Am I the only one?

Most every time I see the hulu logo, I think of Cthulhu; most likely from simple homophonic association.

For a while now, though, every time I also tend to picture this in my head:

Note that this only makes sense if you're familiar with H.P. Lovecraft, or at least the Cthulhu mythos. ...Oh. And Hulu, of course.

New Chemical Element In The Periodic Table

It's not every day that something as established as the periodic table has to be revised:

International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC)... confirmed the recognition of element 112 in an official letter to the head of the discovering team, Professor Sigurd Hofmann. The letter furthermore asks the discoverers to propose a name for the new element.

New Chemical Element In The Periodic Table

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Genetic Region For Tame Animals Discovered

Interesting article, with distinct implications for taming previously untameable creatures:

"The roots of this study date back to 1972 when researchers in Novosibirsk, USSR (now Russia), caught a large group of rats in the wilderness around the city. After bringing them into the laboratory, the researchers divided them into two groups. The first group included the most "friendly" rats – those that were not aggressive toward people. The second group included only the most aggressive rats – those that screamed, attacked and bit the researchers. Since then..."

Genetic Region For Tame Animals Discovered: Horse Whisperers, Lion Tamers Not Needed

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Vertigo and Wrath

I just watched "Taken" with Liam Neeson (~3 hours ago) and I can't get it out of my head. It's not the action, which was tightly choreographed, and it's not the convincingness of Liam's performance, which was so on that I'm surprised that I'm not more taken aback; what has kept Taken so strongly in my head is the simple fact that it's disturbingly real to life.

If you don't know, and without giving too much away, the basic premise concerns itself with a girl who is taken by individuals involved in human sex-trafficking, with her father being someone who is uniquely able to do something about it—a man with a background as a former CIA operative.

What I keep thinking about is the reality of the problem of human trafficking, whether specifically for sex-trafficking (its most common form) or otherwise. It's something not widely discussed – due in part to its unpleasantness – but it's also something that's a widespread problem, being much more common even in the United States than people realize. I offer this article as an example: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28161210/

It's the fact that the movie put a human face to the problem—regardless of its fictionality and the fact that the faces were those of actresses. I keep thinking about the reality of the people who suffer in this, as well as the individuals involved in these abominable endeavors, and I wish that there was more that I knew to do... or was capable of doing.

One thing I would recommend is that if you know any young women thinking of traveling overseas alone or without escort (or even with escort), consider encouraging them to see this movie. It's not a manual or a documentary and it doesn't cover all of the threats – and many young women probably won't take it very seriously – but it might just raise their level of awareness and caution enough to help them avoid common traps, or extremely foolish decisions with possibly disastrous consequences.