⇒ bits and pieces from the week

News.com.au story about a cane toad eating its natural predator, a snake here

Jackass mother takes 8 yr old son to TDK, resulting in fun and laughs for all. Story from an equally vapid reviewer.

Guide to all things Batman here
best Batman according to Cracked.com...awesome!
An electric car that doesn't look crap
Transistors on paper
Baton phone
S60 touch interface
Audi's new MMI
Uber-luxe Bentley laptop
Unisex tennis tourney coming. Preidiction? It will be played once, and never again. Ridiculous rule changes or not, Nadal/Federer's awesomeness will embarrass/destroy everyone else, especially female players who've never played all rounder-specialists like the two kings. I'm a realist, not sexist--just think about it. If you're rallying, the last person you want to rally against is Nadal, and he regularly thrashes people over 5 sets--how many female players regularly play 5 setters? The under-arm serve is utterly ridiculous/stupid. How will any one serve volley?
Genesis climber Mospaeda
Cheat Sheets. Tres useful
Hardware and tech how-tos
Wikipedia GPS entry.
10 ways to troubleshoot a slow PC
Latest Bush-ism. "Wall St got drunk"
Ridiculous RAM from Texas Memory
Photovoltaic window cells
HDTV Calibration
Hologram progress

Small venture capitalists: Y combinator. Good idea, if a bit greedy.
SE roundup
Kojima comments on gaming
Squidoo. Point your 'lens' over topics you know about and earn...something.
Wikigroaning. Gddmn hilarious!
LittleBigPlanet for PS3
Cracked.com video about amazing trick shots
Cracked.com article about Celebrities who might be superheroes
Cracked.com article about 7 who cheated death

Old Santa with humorous physics/joke (I remember bringing this in to my Physics class back in 2001):
Physics Of Santa Clause - Santa Is Dead Theory

As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help from that renowned scientific journal SPY magazine (January, 1990) - I am pleased to present the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus.

1. No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
2. There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.
3. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seemes logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
4. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal anount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth. 5.353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion: If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.

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