green fairy, ruby slippers

Nag on the Lake beckons to us to join her on the hunt for Italy’s answer to absinthe served up in a ruby red concoction called Tamango by a mysterious bar in Turin of the same name.
Just as one has to have reverence and respect for the Green Fairy, one also has to drink this signature cocktail very gingerly or face hallucinatory consequences. The travelogue is fraught with rather terrifying tales of patrons who failed to choose wisely. These poor souls could not straightaway click their heels together to go home. Cin cin!—but an abundance of caution is advised.

super nintendo chalmers

Though Ralph Wiggum may have had professional aspirations to be either a caterpillar or a principal when he grows up, some—nay, all—of the prodigy’s one-liners make are suitable and believable stump-speeches for a higher office. Dangerous Minds graces us with the collected quotations from one cartoon character put into the mouth of another.

insignia or fossil-fuelled

The Atlantic science correspondent Ed Yong unearths the intriguing stories behind the forty-three of the fifty American states that have designated a State Fossil, including polities where the subject of evolution is contentious and not to be mentioned in polite company, via Neatorama.
While most choose to enshrine a dinosaur whose fossil specimen was discovered locally, others were more esoteric in their selection—going for petrified tree bark or other mega fauna, a giant ground sloth and several states going for mammoths or mysteriously (for Connecticut) a track of footprint impressions left a couple hundred million years ago by an unknown hunter. I wonder if this this same dicey and political process is repeated for other national symbols.

stochastic engineering

The ever stimulating Kottke directs our attention to a nifty widget that simulates complex systems with representative emojis that you populate your environment with and add protocols about how they interact and then the resulting models can provide forecasts for things like weather-patterns, wildfires, predation or epidemics—or for whatever scenario you can imagine rules for. This experiment, which examines the stability and sustainability of environments, reveals our weaknesses and fallacies when it comes to complicated and contingent reactions. This tool reminds me of that Microsoft Windows Game of Life, which simulated evolution with pixels forming larger, more complex shapes and gaining locomotion by a few simple rules.