A room without a view:

Eight artists snuck into the depths of Providence Place mall and built a secret studio apartment in which they stayed, on and off, for nearly four years until mall security finally caught their leader last week.

[...]

The casually furnished, unheated apartment was in a 750-square-foot loft beneath an I-beam and above an unused dusty storage room in the mall parking garage that was accessed through a door in a stairwell, according to Townsend, his fellow artists and the police.

[...]

[Via kevan]

A lovely zinger from Senator Joe Biden:

“A sentence from Rudy Giuliani has three parts: a noun, a verb, and 9/11″.

A nicely presented chart of the number of inhabitants per doctor in the countries of the world.

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

As evocative product names go, MomSpit™ is surely one of the very best:

It’s not gel. It’s not sanitizer. It’s MomSpit – the universal no-rinse cleanser for hands and face. Works like magic, smells like heaven, cleans like soap and water without the sink.

[Via Away With Words]

Rejection letters for famous papers in Computer Science:

R.L. RIVEST, A. SHAMIR, AND L. ADELMAN
“A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems.”

According to the (very short) introduction, this paper purports to present a practical implementation of Diffie and Hellman’s public-key cryptosystem for applications in the electronic mail realm. If this is indeed the premise, the paper should be rejected both for a failure to live up to it and for its irrelevance.

I doubt that a system such as this one will ever be practical. The paper does a poor job of convincing the reader that practicality is attainable. For one thing, there is the issue of the number n used to factor the message.

[...]

Electronic mail on the Arpanet is indeed a nice gizmo, but it is unlikely it will ever be diffused outside academic circles and public laboratories—environments in which the need to maintain confidentiality is scarcely pressing. Laboratories with military contracts will never communicate through the Arpanet! Either normal people or small companies will be able to afford a VAX each, or the market for electronic mail will remain tiny. Granted, we are seeing the appearance of so-called microcomputers, such as the recently announced Apple II, but their limitations are so great that neither they nor their descendants will have the power necessary to communicate through a network.

[Via Qwghlm]

From Great Moments in the History of Technical Services:

427 A.D.
The Library at Alexandria decides to contract out its annual weeding project; Vandal hordes are the lowest bidder.

Heh.

[Via Making Light (Particles)]

I’m not sure the wind shaped pavilion is the most practical design for a building, but I could stand seeing a few of them around town:

Made entirely out of lightweight fabric, each of its six main segments twist around its central support frame in response to fluctuations in the wind. This means that the shape of the pavilion continually alters.

I wonder how much noise the segments make as they turn. Enough to drown out a conversation between the occupants, or just a background hum?

[Via Monoscope]

China Mieville on the attraction of floating utopias for those of a libertarian bent:

Freedom is late.

Since 2003, a colossal barge called the Freedom Ship, of debatable tax status, should have been chugging with majestic aimlessness from port to port, a leviathan rover with more than 40,000 wealthy full-time residents living, working and playing on deck. That was the aim eight years ago when the project first made headlines, confidently claiming that construction would start in 2000.

[...]

Freedom Ship’s website claims that the vessel has not been conceived as a locus for tax avoidance, pointing out that as it will sail under a flag of convenience, residents may still be liable for taxes in their home countries. Nonetheless, whatever the ultimate tax status of those whom we will charitably presume might one day set sail, much of the interest in Freedom Ship has revolved precisely around its perceived status as a tax haven.

[...]

[Via 3quarksdaily]

Apple’s new release of OS X uses a rather cheeky icon to represent the typical Windows PC.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Hangman.

1776 meets 300.

[Via VideoSift]

Tonight’s episode of Heroes on BBC3 might just be the most purely entertaining forty-five minutes of television I’ve seen this year.

That is all.

The anatomy of a balloon dog, revealed.

[Via kottke.org]

The wonderful world of Windows Vista.

It’s funny because it’s true.

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]