Church Bloopers and Richard Dawkins

The Daily Nooz blog has posted some old "church bloopers" that were circulated by email years ago. My favourite is this one: The Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 P.M. Please use the back door. Made me laugh. This made me cheer (quietly) though. Richard Dawkins has been named "man of the year" by this blog.

Photos Hangovers

Some nice photos of South Africa from a helicopter and a nice close-up of an insect (don't know what though). A good explanation of hangovers and hangover cures from the How Stuff Works website. They say the medical term for hangover, veisalgia, derives from the Norwegian word kveis, which means "uneasiness following debauchery", and algia, which is Greek for pain.

Psychopathy

I wrote here about the English psychopathic killer Peter Sutcliffe. Psychopathy is still little understood but there's an interesting article in Science News which looks at the work of Dr. Joseph Newman who views psychopathy as the product of attention deficiency.

Robot How Flickr Started Overheard

Back after a week in Wales. Here's one I did earlier: Someone has built a robot that can solve the Rubik's Cube! The story of how Flickr started Snippets of conversations Overheard in New York

Shoe Bomber

An article about the daily life of Richard Reid, the "Shoe Bomber" in a maximum security prison in the US. The Open Document Format is announced; see the Wired article. I posted a link previously to a lovely picture of a snowflake and now I've found some more at a website dedicated to snow crystal photography and research. There's also a "snow crystal primer" with interesting points about snow formation.

Unique Surface Pattern of Paper

Sounds like an interesting discovery and it came about by accident. The scientist was trying to scan microchips with a laser beam and one fell off so that his laser scanner hit the paper below. He was surprised to see that his equipment gave a reading, so he did a bit of testing and found that all sorts of surfaces could be read for unique surface patterns at microscopic scale. He converts the pattern into a set of numbers that can be used as an id for that specific surface. They article says the reading survives damage to the surface, but I don't understand something - wouldn't you have a problem with registration? Wouldn't you have to be sure of scanning exactly the same part of the surface in order to get the same reading?