Over the weekend, I read about

-- Tom Cruise actually did leap off the top of the Burj Khalifa with a tether, like in the last Mission Impossible movie. He apparently loves to do a lot of his own stunts, and whether the scenes in the movie are him -- he did some of it too. There are photos.

-- My brother-in-law got to name a dinosaur genus because he found the bones. He named it after Godzilla, using the Japanese form of the monster's name, Gojiro. So the dino is Gojirosaurus something. However, he's gotten quite a bit of flack about it actually being a new one, some paleos saying it was a mutation of a known one, or included pieces of several different dinos. Until someone finds more of it, it is now considered by many a dubious naming, sadly. I've got to ask my sister the details of this sometime. Ken knows this stuff better than most of the world and the paleo world has said so multiple times.

-- Edward Snowden in Moscow, or not in Moscow now. I laugh and say, Good for you, with each development of his escape. I hope very much that it goes well with him. I have never felt this way toward someone the U.S. is calling a spy, before -- except for Bradley Manning of course. It shows the depth to which my confidence in the federal government has sunk.

-- Popular Science, that venerable print magazine, continues to amaze me online at PopSci.com. Just read an article about a study of afterlife experiences or the debunking thereof. They got a bunch of hospitals to participate in certain aspects of it:

Patients who were revived after bodily death/stoppage of circulation or breathing are being interviewed to see if they have any memories of a near-death experience.
Unknown to the patients, the researchers have actually placed pictures on the walls of ERs way up on the walls in a position that if you're standing on the floor, you cannot see them. Only if your consciousness managed to "float" up, as in the typical near-death reported "memory," could you see them. The researchers planned to drop this part of the study if they don't hear any patient mention the pictures.

-- I didn't know that Andre Sakharov had become activist for nuclear disarmament after having already built and exploded the biggest nuclear bomb in history.