Category: Linklog

In a bold move to counter Google’s online pre-eminence, Microsoft said Friday that it had made an unsolicited offer to buy Yahoo for about $44.6 billion in a mix of cash and stock. This made Yahoo’s stock jump +97.73% to $28 a share.

Jason Kottke live blogged last night’s, presumably, now infamous episode of Mythbusters when an airplane on a conveyor belt defied conventional logic and took off. It’s a really complicated matter of physics going on here, but the jist is this… An airplane is not like a car, it’s wheels are not where the power from the engines goes. They are free spinning with very little frictional contact to the rest of the plane, the power from the engines pulls/pushes the air around it allowing forward momentum. The conveyor belt could have been going a million times the speed of light in the opposite direction to the plane and as long as the engine was going at “take-off” speed, the plane would take off… Awesome huh?

A “large” US spy satellite has gone out of control and is expected to crash to Earth some time in late February or March, government sources say. So right now, everyone has a 50/50 chance of meeting this satellite up close and personal. Always look up, and park your car in an underground lot…

Nine D.C. government employees are being fired for viewing pornography on their work computers, including three who looked at inappropriate sexual images an average of about 200 times per work day in 2007, city officials said yesterday. Do the maths children, 39,000 visits a year, 200 times a work day, that’s one porn site every 2½ minutes… How can you do work if you’re visiting a porn site every couple of minutes?

Star Trek Teaser Trailer. Hmmm, only shows the Enterprise under construction… Definite tease.

Hollywood actor Heath Ledger has been found dead at a residence in downtown Manhattan. “He was found unconscious at the apartment and pronounced dead,” the New York Police Department said, adding that pills were found near the body. Man, that really sucks… Only the good die young

The Nominees for the 80th Annual Academy Awards. No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood lead the way with 8 nominations. Atonement and Michael Clayton not far behind with 7. But will there be a ceremony at all?

iRovr, an ultra-mobile community for iPhone and iPod Touch users. Yeah, so the clique can be more cliquey… But it’s actually quite interesting as it’s all handled through the mail.app.

Flickr announces The Commons. It’s a pilot project created in partnership with The Library of Congress. The Library has an enormous photo catalogue, containing over a million photos. The Library team has chosen about 1,500 photos each from two of their more popular collections to show on Flickr and they invite the public to help describe brief moments in history by adding tags or leaving comments. Very cool if you ask me. [via]

How to make a webclip icon for the Apple iPhone. I’m sure you iPhone users have seen these now, now make your own… I’ve now added a Blossom webclip icon here, so she’s now a favicon, avatar, gravatar and webclip icon, what next?

Sir Edmund Hillary, who made a historic first ascent of the world’s highest peak, Mount Everest, has died aged 88. He was the first man to climb the 8,850m (29,035ft) peak, with Tenzing Norgay, on 29 May 1953. Returning to Everest’s South Col camp, he famously greeted another member of the British expedition group with the words: “Well, George, we’ve knocked the bastard off.”

100 things we didn’t know this time last year. “11. Astronauts wear nappies during launch and re-entry because they can’t stop what they’re doing should they need to urinate.” Their also handy for driving across the country to stalk a lovers rival too…

The New England Patriots’ shot at history Saturday night will be available for every household in the country with a television after months of wrangling. The league announced that the NFL Network feed will be simulcast on NBC and CBS. It’s a major concession by league officials, who repeatedly said they would not show the game anywhere but the NFL Network.

The bacon flowchart. Proof that bacon is the only answer.

What happened to the ball from the final out of the 2007 World Series? Jonathan Papelbon’s dog ate it.