(via the BBC and a thesis student who pointed me at it) A new mineral matching its unique chemistry – as described in the film Superman Returns – has been identified in a mine in Serbia.

According to movie and comic-book storylines, kryptonite is supposed to sap Superman’s powers whenever he is exposed to its large green crystals.

The real mineral is white and harmless, says Dr Chris Stanley, a mineralogist at London’s Natural History Museum.

“I’m afraid it’s not green and it doesn’t glow either – although it will react to ultraviolet light by fluorescing a pinkish-orange,” he told BBC News.

Researchers from mining group Rio Tinto discovered the unusual mineral and enlisted the help of Dr Stanley when they could not match it with anything known previously to science.

Once the London expert had unravelled the mineral’s chemical make-up, he was shocked to discover this formula was already referenced in literature – albeit fictional literature.

“Towards the end of my research I searched the web using the mineral’s chemical formula – sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide – and was amazed to discover that same scientific name, written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luther from a museum in the film Superman Returns.

“The new mineral does not contain fluorine (which it does in the film) and is white rather than green but, in all other respects, the chemistry matches that for the rock containing kryptonite.”

The mineral is relatively hard but is very small grained. Each individual crystal is less than five microns (millionths of a metre) across.

The mineral cannot be called kryptonite under international nomenclature rules because it has nothing to do with krypton – a real element in the Periodic Table that takes the form of a gas.

Instead, it will be formally named Jadarite when it is described in the European Journal of Mineralogy later this year.

Read the rest

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I straightened out a Rubik’s Cube…
Well here you have it, supposedly. The first picture of Heath Ledger as the Joker in the new Batman movie. During a color test. You can see the scarring for the smile if you look. I dunno, he doesn’t look horrible, I have a feeling it will all look better with proper lighting and expression. Still, he looks kinda like Val Kilmer after a bender, but maybe that’s just me.

It would seem this is a fake. Hit the link for the guy who did it. Mind you it is still very on target with everything we’ve heard about what he will look like including the telephoto shots of on set stuff. So who the hell knows.

Did you know (you all probably did but I didn’t) that Yo-yo contests had a lot of different divisions?

• 1A The player uses a long sleeping yo-yo to perform string tricks.
• 2A The player uses two yo-yos simultaneously to perform reciprocating or looping tricks OR uses a long spinning yo-yo to perform tricks that involve manipulation of the string. This tends to be the most visually entertaining style with some players incorporating acrobatics into their routines.

Thanks, Wikipedia! Anyway, those are just two of them (See also: 3A, 4A, 5A, AP and CB) but those are two that I also happen to have the video of the winners of the 2006 Worlds Yo-Yo Contest. First up is Hiroyuki Suzuki the winner of the 1A contest:

Next we have Shinji Saito, the winner of the 2A contest:

Guh and also buh. I can not brain yet. I spent all weekend lost in trying to make a pitch work, only to realize that I couldn’t and I needed to flip the story around and change a hell of a lot to make it into something worth doing. Which is fine, but it set me back a few days. Which means that once again I’m losing ground. And it might all be worth it in the end, hell it probably will be, but right now it’s frustrating. On the other hand the angles I’m working now for this pitch increase its chances of getting a green light. And that would be so very sweet for so many reasons.

Which isn’t to say I did nothing all weekend. Just that most of the work I was doing involved thinking and staring off into space and watching things so my brain could process in the background.

So now I can’t brain.

I can look at pictures of baby emu, sure. That’s easy. I can think of all the things I need to work on when I get home and all the stuff I need to do today. Yup got those lists. I just can’t find it in me yet to be creative at all.

I can also find a wikipedia page that shows, graphically, how the whole cousin thing works. Which is right here. I never knew how the whole ‘first cousin once removed’ thing worked. Much less that there could be third cousin’s, three times removed.

So there ya go. Maybe later I’ll be able to brain.

So this morning I was fully woken to the sounds of music blasting into my apartment. The school next door is having some social thing and they have tied their music into the school’s PA system.

I am torn.

On the one hand I think it is damn cool. It builds a sense of community and it teaches the kids that school is a cool place, for more than just rote learning. It’s a place to be with your friends and where your parents can go too. All in all it’s a very cool idea and I am all for it.

On the other hand I just had to listen to Fegalicious very loudly. I can’t play my own music or watch TV or anything because in order to drown out whatever they want to play I would have to go deaf.

Hello Kitty-Man – defender of the kawaii,
protector of those without mouths of their own!

TCP!
UDP!
FTP!
SSH!
HTTP!

GO INTARWEBS!

With your powers combined I am Captain Intarwebs!

Captain Intarwebs, he’s our hero,
Gonna take productivity down to zero,
He’s our lameness magnified,
And he’s trolling on the intarweb side

Captain Intarwebs, he’s our hero,
Gonna take productivity down to zero,
Gonna help him post our cat pics,
Bad guys who like to look at goatse.cx

“You’ll pay for this Captain Intarwebs!”

(chanting)
We’re the intarwebateers,
You can be one too!
‘Cause postin’ ’bout our day is the thing to do,
Flaming and spamming is not the way,
Hear what Captain Intarweb has to say:

“THE POWER IS A WORLDWIDE, PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE NETWORK OF INTERCONNECTED COMPUTER NETWORKS THAT TRANSMIT DATA BY PACKET SWITCHING USING THE STANDARD INTERNET PROTOCOL!!”

EPISODE #1 – CALLING CAPTAIN INTARWEBS

TCP: Hey guys, what’re you doing?

FTP: I’m gonna go race my bike, and download some files. You?

UDP: I was gonna go be racially sensitive and maybe get drunk and let a flooder use and abuse me.

TCP: Damn, UDP, I’m with you!

SSH: I don’t feel safe outside. I think I’ll stay home.

HTTP: I gots a date with the ladies!

UDP: Which?

HTTP: Alls of ‘em. That’s how I roll.

SSH: Damn I wish I was like HTTP. He’s so… publicly accessible.

HTTP: You could come along with my SSH, if you wanted, to.

SSH: Naw, I should stay and keep watch. Ever since the day we found out that together we can harness ourselves and become…

FTP: Not this speech again. I’m outs.

HTTP: Wait for me!

TCP: Come on UDP!

UDP: Awww, I kinda like hearing it…

SSH: …and then we all were nice to each other. And safe. You know, secure. Bye guys.

ONE COMMERCIAL BREAK LATER

SSH: Guys! Come in Intarwebateers! Guys! Come on!

UDP: Huh? Wassat?

TCP: What’s wrong SSH?

SSH: SYN FLOOD!

HTTP: Can we handle it?

FTP: Not alone!

SSH: You mean?

HTTP: We gotta form up to make Captain Intarwebs, yo!

SSH: I get to feel again, for a little while.

TCP: Uhhhh, yeah. All right people, form up!

ALL TOGETHER: CAPTAIN INTARWEBS! GO!

Captain Intarwebs: Now what they did they make me up for? Oh, I see, Syn flood. Huh. Well I can… hey shit, what’s that on boingboing? Fuck, the Syn flood will only take a few routers out. Oh, shit, someone added me to their MySpace, yes! Woohoo! Hey, I wonder what Smurf I would be…

So by now you’ve heard about [INSERT TRADGEDY]. And, of course, everyone is saying just about everything regarding what happened. [GOVERNMENT OFFCIAL] is saying [X] while we sit and stare, stunned and kinda offended. [RELIGIOUS SPOKESMAN] is, yet again, pointing fingers at [SIN].

When does it change?

Does it ever really change? Except for the names? Any second now we know that [QUASI-RELIGIOUS CULT] will move in and demand things as well as [PR CHASING LAWYER], [MEDIA "EXPERT"] and [PUNDIT]. Because that’s what they do.

In the meantime we have a thousand people, a bagjillion people in internet terms, trying to all say what they feel and not run over each other. Between the people who can’t seem to not take offense because everyone doesn’t feel the way they do to the people who will be offensive because they think it makes them cool – the internet is made of horrible things happening. It’s what drives us. Nothing says “Hey I should post” like a horrible event. They are great for that.

I mean, what now, 85% at the low end, of all blogging about the blogger’s life is about things that annoy, bother, disturb, sadden, frustrate or otherwise make us feel ungood? Seriously, between that, cats, tits and the latest meme you have just thought of every inch of the internet! That’s it, you’re done. Finito.

So why not make up a form? It could be a form, so that it would feel like a meme, that you could plug the details of the latest horrible thing into. Then it could post the results, with a cat picture, maybe a cat being held by someone with a nice rack even. It would be the ULTIPOST! Come on!

COME ON!

A fifteen-year old boy in America was incarcerated for twelve days, wrongly accused of making a hoax bomb threat – because his school had forgotten that the clocks had gone forward.

Cody Webb was arrested last month, after Hempfield Area High School received a bomb threat on their student hotline – which provides a range of information to students about the school – at 3.17am on March 11th. They believed they’d found the culprit when they traced the phone number they thought was responsible to Webb.

Unfortunately, the school forgot that the clocks had switched to Daylight Saving Time that morning. The time stamps left on the hotline were adjusted by an hour after Day Light Savings causing Webb’s call to logged as the same time the bomb threat was placed. Webb, who’s never even had a detention in his life, had actually made his call an hour before the bomb threat was placed.

Despite the fact that the recording of the call featured a voice that sounded nothing like Webb’s, the police arrested Webb and he spent 12 days in a juvenile detention facility before the school eventually realised their mistake.

Webb gave an insight into the school’s impressive investigative techniques, saying that he was ushered in to see the principal, Kathy Charlton. She asked him what his phone number was, and , according to Webb, when he replied ’she started waving her hands in the air and saying “we got him, we got him.”’

‘They just started flipping out, saying I made a bomb threat to the school,’ he told local television station KDKA. After he protested his innocence, Webb says that the principal said: ‘Well, why should we believe you? You’re a criminal. Criminals lie all the time.’

All charges against Webb have now been dropped.

(Via the NY Daily News) The Church of Scientology has dispatched “ministers” to provide “grief counseling” for shell-shocked youth at Virginia Tech – but critics suspect the sect hopes to convert the vulnerable students.

“It’s shameless, how they milk human tragedy to promote their organization,” charges Rick Ross, whose CultNews.net has long tracked the group, which counts Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Kirstie Alley among its members. “These young people [at VT] are experiencing trauma. What they need are qualified mental health professionals.”

HollywoodInterrupted.com’s Mark Ebner brands the Scientologists as “vultures” who are “hindering legitimate, heroic rescue efforts with their spurious ‘therapies,’” such as a “touch assist” – a light massage, which, Ebner says, is “supposed to distract them from their tragedy. It’s a form of mini-hypnosis.”

“They did this at Ground Zero [after 9/11],” says Ross. “They did this in New Orleans [after Hurricane Katrina]. They look for very high-profile disaster that can be milked for photo ops” to promote the Church.

Church official Sylvia Stannard tells us that about 20 “ministers” are in Blacksburg, Va. “We’re doing a lot of emotional counseling, which is kind of our specialty,” says Stannard. “We prohibit our people from proselytizing,” but she adds, “they are going to tell them they are Scientologists” and “they will answer questions.”

The church, which preaches against all psychiatric pharmaceuticals, has already seized upon early reports that Cho Seung-Hui, the gunman accused of Monday’s bloodbath, may have been taking antidepressants.

Stannard says the killings demonstrate “these mind-altering drugs” make “you numb to other people’s suffering. You really have to be drugged up to coldly kill people like that.”

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Well when they demonstrate compassion like that who could ever doubt them?

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Meanwhile, Travolta wants us to know that:

“I have fame on the level of a Marilyn Monroe or an Elvis, but part of the reason I didn’t go the way they did was because of my beliefs. People make judgments about it [Scientology], but often they don’t know what they’re talking about. I would advise anyone who wants to know about it to read up on it. We [the Church of Scientology] are only getting bigger and we help people all over the world, from disaster zones to drug rehabilitation. We were having a problem in Germany [where some critics called Scientology a money-making entity rather than a religion]. I talked to [former president Bill] Clinton who talked to Chancellor Kohl and things have improved since then.”

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But wait, there’s more. Today’s shooting rampage at Virginia Tech is being called the deadliest school shooting incident in U.S. history, with initial reports citing 32 dead and 29 wounded in the bloodiest school massacre since Columbine. The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a mental health watchdog that initially discovered the psychiatric drug connection in the Columbine shootings, says media and law enforcement must move quickly to investigate the Virginia shooter’s psychiatric drug history — a common factor amongst school shooters…

That was a press release from The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a known Scientology fronted ground. From their About CCHR Page: The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is a non-profit, public benefit organization dedicated to investigating and exposing psychiatric violations of human rights. It also ensures that criminal acts within the psychiatric industry are reported to the proper authorities and acted upon.

CCHR was founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and the internationally acclaimed author, Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York, Syracuse. At that time, the victims of psychiatry were a forgotten minority group, warehoused under terrifying conditions in institutions around the world.