Tinfoil hat alert

Just got a call from Elissa, who announced "the computer in the bedroom is talking to me.......from NASA."   
No open or minimized windows, just a voice coming from nowhere.

A little digging with Task Manager led her to a firefox process still hanging around streaming the audio from the LCROSS impact we'd watched this morning. 
Could be worse -- it could have been talking in Rod Serling's voice.......

The Berlin Reunion - The Big Picture

Once separated by a great wall, the Big Giant and his niece the Little Giantess are reunited.

In Velox Libertas!

One of the most carefully documented, footnoted, annotated, fascinating (and, er....hoaxed) discoveries in history.

They always get your order wrong at the Kashiwa Mystery Cafe

And that is the whole point.

Beware the Glass Harmonica

It is said to cause insanity in those who hear it.

One trick none of our cats ever tried

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8jiP5GAQbE

Harry Potter and the killer Headache

Lots of fun stuff in the NCBI PubMed database.  The follow-up comments are equally priceless.

Caution to fMRI researchers: "Remember the Dead Salmon"

As a caution to their fellow researchers reporting ever more optimistic interpretations based on fMRI studies comes this research.

A dead salmon was placed in a fMRI machine and shown "a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations."  By appropriately setting the detection thresholds on subsequent voxel analysis, the investigators could generate results showing correlated brain activity in the dead fish when "viewing" images. 

Their recommendations?  Don't be fooled by false positives in your research data -- Like their test subject, it could start to smell later.

Online Monopoly: Grudge-match edition, part deux

It's been one week, time for a reboot, reports GMSV:

"In its one short week of existence, Monopoly City Streets — a massively multiplayer online variation of the classic board game played out on the landscape of Google Maps — has managed to accurately model some of the most vexing problems afflicting modern urban centers: traffic gridlock, identity theft, scams, mindless vandalism and social unrest.
...
Ultimately, the dev team decided there was only one fair thing to do — take a wrecking ball to all that had been bought and built so far and start fresh. So, on Thursday at 7 a.m. Pacific, the game will be taken offline for 12 to 24 hours, then restarted with a clean map, new registration, and an assortment of gameplay tweaks and rule changes based on the torrent of feedback. We should have a good idea by the weekend whether order has been restored or whether the National Guard will have to be sent in."

Some were not pleased.