Author: Mark Alexander

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Nightmare Fuel

This species of trilobite has been known by Paleontologists and collectors alike for many years. There has never been a complete specimen found. However many segments of this trilobite have been found and based on those fossils a life-size reconstruction was made by George Rennie under the guidance and research by Dr. Copeland McClintock of Yale University Division of Invertebrate Paleontology. At this time the original model is on display at the Peabody Museum at Yale. To date this trilobite is considered to be the largest in the world. Terataspis is found in both the lower Onondaga Limestone (middle Devonian of western New York, particularly the former Fogelsanger Quarry in Williamsville, Erie County, and the upper Schoharie Formation of eastern New York. The large size and spiny nature of this trilobite make it one of the more spectacular forms.

[Source]

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Ummm…

Yes Virginia. Yes they have. The difference is now they can broadcast it to the entire planet.

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An Update on My Adobe Bridge Rant

So it looks like I may have found a replacement for Adobe Bridge.

It’s called XnView.

It’s available for both Mac and Windows, but frankly if you’re on Windows you should be using ThumbsPlus.

It’s been a little bit of a learning curve, but XnView’s functionality is very similar to that of Bridge—but the difference is this application actually works. Thumbnails (with name, size, and create date displayed below each one, a requirement for me) generate near-instantaneously no matter how many files are in a folder.

I remember trying XnView several years ago, but like all the others I’d auditioned, it seemed there was always one thing that didn’t work the way I needed it to. With XnView, it was drag-and-drop. You couldn’t drag files from one folder to another. Seriously?

Well that’s been fixed in this latest version.

The interface took a lot of tweaking to get it looking the way I wanted (and to be honest it’s still not 100% there, but I can work with it), but so far my only gripe has been that there doesn’t seem to be any way of increasing the size of the font in the folders pane. I can live with that; the mere fact that I don’t have to wait hours for thumbnails to generate before I can do anything with the files has me sold.

And the icing on this cake? It’s free (although you’re more than welcome to make a donation, which I did).

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Delta Is Raging Where You Are

More from Tengrain:

We are in a world of trouble, the Delta variant of the Trump-Virus is surging and the merde is hitting the fan as Possum Hollar —as a matter of Fox News orthodoxy— still refuses to be vaccinated.

In at least 46 states, the rates of new Trump-Virus cases this past week were at least 10 percent higher than the week before.

Unvaccinated fools are being hospitalized in alarming numbers. And while nearly all new coronavirus hospitalizations and deaths nationwide are among people who weren’t vaccinated, a steep rise in cases has prompted Los Angeles County health officials to reinstate an indoor mask mandate, regardless of vaccination status.

The County of Los Angeles is about 10M people. This is not a small sample. They don’t go Shields-Up, Mr. Sulu lightly.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta said that there are two types of Americans now: The vaccinated and the infected. If you’re not vaccinated you will eventually get infected. And if you get infected, you will get very sick and may die.

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The Rent is too Damn High

Via Mock Paper Scissors:

We got trouble:

“People working minimum wage jobs full-time cannot afford a two-bedroom apartment in any state in the country, the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s annual “Out of Reach” report finds. In 93% of U.S. counties, the same workers can’t afford a modest one-bedroom….

“Given each state and locality’s minimum wage, the report finds that the average minimum wage worker in the U.S. would need to work nearly 97 hours per week to afford the average two-bedroom home. That’s more than two full-time jobs.”

Housing should be a human right. The American Dream/Nightmare has always been a bit of a bait and switch. But how can working people escape the poverty trap if there are not places that they can afford to live?

I have read recently that the Venture Capitalists have taken to buying entire new subdivisions and renting out the homes at exorbitant rates because there is nothing that late-era capitalism and capitalists cannot make worse.

“They don’t have to conspire,” as Gay Talese once said of the rich, “because they all think alike.”

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Another View From The Top

No, I don’t believe it was aliens. I do, however, believe these and other megalithic structures were built by an advanced planet-wide civilization that preceded our own and was blasted into oblivion by a cometary impact around 12,000 years ago. See: Younger-Dryas Impact

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Fuck Them All

Any one of these guys could end hunger in the United States like that, and still have enough money leftover to buy a few dozen yachts. And yet they choose not to.