Category: Fun

Using the lottery as a retirement vehicle? I’d check out this website first.

A United States Currency $20 bill was printed in 1996 with a Del Monte fruit stick on it.

The bill in genuine and somehow slipped by U.S. Treasury’s inspection process.

I was clued into this by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, but much more information is available on the web. It came up on the paper because the bill is being sold at auction today and tomorrow.

Here is a good link describing the bill, with a picture, and here is another.

7 January 2006 Update: The note sold for $25,300, 1265 times its face value.

I would imagine there are strict security protocols at the mint (Mint? Bureau of Engraving?) to prevent people from causing erroneous currency and then “cashing in.”  If you could make 1,000 times the value of a $100 bill, just by screwing the process a bit, that might be worth it. I wonder what the penalty for that would be if you were caught?

As a public service, here is a list of websites and blogs that I frequented during 2005. Hopefully this list will grow with worthy inhabitants during 2006!

Astronomy Picture of the Day. I can’t say enough good things about this website!
NOAA Geostationary Satellite Server. What’s the weather like? Go take a look. This site is particularly neat during hurricane season as you can see the tropical waves spawning off Africa.
Throw Paper! Self-explanatory.
Planarity.net. This still occasionally puts me in thrall.
The Register. I like the UK version.
Wikipedia. Wikipedia is King! Or Queen, depending.
Flags of the World. Most everything you every wanted to know about Flags.
Talk Origins. “Exploring the Creation/Evolution Controversy.”
Annals of Improbabl Research. Yay for the Ig Nobel awards!
Baen Publishing’s Free Library. Need a book to read for free? Here you go.

May I have the Blogroll, please…

Bad Astronomy Blog
Panda’s Thumb
Tangled Bank
Meandering Starre
SF Signal

How do you make up for not blogging in three weeks? By submitting three times a day, of course…

Check out WIRED Magazine’s Top 10 Sexiest Geeks of 2005.

I spent (mis-spent) a good portion of my New Years Holiday playing online multiplayer Call of Duty 2. I learned several things (again):

1) I will never spend the kind of time or money that is necessary to be a rockin’ kick-ass first-person-shooter King. Just won’t happen. I’ll be happy with the .9 or so kill ratio I end up with.

2) Some people online need another hobby

3) If you play a game too much, you see it in your sleep, in your food, in fact, EVERYWHERE!

For an example of #3, take for instance a person, let’s call him Bill, who goes to bed around 11:30 after a rip-roaring team deathmatch battle where he did rather well, thank you very much. He settles down with Jane Austen (he’s re-reading Pride and Prejudice) and gets to the scene near the beginning of the book where Elizabeth is remarking about Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst at the first Ball. At this time, whilst Elizabeth is remarking about how much she does not care for those two, our hero’s mind insists on projecting the image of tossing a grenade ala COD2 at the two women.

Way too much… The last time I had dreams this vivid was after a 6 hour Tetris binge in the mid nineties.

I got turned on to this link a day or so ago. It is a man stitching together webcam jpgs to create time lapse footage of various things. I had a grand time watching the two Panama Canal videos, and the Mexican Volcano is right cool.

The great thing about this is that you can download his software and do it yourself! Makes me want to go get a webcam and try it out.