brainrow

I’ve been predicting that he would drop out of the race before last night’s Iowa caucuses, because the Furor would never want anyone to recognize him as:

If you’ve followed this blog from the beginning, you probably noticed that posting activity dropped sharply following the death of Jerry Falwell. There were 36 posts in April 2007, 18 posts in May 2007, and only one post in June 2007.

The pace of posting has remained slow. The fifteen posts currently on the front page stretch back nearly three years.

But it hasn’t been all idleness here at Brainrow Headquarters.

Even while few new posts have been made here, visitors have offered many, many comments on some of those posts. Sadly, a significant fraction of those comments appear to be not genuine reactions to posts or other comments, but rude attempts to leave commercial or malicious messages on this site. (Around this past Thanksgiving, there were probably about 3,000 such messages left here every day.)

Fortunately, software helps to identify those comments as suspicious before you see them. This has made it much easier for me to approve the 313 genuine comments we’ve seen here so far. The software also keeps track of the number of messages it has found suspicious, and that number helps me to imagine that this blog is a lot more popular than it actually is.

I also notice that this will be this blog’s lucky 1300^th post.

They aren’t all gems.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow has created a political message for all occasions, and put it on a t-shirt:

Does everyone telling you to “cheer up” only make your depression worse?

George Harrison suggests you Cheer Down:

Cheers me up.

This photo is by photographer Gerald Waller, and was published in Life magazine in 1946. It shows an Austrian orphan with a pair of new shoes given to him by the Red Cross.

It may be my all-time favorite photo. It seemed appropriate for today.

Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address 150 years ago today — or as Gwen Ifill said tonight on the PBS NewsHour, “four score and seventy years ago.”

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns put together this mashup of famous people reciting the address:

Yesterday was my sixty-first birthday.

That means I’m frantically busy now, because today was the start of my sixty-second year — although I must say it already seems to have lasted longer than that.

My theme song for the year:

This happened fifty years ago today:

And so did this:

Today would have been physicist Richard Feynman’s 95th birthday.

I can’t think of a better way to observe this day than to listen to him talk, or to read his first memoir, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.

This is a long video — about 50 minutes. It’s well worth the time to watch it all.

The BBC has a great big chart of man’s exploration of the solar system. The chart is packed pretty densely with information, but it’s worth studying.

Click the image to see the full chart.

Via the Rachel Maddow Show, here’s an ad called Déjà Vu:

Tired of reruns yet?

Really, you can never have too much of the Earth from space:

View full-screen, highest resolution, as usual…

YouTube video of Space Shuttle Endeavor’s last flight. Voices are mostly from pilots of the chase planes.

I guess this flyover is the Space Shuttle equivalent of a ticker-tape parade for earlier heroes of flight.

Watch it full screen, if possible, at the highest available resolution.

This is time-lapse footage of Earth as seen from the International Space Station. I think the flashes of lightning from earthly thunderstorms are particularly interesting.

Watch it full screen, if possible, at the highest possible resolution.

(Very similar video, with different music, is here.)

Video of a Space Shuttle launch (with sound) from cameras on the solid rocket boosters. (I posted something similar a while ago. This video has multiple angles, and occasional explanatory text messages.)

Watch it full screen, if you can.