Cyclotron! Isotope! Logarithme!

One of the French Wikipedia's more amusing pages: Vocabulaire du capitaine Haddock. (Sadly, it is no longer named "list of Captain Haddock's insults".)

For those of you suffering from cultural deprivation, Captain Haddock is a friend of the young reporter Tintin. He is an old sea captain, and is therefore often drunk and forever cursing. Rather than the more usual grawlixes, Captain Haddock's cursing is inventive and often bizarre, calling people things like "bashi-bazouk", "macaque", or the three in the title of this post. (I don't know what the English translations are like, but I assume they kept the colour and variety of the insults. My school library only had the books in French.)

Wikipedia being Wikipedia and Tintin being extremely popular among French speakers, a list of all these diverse insults was created in 2004 and has now ballooned into a categorized, fully referenced list of links to dictionary meanings and articles. Isn't the Internet great?

Edible astronomy

I realize I am again dating myself, but back in the day I used to read a number of usenet groups; alt.folklore.urban was a particular favourite, and I still retain some quirks of textual style I picked up there. One newsgroup I always kept an eye on was alt.humor.best-of-usenet. I didn't, by design, have any original content; instead any particularly amusing post from any other newsgroup could be forwarded there. They weren't always funny, but some postings were downright hilarious. Recently I came across somebody's archive of their favourite postings, a number of which I remember. One I didn't see at the time I find hilarious: What if the moon were made of green cheese?

The science seems about right.

Safety

I certainly understand the value of workplace safety. But really, two pages of alarming safety warnings for a java tone generator applet?

Also, among the very numerous warnings:

All sounds produced by DFG modules are licensed by Digital Recordings for your personal, environmentally-responsible and non-commercial use only.

"All sounds" is just sine waves, so I'm not exactly sure they can claim copyright on them, let alone use copyright restrictions to prevent me from damaging the environment (with sine waves?!)

Best final sentence of an abstract ever

The edge of locality: visualizing a black hole from the inside

Authors: Andrew J S Hamilton, Gavin Polhemus (JILA)

(Submitted on 27 Mar 2009)

Abstract: We illustrate and discuss the view seen by an observer inside the horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole. The view as the observer approaches the central singularity is of particular interest because, according to ideas arising from "observer complementarity," points in opposite directions along the observer's past lightcone are at "the edge of locality," where standard flat-space quantum-field-theory commutation rules may be at the brink of failure. Near the singularity, the observer's view is aberrated by the diverging tidal force into a horizontal plane. The view in the horizontal plane is highly blueshifted, but all directions other than horizontal appear highly redshifted. We argue that the affine distance provides a canonical measure of distance along a light ray from emitter to observer. Since the affine distance is not directly measurable by the observer, we also consider perceptual distances, and argue that the trinocular distance (binocular distance is inadequate) provides an estimate of affine distance that would allow tree-leaping apes to survive in highly curved spacetime.

Boldface mine.