John Schwartz has a great piece in the NYT on system breakdowns — he starts out with the recent airline system clusterfck at LAX that stranded 17,000 passengers on planes for hours one day, after computers for the United States Customs and Border Protection agency went down and stayed down for nine hours. “Hackers? Nope. Though it was the kind of chaos that malevolent computer intruders always seem to be creating in the movies, the problem was traced to a malfunctioning network card on a desktop computer.”
WSJ article by Lee Gomes asks whether sonic technology limitations in iPods and MP3s are wrecking popular music.
Why is it important to pay attention to crackpot inventors? Jer Falludi at Worldchanging offers insights on how to spot value in kooky creations. Also my tinfoil beanie thong and matching steampunk buttplug can cure cancer, pls send money order for blueprints and investment plan.
Here is a freaky 28-second video clip in which an animated, 4-legged, headless naked ladybody crawls like a crab across a living room. NSFW I guess, but it’s less than half a minute so your boss probably won’t catch you anyway.
DeBeers uses zeppelins (oh sorry, “semi-rigid manned aerostats”) to sniff out diamonds with gravity measuring devices.