A ferry designed by anime artist Leiji Matsumoto is now plying the waters in Japan.  
Mephron

Ah, computer humor. Tim Self accidentally deallocated:

Tim Self, Be's vice-president of product marketing, ceased to exist today in a freak accident involving the BeOS port of Squeak, a popular Smalltalk variant.

Be programmer Dave Bort was experimenting with Squeak destructors. In an attempt to trigger the Squeak system's garbage collection, he wrote a class which included in the destructor the assignment "self := nil". When execution reached this point, Tim Self suddenly vanished from this plane of existance. This caused quite a stir, as he had been attending a meeting at the time.

Excuse me, ma'am, but the gentleman at that table has sent you a FYH 2005 energy and water appropriations bill rider for a $52.3 million solid-waste treatment plant upgrade in your home congressional district, with his compliments. --Mark Briscoe

15 April 2004

Trust no one. Learn how to unbezzle a fortune.

I had launched my company ten years earlier with just $52, and with the help of a talented staff our business had grown to a multi-million-dollar a year chain of 20 sites spread across seven states. We had a team of people all working toward the same dream: building a company, establishing careers, creating a future. And all that time our bookkeeper was stealing the dream.

Embezzlers are some of the nicest people in the world.

Wide-eyed mothers of preschoolers. Your best friend. CPAs with impeccable resumes. People who profess deep religious commitments. Your partner. Loyal business managers who arrive early, stay late, and never take a vacation. And sometimes, even FAMILY MEMBERS. So if you're looking for a sinister waxed mustache and shifty eyes, you're in for a surprise--scoundrels come in every description.

I found out at midnight in a Kansas City hotel room. Returning to my room to a blinking red phone light, I picked up the receiver and returned Jim's call.

"You know that note you left about doing an outside audit?" he said. "Well today Erick confessed to stealing $40,000." Jim was our vice president; Erick was the accountant.

Gosh, I felt like a dummy. But now I know it wouldn't have mattered if I was an MBA, a CPA, and a Ph.D. Listen, if you think you can set up safeguards that rule out internal theft, you're kidding yourself. There are none. If a person wants to steal, they'll find a way. First thing in the morning I got another call. This time, from my administrative assistant.

"I thought you'd want to know," she said. "Erick showed up for work today. He's sitting at his desk. What should I do?" I couldn't believe it! "Ask him what he's doing there," I said.

"I need my last paycheck," he said.

"I think you already took it," she said, officially relieving Erick of his responsibilities.

Primes and the number spiral. Spin it and get hypnotized by numbers!  

The phases of Pluto's moon Charon go through a cycle that is as long as Pluto's orbital period.  

Go have some fun blowing stuff up with the meteor impact effects simulator. There's some problems with it (the simulator states that a 750 meter wide cratering event should happen every 25 years), but it's otherwise quite fun. And scary, looked at another way.  
Betty Ragan

Who needs drugs when you are very slightly mad? Hey, I am therefore a very cheap date! Or a poor standup comic with limited potential! --Jen Smurlo Jasper

13 April 2004

AfAP was, oddly, found via a Google search for a term (Murdertron 9000, made up for a political gag back in 2003) which, at the time, showed up only on my page. Now it also shows up on another page. Micromeme.

(Yes, I know this isn't a meme.)  

Harlequin Romance, the company best known for launching Fabio's career, is a player in the manga publishing industry in Japan. The world gets smaller every day.  
Amanda Babcock

A member of the Gamma Phi Beta sorority urged her sorority sisters to lie in order to increase their blood donations, even at the (slim) risk of spreading infections into the blood banks. Remember, kids, the Greek system builds lifelong bonds...and so does prison.  
Jessica Gothie

Alyce's brush with David Paul Hammer reads like a very odd episode of Law and Order. Except that it's true.  
Alyce Wilson

All of my plans! Ruined because of this travesty of a pork-chop ray! --David Bort

12 April 2004

Angels from Another Pin now enters its fourth year. We began beating our head into the heavy concrete wall of knowledge on April 12, 2001.  

A Miracle of Science has, of course, been updated regularly over the last month. If you haven't looked lately, I recommend starting on page 173 and working forward to today's update.  

Precoveries are when you look at old data and find an astronomical object which is known now, but which wasn't known at the time the old data were gathered. Quaoar is a relatively newly-found object, discovered in 2002 orbiting in the Kuiper Belt out past Pluto. Its precoveries go as far back as 1983. Precoveries help to refine our knowledge of an object's orbit around the Sun.

It's amazing what you can do with computers today; when I was in college, we learned about using two photographic plates to find moving objects, looking for planetoids in orbit. Anyone making "uphill both ways in the snow" jokes will be hit with my copy of the Feynman Lectures.  

The last veteran of the Crimean War has died at the age of about 160. Timothy, a tortoise who was the mascot aboard the HMS Queen during the 1854 bombardment of Sevastopol, has been in retirement in the English countryside since 1892.