Link Sausage [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

BlockDeath, a Lego museum of horrors. Very slow to load, very quick to page through.
Eeeeeeee! Predator's view of a cat! Yet another adorable (and in this case also rather dramatic) photo of Preia, the cat of emmett_the_sane and cyan_blue. Impressive.
Results of the annual human vs. horse race
Teen in trouble over $3.16 tax return
I wonder a) how loud one of these is and b) whether anyone could a working model up and running between now and Pennsic: the HumCooler, refrigeration with no moving parts and no electricity. [EDIT 2004-05-06: stale link replaced with current address of that page.]
Thanks to speaker2animals for this link to something that I think Fred had told me about in conversation before: The Messerschmidt ME-163 Komet, a rocket powered interceptor aircraft. Fascinating aircraft, harrowing test-flight stories, looks and sounds like cheese 1950s science fiction movie fighters, not real-life 1940s aircraft. And the things were tiny.
speaker2animals also pointed out that our government has basically performed a real-life version of the famous "Schroedinger's Cat" thought-exercise, Schroedinger's Despot. "You've got this somewhat feared ruler of a nation of several million people, and he's sitting in a bunker somewhere in Iraq [...]"
And merde pointed out this fascinating article about Pykrete. Battleships and aircraft carriers made of a funky ice that takes forever to melt and is nearly bulletproof. Floating islands. More WWII tech that sounds like science fiction. Now I want an ice boat. "Pyke envisioned ships as vast and solid as icebergs. You could make the sides of your boat tens of feet thick, hundreds if you felt like it, and bullets or torpedoes would bounce away or knock off pathetically ineffectual chunks. And when a torpedo did knock a chunk away, so? You were floating in a sea of raw repair material. Given how long it took pykrete to melt, and the minimal onboard refrigeration equipment needed to stay frozen and afloat, it would be months or years before the boats exhausted their usefulness."
Fred pointed out this article about giant electromagnets for mooring ships instead of using ropes. "If it works, they say the system could save them around 5 million Euro a year in labour costs, and speed ships' average turnaround times by 40 minutes." And, "Docking magnets have always been ruled out in the past because of the risk of damaging sensitive cargo or on-board equipment [...] Now Martin Verweij and Erik Fiktorie of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands claim to have developed an electromagnet that generates a magnetic field that does not penetrate too far into the ship."
bikergeek posted geek installation instructions for love, clever enough to not be cloying while making its points. Worth the time it takes to read.