TDK thinks you may be interested in this:

Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.

Compulsory population control? Compulsory abortion? I’d have guessed that “concluding” such things, even in the passive voice, might hinder a person’s climb to a position of political influence.

Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.

Perhaps you think such totalitarian musings would cast a little doubt on a person’s credibility. Apparently not. 

Related: Infestation.

Brace yourselves for some pure essence of Guardian, courtesy of Libby Brooks.

Amid the economic rubble, a revolution is being knitted.

I bet you weren’t expecting that.

Tactile and egalitarian, nourishing and slow, arts and crafts are enjoying a deserved revival in our recession-hit society.

The “nourishing” bit is a nice touch, implying as it does a wholesomeness and moral regeneration to offset all that “economic rubble” business. Yes, it’s true, home-made woollens will set us free and make us warmer, better people. Well, warmer possibly.

This week, the think-tank Demos published a collection of essays exploring the idea of “expressive life.” In the volume, US arts writer Bill Ivey – who coined the phrase – and Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery, tease out the prospect of a rebirth of the arts and crafts movement as part of the search for quality of life in a post-consumerist, recession-hit society.

Post-consumerist? Really? Care to bet on that, Libby?

At a moment when laid-off bankers are testifying to the benefits of basket-weaving, a reversion to the reformist aesthetic of John Ruskin and William Morris can feel suitably corrective.

Oh, there’s more.

The reasons for this resurgence are not hard to fathom: we are producers frustrated with never seeing the end product of our efforts; consumers weary of being bullied into buying stuff we don’t need, that is badly made or doesn’t fit.

I’m all in favour of craft. For instance, a professional columnist concerned with her craft, or with basic competence, might hesitate before filing an article in which she baldly asserts that “we” are “frustrated” and “weary,” dressed in ill-fitting clothes, and worse, “bullied into buying stuff we don’t need.” Who is this presumed “we”? How does Libby know what you or I need, or want, or how “bullied” and “weary” we are, if at all? Alas, dear Libby doesn’t reveal the secret of her preternatural knowledge. She does, however, tell us,

You cannot Twitter a cushion cover.

Before delivering the obligatory moral punch line.

Crucially, craft is egalitarian. While some in the Labour party appear bent on resuscitating the canard of meritocracy, which divides the gifted few from the unexceptional mass, craft reminds us of the significance of equality of outcome, rather than of opportunity. Everyone shares the capacity to develop a skill, based on decent teaching, application and time – not raw talent.

Ah. There we go. Equality of outcome, rooted in a knitwear revolution. Any monkey can be taught to knit or whittle, apparently, and this is reassuringly egalitarian, and therefore good. All “we” need is teaching, no “raw talent” required. Raw talent – like its more evil relations, giftedness and genius – is by definition unequally distributed, conspicuous, and thus to be frowned upon. And if Libby should, God forbid, be knocked down by a bus, I’m sure she’d welcome treatment by a surgeon whose skills are, at best, unremarkable. 

Ravishing bacteria. // What aliens are watching. // Make your own Klingon forehead ridges. (h/t, Candice) // The Kremlin, revealed. // The internet in space. // Michio Kaku’s cosmology cheat sheet. // The latest crop of rice paddy art. // Sheep crackers. // Dark Zoo. (h/t, Coudal) // Monochrome pigs. // Animals that glow. // A world of weeping. // Penthouse poverty. // In praise of the wheel. // Disney and Dali. // Building with glass. // Snowboarding, dude. // Bad movies of note. Flash Gordon, bad? (h/t, Things) // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Mr Andy Bright. 

No, seriously. See for yourselves. 

I quote:

In January 2004, the carcass of a 50-ton sperm whale explodes in a Taiwanese city centre. [National Geographic Channel] examines the physics and the biology of this 100,000-pound animal whose body was destroyed by its own internal forces. On the way to Tainan University for research, the whale exploded due to volatile gas build up in the abdomen.

At this point, further comment seems unwise. It would only lead to jokes involving the ending of Watchmen and “volatile gas build-ups.”

Here’s a short animation by Cal Arts student Nelson Boles. Like many good yarns, it’s about a boy, his, er, dog and… a big, terrible thing. The ending’s a little abrupt, but I do like the sound design and air of oddity.

Via Drawn!