Craigslist’s Missed Connections feature inspired I Saw You: Missed Connection Comics. There’s a variety of approaches to the material: the creepy, the sweet and the wistful. Worth a look.

[Via MetaFilter]

Scrolling around this life size blue whale image drives home just how big the beast truly is. Positively awe-inspiring.

[Via Progressive Gold]

Artist Gregory Colbert’s exhibition Ashes and Snow showcases some stunning images of people and animals, in repose and in motion. I’d love to see his photographs at full size.

[Via frangipani]

Magicians David and Dania have an amazing quick-change act.

[Via More a way of life....]

It’s Philip K Dick’s world, we’re just living in it. News headlines matched with quotes from PKD’s works: spookily good matches in some cases.

(Previously. I don’t think Orwell is going to have to wait as long as 2025.)

[Via Fimoculous]

Group Finds Toad the Size of a Small Dog. That’s a seriously big toad.

(If you watch Pan’s Labyrinth – and if you haven’t, you really should – you’ll see that thing’s big brother, nesting in the roots of a very old tree, just waiting for a little girl on a quest.)

[Via Widgett]

A couple of sources of high quality desktop wallpaper I came across this evening: Pixelgirl and VladStudio.

[Via MetaFilter posters debralee and Brandon Blatcher]

This intro from The Simpsons is very cleverly done: we go from a single-celled organism to Homer Simpson in just over a minute.

[Via Pharyngula]

10 Strange Facts About Einstein:

2. Einstein Had Speech Difficulty as a Child
As a child, Einstein seldom spoke. When he did, he spoke very slowly – indeed, he tried out entire sentences in his head (or muttered them under his breath) until he got them right before he spoke aloud. According to accounts, Einstein did this until he was nine years old. Einstein’s parents were fearful that he was retarded – of course, their fear was completely unfounded!

One interesting anecdote, told by Otto Neugebauer, a historian of science, goes like this:

As he was a late talker, his parents were worried. At last, at the supper table one night, he broke his silence to say, “The soup is too hot.”

Greatly relieved, his parents asked why he had never said a word before.
Albert replied, “Because up to now everything was in order.”

Eminently logical. Clearly Einstein was a Vulcan.

[Via Fimoculous]

Aaron Sorkin is writing a Broadway musical adaptation of the Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots:

Described [Flaming Lips lead singer Wayne Coyne], “There’s the real world and then there’s this fantastical world. This girl, the Yoshimi character, is dying of something. And these two guys are battling to come visit her in the hospital. And as one of the boyfriends envisions trying to save the girl, he enters this other dimension where Yoshimi is this Japanese warrior and the pink robots are an incarnation of her disease. It’s almost like the disease has to win in order for her soul to survive. Or something like that.”

With a new Sorkin project on the horizon, no doubt Josh Malina is clearing his schedule even as we speak.

[Via BuzzFeed]

The first proper trailer is out for Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. The last third compresses far too many scenes into way too few seconds to be comprehensible unless you play it back frame-by-frame, but the bulk of the trailer looks just fine. The cast, as I’ve mentioned before, is to die for, and the trailer makes the film look like a highly entertaining romp at the very least. Definitely worth a look, I reckon.

Talking of entertaining romps, the first trailer in ages for Day Watch is also out. It looks at least as spectacular as Night Watch was, but it’s hard to tell much about how they’ve advanced the plot since the first instalment. Still, I liked the first instalment well enough that I’ll certainly give the second film a chance come October.

[Stardust trailer via Neil Gaiman]

KFC are planning to take their latest marketing campaign to the next level:

KFC sent the Pope a letter earlier this month, asking him to bestow a blessing on [their Fish Snacker sandwich]. While the sandwich is being marketed generally, John O’Reilly, chief marketing officer for KFC, said the sandwich should prove especially popular on Friday’s (sic), when Catholics traditionally don’t eat meat in the 40 days leading up to Easter Sunday.

“This is the first time KFC has ever served fish nationally, and we believe that the new sandwich could make it easier and more affordable for Catholics to observe the tenets of their faith,” KFC President Greg Dedrick wrote in a letter to the Pope.

Apparently the Vatican has confirmed that it has received KFC’s letter, but for some reason it has yet to reply.

[Via Mark Morford]

An NHS Trust in Liverpool is considering sending employees on a course on communicating through humour:

Stephanie Davies, creative director of Laughology Ltd, who works with the trust, points to scientific reasons why laughter makes people not just happy, but healthy too: it lowers dopamine levels, the chemical associated with elevated blood pressure, reduces stress hormones and triggers release of endorphins, which produces a general sense of wellbeing.

But she also believes that laughter can be a powerful tool for increased productivity and efficiency: ‘It is really important that we, as a society, come away from assuming humour is all about silliness and look instead at its serious side. People too often think that because someone’s laughing, they’re not working efficiently or effectively. But humour can defuse workplace conflict, reduce general stress, unite people, build morale and motivate people.’

You unite against something or someone; I hope management won’t be too upset if it turns out they’re the butt of the joke.

So what’s funny? It has to be the right humour, said Davies. Sex, race, ethnicity, politics and religion are out as are sarcasm or jokes that put people down or make them feel bad in other ways. Practical jokes are also dangerous: they can too easily backfire and cause humiliation and embarrassment.

So what’s left? Safe workplace humour, said Davies, should be focused on inanimate objects or turned back on to the person making the joke. ‘Once you’re looking at the world through a comedy eye, there’s humour in what happens to you on the way to work in the mornings. Everyday stuff about families or innocent mix-ups in the office.’

“Looking at the world through a comedy eye” and working for a company called “Laughology Inc”. Are we completely certain that Stephanie Davies isn’t Ricky Gervais in drag? Have the two of them ever been seen in the same room at the same time? I Think We Should be Told.

The Register has a fascinating story about a dispute between the Dutch government and Jan Groenendaal, head of the company that provides the systems used to tabulate votes in local and national elections. (For the avoidance of doubt, the company doesn’t make voting machines; they provide the computers the electoral body uses to organise and administer the electoral process.)

The gist of the story is that the Dutch government is setting up an enquiry into the security of the systems Groenendaal’s company provides, in the wake of a demonstration on a TV documentary that suggested that the systems could easily be compromised. Groenendaal’s response to the enquiry was to essentially try to blackmail the government in an email:

[Re one of the hackers who demonstrated the problem on TV, and who has been asked to participate in the enquiry...] His activities are disrupting society and thereby comparable to acts of terrorism. Detention pending trial and a preliminary investigation hearing would have been completely justified here.

Furthermore we are considering to submit claims against the municipalities that have cooperated and which now have been identified by us, as well as against the television programme ‘Een Vandaag’, for precognition¹ of aforementioned indictable acts.

[...]

If the department believes, as now obviously appears from the disproportional concern, that we do not come up to the mark, then the solution is clear;

• The department takes over the shares of our company at a reasonable price,
• Ceases operations immediately
• Has its hands completely free for every future development that can be thought off,
• Amortising the takeover expenses within a few elections by means of charging the municipalities, which see temporarily continuation of the service for a gentle price, unless off course the ministry comes up with something better overnight.
• We will then still cooperate for the next elections (PS 2007).

There’s a fuller account of the story, including more email correspondence, at the We Don’t Trust Voting Computers Foundation. The email quoted above may not represent a perfect translation of the original, but I think we all get the idea.

¹ “Precognition” probably isn’t the word they were looking for: I’m guessing that “foreknowledge” or “prior knowledge” is closer to the mark, but I lack the language skills to verify that for myself.

Three interesting points arise from this story, neither of them strictly speaking a technological issue:

1. “Terrorism” is the new “Communism.”
2. The reason we have the emails between Jan Groenendaal and the Dutch Electoral Commission is that the Dutch apparently have functioning freedom of information legislation. If the British government has its way, we won’t. Consider the bureaucratic hurdles that lie in wait for those who submit perfectly reasonable requests under the current legislation, then ask yourself how much easier it would have been for the public bodies concerned to dismiss those enquiries by simply adding in the cost of a few hours spent by a committee of high-ranking officials considering the request until they reached the threshold the government is proposing.
3. It seems that one reason the Dutch Electoral Commission is vulnerable to pressure from a private contractor is that they’re utterly reliant upon the contractor’s services if they’re to run elections. I appreciate that the mantra of every would-be minister these days is that the private sector’s dymanism and spirit of innovation is by definition superior to the attitudes of those who work in the public sector, but isn’t the ability to administer elections one of those functions that really shouldn’t be dependent upon the continued cooperation of a private contractor? That doesn’t mean that a private company shouldn’t be given the chance to design and implement the IT systems, but it does mean that the electoral commission should require that the systems should run on industry-standard hardware, and that all rights to the software and the data it produces be assigned to the electoral commission for it to dispose of as it sees fit. That might involve maintaining the code in-house or inviting tenders from private contractors for such modifications as are considered necessary: the point is that no one private company should be in a position to threaten to derail the electoral process.

[Via Bruce Schneier]