Science reporter John Tierney has challenged his readers to come up with an inventive name and/or explanation for the Saturn hexagon.
I’ve already posted one theory about it, but here’s another one: it’s part of a publicity campaign by the Saturn Corporation. You know, the company that makes Saturn cars. They will soon be unveiling a new vehicle called the Saturn Hexagon, and the six-sided feature on the planet Saturn is just a really big billboard.
A polar vortex is (in the words of Wikipedia) “a persistent, large-scale cyclone located near the Earth’s poles.” But some other planets have them too. Saturn, for example, has vortices at both of its poles. The south polar vortex is pretty typical; it looks like a giant hurricane. But Saturn’s north polar vortex is hexagonal. Nobody knows why.
When I saw the pictures of Saturn’s polar hexagon, the first thing I thought of was the Well of Souls series of novels by Jack Chalker. It takes place on the Well World, a planet almost entirely tiled with hexagonal features that are visible from space. But the Well World is an artificial structure. And, ironically, the poles are among the few parts of it that are not covered by hexagons. (The only other exception is the equator.)
So Saturn’s polar hexagon must be caused by something else. I’ll bet there’s a black monolith at the center of it.
According to CNet, the phenomenon of blogging is ten years old this year — but we don’t really know who invented the blog. It depends on exactly how you define the term. You can read the CNet article and decide for yourself who deserves to be called “father of the blog”.
I don’t agree that blogs originated in 1997. If you ask me, The Daily Illuminator qualifies as a blog, and its archives go all the way back to 1994.
Source: Buzz Out Loud podcast
Like a lot of big cities, Liverpool has a pigeon problem. The city council has decided to try a new solution: bring in a bunch of robotic predator birds to scare the pigeons away. Ten mechanical Peregrine Falcons will be installed in the city center by next year. These birds (called Robops) don’t actually fly or attack pigeons, but they do squawk and flap their wings.
This is a good start, but I have some suggestions for additional steps to be taken after the Robops are installed.
Source: Daily Illuminator
Ordinarily, I would not consider a Web site consisting of cat photos to be worth a mention here. But Cats That Look Like Hitler is an exception. This is a phenomenon that should concern us all. I had no idea there were so many of them.
If you liked the song “Code Monkey”, check out this music video that Mike Spiff Booth made of it.
Did you know that American and British troops use Silly String to detect the tripwires of booby traps? Neither did I, until I read the Wikipedia article about it.
UPDATE: Here’s a video about an effort to keep the troops supplied with this stuff.
The folks at Weta Workshop have an online store called Weta Collectibles. (Yes, this is the Weta Workshop responsible for jaw-dropping effects in films like the Lord of the Rings series and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.) In addition to the movie-related merchandise, the store also offers rayguns. And when I say rayguns, I mean Dr. Grordbort’s Infallible Aether Oscillators, “a line of immensely dangerous yet simple to operate wave oscillation weapons”. These limited-edition handcrafted guns appear to be 19th-century technology, using phlogiston and compressed aether for ammunition. Three models are available:
These are exactly the kind of weapons you need when you’re battling nameless horrors at the center of the Earth, setting out to explore the distant future in your time machine, or just going for a stroll through the East End of London on a foggy night.
Source: J. Michael Straczynski
A couple of years ago, I wrote about a report that rats laugh ultrasonically when tickled. This New York Times article doesn’t really add any new information, but it includes a video that lets you see the rats’ behavior for yourself — and hear the ultrasonic chirps that, according to scientists, are laughter.
Source: Instapundit
In case you were wondering, duct tape does not cure warts.
Source: James Taranto