Every year the earth’s rotation slows a bit and so we have to add a second to our time keeping once in a while to keep it in sync with the old rock. Large earthquakes like the devastating tremor last week in Chile, or the Sumatran quake that triggered the massive tsunami 0f 2004 can [...]

As of yesterday, days will be getting longer again on this side of the globe. Of course here, in the Old North State that’s not that big a deal, anyway. But I did start paying more attention to sunrise/sunset this fall. When I bike to work and back home, I prefer to avoid the bad [...]

With three stokes of his wooden mallet, the Mayor of Munich tapped a 224-Liter beer barrel today – the first of many beer barrels to be drained at this year’s Oktoberfest in Munich. He poured the first Mass for the Ministerpräsident (governor) of Bavaria.
Organizers expect to sell 6 Million Mass (Liters) at €7.90, as well [...]

… accidentally. In the night from Wednesday to Thursday, 170 armed Swiss troops crossed into the tiny neighboring Principality of Liechtenstein. They got lost in bad weather in the Alps during a training exercise and strayed a mile into the unarmed principalities sovereign territory. Scrambling to prevent any escalation, both countries immediately launched diplomatic efforts [...]

Boy – Bill Gates is so not funny! Even Jon Stewart has a hard time being funny with the Ãœber-geek in the studio. “What does the F12 button do?” ??? This is a bit of an awkward interview, especially for Stewart, who is usually pretty good at it.
Last night we watched the DVD of Andy [...]

The Dakar Rally has always fascinated me, even though, over the years, I became increasingly aware of its questionable ethics regarding the communities it touches, and the waste of resources on a vain, more-or-less useless sporting event. Motorsports are basically pretty stupid, but still, I cannot totally escape the fascination of a race across the [...]

Today’s Word of the Day was invented (I think) by my boss: picobuckets. We got a good chuckle out of this one during the staff meeting, when he tried to illustrate his consternation at some of the strange measurements of one of his fellow researchers.

President Bush is visiting (de) Angela Merkel’s home district in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The cute, historic town of Stralsund is under siege: all cars had to be removed to lots outside the town, gutters are welded shut, mailboxes sealed, stores cannot open, and residents are even prohibited from opening their WINDOWS in July! [...]

The word of the day, on this day – 6/6/06, I guess, is hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia:
Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia is a fear which originates in the belief that the Biblical verse, Revelation 13:18, indicates that the number 666 is linked to Satan or the Anti-Christ. Outside the Christian faith, the phobia has been further popularized as a leitmotif in [...]

The BBC reports on a weird trend of people taking their mobile phone to their grave. The origin of this idea was fear of being buried alive, according to Martin Raymond, director of international trend-spotting think-tank, The Future Laboratory. However, that does not explain cremations with cell phones:

“We came across this in places like South [...]

The NY Times has a story about an odd bit of information from pre-invasion Iraq: apparently German spies in Baghdad provided pretty important information about the Iraqi defenses to the US-led invasion forces.
Two German intelligence agents in Baghdad obtained a copy of Saddam Hussein’s plan to defend the Iraqi capital, which a German official passed [...]

A politician winning an award for speaking? About himself? That’s pretty impressive …

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) won a Grammy award Wednesday evening in a category rarely made for a politician: the best spoken word.
As the awards were announced at the ceremony in downtown Los Angeles, Obama was finishing his work day in Washington. [...]

Lately I have found myself staring at this. It’s mesmerizing and it makes me wonder about the quality we call “random” (as opposed to the mathematical concept). I think our brain is just really wired to try very hard to extract meaning out of visual stimuli and it is very hard to get it [...]

It is the year 2005 A.D. and a border dispute is brewing between Canada and Denmark over a 1.3 km² rock in the arctic. Both countries are members of NATO, but they had competing flag-raisings, flyovers by jets and even officials visiting Hans Island, an arctic island claimed by both countries. Hans Island is [...]

Boy – I am so glad they were able to straightened this out:

A bowl of Neolithic noodles has revealed that China was the most likely birthplace of this popular food.
For millennia, arguments have raged about whether the noodle was invented by the Chinese, Italians or Arabs.
(…)
The researchers discovered the 20 inch-long noodles inside an overturned, [...]

I like my cars with a hitch. I have a small utility trailer that I use to haul garbage, furniture, cinder blocks, firewood, and other stuff that I don’t want inside the car or that does not fit inside the car. Over the years I found the trailer-car combo much more efficient than owning a [...]

O’zapft is! at the mother of all beer orgies, the oohmpah fest to end all oohmpah fests. With two mighty strokes the mayor of Munich drove the tap into the barrel of beer and handed the first beer to the Ministerpräsident (Governor) of the Free State of Bavaria. The natives went wild! Especially the Japanese, [...]