National Geographic: Jews Evaded Nazis by Living in Cave for Nearly 2 Years (link via BoingBoing).
They also have an interview with an American caver who visited the cave and investigated the story, with some more details of the daily cave live.
Category: Oddities
Round-up of weird links:
- Jungle girl vs. the Shmoes – a really bad comic, recapped, with pics.
- Isaac Hayes’ Three Laws of Robotics (via jwz).
- Also from Jamie Zawinski, a page where he’s collected a list of “inappropriate language” the lawyers removed from the Netscape Communicator source code for its release. As a bonus, he adds the comparable lines from the Navigator 3.x source. Sample gems:
/* "Object oriented? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!" --Dennis Hopper */
// They'll never fix the damned warnings. To hell with quality:
// to make Symantec Cafe function properly -- piece 'o crap compiler)
// ok, we are formatting an image. turn off the buggy piece of crap feature
PissOnThisDocument(fHContext);
/* This function is a complete piece of shit - it takes a billion flags */
# define rename hpux_sucks_wet_farts_from_dead_pigeons
// Read in the user's sig and do Jamie pacifying crap to itI could go on…
- A directory of heavier-than-air flying machines in western Europe, 850 B.C. – 1783 A.D. by Clive Hart lists various attempts at flight by hopeful fools jumping off castle walls with Chicken feathers glued to their arms, and such.
In his review of Ash, John Clute refers to Ioan Culianu (the Chicago academic who specialized in Hermetic philosophy, and who was murdered in 1991)
. That sparked my curiosity. Google finds a chapter from a book about Culianu and his unsolved murder by Ted Anton, called Eros, Magic, and the Death of Professor Culianu. It also finds a transcript of a conversation with his ghost…
Categories
Excel causing errors in bioinformatics
Would be funny if it wasn’t sad department: BioMed Central | Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics (via boingboing, via The Register).
Reuters: Don Quixote to Ride Again on Cosmic Rescue Mission:
The European Space Agency has given high priority to a Spanish project which aims to attack an approaching asteroid to see whether spacecraft can deflect a body that may in future be on a collision course with earth.
Two craft will set out — one named after the valiant knight of Cervantes’ classic tale, the other after his long-suffering servant Sancho Panza.
Spacecraft Sancho will circle the chosen asteroid while the other — aping its literary namesake — smashes headlong into the target.
The orbiting Sancho and earth-based telescopes will watch closely to see what, if any, effect the impact has on the speed and direction of the asteroid.
At the same time Sancho, being in orbit around the asteroid, will be able to detect fragments thrown from it by the impact and get a glimpse of its internal structure.