Busy spiders in British Columbia weave a 60 acre web

Insert any and all bug movie cliches here. The photos of this thing are amazing…

A biology professor in northern British Columbia has spotted a clover field crawling with spiders. Brian Thair of the College of New Caledonia in Prince George said he saw a silky, white web stretching 60 acres across a field.

“When you see horror movies with spider web festooned from this place to that place and so on, it comes nowhere near approaching what occurred in this field,” Thair told CBC Radio’s As It Happens.

A typical barbwire fence on wood posts surrounded the field about six kilometres east of McBride in the Robson Valley. Thair said it looked like the whole area was covered with an opaque, white plastic grocery store bag.

So did like another one of the Seals open up or something?

What’s the deal with Enoch Root?

Tons of thoughts about the Enoch Root character in Neal Stephenson‘s Cryptonomicon. I figured there was something up with Root because of his name: Enoch, a Biblical character that gains some sort of transdimensional Enlightenment. And Root, which is the name of the superuser administrative All Powerful account on *nix systems.

Enoch Root, the shadowy deus-ex-machina/Ascended Master of Neal Stephenson’s brilliant Cryptonomicon is the subject of much debate. Root appears to die midway through the book, in a scene set during WWII, only to reappear in modern times. Inquiring minds want to know: did Stephenson make a boo-boo? Is there more than one Enoch Root? Is he immortal? Here is a great deal of speculation on the subject, from both informed sources and astute guessers:

Here’s my guess: Enoch Root is an alchemist who carries the philosopher’s stone around in a cigar box. He really did die in WWII but was re-vivified by the stone. Consider:

  1. Enoch’s age is difficult to discern, and he does not seem to get older.
  2. The contents of the cigar box seem to have healing powers.
  3. When Detachment 2702 is in Italy, Enoch Root says that he can speak Italian but would sound like a “16th century alchemist” or something similar (don’t have the book in front of me). At first, I assumed that he learned scholarly Italian, but perhaps he was telling the literal truth.
  4. The symbol on the cover of Cryptonomicon is one used by alchemists.

[via Boing Boing]

Heeyaaahhh!!! Spaceward Ho! 5 released

spacewardho5Great Cthulhu, it’s a good day today! Delta Tao released a public beta version of Spaceward Ho! 5. Spaceward Ho! is one of the all-time great Mac games. I burned at least a half-dozen or so months on this back in my Mac IIsi days. New features include native OS X support, and (gulp) Internet play via spacewardho.net.

There goes Thanksgiving break.

Radio Shack ends asking for customer info

Halle-freaking-luah! I avoided buying anything from them no matter how close the store was because I was tired of providing a name and address every time I bought a battery.

For the record, if you ever get asked for a resident address and don’t want to give out your real one, use 1313 S. Harbor Blvd., Anaheim, CA 92802. It’s the address for Disneyland.

[via Slashdot]

French Intellectuals to be Deployed in Afghanistan To Convince Taleban of Non-Existence of God

So good, it needs to be posted…

The ground war in Afghanistan hotted up yesterday when the Allies revealed plans to airdrop a platoon of crack French existentialist philosophers into the country to destroy the morale of Taleban zealots by proving the non-existence of God.

Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or ‘Black Berets’, will be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despondency and existential anomie among the enemy. Hardened by numerous intellectual battles fought during their long occupation of Paris’s Left Bank, their first action will be to establish a number of pavement cafes at strategic points near the front lines. There they will drink coffee and talk animatedly about the absurd nature of life and man’s lonely isolation in the universe. They will be accompanied by a number of heartbreakingly beautiful girlfriends who will further spread dismay by sticking their tongues in the philosophers’ ears every five minutes and looking remote and unattainable to everyone else.

Their leader, Colonel Marc-Ange Belmondo, spoke yesterday of his confidence in the success of their mission. Sorbonne graduate Belmondo, a very intense and unshaven young man in a black pullover, gesticulated wildly and said, “The Taleban are caught in a logical fallacy of the most ridiculous. There is no God and I can prove it. Take your tongue out of my ear, Juliet, I am talking.”

Marc-Ange plans to deliver an impassioned thesis on man’s nauseating freedom of action with special reference to the work of Foucault and the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

However, humanitarian agencies have been quick to condemn the operation as inhumane, pointing out that the effects of passive smoking from the Frenchmens’ endless Gitanes could wreak a terrible toll on civilians in the area.

Sioux City, Iowa’s airport may no longer SUX

Until then, it really SUX.

SIOUX CITY, Iowa – The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), after denying a request by Sioux City officials to change its official three-letter airport code from SUX to another designation, may reverse its decision.

Airport Director Larry Hobald said the western Iowa municipality appealed the ruling after the FAA refused its initial request made last March.

“We feel vindicated and hopeful,” said Sioux City chamber of commerce spokesperson Wendy Warf. “Residents here are quite conservative and are embarrassed when tourists and relatives ask why “SUX” tags have been attached to their luggage.”