The Sainsbury's chap tried to approve my beer purchase, but accidentally flagged me as underage instead. It turned out there was no way of undoing this, so he cancelled the entire transaction, and I had to move everything out of the Bagging Area back to the start point and scan it all again 
Happy invoicing!
- Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek - Very impressive use of multimedia browser technologies in this New York Times special feature on an avalanche that claimed three lives last February: "The very thing the 16 skiers and snowboarders had sought — fresh, soft snow — instantly became the enemy. Somewhere above, a pristine meadow cracked in the shape of a lightning bolt, slicing a slab nearly 200 feet across and 3 feet deep. Gravity did the rest."
- Bridge - Series of short animations depicting doomed attempts to cross a gap. (Flash required, sorry.) Also, the most excellent series Mr. Round Learns About Earth
- Why Rudolph’s nose is red: observational study - A paper recently published in the British Medical Journal: "Objective To characterise the functional morphology of the nasal microcirculation in humans in comparison with reindeer as a means of testing the hypothesis that the luminous red nose of Rudolph, one of the most well known reindeer pulling Santa Claus’s sleigh, is due to the presence of a highly dense and rich nasal microcirculation."
- Scientific Punch-Up Over Idea That Fighting Shaped Our Hands - "Carrier and Morgan also suggest that this might explain why the proportions of our hands evolved in the first place—for stability during combat, rather than dexterity during tool use... I contacted four scientists about the study. Two expressed their respect for Carrier’s wider work but were unconvinced by his new idea (although neither wanted to comment on the record). A third—Brigitte Demes, who studies the limbs of primates at Stony Brook State University—said that the actual experiments were sound, but “the interpretation is far-fetched”."
- Look Out—He’s Got a Phone! - Worrying implications of the laughably insecure nature of new technologies on which we increasingly rely: "More than three million American heart patients carry around these small, computerized devices, which monitor their heartbeat and deliver jolts of electricity to stabilize it when needed. To check and adjust these devices, many doctors use wand-like wireless programmers that they wave a few inches above patients’ chests—a straightforward and seemingly safe procedure. But now, with a custom-built transmitter, Jack had discovered how to signal an I.C.D. from 30 feet away. It reacted as if the signal were in fact coming from the manufacturer’s official I.C.D. programmer. Instructed by the counterfeit signal, the I.C.D. suddenly spat out 830 volts—an instantly lethal zap. Had the device been connected to an actual human heart, the fatal episode would likely have been blamed on a malfunction."
- Letter to Santa from Fort Collins kids(1906) - "The Fort Collins Weekly Express asked every little boy and girl, under the age of ten, whose parents read the Express to write a letter to Santa. They said they would print as many letters as possible so 'Santa was sure to see them.'... They should tell Santa what they would like him to bring and what they would like him to bring some other little child who is very poor as Santa would like those letters best of all. Below are some of the letters that children sent." Teddy bears, rocking horses, and a double-barrelled shotgun: not so different from kids nowadays
- Pong Reborn - A project to recreate Pong's original hardware implementation, starting from the original schematics: "Unfortunately, many of the logic chips that make up Pong are no longer readily available. There are newer parts that will perform the same function but they have different pin connections. I started by re-drawing and adapting some the circuits to the available parts."
- Utopian for Beginners - "In 2004, [John Quijada] published a monograph on the Internet that was titled “Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language.” Written like a linguistics textbook, the fourteen-page Web site ran to almost a hundred and sixty thousand words. It documented the grammar, syntax, and lexicon of a language that Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time." All about invented languages, and the astonishing tale of how Quijada's project led to attending conferences with what turned out to be leading right-wing Eastern European terrorists
- I saw paranormal Santa Claus - "'We [were] driving by a lonely McDonald’s and we [saw] something dashing through the clouds. We could all make out Santa’s sleigh and 9 reindeer including Rudolph’s nose.' This is just one of the many Santa sightings that have recently been spotlighted on a website devoted to true-life tales of the unexplained. The person who compiled them, a veteran paranormal researcher named Stephen Wagner, is of the opinion that these accounts should be afforded the same respect as those concerning, say, Bigfoot or the Lost City of Atlantis, which represents a significant departure in a field that is sensitive about exposure to ridicule" Ho ho ho
- ****ed Up Knitting - Had to use a URL shortener to get the link past the naughty words filter Probably the Internet's finest collection of WTF knitting and crochet, with delights such as this:
Happy invoicing!
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