Category: Oddities

defective yeti performs a valuable public service by researching what that Eagles song was all about:

bq(http://www.defectiveyeti.com/archives/000594.html). I assumed — erroneously, I guess — that everyone (including The Queen) had, while in college, attended a party where Hotel California was playing, and been cornered by a Way Too Inebriated College Guy, who insisted, with slurred earnestness, that the song was a thinly veiled paean (or perhaps “pagan”) to Satanism.* I mean, when I was in college this happened to me, like, twice a month.

The Japan Times Online – Seven riddles suggest a secret city beneath Tokyo.

bq. Shun claims to have uncovered a secret code that links a complex network of tunnels unknown to the general public. “Every city with a historic subterranean transport system has secrets,” he says. “In London, for example, some lines are near the surface and others very deep, for no obvious reason.”

According to a recent consensus, Britain now has more Jedis than Jews, Buddhists or Sikhs:

Over 390,000 people wrote “Jedi” on their 2001 census form, more than those who registered their faith as Jewish, Buddhist or Sikh in the optional question on religion, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said on Thursday.

– Yahoo! News

A roundup of links that everyone’s blogged, that are all over the daypop top 40, etc. etc.

• The Switch to Linux ad When you’re holding the moon for ransom, you value stability in an application…
• Japanese Emoticons (smileys) are very cool, and based on the idea that you smile with your cheeks, hands and eyes, not just with your mouth, like in boring old western sideways smilies.
• Oh yeah, and a judge ruled that the X-Men aren’t human. This at the request of Toybiz, who wanted their action figures to be cheaper to import (see, if they’re not human, that makes the figures toys, not dolls, which is better business, for some silly legal reason). Great Wall Street Journal story.

The New Scientist has an interesting story about scientists who set up a bacteria with an “extended” genetic code: they got the bacteria to create a new amino acid (p-aminophenylalanine, which is not one of the 20 amino acides that appear in the genetic code), and incorporate it into a protein when the sequence being translated (from DNA/RNA to protein) contained a specific group of 3 nucleic acid bases (a “codon”, a basic unit of the genetic code) that doesn’t code for any amino acid.

Now, is this feat of genetic engineering just an incredible party trick, or will it have widespread applications? I say it’ll take 10 years before they find something cool to do with this, but I’m not backing that bet with money.