If..Else Log

Dragon in a jar mystery

I actually read about this last week but better late than never.

The baby dragon, in a sealed jar, was discovered with a metal tin containing paperwork in old-fashioned German of the 1890s.

Allistair Mitchell, who was asked to investigate the dragon by a friend, David Hart, who discovered it in his garage, speculates that German scientists may have attempted to use the dragon to hoax their English counterparts at the end of the 19th century, when rivalry between the countries was intense.

"At the time, scientists were the equivalent of today's pop stars. It would have been a great propaganda coup for the Germans if it had come off," Mr Mitchell said.

"I've shown the photos to someone from Oxford University and he thought it was amazing. Obviously he could not say if it was real and wanted to do a biopsy."

The documents suggest that the Natural History Museum turned the dragon away, possibly because they suspected it was a trick, and sent it to be destroyed. But it appears a porter intercepted the jar and took it home. The papers suggest the porter may have been Frederick Hart - David Hart's grandfather.

Mr Mitchell said: "The dragon is flawless, from the tiny teeth to the umbilical cord. It could be made from indiarubber, because Germany was the world's leading manufacturer of it at the time, or it could be made of wax. It has to be fake. No one has ever proved scientifically that dragons exist. But everyone who sees it immediately asks, 'Is it real?"'

Yet another set of random links.

Editorial Pet Peeves
Interview Wiki Page
Pixar Shorts
Classic games remade in Flash
Classic games remade in Excel

QOTD:
"Plans are worthless, planning is indispensable." Eisenhower

Business 2.0 yearly "101 Dumbest Moments in Business."

Here's no 9:

In April, Swedish furniture giant Ikea explains that a children's bunk bed called the Gutvik is named for "a tiny town in Sweden." Announcing that bit of etymology becomes necessary when Germans point out that, in their neck of the woods, the word sounds like a phrase that means "good f***." Ikea yanks the Gutvik from its catalogs in Germany.

20 Questions: A online demostration of a neural net.

>From: jstracke@centive.com (John Stracke)
>Subject: The Problem with Rover

NASA has lost touch with the first Mars Rover; it's responding to pings, but they can't get any telemetry back. I think I know what's happened: the onboard computer has gotten confused and decided all its images are underexposed, so it's diverted power to charging the capacitor for its spotlight. You see, the Spirit is willing, but the flash is weak.

>From: mbkramer510@yahoo.com (Mitch Kramer)
>Subject: Mars rover

NASA says it will take two weeks to fix the software on the Mars Rover. Actually, it should only take 3 minutes to fix. They've budgeted the rest of the time for being on hold with Dell Technical Support.

Get the fastest wireless data transfer possible

Some other links for my own reference:
Blog as Contact Manager
Faux Columns
Definition Lists
MozPHP: A Mozilla PHP integration package that allows you to execute PHP scripts in Mozilla directly without the need for a local HTTP server.
Basic PS stuff
PS Lomo

QotD: If there is a 50-50 chance that something can go wrong, then 9 times out of ten it will. (Paul Harvey News, 1979)

CNN:

Britain's biggest-selling hiking magazine apologized Wednesday after its latest issue contained a route that would lead climbers off the edge of a cliff on Britain's tallest peak.

The February edition of Trail magazine gives advice to walkers caught in bad weather on Ben Nevis in Scotland about how to make a safe descent.

But the magazine's directions would instead lead readers off the north face of the 4,406-feet (1,322-meter) mountain, which is notorious for its changeable weather and has claimed the lives of several climbers.

Arghhhhhh, my eyes….. http://www.ifelse.co.uk.crazy.sytes.org/

Some links for my own benefit. Feel free to ignore.
Win32 to .Net map
MB/CPU temp comparison
Etch-A-Sketch art
Business blues
Luxury Type
Simple Tricks for More Usable Forms
Windows font survey result
VisiBone Font Survey Results - Browsershare
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (Peter Norvig)
VB.NET boolean operators and short-circuit evaluation

TheRegister:

In the first incident, highly-skilled operatives inadvertently drilled into the warhead's core, provoking a full-scale evacuation of Pantex. They later made a second Chernobylesque blunder by bodging a highly-explosive warhead part back together with tape.

Had they subsequently dropped the component, the likely outcome would have been a "violent reaction", with "potentially unacceptable consequences", as safety board chairman John T. Conway rather conservatively put it.

Pantex is operated by BWX Technologies Inc. The facility's website assures visitors that BWXT Pantex is "Maintaining the safety, security and reliability of America's nuclear weapons stockpile" through "Teamwork that delivers… Results!".