The Asteroid Belt

Giving up email? I can see where he’s coming from. I don’t get huge amounts of email like many people, but it still takes up a bit of my time. Having said that, I won’t be giving it up; I have too many friends on the internet who wouldn’t be able to afford to call me all the time (and vice versa).

Wikipedia is an amazing thing. With such excellent articles on thousands of topics, it’s a bit disconcerting that apparently, many folks are simply using it to read up on penises, oral sex, and Family Guy.

This is one big hole. It’s an open pit mine near Mirny, Russia, East Siberia. A few stats: 525m deep, 1200m in diameter. For those of you who don’t do metric very well (like me): that comes out to a little over .3 miles deep, and .75 miles in diameter.

I read about this yesterday and thought it pretty cool: the New York Times is now offering TimesSelect to university students and faculty for free. With TimesSelect, you get access to op-ed columnists, news columnists, and “The Archive”, which consists of the New York Times all the way back to 1851. All you need to sign up is an email address ending in .edu. Check it out.

Speaking of the New York Times, here’s an article from today’s paper about Richard W. Sonnenfeldt, who was the chief interpreter for the Nuremberg war crimes trials of the leading Nazis in 1945-1946. It’s interesting to read what Sonnenfeldt said about some of the top leaders, like Goering or Speer: that they were just like people you’d be meet on the street.

Here’s a (mostly complete) transcript of Will Wright’s talk at SXSW. It’s pretty long, but worth the read. And, if you don’t know what Spore is, you can read more about this video game here. And, if you’re now interested in Will Wright and the Spore video game (and you should be), here is an interview with Will Wright about the game.

In one of my previous Asteroid Belts, I linked to some stuff about a tomb being found, which supposedly held the remains of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and their family. Here’s a bit more about it.

What if the asteroid that killed off dinosaurs had missed? (via the link maniac, kottke.org) There’s even a bit of speculation that dinosaurs might have evolved like humans, but most scientists (and me as well, as an aside) think that’s nonsense. While it’s hard to predict how life on earth would have evolved, in short: dinosaurs probably would have continued to rule the joint, getting bigger and smarter. Humans might have popped up on the radar for a bit, but most likely, we wouldn’t have stuck around too long.

Archaeologists believe they may have found the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth, along with the remains of his family. The findings “suggest that Jesus and Mary Magdalene might have produced a son named Judah.” This sounds oddly reminiscent of The Da Vinci Code. The article is short and doesn’t give much detail, so I don’t know how much weight it holds. If this ends up going anywhere, I wonder how churches will respond. If you’re interested, there’s a better article about the documentary that is being made. Do any Christians feel like commenting on this?

Bint Battuta of Bahrain writes briefly about a friend telling her of his time in prison during the 1990s. He was imprisoned in the wing for political criminals; in this wing, many of the inmates held classes for each other, “like a university.” The man in question taught poetry.

I chat online quite a bit with friends, and I use emoticons often. However, the Japanese seemingly use a whole hell of a lot more. Do they offer classes on their emoticons? All joking aside, I don’t understand a lot of them. Most emoticons I’ve seen are pretty common sense, like the colon with the parenthesis creates a smiley face, etc. By turning your head sideways, you can actually see the face being produced. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be seeing in a lot of those emoticons…

Nils goes productive on us. I wish my browser was so organized. As an aside, I hope I’m not the only one who strained my eyes while trying to see all of the websites Nils has on his quickbar.

Apparently, locking up female koalas cause them to become lesbians. Well then! I’d add a further comment to this, but I don’t really know what to say.

A man from Palmer, Alaska may face criminal charges for using a wifi connection, provided by a public library, after hours. I’ll grant that the guy was being silly, moving from one wifi connection to another, after being told to knock it off. However, if the public library doesn’t want people using the wifi connection after the library is closed, wouldn’t it be simpler to just set up the connection to turn off when library closes?

Interested in what the United States Congress is up to? Check out OpenCongress. From the site: “OpenCongress brings together official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind each bill.” It sounds promising.

Today’s college students are far more narcissistic than their predecessors.

A jobless German used a false name to order five thousand dollars worth of food from a catering service, so he could treat his friends to something special. Unfortunately, he got caught.

Update: This is probably ancient, and I’m probably the last person on the planet to see it, but I’m going to link to it anyway, just because it’s so amazingly bad. The Worst Album Covers Ever.

Archimedes apparently came up with an ingenious way to deal with enemy ships: a giant claw-like thing that could tip them over. It almost sounds like a fantasy novel idea.

Speaking of fantasy novels… if you love Tolkien (and you should, you know), you should enjoy this interactive map of Mordor. On that page, there’s also quite a bit of history about Mordor. Pretty nifty.

Yesterday was International Mother Language Day, and I missed it. Damn. I’ll be writing up a post about this, and language in general, fairly soon.

Oh dear. A man broke kicked in his neighbor’s door and charged in with a cavalry sword, because he thought he heard a woman being raped. What he heard was, in fact, a porn movie. His intentions were noble, but that’s just embarrassing… He gets bonus points for owning (and being willing to use) a cavalry sword.

According to Devin, over 74% of wood-shop owners have named their sons Pinocchio. Can you imagine the liar jokes?

Apparently the government in New Delhi is finalizing a law that will provide for punishment for people who neglect their elderly parents. After reading about children throwing their own parents out onto the street, I think this is a wonderful piece of legislation.

If you haven’t seen Sean’s “Mini-me” series of Photoshop images, you really must, if for no other reason than that if I have to be creeped out by them, so do you. So far he has done Kirsten Dunst,  Carmen Electra, and Johnny Depp.

Damn Interesting has a short article about Virginia Hall, a spy during World War II. Snippet:

In the early 1940s, German secret police agents in Nazi-occupied France were on the lookout for a woman with a wooden leg. She was known only as “the woman with a limp,” but the Gestapo’s many wanted posters described her as “the most dangerous of all Allied spies,” asserting that the Nazis “must find and destroy her.” Her name was Virginia Hall.

I find the name of the blog this is on apt, because the article is damn interesting. Here’s the link.

Dude gets the hair on the back of his head to look like a face. As said by the great Boing Boing, that’s just creepy.

Ah, yes, those nasty Germans, terrorizing the world. Not with bombs, oh no. Something much, much worse. Dresden fruitcake! I suppose we’ll all have to move underground to avoid the terror. However, that’s okay, because if we move underground, we can live in a place like this. And yes, I really would love to have a home like that. Hobbitesque to the extreme!

And, alas, that is all. I felt it was time to bring back the Belt, even if it was just with a few links. Hopefully next week will be better!

I got a spam email a few days ago and the subject was this: With ruin, war, and waste of either line. I must say, while I detest spam (both the email type and the food), that’s a great line. It sounds like a title of a really good fantasy book or something.

I posted this trailer for Requiem for a Dream back in August. Now, I give you the trailer for Toy Story Requiem. Just like the first one, it isn’t safe for work. Pretty good job on mixing the two movies together, I thought.

A type of fungi infects insects, forces them to climb up to a height, and then makes a giant spike burst out of their head. Err.. ow? However, if you’re going for gross factor instead of creepy, you can’t go wrong with giant carnivorous centipedes. As a personal aside, reading the article about the giant centipedes actually made me a bit queasy. Then again, I find even tiny centipedes unnerving, so it’s not really that surprising.

This image is a wonderful example for what I was talking about when I said books weren’t going anywhere.

Have you ever wondered what really happens to a human when they’re exposed to the vacuum of outer space? Now you can find out.

This big half-wheel image showing the development of languages is really quite cool. It’s not very practical, because you often have to turn your head at odd angles to read it, but I like it anyway.

PermaTabs, an extension for Firefox that lets you mark tabs as ‘permanent’. They’ll automatically load everytime you open Firefox. Oh yes, I will be installing this.