Cool!  NASA has some compelling images of the new island forming in the Pacific.  They include some photos showing the pumice raft (the swathe of ocean covered in ejecta from the volcano).  While you’re there, also check out this photo showing the plume of sediment in the water spreading out from the island.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been receiving an increasing amount of spam touting penny stocks in attempts to pump the price high enough so the spammer can then dump it at a worthwhile profit (called a “pump-and-dump” scheme).  The influx began more than a year ago but has grown progressively worse over the last several months (I now see many dozens of these messages each day).  It appears they’re coming from Russia.  “The recent surge in e-mail spam hawking penny stocks and penis enlargement pills is the handiwork of Russian hackers running a botnet powered by tens of thousands of hijacked computers. Internet security researchers and law enforcement authorities have traced the operation to a well-organized hacking gang controlling a 70,000-strong peer-to-peer botnet seeded with the SpamThru Trojan.”  This is yet another reason why antivirus and firewall software should be used and kept updated.  More and more people are unwittingly providing spam channels and hacking platforms with their unprotected online computers.

PZ thrashes an ignorant pastor who thinks he knows something about science and history but really demonstrates complete ignorance with one false statement after another.  This is a very good read.  I won’t quote from it because doing so would ruin the impact of the entire article, so I’ll just strongly recommend you go read it.  And I’ll ask this: Why is common sense so hard to come by in religious circles?  And what of honesty?

There was a solar eclipse recently.  Did you hear about it?  Probably not, I think, since it involved Mercury crossing between Earth and Sol.  Nevertheless, take a gander at these photos and article for some details and two very compelling images.

Prometheus, one of Saturn’s moons, is stripping particles from the F ring as it orbits.  You can see it happening in this photo.  Very cool.  By the way, the small satellite will actually run directly through the F ring in 2009, and it will do so repeatedly.  That should be an interesting show to watch.

Racism is alive and well in Dallas.  Sometimes I’m really embarrassed to live here.  “For years, it was an open secret at North Dallas’ Preston Hollow Elementary School: Even though the school was overwhelmingly Hispanic and black, white parents could get their children into all-white classes. And once placed, the students would have little interaction with the rest of the students. The result, a federal judge has ruled, was that principal Teresa Parker ‘was, in effect, operating, at taxpayer’s expense, a private school for Anglo children within a public school that was predominantly minority.'”  It’s not only disgusting to know the principal was deliberately segregating the school, but it’s even more horrendous to know she did so at the behest of white parents.  But it wasn’t just segregating the students into separate classes.  No, that would have been too easy.  The school systematically worked to hide the classroom assignments by making teachers sign confidentiality agreements, destroyed paperwork under circumstances the judge even found to be mysterious, had race-based lunch schedules, reshuffled classroom assignments when they knew investigators were coming to observe the school, blatantly lied to the judge, argued (via the school district) that segregation would not harm the students (something the judge referred to as a baffling “separate-but-equal” argument), utilized the segregation as a PTA endorsement to get more white students into the school, held separate open houses and recruitments based on race (something else the PTA did), blocked minority students and parents from participating in the almost all-white photo session for school brochures (again, the PTA), and even stuck Hispanic students into ESL classes despite English being their native language.  I’m horrified.  Talk about setting the clocks back by 50 years or more.  What a bunch of racist pigs.

Head on over to Weekend Cat Blogging #76 for a good deal of feline fun.