Eric Bodden

-1°C

I am truly amazed by this picture of the Phoenix Lander, parachuting down to the surface of Mars. Not only does this image come from a planet that’s damn far away, the photo was also shot from an incredibly large distance. MRO was 760km away from the lander when it took this shot. I would like a camera like that!

This second image is not less remarkable, showing the lander itself (top left), the discarded heat shield (middle) and the parachute (bottom left).

It’s really true: you live and learn! Today I browsed Wikipedia to look up Aspirin, only to find out that the produce Bayer once advertised Heroin as cough medicine!!! Look at the ad! Well, who knows – it probably really helps, but that’s one of the few things I’d rather not wanna figure out by myself though.

Credits go to this webpage

1. He had only one major publication.
2. It was in Hebrew.
3. It had no references.
4. It wasn’t published in a refereed journal.
5. Some even doubt he wrote it himself.
6. It may be true that he created the world, but what has he done since then?
7. His cooperative efforts have been quite limited.
8. The scientific community has had a hard time replicating his results.
9. He never applied to the Ethics Board for permission to use human subjects.
10. When one experiment went awry he tried to cover it up by drowning the subjects.
11. When subjects didn’t behave as predicted, he deleted them from the sample.
12. He rarely came to class, just told students to read the Book.
13. Some say he had his son teach the class.
14. He expelled his first two students for learning.
15. Although there were only ten requirements, most students failed his tests.
16. His office hours were infrequent and usually held on a mountaintop.

Varargs is a feature that allows you to pass a variable-length list of arguments to a method, e.g. in Java 5. The implementation in Java boxes these arguments automatically into an array, which makes the implementation backwards compatible. As I just found out, this technique has actually been patented by HP. Interesting… I wonder whether Sun actually licensed that technology for Java somehow.

Check out this guy, Robert Muraine, a “Popper” from LA. He so gotta be not from this world… Unbelievable!

Montreal auditions start on Tuesday

“Dooring” is a popular sport in Quebec and involves sitting and waiting in your car until an innocent biker rides by and then opening the door just at the right second so to cause maximal damage to the biker and his bike, probably even at risk of damaging your own car.

Happened to me right today in Montreal. The result: I injured my knee and my bike is partially damaged. The car’s door now has a huge dent, so at least this moron gets to suffer a bit too. The “funny” thing is that Quebecers apparently like dooring so much that they have decided that it’s not necessary to provide the poor biker with any kind of compensation! Both the car driver and the police that I called made it almost look like it was my own fault to drive close to a parked car!!! How can I dare to drive not in the middle of the road but on the right-hand side? Excuuuuuse me!??

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