Crawling cross the face of the sun

Via inky circus, the Space Shuttle and the ISS caught against the sun. O humanity is but a speck of dust etc.

Protest to (not) survive

A classic of the genre from Boing Boing - a zombie rights march in Austin, Texas, that suffered an attempted boarding from a counter-march of pirates.

The zombies' signs in the march included badly spelled slogans such as "Mairage = 1 Zombie + 1 Zombie", "More Binifits for Zombie Vets in Our Necronomoconomy", "Brains...The Other White Meat", "We're here, we're dead, get used to it!" and "Zombies Was People Too." The zombies, shouting "What do we want? Brains! When do we want them? Brains!" was unhindered by a group of pirates protesting the undead's demands for their rights.

in-flight (un)safety

A nice one from the Economist - an honest flight safety announcement. It'll never catch on:

"Please switch off all mobile phones, since they can interfere with the aircraft's navigation systems. At least, that's what you've always been told. The real reason to switch them off is because they interfere with mobile networks on the ground, but somehow that doesn't sound quite so good. On most flights a few mobile phones are left on by mistake, so if they were really dangerous we would not allow them on board at all, if you think about it. We will have to come clean about this next year, when we introduce in-flight calling across the Veritas fleet. At that point the prospect of taking a cut of the sky-high calling charges will miraculously cause our safety concerns about mobile phones to evaporate."

Economist.com

[via them lovely people at inky circus]

Enigma crack

Ever since reading Stephenson's magnificent Cryptonomicon, Bletchley - a god-forsaken part of Milton Keynes nowadays - and the work they did there on cracking the Enigma code has always exerted a pull. Now they've on the verge of recreating the Turing Bombe - the machine that Churchill ordered smashed at the end of the war.

BBC NEWS | UK | WWII Nazi code-break re-enacted

Feel a field trip coming on...

There goes Xmas

BBC NEWS | Technology | PlayStation 3 Euro launch delayed

Bugger.

Watchmen remix

Alan Moore's seminal Watchmen remixed as if it had been written by that master of the hyperbolean comic form, Stan Lee. Genius. BeaucoupKevin // BlogMachineGo: This Week's Project.

[via BoingBoing]

Uber Lego

The chaps and chapesses over at arstechnica have been looking at the new Lego and pronounced it good. Lego Mindstorms NXT review

And I quote: "The NXT brick can communicate with three other Bluetooth devices at any one time. This means that if you had four Mindstorms kits, you could create a mega-robot with four brains, twelve motors, and sixteen sensors—all of it coordinated through Bluetooth. The setup also works with cell phone and PDA Bluetooth systems, meaning that you can use your phone as a remote control or an output device."

Now that rocks. Beats my boyhood Capsela set into a cocked hat.