Posts Tagged ‘crime’

Urban Camouflage

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

This could easily have been the last item in that last link post, but I felt it was gloriously bizarre enough to merit a post all its own:
Man found in WI basement covered in BBQ sauce

APPLETON, Wisc. (NEWSCHANNEL 3) - A couple telephoned police in the middle of the night after finding a man in [...]

Y.A.L.P.

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

I had a definite plan this morning to do a little geohashing and see who showed up at the local meeting. Too bad the algorithm would have put me in the Atlantic Ocean off the South Shore. Maybe tomorrow it’ll be on land–easy enough to calculate with the online reference implementation.
Actually, if I had access [...]

Early Saturday Morning Gallimaufry

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

And, time to close a few more tabs…

It’s lovely that the Internet can bring me an interactive beer and food matching guide. Sadly, it uses a different algorithm than I do–resulting in far more matches with “see through” beer than my scheme would generate.
Speaking of beer, I love the idea of beer haiku. My favourite [...]

Definitely the headline of the month

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Sometimes I am very glad that I only have to deal with the relatively more abstract, if no less scary, concerns of modern Western society.
Lynchings in Congo as penis theft panic hits capital
KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after [...]

Scottish protection rackets

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Things I Learned Today #1: “blackmail” is a Scottish word, and the Highland Scots invented the protection rackets.
World Wide Words: Blackmail
The mail in blackmail (at various times also spelled maill, male and in other ways) is an old Scots word for rent. This was usually paid in what was often called white money, silver coins. [...]

It’s like a movie plot

Monday, January 21st, 2008

Did you see this bit on BoingBoing?
Adrian says: According to the Swedish daily newspaper Expressen.se, police suspect that a team of thieves operating in Sweden are using little people hidden in hockey bags and placed in the cargo holds of buses to loot passengers luggage while in transit.
They link to the original story in [...]

Miscellany: Your lab fees at work.

Thursday, September 6th, 2007

For a long time now I’ve been asking to be cremated and buried or scattered, rather than being embalmed and buried whole. This is primarily because I find the whole embalming thing a bit icky and unnatural, and secondarily because as an engineer I realize that the conventional burial model doesn’t scale with geometrically expanding [...]