Crumb-disposing cutting board
Via the always-entertaining There, I Fixed It.
humor
Fiction science: Aliens, Predator, and Mega Shark infographics
The second graphic explains the physics behind what Boing-Boinger Jimmy Guterman has described as “the greatest scene ever in the greatest movie of all time,” viz. the destruction of a cruising jetliner by the eponymous “Mega Shark” from Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. You may be interested to know, for instance, that Mega Shark’s air attack requires that it break the surface of the water with a velocity of 710 km/hr, which is faster than a bullet train but not quite so fast as a Tomahawk missile.
Petition to establish “hella-” as SI prefix for octillion
Thanks to the prodigious growth of computer storage media over the past couple of decades, most people have a pretty good command of the metric (SI) prefixes for big numbers: a kilobyte is a thousand bytes, a megabyte is a million, a gigabyte is a billion, and a terabyte is a trillion. Some folks are already making noises about “petabyte”–or one quadrillion byte–storage media. After that comes “exabyte,” which, of course, would be a quintillion bytes. And beyond that you get into “Marx brothers” country. More than one wag has suggested that the as-yet-unnamed metric prefix to denote one octillion somethings-or-other should be “groucho” or “harpo.”
You win this round, engineers!
As a man with a degree in philosophy, another degree in chemistry, and three engineers in my immediate family, I have to admit this strip from Zach Weiner of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal pretty much hit me right between the eyes. [Thanks, Matt Mets!]
Amusing warning sign for CNC tools
So I don’t want to go too far down the “funny warning signs” rabbit hole (you could get a whole blog out of that, I think), but a commenter on last Tuesday’s “Big Scary Laser” warning sign post linked to this design, of hers, for a warning sign to go on robotic power tools. I get a huge kick out of the giant menacing robot with the buzz-saw hand. [Thanks, Jennifer!]
Best warning sign ever
Accidental blindness has never been so funny! You can download a high-res version from the always-entertaining Mike’s Electric Stuff. [via Boing, which is to say Boing]
UC Berkeley has “Nobel Laureate Only” parking spaces
Well, in terms of available parking, UC Berkeley makes UT Austin look like an airport remote lot in Iowa on a Wednesday in the summer. And according to this official page there are presently seven living Nobel laureates on the faculty there, so I’m guessing there must be at least seven NL parking spaces. Supposedly, regular mortals have to shell out $50 for presumptious malparkage among the elite.
