Apparently the remains of some giant creature have washed up in India following the tsunami last December, or is it a hoax? The verdict is still out on this one, but the story and video are compelling nonetheless. Maybe it’s a blue whale, maybe it’s a dinosaur or maybe it’s just an elaborate computer generated image. You be the judge.
(via Snopes)
Kevin Kelly over at Cool Tools has a review on Behind Bars: Surviving Prison. I found the excerpts to be very interesting. It’s the kind of stuff you’d want to read before you, or someone you know was headed for the big house. Even if you’re not, it’s still interesting.
Some guy by the name of Samy wrote a social network popularity worm for MySpace blogs and made over a million new friends in under 24 hours. The worm also added the text “but most of all, samy is my hero” in the infected users self-description / hero section. The worm source code can still be seen in the Google Cache (just search for Samy’s user id 11851658 to jump to the relevant part).
The outstanding story of the creation and spread of a MySpace worm.
Update: The folks at Google Blogoscoped have interviewed Samy.
I watched a short clip of Pallywood on Rocketboom, but from what I’ve seen it’s hard to say for sure whether the footage was staged or not. Some footage looks more real than others.
Pallywood, “According to Palestinian Sources…” a film by Richard Landes. International news media extract a few convincing instants of staged scenes — sight-bytes, and present them as news…
You can download Pallywood if it sparks your interest.
Update: After watching the whole thing, I’m still not convinced completely either way, but if what the documentary shows and says is true, then there is no doubt that some of the footage, used in 60 Minutes and other newscasts, was staged.
An interesting read from the New Yorker about an Internet security company and their effort to keep cyber criminals down.
THE ZOMBIE HUNTERS by Evan Ratliff.
Bryan Berg is no ordinary card stacker. His amazing playing card creations are not only esthetically incredible, but they are also fantastic examples of the power of repetitive geometry, which prevents the cards from bending. Using no glue, no sticks, and only standard playing cards, he puts together giant playing card constructions.
See more at cardstacker.com.
(via BoingBoing)
Afroman’s guide to recharging alkaline batteries includes not only how to save money on old batteries, but also how to build the charger to do it. His metaphors are a little rough around the edges, but I’ve long held a theory that it’s not as unsafe to recharge the “non-rechargables” as they claim. Afroman busts the myth wide open.
This is old news considering it opened in 2003, but I still found the story behind Germany’s Water bridge fascinating.
Engineers first dreamt of joining the two waterways as far back as 1919. Construction to bridge the Elbe river near Magdeburg actually started in the 1930s, but progress was halted during the Second World War in 1942. After the Cold War split Germany the project was shelved indefinitely, but things were put back on track following reunification in 1990.
Here is a joke I found whilst stumbling around the Internet this morning:
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A woman was shopping at her local supermarket where she selected:
* a half-gallon of 2% milk,
* a carton of eggs,
* a quart of orange juice,
* a head of romaine lettuce,
* a 2 lb. can of coffee,
* and a 1 lb. package of bacon.
As she was unloading her items on the conveyor belt to check out, a drunk man standing behind her watched as she placed the items in front of the cashier.
While the cashier was ringing up her purchases, the drunk man slurred, “You must be single.”
The woman was a bit startled by this proclamation, but she was intrigued by the stranger’s intuition, since she was indeed single.
She looked at her six items on the belt and saw nothing particularly unusual about her selections that could have tipped him off to her marital status.
Curiosity getting the better of her, she said “Well, you know what, you’re absolutely correct. But how on earth did you know that?”
The drunk man touched the side of his nose twice, winked, and lisped, “‘cuz you’re ugly.”
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Happy Thanksgiving.