Get a load of this new boat design.  How cool is that?  Read all the details to see its many features, and there are several pages of information and photos on that site.  What a cool concept!  [via Deep Sea News, the same folks who introduced me to my fantasy home, the Trilobis 65]

An interesting view of going to work when sick.  “Sick employees showing up to work is persistent and costing $180 billion a year; more HR execs are taking notice.”  Yet here in America (and, I’m sure, elsewhere), employers play both sides of the court on this: They don’t like for a sick employee to come to work and get others sick as that will diminish productivity across the board, yet they’ve downsized so much that no one is available to cover the workload, they instill a general fear of job security in everyone that makes them weary of missing a day, and they make a big deal out of perfect attendance such that it becomes an overriding goal to meet employer expectations at any cost.

Holy cow!  “Wildlife officials credited a woman with saving her husband’s life by clubbing a mountain lion that attacked him while the couple were hiking in a California state park. Jim and Nell Hamm, who will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary next month, were hiking in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park when the lion pounced, officials said Thursday. ‘He didn’t scream. It was a different, horrible plea for help, and I turned around, and by then the cat had wrestled Jim to the ground,’ Nell Hamm said in an interview from the hospital where her husband was recovering from a torn scalp, puncture wounds and other injuries.”  After beating it with a log, trying to stab it in the eye with a pen, and going back to beating it with a log…  “The lion eventually let go and, with blood on its snout, stood staring at the woman. She screamed and waved the log until the animal walked away.”

The U.S. torture policy is costing our allies.  “Canada’s prime minister apologized to Maher Arar on Friday and announced the government would compensate him $8.9 million for its role in his deportation by U.S. authorities to Syria, where he was tortured while held in prison for nearly a year. Prime Minister Stephen Harper again called on the U.S. government to remove the Ottawa engineer from any of its no-fly or terrorist watchlists and reiterated that Ottawa would keep pressing Washington to clear Arar’s name.”  Meanwhile, our mindless government still claims the man is a threat and won’t clear his name.  Pathetic.

So how’s that energy plan going?  “Gas drilling on the Indonesian island of Java has triggered a ‘mud volcano’ that has killed 13 people and may render four square miles (ten square kilometers) of countryside uninhabitable for years. In a report released on January 23, a team of British researchers says the deadly upwelling began when an exploratory gas well punched through a layer of rock 9,300 feet (2,800 meters) below the surface, allowing hot, high-pressure water to escape. The water carried mud to the surface, where it has spread across a region 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) in diameter in the eight months since the eruption began. The mud volcano is similar to a gusher or blowout, which occur in oil drilling when oil or gas squirt to the surface, the team says. This upwelling, however, spews out a volume of mud equivalent to a dozen Olympic swimming pools each day.”

Be sure to visit the latest edition of Good Planets for a menagerie of wonderful nature photographs.  What a splendid celebration of our little world.