Pixar versus Dreamworks.

[Via GromBlog]

Atlas Shrugged 2: Shrug Harder:

I don’t know how many of you realize that Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s science fiction classic, is actually only book 1 of a trilogy? Hardly anybody knows this, because she never got around to writing the missing middle volume. She wrote book 1 in the series. She wrote book 3 in the series, but didn’t explicitly label it a sequel to Atlas Shrugged, she and her agent marketed it as a stand-alone volume. She never got around to writing the middle volume that bridges the two. It’s probably because she found it too depressing, the way that Heinlein never got around to writing The Stone Pillow, the missing volume in the Future History series that comes between “All You Zombies” and “If This Goes On.” [...]

[Via James Nicoll]

Earlier this year, John Dvorak celebrated the 30th anniversary of the invention of the computerised spreadsheet by declaring that the use of spreadsheets to make financial projections had brought about the credit crunch.

I said at the time that Dvorak was aiming at the wrong target, and it turns out that I was right. Dvorak’s ire would have been better directed towards one Michael Osinski:

It’s not uncommon for people, when I tell them what I used to do, to ask if I feel guilty. I do, somewhat, and it nags at me. When I put it out of mind, it inevitably resurfaces, like a shipwreck at low tide. It’s been eight years since I compiled a program, but the last one lived on, becoming the industry standard that seeded itself into every investment bank in the world.

I wrote the software that turned mortgages into bonds. [...]

[Via The Browser]

What public space wouldn’t be enhanced by the presence of a giant baby robot?¹

[Via jwz]

1. Fire-breathing optional, but highly desirable. ^

Breathing Earth charts the world’s population and CO₂ emission rates in real time.

[Via InfraNet Lab]

LübeckerJung has a beautifully decorated MacBook.

[Via Monoscope]

One of these rocks is not like the others.

Two flights after the Challenger disaster, flight STS-27 could easily have brought the Space Shuttle program to a premature end:

I will never forget, we hung the (robot) arm over the right wing, we panned it to the (damage) location and took a look and I said to myself, ‘we are going to die,’ recalled legendary shuttle commander Robert “Hoot” Gibson. There was so much damage. I looked at that stuff and I said, ‘oh, holy smokes, this looks horrible, this looks awful.’

[Via MetaFilter]

You truly do learn something new every day on the internet. From a discussion about company names:

In Australia, now,

6203. For paragraph 147(1)(c) or 601DC(1)(c) of the Corporations Act 2001, a name is unacceptable for registration if the name:

(e) in the context in which it is proposed to be used, suggests a connection with:

(i) a member of the Royal Family; or
(ii) the receipt of Royal patronage; or
(iii) an ex-servicemen’s organisation; or
(iv) Sir Donald Bradman.

(Tangentially related.)

Twistori: positively hypnotic.

[Via Word Magazine Blog]

Newquay’s Blue Reef Aquarium had an uninvited guest:

Curator Matt Slater said: As part of our tropical marine displays we have been painstakingly propagating a variety of corals. They are extremely slow-growing and every one we have lost to these attacks was a major blow.

In the end it got so bad that I decided to literally take the display apart to find out who was responsible. I could hardly believe my eyes when I finally caught sight of the culprit. [...]

It’s the photograph of the coral-eater that sells the story. Are we sure this whole story isn’t a viral ad for the new season of Primeval?

[Via jwz]

Marcus du Sautoy on enormous numbers:

1,000,000,000 (one billion)

In the UK, this number used to be called, simply, 1,000 million, while a billion was reserved for a million million (a number with 12 zeros). But pressure to standardise our numbers with the US drove Harold Wilson to announce in 1974 that any government mention of a billion would from then on mean a number with nine zeros.

If you really want someone to blame for the confusion over billions, however, it’s the French. Throughout history, they have flip-flopped between different definitions, wreaking havoc on the names of numbers. In 1480, they proposed that a billion have 12 zeros, which is what the British adopted. Then, in the middle of the 17th century, they knocked three zeros off, so a billion became a number with nine zeros. The young United States inherited this new definition. Then in 1948, the French reverted back to the old system.

After careful study of images taken by the Mars Phoenix lander, some of the mission’s science team have authored a paper suggesting that there’s evidence of the presence of liquid water in the vicinity of the lander:

First off, get rid of the image in your head of pools of pretty blue water that you could swim in sitting on the surface. If you must think of an Earth analogy, you’ll get pretty close with the Great Salt Lake in Utah, except much saltier, in much less quantities, and not on the surface. Specifically, the liquid water suggested in the paper is not pure liquid water, but instead a brine. Brine is liquid water that has a very high salt concentration, either approaching or at saturation. [...]

Bernie Madoff is … Scumbag Billionaire.

[Via The Browser]