Given the time of year this headline from the BBC News website makes the mind boggle slightly:
Turkey in fresh Iraq air strikes
Happy Yule to to all our readers!
Category Archives: amusements
Fictional Flying Carpets
Magic carpets are GO! According to a report in the Daily Telegraph of 19 December magic carpets are no longer a flight of fancy confined to the realms of the Arabian Nights. Professor Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan of Harvard has shown that the flying carpet is possible under the laws of Physics, although to be useful a lot of work will have to be done on the power to weight ratio. Good news for those of us who hate wasting time travelling.
Wizard of Id
This Wizard of Id cartoon earlier in the week amused me; as usual there’s the usual slightly zen quality to it.
The Secret
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing.
If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
Groucho Marx
Wizard of Id
Yesterday’s (or was it today’s?) Wizard of Id cartoonfrom comics.com is another with a really zen quality to it (well at least if you think about it):
Whoopee: Love in a deep-sea style
For amusement … Whoopee: Love in a deep-sea style. It absolutely cracked me up!
Monty Python
Skatje over at Lacrimae Rerum has today observed:
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is an educational commentary on nobility-peasant relationships.
Don’t think I could have put it better myself. Says it all really.
Endless Screw
Apparently the manual for servicing the keel-lifting mechanism of a Beneteau Oceanis 311 yacht advises:
Unscrew the bolt THM8 located at the end of the endless screw.
[New Scientist; 24/11/2007]
President Army Bush Quotes
Two excellent quotes today from the Quotation of the Day; both perpetrated by President George W Bush:
You can’t be the president and the head of the military at the same time.
Phone conversation with Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf; 7 November 2007; reported by CBC
The power of the executive branch is vested in the President, who also serves as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.
White House document explaining the role of the President of the United States
It does make one wonder how good these peoples’ grip is on reality.
Microbes for Christmas Without Being Ill
So here we are. Just what every Just William schoolboy always wanted. Giant Microbes for Christmas. And you don’t get sick.
Thanks to a top off from Noreen it seems that quite a lot of gift outlets are selling soft toys this Christmas made by Giant Microbes. They have a wonderful array of bugs from Black Death to Syphilis by way of Typhoid and Ebola. They’re a snip at around £6 or $8 each. Just the present for the young science geek.
But there is a serious point to this. The toys are actually made in the shape of the eponymous organism, only around a million times bigger. And they they come with information about the bug they depict. So they do have educational value. And some of them, like E. coli (pictured above), are actually quote cute.
Go have a look at Giant Microbes and give yourself the ‘flu for Christmas! (Well actually maybe not, it’s a nasty pastel apple green colour.)