Property developer Marcus Salter encountered an unusual problem when work started on his latest project:

[...]

His first notice of the residential sensibilities of the netherworld came as his diggers moved on to a site on the outskirts of the village, which crowns the easterly shore of Loch Earn.

He said: "A neighbour came over shouting, 'Don’t move that rock. You'll kill the fairies'." The rock protruded from the centre of a gently shelving field, edged by the steep slopes of Dundurn mountain, where in the sixth century the Celtic missionary St Fillan set up camp and attempted to convert the Picts from the pagan darkness of superstition.

"Then we got a series of phone calls, saying we were disturbing the fairies. I thought they were joking. It didn't go down very well," Mr Salter said.

[...]

[Via Amygdala]

Small Town Misfit is a weblog devoted to collecting the odd little law enforcement stories found in small-town US newspapers:

Chadron, NE
12:14 a.m. Caller from Highway 20 advised there were two male subjects who had been drinking mouthwash and were passed out. Caller requested someone check on them and possibly remove them because "it doesn’t look good."

Found in the Chadron Record

[Via Superhero Journal]

The Planetary Society's web site now includes a section allowing you to Compare the Planets in various ways: how many moons, how large, that sort of thing.

There's no information here that you couldn't find elsewhere, but it's all very nicely presented and makes for a very handy resource. (The rest of the site is well worth a look if this sort of thing appeals.)

Not my work, just pictures I've spotted elsewhere over the last seven days:

• I'd assumed that Black-eyed Susan was a close-up shot of an exceptionally unblemished marble, but it turns out it's a bit of Photoshop trickery instead.
• Autumn in Japan is looking exceptionally colourful right now.
• By contrast, downtown Toronto is just very, very wet.
• A few nice landscape shots:
  • Table Mountain
  • Mt Pilatus
  • Rio de Janeiro
  • Southern Iceland.
• A pleasant way to spend an afternoon.
• A Dakota dropping poppies for Remembrance Sunday.

[Dakota with poppies picture via feeling listless]

If you're thinking of picking up a copy of the box set of the first season of the new run of Doctor Who tomorrow, you might just want to hold on a bit: early reports suggest that some of the disks are missing a few minutes in the middle of one episode.

This might just be a couple of people having disks from the same bad batch; no doubt reports over the next few days will give us a clearer idea of the extent of the problem.

iMac Love Story. Proof that Macs and PCs really can work together. (NB: 23.4MB Quicktime movie.)

Artist Peter Callesen has done amazing and beautiful things with just a sheet of paper, some glue and a sharp knife. I especially like Snowballs and Stairways to heaven.

[Via plasticbag.org]

In rec.arts.sf.fandom, Paul Dormer on House:

From: Paul Dormer
Subject: Re: Serenity!
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 10:45 +0100 (BST)

James Nicoll wrote:

> It had to be one of two things: attempted
> murder or Doctor Gregory House's
> penultimate attempt treating that patient.

Reminds me. The paper recently had a real
life doctor reviewing the current crop of
medical dramas on TV. He said this: "In
medicine, we have a saying. 'If it's yellow,
sits in a cage and sings, it's a canary.'
However, if you work in Gregory House's team,
it'll turn out to be a baby alligator with
a rare form of jaundice and a tumour on its
voice box."

A Firefly-Serenity Chinese Pinyinary, translating the various Chinese phrases uttered by characters in Firefly and Serenity.

這個計劃真可怕！・这个计划真可怕！
"Juhguh JEE HUA jun kuhPAH!"
"There's nothing about this plan that isn't horrific!"
Wash, about Mal's dangerous plan

Good to know…

[Via Ninja Polymath Blues]

Phillip Torrone has a very pretty laptop.

[Via Cult of Mac]

For those of you who, like me, didn't see the Doctor Who segment of last night's Children In Need telethon, the BBC have put a tiny streaming version of the scene here. If you have the bandwidth, a somewhat higher resolution version of the clip can be found here (NB: 18MB MPEG4 movie).

It's pretty much impossible to judge how David Tennant is going to fare in the role based on six minutes of post-regeneration footage, but after a barnstorming first season at the helm I reckon writer/producer/genius Russell T Davies has earned our trust regarding his casting choices. (And his choice of writers and directors, come to that.) I mean, who thought that Billie Piper would be so right for her part? I just hope that the BBC play fair with viewers and repeat this scene before the Doctor's next full-length appearance: the first scene between a regenerated Doctor and their companion is far too important to the tone of a new season to miss out on just because you didn't want to sit through a telethon.

The Christmas Invasion can't come soon enough…

[H.264 video clip via Mwongozi, posting at MetaFilter]

The product description says it all:

Breath Capture is a patent-pending method and apparatus for collecting human breath as a keepsake display.

Good grief!

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

Mercedes decided to stage a demonstration for journalists of the neat radar-based braking system in their S-Class saloon. Unfortunately the hall where the demo was conducted was made of steel, which confused the radar no end.

As a Mercedes spokesman later commented, the system "works perfectly in all other circumstances." Very comforting, I'm sure…

[Via Techdirt]

Somehow the fact that a fourth Hannibal Lecter film was in production had escaped my attention.

For my money they should have stopped after The Silence of the Lambs, but let that pass. What's almost as shocking as the idea that we need another Hannibal Lecter novel is the dreadfully clunky title the IMDB are listing for the film: Young Hannibal: Behind the Mask.

(According to Amazon UK the title of the Thomas Harris novel, due out next March, is simply Behind the Mask. Which is slightly better, I suppose.)

[Via Japundit]

In the wake of the Sony rootkit fiasco, Bruce Schneier poses an excellent question about the response of the anti-virus and spyware companies:

[...]

The story to pay attention to here is the collusion between big media companies who try to control what we do on our computers and computer-security companies who are supposed to be protecting us.

Initial estimates are that more than half a million computers worldwide are infected with this Sony rootkit. Those are amazing infection numbers, making this one of the most serious internet epidemics of all time — on a par with worms like Blaster, Slammer, Code Red and Nimda.

What do you think of your antivirus company, the one that didn't notice Sony's rootkit as it infected half a million computers? And this isn't one of those lightning-fast internet worms; this one has been spreading since mid-2004. Because it spread through infected CDs, not through internet connections, they didn't notice? This is exactly the kind of thing we're paying those companies to detect — especially because the rootkit was phoning home.

But much worse than not detecting it before Russinovich's discovery was the deafening silence that followed. When a new piece of malware is found, security companies fall over themselves to clean our computers and inoculate our networks. Not in this case.

[...]

No doubt even as we speak the PR companies working for Big Content are racking their brains to come up with a techie-sounding term they can start substitute for terms like "malware" and "rootkit" when the author is a large media company with content to protect at all costs (to others) instead of a lone cracker or an opportunistic fraudster.

[Via rc3.org]

The B612 Foundation's approach to stopping an asteroid from hitting Earth may not be as spectacular as sending Bruce Willis or Robert Duvall to do the job, but it'll probably work a lot better:

The B612 goal is to actually change the orbit of an asteroid in order to demonstrate that humankind can indeed protect the Earth from future asteroid impacts.  The determination to conduct such a mission is born of our conviction, based on experience, that the best way to learn how to do something is to do it.  Anyone who has learned to ski knows that real learning begins after you’ve put down the books, returned the rented videos, and gotten out on the slopes.  You may very well fall down. In fact you probably aren’t learning as rapidly as you might unless you are falling down on occasion.

Our preferred solution to deflecting an incoming near Earth asteroid (NEA), for reasons that are clarified below, is to rendezvous and "dock" with it at either its North or South Pole, realign the asteroid’s spin vector to a preferred direction and then push it (gently and for a long time) until we’ve changed its speed enough to miss the Earth. This scenario is very direct. It makes the key assumption, well supported by statistics and common sense that we will know of a pending impact many years ahead of time. The strange logic of NEA detection is that we will either know that an impact is pending several decades ahead of time, or that we will be hit by an asteroid we don’t know about with no warning at all! The critical importance of the detection program is that as you detect and track more and more NEAs you increase the former category and reduce the latter.

[...]

If the human race doesn't try this out (or come up with something better) then perhaps we really do have a death wish, and it's time to let the cockroaches take a crack at this whole civilisation thing.

[Via collision detection]

Quotes about Operating Systems:

• Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of UNIX, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement. (MIT job advertisement)
• Saying that XP is the most stable MS OS is like saying that asparagus is the most articulate vegetable. (Dave Barry)
• The purpose of the icons, the purpose of the entire OS X look and feel, is to keep the customer happy during that critical period between the time of sale and the time the check clears. (Bruce Tognazini)

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

For iPod owners everywhere (well, everywhere except the US, Canada and Australia) who really, really love their iPod: the iBuzz Music Activated Sex Toy.

No doubt you have to choose your playlist very carefully: I dread to think what would happen if, say, Faith No More's Jizzlobber came up at an inopportune moment.

[Via Cult of Mac]

The New York Times brings a little-noticed phenomenon to our notice:

[...]

Grille-mounted stuffed animals form a compelling yet little-studied aspect of the urban streetscape, a traveling gallery of baldly transgressive public art. The time has come not just to praise them but to ask the big question. Why?

That is, why do a small percentage of trucks and vans have filthy plush toys lashed to their fronts, like prisoners at the mast? Are they someone's idea of a joke? Parking aids? Talismans against summonses?

Don't expect an easy answer.

[...]

[Via Amygdala]

The Stop Sign Kid. (NB: 330KB Windows Media file.)

Painfully funny.

[Via GromBlog]