Richard – Page 20

A ship disguised as an island

8 February 20108 February 2010 Richard

This camouflaged Dutch ship successfully disguised itself as a small
tropical
island and avoided the Japanese Navy after the Battle of the Java Sea.

HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen was stationed in the Dutch East Indies when WW
II began. After the destruction of the Allied Fleet by the Japanese
during the Battle of the Java Sea in February 1942, Crijnssen’s captain
was ordered to escape with his ship to Australia. Covered with tree
branches, the minesweeper crossed the Japanese naval lines camouflaged
as a tropical island.

As a denizen of the Snowbelt (see my earlier post on that topic), I can’t help but experience a bit of schadenfreude over the recent snowpocalypse that paralyzed the United States from Pittsburgh to DC. 30 inches of snow in one storm? That’s old hat up here, but for once, it missed us.

Anyhow, cruel enjoyment aside, you can take a look at a satellite view of the snowpocalypse over at LiveScience.

The world’s creepiest icicle

7 February 20107 February 2010 Richard

I’ve never been one to break icicles. Sure, they might tear down my gutters, but they’re pretty to look at and oh-so-wintry, especially around Christmastime. If I saw this one slowly dripping towards me, though, I might change my tune (via RealityCarnival).

So, the universe may be a holographic projection.

7 February 20107 February 2010 Richard 1 Comment

Scientists have apparently conducted an experiment that may suggest we are living within a hologram. Via kottke.org:

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard ‘t Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

The “holographic principle” challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.

What this may mean – if it means anything at all – I don’t know, but you can read more here.

Early space station concepts

6 February 20106 February 2010 Richard

International Space Station (NASA, 09/08/09)

Image by nasa1fan/MSFC via Flickr

There’s a very cool list of some early space station concepts at Scienceray:

The conquest of outer space was on
the mind of men decades ago, with some surprising similarities to
today’s space platforms these visionaries seemed to predict the future.
A future that they could not an have possibly understood or fathomed.
Ultimately, we will need a new fleet of space shuttles to get there.

Check out these minimalist Star Wars posters.

6 February 20106 February 2010 Richard

I’m rather partial to this Bespin one, myself. You can see more here.

The last unclaimed land on Earth

6 February 20106 February 2010 Richard 2 Comments

It might be hard to believe that in the year AD 2010, there is still land that remains unclaimed by any nation. But such is the case. Via Neatorama:

Marie Byrd Land and Bir Tawil Triangle are the only
two land areas on Earth not claimed by any country.

Marie Byrd
Land is a portion of Antarctica so remote that no country in the
world bothered to claim it. It’s the single largest unclaimed territory
on Earth.

Bir Tawil Triangle
likely has no owner because of some administrative snafu. First of all,
despite of its name, it’s not a triangle at all. In fact, it has a
trapezoidal shape. In 1899, when the British drew the map between Egypt
and Sudan, Bir Tawil was put in Sudan’s territory (which Egypt
accepted). However, in 1902, when Sudan drew its own map, it put Bir
Tawil on the Egyptian side! So far, neither country bothered to lay
claim to this patch of land.

It was no big loss, however, as Bir Tawil is full of sand and a whole
lot of nothing.

Carly Fiorina’s amazing campaign ad

4 February 20104 February 2010 Richard

Carly Fiorina, a former CEO of Hewlett-Packard (who was fired by its board of directors), is seeking the Republican nomination to challenge incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California). Her rival for the nomination is Tom Campbell, a former Republican congressman from California’s 12th and 15th districts. Her campaign has produced an astounding train wreck of an advertisement criticizing Campbell’s conservative credentials:

It’s hard to believe, but this is an actual ad produced by Fiorina’s campaign. I don’t even know what to say about it. You have to see it for yourself.

A sculpture that perpetually sells itself on eBay

4 February 20104 February 2010 Richard

via LaughingSquid:

Combining Robert Morris’ Box With the Sound of Its Own
Making with Baudrillard’s writing on the art auction this sculpture
exists in eternal transactional flux. It is a physical sculpture that is
perpetually attempting to auction itself on eBay.

Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via
the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its
auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction
of itself.

If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it
to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and
the cycle repeats itself.

The sculpture, entitled “A Tool to Deceive and
Slaughter“, recently sold
on eBay for $6,350.00 and is now being shipped to its next “owner”.

You can read more here.

Some book and library-related items

3 February 20103 February 2010 Richard

Boing Boing has put together an interesting little list of some literary things:

– Publishing
Food #2 – Edible Geography looks at miniature cookbooks and
chocolate letters and robotic food chefs.
– Fore-Edge book painting comes in classic
and modern forms
– Brian
Dettmer’s book art
– American Woodworker shows people how to make a Lumber Library
to show off fancy woods. Another
Wood Book.
– Typo of the Day for
Librarians – a compilation of common library catalog typos.
– The
International Edible Books festival album pages always make me
hungry, for words and snacks
– A few more library
mash-ups from an old MetaFilter post. And BibliOdyssey is always good
for more biblioporn.

In memory of Steve
Cisler, Apple’s digital librarian and all-around awesome guy.

There’s more here.

There are spiders on your internet.

2 February 20102 February 2010 Richard

Image by Lip Kee via Flickr

On its surface, the internet typically seems like a friendly place – or at least generally neutral. You’d hardly expect to find an infestation of spiders online (although other sorts of infestations would probably be unsurprising).

Image via Wikipedia

Unbeknownst to most casual browsers, though, the World Wide Web is (fittingly, I suppose) teeming with them. Also known as web crawlers (or bots, web scutters, or automatic indexers), these spiders are computer programs that trawl the internet for content and report their findings back to search engines and other similar services. Without web spiders, search engines like Google would be forced to assign humans to browse through and catalog each and every existing web page by hand – an impossible task, given that billions of different web pages exist.

Instead, though, search engines can deploy these automatons to do their dirty work for them (and depending on what parts of the internet you frequent, I’m sure it can be very dirty work). Most webmasters are familiar with the scurryings of internet spiders; they typically come during the night, and poke and prod and crawl over and under each part of your website. Adverbly.net has been visited by at least nine different “robots/spiders,” including Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp, Ask, Relevant Noise, and several somewhat-creepy “unknown robots” identified only by short strings like “robot,” “spider,” or “bot.” I can’t help but wonder who directed these unknown bots to crawl this website; one visited nearly 200 times.

If you’re interested in learning more, you can visit the quite-extensive Wikipedia page about web crawlers, or Google’s helpful-but-brief Googlebot FAQ.

Some say that a spider in your house isn’t all bad, because spiders hunt and kill house centipedes. I’ll take house spiders over house centipedes any day. And I definitely don’t ever want to meet an internet centipede.