I Believe Two Things

Best… related topics… ever:

Boy Scouts in the News

Vehicle Power Interface with the Doors Open

If you have an extra $75,000 saved up and you’re looking for a good Valentine’s Day present, you could buy the “Vehicle Power Interface” for the Hubble Space Telescope on eBay!

According to the auction’s description, the console weighs 2,750 pounds and was used to provide power to the telescope and test its on-board power systems while the telescope was still on the ground. An accompanying log book includes details of the equipment’s usage.

On the other hand, the eBay seller has no obvious affiliation with NASA and has only four reviews (all positive), so I’ll probably save my $75,000 for other completely impractical pieces of NASA equipment that may become available in the future. Ideally I’d like to hold out for a Canadarm.

(via Boing Boing)

Clearly the zoo’s tiger fencing is working perfectly.

Fully Functional Tiger Fence

Scholastic book fair catalogs are always great for a laugh. (No, really.) In the Fall 2010 catalog, these two books appear side-by-side:

The Girls’ Book of Friendship: How to Be the Best Friend Ever

Learn How To:

✔ Stay Friends for Life
✔ Help a Friend
✔ And More!

and

The Boys’ Book of Adventure: Are You Ready to Face the Challenge?

Learn How To:

✔ Dive for Treasure
✔ Slay a Werewolf
✔ And More!

Don’t tell me there’s gender equality in kindergarten.

And my favorite part? The pair sits below the heading “New York Times Best-Selling Series!”

We just ordered Sophie’s school pictures online. Using sample pictures with models (letting you choose which model looks most like your child), the Lifetouch website does its best to offer up-sells — added bonuses for an extra charge. Do we want an extra thousand wallet prints, or a selection of multiple poses so we can choose our favorite?

The best option is this, offering to retouch the picture to remove acne:

Retouching?

Even better than the existence of this service is the brilliant marketing: the default choice is “Basic Retouching” showing the handsome young man you surely want printed in your son’s yearbook. Or, if you’re a cheapskate, you can choose to see his face dotted with acne.

This is an actual blurb Comcast offers describing one of the movies available to watch free in the On Demand listings:

Bloody mayhem in the Champagne Room. In the near future, a secret government reanimation virus is released, and lands in a strip club. The virus spreads, creating Super Zombie Strippers. TV Premiere

Jenna Jameson, Robert Englund

I can’t tell if that’s horrifying or awesome.

I’ve started getting caught up on season 5 of Doctor Who, and (of course) reading about it on Wikipedia at the same time. Since The Doctor’s new companion works as a “kiss-o-gram” at the beginning of the first episode, one thing naturally lead to another, and I landed on the Strip-o-gram article.

This type of entertainment became popular in the 1970s…. Exact dates are difficult to ascertain however, as there does not appear to have been any major research carried out on the subject.

Wait, should there have been major research on the subject? Should there have been any research on the subject?

(And in case you were wondering, my fianceé did indeed see this post when all I’d written was “Extensive Stripper Research,” and now I’m in trouble.)

First I find crazy backyard offices and now it’s crazy office chairs:

Human Hamster Wheel?

The idea of curling up in there with a laptop makes me nervous about the entire idea of working from home.

(This came up in a search for “co-working” facilities, which I’m bound to discuss at length at some point.  These chairs live at a place called Cohere.)

These graphics depict the international standard signaling techniques used to communicate with helicopter pilots on or near a helipad.  These particular signals tell the pilot to lift off or move downward, respectively.

They’re also fantastic dance moves as exhibited by one of the lesser known Village People:  the Aircraft Marshaller.

This is my favorite unintentionally funny database table name ever:

skin_condition

This application, like many applications we create, supports different templates so that the application can look like a natural part of a variety of different websites.  That’s a skin.

Each such site might want to limit which records are shown, so the School of Management can show only their own faculty’s records, for example.  That’s a condition.

A condition for a particular skin?  A skin_condition, of course!