What goes up must come down

Going up:

Apparently, Intel employee and new Slashdot-celebrity (poor girl) Sarah Sharp is into open source rocketry. The stated point is to put a rocket into orbit. Most awesome.

Coming down:

A kid in Germany got hit in the hand a tiny meteor (which became a meteorite very shortly thereafter). He got a slight scar, but that's it.

Tank Man

It's been 20 years since the Tiananmen Square massacre and the taking of the iconic picture and footage of the man who stared down a column of tanks: Tank Man. PBS has a special on it.

As you're staring at the sun

My ridiculously powerful sneezes are often caused by stepping into a bright area from a dark area, usually caused by the sun. It turns out this is called the photic sneeze reflex.

It could be worse, I could sneeze every time I think about sex or when I'm full.

The Chemicals Between Us

In this video, Helen Fisher discusses her studies of the chemistry of love and lust. One interesting facet is that she warns that SSRI antidepressants tend to break the brain chemistry mechanisms for love.

Channelling Youtube

Two youtube channels here:

Lyrics for Video Games: Best one probably being Ducktales WITH Lyrics.

How It Should Have Ended: Best one I've seen is Ocean's 40.

Who Will Think of the Children? Nicholas Winton Will

In 1938 and '39, a man named Nicholas Winton saved many, many children's lives.

It doesn't get any niftier (though the circumstances decidedly weren't).

Searching for the NSX of programming languages

Programming.reddit.com had a discussion about an interesting analysis of how languages relate as far as speed versus code size. The analysis is based on data from The Computer Language Benchmarks Game, which takes submissions of programs in different languages to loosely compare the performances of the languages.

Both the blog article and the reddit discussion are worth reading. The reddit page includes posts by both the author of the article, gmarceau, and the one of the Benchmarks Game's maintainers, iguoy.