Banksy, who no one can accuse of not having a sense of humour (remember this?), has updated Paris Hilton’s debute CD without her permission. The modified version features a topless picture of Paris with a dog’s head and tracks remixed by Banksy. I want one!
I didn’t realise that the Korean war (1950 – 1953) still hasn’t formally ended until I read today that the USA is thinking of offering to sign a peace treaty with N. Korea. Currently, the only thing stopping the war is an armistice signed on 1953-07-27, which was intended as a temporary measure until the peace treaty was signed.
How much information about someone can you find out, starting with a discarded boarding card stub and just surfing the internet for 15 minutes using only data available in publicly available databases?
Well, all of those and while you’re about it, why not log into his frequent flyer account and change a few details and book a flight somewhere hot and sunny? Also no problem. In this particular case, you can thank British Airways and the American Government for their help, and the Guardian for highlighting the case.
So remember, think about what you throw away, and shred sensitive paperwork, such as bank statements, credit card slips etc. before you put them in the dustbin.
You just need the right idea to make money.
After reading about the student who made his first million by charging a dollar per pixel to advertise on his 1000×1000 pixel web site, I see that Selfridges are charging £65 for a 40 minute session teaching rich non-techies how to use their iPods.
Naturally, we were all curious to see what 250 pounds of Silly Putty would look like, so before distributing the stuff, we put it all in a single pile to see. Huge mistake.(via Boing Boing)
The problem was that once together, Silly Putty doesn’t like to come apart, and none of us had any idea of how to deal with this effect. We tried everything: very strong people (didn’t work), scissors (stabbing worked, slicing didn’t), 28-gauge steel wire (broke), 22-gauge steel wire (broke), 16-gauge steel wire (too thick), and twisting and breaking (worked well for “smaller” pieces—under five pounds, that is.)
This week’s British Medical Journal has tackled the thorny problem of disappearing teaspoons in the office environment. Their experiments show the average half-life of a teaspoon is 81 days, which means that you would need 250 teaspoons per year to maintain a constant population of 70 teaspoons in an organisation. Indeed:
If we assume that the annual rate of teaspoon loss per employee can be applied to the entire workforce of the city of Melbourne (about 2.5 million), an estimated 18 million teaspoons are going missing in Melbourne each year. Laid end to end, these lost teaspoons would cover over 2700 km — the length of the entire coastline of Mozambique — and weigh over 360 metric tons — the approximate weight of four adult blue whales.
The authors of the report propose a possible explanation, namely that teaspoons exhibit resistentialism. (Resistentialism is the belief that inanimate objects have a natural antipathy towards humans, and therefore it is not people who control things but things that increasingly control people). Alternatively, they propose that:
Somewhere in the cosmos, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, walking treeoids, and superintelligent shades of the colour blue, a planet is entirely given over to spoon life-forms. Unattended spoons make their way to this planet, slipping away through space to a world where they enjoy a uniquely spoonoid lifestyle, responding to highly spoon oriented stimuli, and generally leading the spoon equivalent of the good life.
It’s good to see this important topic is finally being researched properly – for more details, read the full BMJ report here.
Difficult to believe, but the BBC reports that a group of black squirrels in some trees in eastern Russia being barked at by a large dog suddenly descended from the branches and attacked and gutted the dog.
November 3rd is World Usability Day, with events going on all round the world. “Usability” typically conjures up pictures of users struggling with software which just doesn’t want to behave as the user wants, but it is a much wider issue, covering, for example, household goods and industrial equipment. This an event which needs maximum support, when things like this are happening:
A recent AP news story told of how a pilot who lost radio communications was surprised to find his plane surrounded by security forces as he landed. He thought he had entered 7600, the code for “lost communications,” but code 7500 told those on the ground that he was being hijacked…
What does a chainsaw manufacturer do, to demonstrate the power of his product?
He builds a bike powered by 24 of them.
Akira Haraguchi, 59, managed to recite the number’s first 83,431 decimal places, almost doubling the previous record held by another Japanese.
He had to stop three hours into his recital after losing his place, and had to start from the beginning…