via xkcd

When the health department in Columbia, Missouri nixed a new flavor of ice cream laced with cicadas in early June from a local shops menu board, it wasnt because its actually illegal to serve the winged insects in food to the public. "Its not really regulated," says Gerald Worley, the departments manager of environmental health, who adds, "I dont claim to be an expert on this." Nonetheless, Worley says he discouraged Sparkys Homemade Ice Cream proprietor Scott Southwick from selling the surprisingly popular flavor because Southwick "didnt really have a plan for how he would cook them," and Worley worried that the critters, which were collected from the ground, might make people sick. "We suggested that it would not be a good idea," says Worley. The first batch, in which the boiled bugs were covered with brown sugar and milk chocolate, then mixed in with a brown sugar and butter flavored ice cream base, had promptly sold out after the shop pre-announced the flavor on its Facebook page.

As it turns out, cicadas have a long culinary history, and the emergence this spring of the noisy, 13-year cyclical cricket-like insect in the Southeast and Southern Midwest has brought a concurrent resurgence in cicada cuisine. Ashlee Horne of Nashville, Tennessee likes her cicadas sauted in butter and garlic. Jenna Jadin of Washington, D.C., bakes them into banana bread, chocolate chip cookies and rhubarb pie. Others like them dipped in chocolate for a sweet, crunchy snack. The inch-long bugs are widely consumed around the world, especially in East Asia, and are considered a delicacy among the Iroquois people right here in the United States. Even the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle gobbled them up: In his fourth-century B.C. text Historia Animalium he noted that the young nymphs are tastier than mature bugs, which have a harder exoskeleton, and that among adults, the egg-laden females are best.

via TIME.

How do you inaugurate a new era of technology – not an incremental step forward, but a quantum leap: from vacuum tubes to transistors, CB radios to the iPhone? The introduction of the first razor with sapphire blades poses that challenge. The Zafirro Iridium is our answer.  Utilizing expertise in fields as varied as rocket engine manufacturing, nanotechnology, and particle physics, the Zafirro Iridium combines some of the rarest, strongest, and most technically advanced materials in existence.  The resulting combination of exotic materials pushes the boundaries of technology while creating an aesthetic that could be the centerpiece of a gallery collection.

Due to the rarity of the materials, and the expense associated with manufacturing, production of the Iridium line is extremely limited.

via Zafirro Iridium - Zafirro.

Seriously? I mean, seriously?

Nick Owchar reviews Sarah Sentilles' Breaking Up With God: A Love Story:

"I believed in a male God," she writes, early in the book. "I loved him. I needed him. Sometimes he was gentle and kind. Sometimes he frightened me."

Like many, she started with a child's Sunday-school version of God — the kindly man watching our lives through a hole in the clouds. "Breaking Up With God" describes her childhood in New Jersey and Texas, her beginnings as a Catholic and her quest to shed that juvenile version of God during years of academic achievement and distinction at Yale and Harvard, and explores her loneliness and self-esteem issues. She also spends time in Southern California as a teacher in Compton in the Teach for America program (see her 2005 book "Taught by America") and as a member of All Saints Church in Pasadena, where she discovers a loving, welcoming community. They treat her like a little sister or a daughter, showing her love in the smallest of gestures:

"People knew what was going on in my life. They prayed for me, prayed for my students, let me cry, brought me soup when I had the flu, sent me home with hot toddies after night meetings when I had a sore throat… I belonged.… When the priest dismissed the congregation at the end of a church service one Sunday she said, 'We are home,' and I knew it was true."

They're also the ones who tell her that she has spiritual gifts and should consider entering the Episcopal priesthood. She does.

"Other twenty-three-year-olds I knew didn't want to be priests, and that was, at least in part, why I chose the vocation," she says with brutal honesty. "Wanting to be a priest marked me as different, and being different felt like being chosen."

But it doesn't work out. Sentilles struggles too much with the judgment in so many people's attitudes toward faith and God, especially self-proclaimed God-fearing people who use religion to attack other people's sexuality and lifestyles. As an apprentice pastor she learns that no one wants to hear provocative political talk from the pulpit even though, she says, "faith and politics weren't separate for me … I went to divinity school … because I thought churches could help make the world more just and life-giving for everyone." After struggling with an Episcopalian discernment committee helping her make a decision about her vocation, she calls it quits.

via latimes.com.

Mao Tse-Tung's "Little Red Book" is the closest thing to a bible that Marxist-Leninist, materialist and atheist Chinese society can have. By some estimates, five billion copies of The Thoughts of Chairman Mao were published during its heyday, the Cultural Revolution, that violent period of ideological fervour in the 1960s and 1970s. But questions have now been raised about whether the Great Helmsman actually wrote it himself, or got a ghost writer to do it for him.

The book of quotations from communist China's founding father Chairman Mao Tse-tung, was a must-have in the days when Red Guards roamed the streets looking for any signs of ideological wavering. It was also the revolutionary tome of choice for every western Marxist-Leninist hipster on university campuses. Pithy and strident aphorisms such as, "it is the duty of the cadres and the Party to serve the people. Without the people's interests constantly at heart, their work is useless," helped to establish a cult of personality around Mao Tse-tung so powerful that the current leadership of China is still trying to shake it off.

But lately there has been a flurry of online rumours that some of Mao's writings were not written by Mao himself, but by his secretary Hu Qiaomu...

via The Independent.

Via: Online PhD Programs