* Marilyn Monroe's library. Quite a diverse selection.
* Lemaitre and Hubble's Law prior to Hubble.
* We may soon have tests for matter/antimatter symmetry, due to a new set of discoveries involving neutrinos.
* The U.S. Bicycle Route System is being expanded for the first time in about three decades. It's not a federal venture, but one sponsored by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials and put forward mostly at the state and local level (with some federal consultation) to facilitate interstate bicycle travel, of which there is considerably more than one might imagine; but putting it under the authority of the Federal Highway Administration has occasionally come up in Congress. Currently there are 2 incomplete routes out of a total of an originally planned 95, so it's a project that has moved very slowly. The Europeans already have such a system, the EuroVelo, which is also incomplete, although, as it makes considerable more use of already existing infrastructure, is farther along. The interesting thing about EuroVelo is that large sections of many of its major routes follow old medieval pilgrimage routes.
* First World Problems (ht). This was much funnier than I expected:
* The young man who puts these up has a number of good ones mocking some of the pop songs that are out today. The one parodying Rebecca Black's "Friday" is pretty much exactly the way to capture the impression the original would make on any rational person (even if they don't know how to spell 'preceded').
But it has to be said in all fairness that Black's original pretty much captures the mentality of a typical modern eighth grader, too.
Which says something, I suppose, about eighth graders and rationality.
At the same time, the poor girl, only thirteen years old, has apparently received death threats over the song, which seems to say something rather worse about the state of society at large, however bad the song may be.
On the other hand, the song is so likably bad that Stephen Colbert covered it, which is something. And, on the same note, I've just spent a thoroughly absurd number of sentences talking about this thoroughly absurd song.
