Caitlin Burke

Also available in a beautiful wooden box with handle as a 6-pack, with a set of long matches. Oscar Perez has a variety of gifts for the hard-to-shop-for on your list.

From the always charming Christoph Niemann.

Throughout 2010, the folks at Parasite of the Day have been exploring those hardy stowaways of the animal kindgdom. Now they are counting down the 12 Parasites of Christmas. Each entry offers the opportunity to vote—interesting, cool, funny, or yuck!

Shown, that quintessentially holiday parasite—and subject of December 17th’s Parasite of the Day—mistletoe, in a vintage postcard collected by Cheryl Hicks.

Birds. Aren’t they awesome?

Mac Stone created this fabulous time-lapse of burrowing owls by their nest. Don’t miss the wonderful cameo by a humble orange cone. (Link to video)

Bird displays – especially the mating kind. Need I say more? Well, Ed Yong discusses the special effects of these feathers at length.

Groupon’s public guide to editorial voice includes a discussion of humor taboos. Learn what’s a problem not because it’s offensive but simply because it’s not funny. Learn which topics are “over-used, unfunny humor crutches” (hint: includes ligers). Includes bonus religious double-standard:

Steer clear of jokes that could offend religious people. Even if it seems harmless and playful, there are some religious people who will freak out. It’s not worth the headache.

Example of great teeth whitening joke that got us lots of angry letters & just wasn’t worth it: “whiten by an average of eight shades, equivalent to being punched by God twice.”

Roman mythology is an innocuous substitute: “whiten by an average of eight shades, equivalent to being punched by Zeus twice.”

The voluminous list is intended to help Groupon writers avoid “easily avoidable problems for us with vendors & customers.” The rest of the document fills out an interesting little crash course in issues of commercial writing.

Pretty wonderful design project challenging the notion that a prosthetic should simply mimic natural function. I think this is a natural direction of design in the spirit of the Cheetah Flex-Foot, which is a highly specialized shock absorber. It’s an approach that says, “OK, let’s start with the function, and see where the form goes.”

This is a fairly specialized option, but it’s only one step before a base arm unit with a variety of attachments. I don’t know if I’m ready to give my left arm for it yet, but I’ll be interested to see where this kind of work goes.

OK, not really, but sort of.

Some magazines I just leaf through and toss in the recycling, but for others I love having back issues on disk (I’m looking at you New Yorker and National Geographic), and I want a subscription that gives me online access and then sends me a CD at the end of the year. Or maybe a little flash memory card. Or a link to an archive file. (Yes, as I’ve written this, I realize I don’t want to process them weekly or even monthly. I am sure that says something substantial about me. But even just logistically speaking, I am talking about magazines that, as I understand the demographics, people tend to form long-term relationships with.)

As it is, magazines push you to the paper product OR the digital edition OR occasional omnibus archive sets. Often sold so separately, you might not even be aware of the other formats. I don’t like that.

Part of the problem I’ve had over the years is that I don’t much like the proprietary magazine apps I’ve used. My idea of what I want, I guess, is a full-text-searchable PDF of each issue. But I do like meaningful search functions (“All ‘Shouts and Murmurs’ pieces for x date range”). So files I could load into a proprietary viewer would be fine. I would happily pay an annual subscription fee for viewer software and software updates.

Would this be way harder for most people than whatever they have now? Are people so lulled by installers that they would balk at “drag this into whatever folder your viewer is in”? Do I feel this way just because I’ve used apps that pair with file formats for so long? It seems like a more reasonable trade-off than, say, Microsoft Word–only compatability, because elegant and customized search options feel like good value added to me—especially if they could break out some components and consolidate across issues, like slideshows by subject in NG. I like back issues, but I also want to be able to navigate an archive.

National Geographic does something like what I want. It offers a digital edition, and it sells a big archive product for which you can buy annual updates. But I don’t see those features sold together, and I’m turned off by the hassle factor of figuring it all out on my own. And I don’t want to cancel my subscription and then try to remind myself to order the update disk at the end of the year.

This is a little bit about paper, but it’s more about clutter. I like paper magazines as an experience and for their portability, but I also LOVE moving stacks of them out of my place periodically (and retaining a digital archive). I just want the publishers to make it easy for me to give them my money and still have the mix I want of subscription and archive. (Super extra ultra bonus points if they adopt an archive format that is widely parsable, eg, so you could always leaf through with, for example, a PDF viewer even if value-added nav apps are no longer supported. Also, a pony.)

I’d be remiss if I didn’t link to this super-genius video.

Bonus link: Ian Frazier’s piece, Coyote v Acme [modified], which originally ran in The New Yorker in 1990.

By turns delightful and serious discussion (and links roundup) of the teaser, FREAKOUT ALL OVER THE INNERTUBES, and explanatory voices of reason that emerged this week around NASA’s arsenic-in-a-pinch-using microbes from Mono Lake (plus a brief coda on an invader we’ve been struggling with for a while now: HIV) at On science blogs this week: Alien abductions (NASW).

Securing the Washington Monument from terrorism has turned out to be a surprisingly difficult job. The concrete fence around the building protects it from attacking vehicles, but there’s no visually appealing way to house the airport-level security mechanisms the National Park Service has decided are a must for visitors. It is considering several options, but I think we should close the monument entirely. Let it stand, empty and inaccessible, as a monument to our fears.

Read the rest at Bruce Schneier’s site.