my nose off. I've had some really bad parrot bites."

-- Steve Irwin

How do I get on this list?

John da Fiesole reviews a book that sounds really interesting to me: Saints Behaving Badly: The Cutthroats, Crooks, Trollops, Con Men, and Devil-Worshippers Who Became Saints. Not that I'm necessarily any of those things. I'm also definitely sure I'm not a saint, so there you are.

Anyway check out his review for a full list of the saints, to give you some idea of why I don't expect to be able to resist picking up a copy.

Impossible

There is no legal obligation to perform impossibilities.

-- Publius Celsus

Current Boom

A dramatic graph showing the scale of the current real estate bubble. (The Galvin Opinion).

How appropriate

Which OS are You?

The Rules of the Game

The Official Rules of Baseball

The universe is a giant quantum computer

In Markopoulou and Kribs's version of loop quantum gravity, they considered the universe as a giant quantum computer, where each quantum of space is replaced by a bit of quantum information.

You are made of space-time

The 9/11 Report as a Graphic Novel

is being excerpted by Slate this week (one chapter per day apparently -- there are two chapters up right now.) This looks very ambitious and an interesting use of the graphic novel format.

The excerpts are available here.

You can purchase a copy from Amazon here (hardcover) or (paperback).

(From Brian.)

An interesting bit of Civil War history

Lots of information in here I wasn't familiar with.

The Catholic Church and the Confederate States of America (two pages)

I'll be drawing the attention of airport security

This is almost exactly what my x-ray looks like for the most significant of the injuries I had in my bike accident back in the beginning of July. Wheeless' Textbook of Orthopaedics contains much more information about what an intertrochanteric fracture is and how it's treated.

As for me, I still can't walk on it, until August 28, but am otherwise feeling fine now, and getting good at hopping around on crutches.