Capital stupid

yndy found this ... seems some 17-year-old chiXX0r in Kansas decided she couldn't possibly have some mere ordinary photo for her yearbook senior photo, she had to pose with a tiger at a wildlife sanctuary.  Despite being "restrained" by its handler, the tiger killed her, whereupon the local sheriff's department killed the tiger for, well, basically for being a tiger, when you really come down to it.

IMHO, they should have let the tiger live -- it was just being a tiger, for crissakes -- and executed the parents instead for approving this stupid stunt.  Charge them with conspiracy to arrange the death of their daughter or something.

....Well, OK, so I'm not entirely serious about executing the parents.  But this was both (a) not the tiger's fault, and (b) a Really Fucking Stupid Idea.  You'd think at the very least, they'd have called the whole thing off as soon as it became apparent the handler was having to restrain the tiger.  This is a case of a complete and total lack of common sense from beginning to end.  This wasn't just felony stupid, it was capital stupid, and Nature imposed sentence on the spot.

Hello?!?  600lb predator?  This isn't like posing with your stuffed Tigger toy, y'know.

Hell of a shame about the waste of a perfectly good tiger.

Speaking of evolution in action ....

...some ne'er-do-well stole a customer's Kawasaki ZX9R from a motorcycle dealer in Plaistow yesterday.  "People who knew him said he was probably going to sell the bike to score drugs."

He made it less than a mile down the road before blowing a red light at over 100mph and slamming into an SUV, killing himself.  Whereupon the average intelligence of the human race doubtless rose by a small fraction of a point.

"Thirty seconds later it slammed directly into the third moon of Jaglan Beta.  Looks like a fish, moves like a fish, steers like a cow." -- Ford Prefect

So, about that golden egg?

Unless I'm badly mistaken, yesterday's announcement of a process for continuously extruding carbon-nanotube ribbon means we how have every essential technology and material that we need to build a beanstalk.  That's right, not the goose-and-giant type, the space-elevator type.  The process, developed by the University of Texas at Dallas, can extrude continuous "buckytape" up to 5cm wide at speeds up to 10 meters per minute.  Stronger than steel, weight-for-weight, but weighing only 30kg per square kilometer, it'd also make a hell of a material for a lightsail.

Arthur C. Clarke bet it would become possible soon.  Looks like it might happen even sooner than he expected.

(Article from jw1776 via technoshaman)