Double suicides are inherently romantic

This Times article about the Tottori Sand Dunes is particularly interesting to those of us who have recently seen a new 35mm print of Woman in the Dunes, like, for instance, me. From the Times piece:

In the last five years, the sand dunes are estimated to have shrunk by tens of thousands of cubic yards. New seawalls nearby have changed the currents that long carried sand to the dunes, and the lack of fresh sand appears to have made it easier for rainfall to accumulate and previously unseen weeds to grow.

"There’s the fear that the balance of the sand dunes may have collapsed," said Toshiaki Hotta, 50, who oversees this site for the prefectural government. "The sand dunes are tens of thousands of years old, so we human beings can’t have our own way. If we stop weeding, it will become grassland in no time."

This is most unfortunate for those of us who wish to someday visit the dunes and voluntarily (though under false pretenses) descend into a sand pit featuring a decrepit house and a lonely sandwoman and be compelled to copulate with her forcibly in front of the jeering townspeople.

Another dream ruined by encroaching grasslands. *sigh*

Astrophysics is rather sardonic

An interesting observation has been made by those accursed NASA wonks:

1E 0657-56: NASA Discovers Dark and Normal Matter Forced Apart: These observations provide the strongest evidence yet that most of the matter in the universe is dark. Despite considerable evidence for dark matter, some scientists have proposed alternative theories for gravity where it is stronger on intergalactic scales than predicted by Newton and Einstein, removing the need for dark matter. However, such theories cannot explain the observed effects of this collision.

Damn. I was hoping for a complete re-formulation of the gravitational force laws. I propose, however, a new name for dark matter: cruelly ironic space-filler. I've already starting using it around UCSC's physics department and have only been punched three times. Victory is mine.

More ennobling links in this MetaFilter post.