The other side of the argument which says that all these hominim skeletons found so far, including those of the Neanderthals and Homo floresiensis

may all, in fact, be examples of one species - our own.

Tandem repeats anyone?

Yes, it's official. Jesus of Nazareth was in reality a German backpacker on an overland trip to India who accidentally got mixed up in local politics. This we can infer from the face reconstructed from the Shroud of Turin by an Italian forensic police unit. This should come as a warning to all parents who worry about letting their kids have passports.

Indonesia 80,428
Sri Lanka 28,627
India 12,709
Thailand 4,800
East Africa 137
Maldives 67
Malaysia 66
Burma 53
Bangladesh 2

Total 126,889

Also here's an interesting article from 1999 about tsunamis in which I learn amongst other things that Katsushika Hokusai never intended his Great Wave image to represent a tsunami. In fact tsunamis do not even disturb the surface until they reach the shore, instead being transmitted through the entire depth of the ocean. Fleets of fishermen have been known to sail right over them without noticing, only to discover on returning to port that homes and families have been swept away.

OK, I'm back. Lot's to talk about, not enough time. So let me bulletpoint you.

• Tim May blogs up a storm in the comments section of this post about the Titan landing. He also points to this helpful summary.
• Speaking of comments, Laputan Logic got its first comment spam. Time to write a new commenting system methinks.
• My Nahkla Dog article "A Dog's Life" now graces the pages of the nakhladogmeteorites.com website - with permission as part of a high-powered digital rights licensing deal.
  
• Still tinkering with the format. Finding columns a bit too constraining.
• Had lot's of fun playing around with Javascript on the notebook computer. Will have something to show for it eventually.
  
• Eating masala thosai is like kissing the face of God - better actually.
• Old news but popular brand "Darkie" toothpaste is now called "Darlie" toothpaste. Cover picture of a smiling negro inverted and now somewhat racially ambiguous. Still in killer peppermint.
  
• Actually stood on a tsunami beach. Not a lot to report beyond that simple fact. Didn't swim.
  
• The true legacy of 911? The plastic steak knife.
• What stands between Malaysia and total food nirvana? Chicken "ham" and beef "salami".
  
• Move over Chicxulub. It wasn't some meteorite that killed the dinosaurs. It was us mammals - we ate their babies.
  

I've finally got around to replacing Haloscan's commenting system with one of my own. Currently it's still pretty basic and doesn't allow HTML yet but it appends the comments to the end of the post instead of popping up one of those tedious little windows.

The motivation for making this change has been the need to implement a generic annotation system for a number of applications. Some of them you'll be seeing shortly.