Where the scenery’s attractive, and the air is radioactive...

Apparently tumbleweeds may be useful for soaking up depleted uranium. Great image there for any post-apocalyptic Western-themed science fiction you might be working on.

And there are artistic implications:

As for why some plants absorb uranium, that's still a mystery, says Ulmer-Scholle. It could be that the plants use the metal to create pigments. One way she hopes to test that possibility is to grow native plants used for dyes, she said.

(via Agenda Bender, which doesn’t seem to have an RSS or Atom feed)

Jeez, I should get to sleep

My two favorites so far from the non-political photo meme that’s been going around:

• The bottle house, from miss_chance
• The hedgehog, from pnh

Sounds like a rejected Transformer

There is almost certainly no sensible reason for me to have three text editors running simultaneously.

Except that I love the name “Smultron”. And I’m used to BBEdit. And TextEdit is kinda handy to have around as a low-end word processor.

I wouldn’t have to bother with this kind of stuff if I’d devoted myself to Emacs back in my brief Linux phase. But then I’d be running a higher risk of getting absorbed into an AI conglomerate when the Singularity hits.

Hmmmmm...