Roadside Ear Cleaners...

Apparently roadside ear cleaners (that is, people who specialize in cleaning ears who ply their trade at the side of the road) are common in India.  This is one of 10 things I didn't know about India...

It Must Be Nice...

Someone in England has complained to the BBC Trust that the clock on the BBC website isn't necessarily accurate.

I'm envious.  It must be really, really nice to have that be your worst problem!

Awesome Imagery...

Sonar has come a long, long way since the primitive gear I worked with in the Navy some 40 years ago.  Back then, state of the art was detecting the existence of a submarine, or the depth of the water under the ship.  These days, side-scanning synthetic-aperture sonars take “pictures” that look like sharply focused old-fashioned black-and-white photos:

This shows the stern of the Titanic (at left) and many piece of debris from the ship after in broke in two on the way down.  It's not a simple sonar image, but rather a composite painstakingly made using a combination of sonar imagery and underwater photography.  I like the relief provided by the shadows; it makes the image “pop” almost as though it were 3D.

Much more here...

Weird, But Real...

Here are 22 animals that are all really weird, 19 of which I had never heard of before.  For example, at right is a sunda colugo.  Look familiar?

Most of the animals are kind of cute, but a few look like something out of a low-budget Bollywood horror movie...

CTRL-ALT-DEL...

If you've ever used a Windows computer, then you are surely familiar with the “three-fingered salute”: pressing the control, alternate, and delete keys simultaneously to reboot your computer.  While other operating systems have used the same key combination for rebooting, Windows users need to use it much more frequently.  Many other operating systems have a similar reboot command (perhaps with a different key combination), but users often never need to use it, so they don't even learn it.  Not so on Windows; virtually all Windows users need the three-fingered salute quite often.  In fact, for many people it's the very first thing you try when your Windows computer is acting up – because all too frequently it solves the problem.  I've been using Maci computers now for six years, and until I wrote this post I wasn't sure whether the Mac even had such a key combination (it does, but it's not CTRL-ALT-DEL).  I've never needed it.

The invention of the CTRL-ALT-DEL sequence is most often attributed to David Bradley, one of the engineers who designed the original IBM PC, in 1982.  He put the key combination in to make life easier for the engineers, as they frequently needed to reboot their computers.  There is another claim for the invention, though: Mike Wise, founder of A-Systems, in 1975.

Why one would be eager to claim this particular title, I'm not sure :)

Reader, former colleague, and friend Doug S. passed along this interesting video clip from 2002.  In it, David Bradley pokes a little fun at Bill Gates for having made CTRL-ALT-DEL famous – and Mr. Bill isn't happy about it: