Two helicopters sit at the entrance.

Cueva del Fantasma, Venezuela.

He's here. He's Weir. Get used to it.

Weir, who finished fifth last week in the men's figure skating competition, showed up at the Russia House after midnight Tuesday, for his second consecutive night of partying with his favorite comrades.

This time, he wore a beaver-and-python jacket and True Religion jeans, blending in with the other men and women in fur and designer duds. In minutes, he had a leggy Russian woman in stilettos on each of his arms. The trio giggled as they skipped past the hors d'oeuvres.

"These are friends of the lawyer of the richest man in Moscow," Weir said in passing, as the women tossed their long hair. "These Russians know how to have a good time."

The women interrupt him: "C'mon, Johnny," one brunette said, in a heavy Russian accent. "We want to dance."

"Dve minuti!" he yelled out in Russian, telling them to wait two minutes before running off.

Link.

I guess the Infinite Improbability Drive is no longer fiction. . .

I've been trying to do this for years, but without any luck. A computer that can solve a problem without actually solving the problem:

Utilizing two coupled optical interferometers, nested within a third, Kwiat's team succeeded in counterfactually searching a four-element database using Grover's quantum search algorithm. "By placing our photon in a quantum superposition of running and not running the search algorithm, we obtained information about the answer even when the photon did not run the search algorithm," said graduate student Onur Hosten, lead author of the Nature paper. "We also showed theoretically how to obtain the answer without ever running the algorithm, by using a 'chained Zeno' effect."

Link.

What ho, old chap!

P.G. Wodehouse, creator of many a memorable character (among them Hildebrand Spencer Poyns de Burgh John Hanneyside Coombe-Crombie, 12th Earl of Dreever, and of course the immortal Bertie Wooster), remains enduringly popular in India.

England has been cool to him ever since he agreed to make several "non-political" broadcasts on German radio. The Germans had captured him during their advance through Belgium and France in 1940, finding him still bunging about in his seaside villa at Le Touquet. He was held captive for about a year, and upon his release in June 1941, took up residence at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin.

After the war, George Orwell defended "the wretched Wodehouse" and his work with typical perspicacity:

In the desperate circumstances of the time, it was excusable to be angry at what Wodehouse did, but to go on denouncing him three or four years later -- and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with conscious treachery -- is not excusable. Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. In France, all kinds of petty rats -- police officials, penny-a-lining journalists, women who have slept with German soldiers -- are hunted down while almost without exception the big rats escape. In England the fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by Conservatives who were practising appeasement in 1938 and Communists who were advocating it in 1940. I have striven to show how the wretched Wodehouse -- just because success and expatriation had allowed him to remain mentally in the Edwardian age -- became the corpus vile in a propaganda experiment, and I suggest that it is now time to regard the incident as closed. If Ezra Pound is caught and shot by the American authorities, it will have the effect of establishing his reputation as a poet for hundreds of years; and even in the case of Wodehouse, if we drive him to retire to the United States and renounce his British citizenship, we shall end by being horribly ashamed of ourselves. Meanwhile, if we really want to punish the people who weakened national morale at critical moments, there are other culprits who are nearer home and better worth chasing.

May the Force of Love be with you.

Of the Star Wars valentines, this is probably my favorite:


This one, though, is a close second:



(Thanks, Something Awful via BoingBoing.)

I married a supermodal.

Voltaire wrote, "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien," which is to say that if you're waiting to marry the perfect spouse, you may be ruining your chances to marry a reasonably satisfactory person instead. Further musings here. My solution was to meet the perfect person as soon as possible.

Get a human. Now.

Most valuable page on the whole internet? Quite possibly.

(Thanks, Lagniappe.)

Lord, he was born a ramblin' man.

The hobo traveler is a little chary with personal details, but his sprawling web site is a treat.

Mexico (Sim) City

Housing developments in Mexico City. Photographs taken by a helicopter pilot. He has other good ones, too.

Thanks, BLDGBLOG.

OMG u noob!

This is one of the funniest things I have ever read on the internets. The only thing missing is a "w00t!" or two.

If World War Two had been an online Real Time Strategy game, the chat room traffic would have gone something like this . . .