Things too good to pass up but not good enough to merit their own posts:
This post at English Russia.com remembers some of the more prevalent urban legends that were common among Russians during the Soviet era. A lot of them involve being poisoned by evil Western imperialists, as you might expect, particularly through our evil blue jeans, but there are also the apparently universal legends about rats in food products, certain products being notorious aphrodesiacs, and the occasional corpse in the tanker truck.
Those of us who were paying attention to the Internet back in the early 1990s remember a time before the “World Wide Web”, when the online universe consisted of several distinct provinces: Usenet, FTP servers and “Archie” searches, and “gophers”. Gophers were publicly available databases that contained all sorts of things, but usually documents pertaining to a particular university’s research or something similar, named after the mascot of the University of Minnesota, which created the first one. The advent of the web collapsed most of those distinct information sources into one giant black hole of information, but there were still gopher sites on line right up until the last couple of years. This post at BoingBoing tells us that one guy captured a snapshot of everything he could still find on gopher sites in 2007 and saved it all as one big database of about 40 gigs’ worth of data. Because it’s almost all text, the data can be compressed into 15GB, at which point the guy ought to just copy it onto a USB flash drive and put it on his keychain for safekeeping.
Gizmag reports that the University of Granada in Spain has developed an improved artificial skin that uses a compound of fibrin from real skin samples and a seaweed derivative called agarose. It’s stretchier than previous artificial skin materials, making it a better candidate for use with burn victims.
I always enjoy the posts from TV writer-extraordinaire Ken Levine, but I was especially charmed by his fond recollection of actress Elizabeth Montgomery. He nursed a crush for her for years (and, seriously, who hasn’t) but only ever got to see her from afar despite his involvement in many TV shows over the years. Sadly, she passed away about a dozen years ago at the early age of 62, but through the magic of television will be wiggling her nose for us forever.
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