Month: August 2006

Spell any word out of zombie letters, courtesy of E-Zombie.com.

The Onion weighs in on the FDA’s upcoming review of the emergency contraceptive “Plan B” pill.

xkcd’s work The Blogofractal is an incisive yet humorous look at what captures our attention on the Interweb…

Photojournalist Bill Biggart died when the second World Trade Center tower collapsed on him on 9/11/2001, doggedly shooting until his untimely demise. Miraculously, his legacy lives on:

When [photographer] Chip East was handed the bag containing Biggart’s gear by his widow, Wendy, he was convinced that no pictures had survived. The avalanche of falling debris had blown off the backs of the two film cameras. There were several rolls of film in Biggart’s bag; however, the lids of the film canisters had been peeled back, allowing light to fall into the cassettes. Finally, East turned his attention to the digital camera. It was covered by ash. The lens had been sheared off at the flange. But when he opened the chamber that held the compact flash card, it was pristine.

Check out the amazing photo gallery of the images of 9/11 that were recovered from Bill Biggart’s camera, many of which offer unparalleled or heretofore unseen vantages of the tragedy.

Cinematical has the scoop on an unusual version of the Star Wars saga:

[You may have] heard about the dude who performs the entire original Star Wars trilogy by himself in only one hour (not to be confused with the folks who spit out the original trilogy in 30 minutes). It’s pretty impressive stuff and I’d love to check it out one of these days. However, what’s even more impressive is Adam Long’s plan to write and direct a 20-minute version of – get this – the entire Star Wars saga. That’s right, all six films packed into a very tiny 20-minute window.

I’d go see it…

The image above is supposedly the “sharpest manmade thing.”:

A field ion microscope (FIM) image of a very sharp tungsten needle. The small round features are individual atoms. The lighter colored elongated features are traces captured as atoms moved during the imaging process (approximately 1 second).

Click on the image to see a larger version…

I really like the Showtime TV show Penn and Teller: Bullshit, even if I disagree with a couple of their viewpoints. For those of you that don’t get Showtime or want to catch up on previous episodes, check out Links to 23 Penn and Teller: Bullshit episodes.

Just about everyone has heard about The Big Bang, the leading cosmological theory for how the universe began. However, chances are you haven’t heard of these ten unusual-sounding theories:

1. Clashing branes
2. Evolving universes
3. Superfluid space-time
4. Goldilocks universe
5. Gravity reaches out
6. Cosmic ghost
7. It’s a small universe
8. Fast light
9. Sterile neutrinos
10. In the Matrix

More details on each theory are available in the article…

Calvin and Hobbes is a classic on so many levels, and this was a fun reminder. Calvin’s dad’s explanations of scientific phenomena, collected here by RF Cafe, never failed to amuse me. I think this one is my favorite:

Calvin: Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn’t they have color film back then?
Dad: Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs ARE in color. It’s just the WORLD was black and white then.
C: Really?
D: Yep. The world didn’t turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.
C: That’s really weird.
D: Well, truth is stranger than fiction.
C: But then why are old PAINTINGS in color?! If the world was black and white, wouldn’t artists have painted it that way?
D: Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane.
C: But… but how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn’t their paints have been shades of gray back then?
D: Of course, but they turned colors like everything else in the ‘30s.
C: So why didn’t old black and white photos turn color too?
D: Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?

Edna (DailyMotion video) is a fun video in which Charlie Chaplin seeks his fiance in an alternate universe filled with references to Steven Spielberg movies.