The World’s Fair proposed a meme where you have to find Google search terms that return your weblog as the #1 hit. Here’s one set that I just discovered, that I’m rather happy with:
Amusing programming error o’ the day:
This is the Amazon page for a program to teach piano. When I saw the dimensions, I thought maybe they threw in a grand piano along with the CD. But at 30m × 25m × 3.5m, there’s room for not just the grand piano, but the rest of the Philharmonic as well.
If you look at the ASIN, you’ll see whom to blame: those damn Ewoks!
Update: The volume of the box is 91527 cubic feet. According to Engineering Toolbox, a cubic foot of air at 70°F weighs 7.492×10-2lb/ft3. So if the box were filled with air, it would weigh 6857 lbs. But it only weighs 120 lbs, which means it floats like a balloon. That must be why the shipping weight is 1 lb: the Post Office lumps all packages that weigh less than a pound together.
Update, Sep. 10, 2007:
http://www.collegehumor.com/moogaloop/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1770138
I either really really want to see this movie, or I really really don’t. I can’t tell which.
Phil Plait reminds us that 38 years ago, Neil Armstrong was the first person in history to set foot on another world.
But how many of you remember the last astronaut on the moon?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svAQ6BCIgxg]
You know the “Friday Random Ten” game: put your MP3 player on random
shuffle, and list the first ten songs that come up. Good, wholesome
fun.
Unfortunately, I have an awful lot of crap in my collection. Well,
maybe not crap per se, but stuff that I only feel like listening to
once in a blue moon. So here’s an adapted version, in which I only
list songs that I wouldn’t have skipped over when they came up:
Captchas are good at weeding out spam, because they rely on tasks that humans do well and computers don’t, and because spammers use bots.
But as spammers get more sophisticated, their tools will get better and better at reading letters and numbers, so we’ll need to use new types of problems to keep them out:
points out that this would also be a good way of keeping out the riff-raff, such as people who can’t write a sentence without doing violence to the English language:
(Adjust for whatever language your site is in.)
Or people who just don’t belong on your site:
And since spammers now get email subject lines from news headlines, perhaps it’s time to turn the tables on them:
Okay, maybe not that last one: for a captcha to work, there have to be at least some wrong answers.
The Associated Press reports:
What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.
According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered just over a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.
A spokesman for the Swiss army confirmed the story but said that there were unlikely to be any serious repercussions for the mistaken invasion.
“We’ve spoken to the authorities in Liechtenstein and it’s not a problem,” Daniel Reist told The Associated Press.
TSR confirms.