One of my favorite sites is Cute Overload, and today I discovered that it has a counterpart, run by entirely different people, called Ugly Overload. Awesome!

Now, the interesting thing is that Ugly Overload isn’t about gross stuff (unless you think bugs are gross), but about the odd and not-so-cuddly creatures of the world. The thing that excited me most about the site is that there’s a lot of science to go with all that ugly. Here’s an example:

Bats belong to the order of Chiroptera, which means “hand-wing”. But did you know that there is also an order by the name of Dermoptera, “skin-wing”? (Think of the suffix “opter” and you’ll get a clue as to how the helicopter was named). [Link to original]

I love it! Ugly Overload now holds a spot right at the top of my mental blogroll, along with Cute Overload and I Can Has Cheezurger.

WTF LOL!

Sign hackage in TX, IL, and IN. Best so far: DAILY LANE CLOSURES DUE TO ZOMBIES. Best idea not yet done, on jalopnik.com’s “How to hack an electronic road sign” article: WARNING: SIGN, BARRELS, NO WORKERS.

My refrigerator broke last night. One of the benefits of apartment living is that you don’t personally have to run to the nearest home improvement store and drop a large sum of cash for a new major appliance. A quick call to the apartment maintenance guy, and in just a couple of hours a pristine new ice-box is sitting in the kitchen.

This unfortunate event got me to thinking about entropy, a concept which is just weird to me most of the time. I do grasp the Second Law of Thermodynamics (and grok the field of Quantum Bogodynamics), but why does it have to be that way? What caused the fridge to stop doing its fridgy thing? (What was the source of the bogon flux?) I’m sure the maintenance guy is good at fixing things (a strong source of cluons, or anti-bogons), and the fridge will resume its normal function in someone else’s apartment.

I suppose entropy is actually a good thing, because if there were no localized energy potentials, nothing would (could) ever happen, and the universe would be dead. And that makes me think of things like the unevenness of the cosmic background, and that it’s a good thing that when the Big Bang happened, it was ever so slightly irregular. I have to stop thinking of this now, because my head is starting to hurt from thinking of the vastness of it all.

One upside to this event is that fridge failure forces the single guy to get rid of all those mystery containers tucked in the back corners. However, this incident was not without cost. A nearly untouched half-gallon of Breyer’s All Natural Vanilla Ice Cream went all melty on me. Oh, the humanity! At least I rescued the Hershey’s Syrup.

via Science Blog

In an article in the Annals of Improbable Research, three geographers used geodetic techniques to answer the pressing question, “Is Kansas as flat as a pancake?” This one made CNN, among others. This may be mostly humorous, but I actually learned a few things I had no idea about in this article. Note to science teachers: use stuff like this to get your students interested in science!

So I’m out trolling trawling for content for this blog, and find a thread in the forums on Science Blog that tickled my funny bone. I’m not sure if these people are serious or not. I think they are.