Avoid stingray stings by shuffling into shallow water rather than stepping.

I loved this. My father was a fan of the Carlos Jobim bossa nova records popular in the 60s and my first guitar was a nylon string he gave me when I was 12.

This clip brings me back to that unique sound, makes me want to go buy a nylon sting guitar and throw away my picks for awhile.

Interesting but not terribly useful without context (on the smaller scale, 1L of vodka is pretty easy to understand).

How much venom does a hornet typically release in one attack? Obviously not the lethal dose but still, it'd be more interesting to visualise how many hornet stings it takes to kill me.

How much caffeine in a typical cup of coffee? How much salt in an average wrap? etc

That's the worst time, the inevitable second act dilemma, of PC building.

You can budget in the expectation of how long it takes to do the housekeeping stuff. Loading the OS, essential programs, personal preferences - the games themselves...but there's often that one random thing.

I built a nice medium-range game PC with someone else recently, my building partner was so excited. It's amazing how much of a bond that creates between people, or how it can strengthen a relationship. Not just for building PC's specifically, but for sharing something and having that moment of realization of how cool that thing shared really is.

I felt more pissed off than anything for a brief moment during the boot up, when the display seemed to shutdown startup before anything really happened. Luckily, I'd paid attention enough when researching the GPU and eventually remembered someone mentioning there was a button on the card itself that controls the LED lights on it, pressing it seemed to clear whatever was blocking the startup processes for the card.

There was definitely a soul-crushing few hours of doubt and agony before I remembered that detail. During that time, I stared at the clean interior of the fully assembled build, having had a hard enough time getting the cords to fit and wondering if something minor and imperceptible had wiggled loose, wondering if I would go mad.

Having someone else depending on the solution was another intense emotion heightening element. I'd done my best to prime for this likelihood. I'd shared stories of problems I'd had on previous builds, the random thing that went wrong. I stressed the fact that the computer had always, eventually, got built.

It's a good, stinging bit of humility for me. Even when I try to minimize problems and anticipate potential issues, I'll still miss something as obvious as a big button right in front of my face.

Sting is missing him right about now.

Of all of the major stars and performers we lost I think the one that stings the most for me is Anton Yelchin. He was so young yet and such a good actor and many of the movies he did were fantastic. Not some generic hollywood 'leading man' with a gruff voice and rugged looks but an intellectual who had incredible potential and an amazing future that will now never happen.

CRISPR-Cas9
Bring me a gene
Encoding for a specific protein
Make a few snips at this coded locus
You work so well inside a streptococcus
Cas9
I'm so alone
Without your scissors in my chromosome
Cut me up and do it clean
CRISPR-Cas9 bring me a gene

CRISPR-Cas9
Keep me a gene
A viral sequence you've already seen
Chopped into bits and stored as genomic
With clustered repeats
That are palindromic
Cas9
Bind with this code
Use it to target infections of old
Immunized like a vaccine
CRISPR-Cas9 keep me a gene

CRISPR-Cas9
Cut me a gene
With a precision that I've never seen
Unzip a strand and interrogate it
Seek out your sequence until you locate it
Cas9
Lock into place
And do your job as endonuclease
Chop just like a guillotine
CRISPR-Cas9 cut me a gene

Snip snap!
CRISPR-Cas9
CRISPR-Cas9

CRISPR-Cas9
Bring me a gene
By commandeering my repair routine
A strand to match your severed location
For some homologous recombination
Cas9
Cheap and precise
Rewriting genomes from microbes to mice
And soon the humble human being
CRISPR-Cas9 bring me a gene

CRISPR-Cas9
Give us a gene
Give us a miracle like that one Nazarene
‘Cause giving the lame their legs and the blind their sight is
In view for dystrophy and retinitis
But CRISPR-Cas9
What if you fall
Outside our power and inside us all
That really could incite a scene

When this terrible wonderful power unsettling
Opens the door to unethically meddle
Is ev’ry congenital malady bettered
Sufficient to warrant genetics unfettered
To modify man in the manner of Gattaca
Raise up a mammoth or make a rattata
Dramatical medical means to eradicate aging
Or cancer or make a fanatic
A mass epidemic a weapon nefarious
Single mosquito to wipe out malaria
Send in a viral infection to ferry a
Cure to the cells of an HIV carrier
Freed of disease as we're free to uncover
What nature and accident failed to discover
And free to be other than
All that we ever have been

CRISPR-Cas9
CRISPR-Cas9

Oh CRISPR-Cas9
Bring us a gene
You wondrous ribonucleoprotein
You have the power to vanquish or save us
Who would have thought that the microbe that gave us
Cas9
S. pyogenes
The source of strep and flesh-eating disease
Housed this marvellous machine
Full of uses great and obscene
CRISPR-Cas9 bring us
Please don't sting us
Cas9 bring us a gene

With adenine
And thiamine
Incite a scene
Cas9 bring us a gene!

See:
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1152690/images/o-STING-HOME-facebook.jpg

From what I understand, eels were easily available as a cheap source of protein for many years. Even after the Thames became so dirty that the eels couldn't survive, they retained their status as a comfort food for people around the London area.

They do have poisonous blood to mammals, so the guy was telling the truth about the stinging in the eye bit.

Thanks for the promote!

I loved Firefly, truly I did. Sure, The Wire and I had longer together but with Firefly...Firefly always felt like we left something unfinished. But, you know, I'm beginning to feel like I can let Firefly go now. I've accepted that in this life some truly beautiful things will be cut short - and that stings like a mother, but its _O.K_ because we were privileged to share those fleeting moments, and we still have our memories and the DVD box set.

ps. True Story, my current employer revealed to me that I became his first choice for the job after I correctly identified an idly muttered Firefly quotation. (two by two, hands of blue).

pps. Did anybody else watch Castle purely because it was easy to imagine Castle was Mal in an alternate universe. Well, maybe not purely - Stana Katic is very easy on the eye, but it was like, maybe 75% of the reason.

Gary Breecher, better know as The War Nerd, "Saddam Died Beautiful: A Special Eulogy":

"Blaming Saddam for being what he was is like blaming a rattlesnake for killing. That's how it lives, and it's what that Crocodile Hunter guy would've called "a bee-YOO-tiful ambush predator." Saddam was right for Iraq the way a Sidewinder is right for the Mojave. The NeoCons scared us by shaking his fangs in our faces, as if Saddam planned to bite every single commuter in LA, when all he wanted to do was stay alive and in power -- because those were the same thing for him -- in the Iraqi desert, where everything stings, sticks or bites. We may as well have gone on a crusade to wipe out all the snakes and spiders in the desert for being what they are. Only difference is, we wouldn't have lost 3000 soldiers that way."

---

Saddam was a rat-fuck bastard of the lowest order, but the world ISN'T a better place now that he's gone. In fact, for the amount of chaos his removal has sown, he might as well have been named Franz Ferdinand

I do rather like the nose-stinging zing of the fake wasabi, I have to say