[Photo: Newseum]

I was fascinated by this Top 10 Evil Lairs list featured on Time.com today. It was inspired by Bin Laden’s mansion in Abbottabad, of course, but you’ll also find Hitler’s bunker and the Unabomber’s cabin, among others. The Unabomber’s cabin is now a piece at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Authorities were going to demolish the modest shack before the Newseum claimed it instead. Ted Kaczynski, by the way, isn’t very happy about the display.

Check out Time’s round up and let us know in the comments if there are any you think they missed.

I’ve had Space Shuttle fever lately. So, I’m very intrigued by this list of seven space museums across America.
*
This video is intended for the people who exist in the overlap between No Country For Old Men fans and Scooby-Doo fans.
*
Fast Company explores 3 Things Wile E. Coyote Teaches Us About Creative Intelligence.
*
If your digital camera has been lost, misplaced or stolen, you might be able to track it down with Stolen Camera Finder.
*
If you still don’t quite understand the movie Inception, it’s probably because you never had it explained to you with Mac desktop folders.
*
Wide World of Sports is one of the landmark shows in the history of television sports programming – and Vinko Bogataj’s famous ski jumping crash is the most famous example of the show’s propensity for showcasing the “agony of defeat”.
*
And speaking of the agony of defeat, a “Robot Journalist” can write better than a human.

Grauman’s Chinese Theater has been entertaining celebs and tourists alike since it opened in 1927. That was the same year stars first had their autographs, handprints and footprints immortalized in the concrete forecourt of the theater as well. It didn’t take long for those creative types to start jazzing up the cement squares with more than just their scrawled signatures, though – check out these 10 interesting things forever outlined in front of Grauman’s.

1. Ice skating blades: Sonja Henie
2. Cigars: Groucho Marx, George Burns
3. Hoofprints: Tom Mix, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers all made sure their beloved horses got their dues as well.
4. Leg: Betty Grable
5. Wands: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint. When the Harry Potter stars made their impressions in 2007, they brought their wands along for the ride.
6. Noses: Bob Hope and Jimmy Durante
7. Guns: Roy Rogers and William S. Hart
8. Knees: Al Jolson
9. Eye glasses: Harold Lloyd. He may not exactly be a household name now, but back in the silent film days, Lloyd rivaled Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton in popularity.
10. Braids: Whoopi Goldberg.

A couple of others: the real footprints (as opposed to just shoeprints) of Sean Connery and Harpo Marx, John Wayne’s fist and R2D2′s trademarks.

You can see some (though not all) of these as they happened over at this cool Flickr photostream.

Some like to reenact battles from history in their spare time. Others do it on YouTube, using Lego Minifigs. Stop-motion Lego movies are a wonderful way for students to understand and illustrate scenes from history -including war.

1814 The Battle of New Orleans

Narrated by the late great Johnny Horton. I found this wonderful Lego film through one of my favorite link blogs and that led me to more and more Lego depictions of history’s battlefields.
*

1861 The Battle of Ft. Sumter

The beginning of the US Civil War.
*
(more…)

YES! You can play this challenge/contest without knowing a thing about the weekly hunt! It’s sort of a one-off – a stand-alone if you will. Will you?

Answer the Level 3 bonus-round question correctly and you may win your pick of anything you want from the neatoshop (valued under $25). Ready? Set.
GO!

Oh, and don’t forget, even if you’re not the winner, you still need to solve the challenge to compete for next week’s Day 5 final challenge!

At the blog Overthinking It, a delightful roundtable has assembled to overthink the economics of the Death Star, as seen in Star Wars. In case you don’t recall, the Death Star was a weapon designed to destroy an entire planet — which brings up some potential issues if that planet is a productive part of an empire (sorry, Empire). The initial question boils down to:

Doesn’t the Empire take a huge economic loss from the lost productivity of an entire planet? They were presumably paying taxes and providing resources to the rest of the Empire. Presumably the loss of that planet’s output would have to be made up by increased output from other planets that were either slacking in productivity due to rebellion or threatening to rebel and withdraw from the Empire altogether. It doesn’t seem to make good economic sense.

From there, the discussion veers into Roman history, the use of nuclear bombs in World War II, the general economics of war, bureaucracy, republics, and so on. It’s actually very enlightening, and I encourage you to geek out on this, assuming your Midi-chlorian count is sufficiently high.

Watermelon Death Star photo courtesy of Flickr user jenny8lee, used under Creative Commons license. Apparently it was created by @noeldickover at #foocamp.

On Fridays, I post a series of unrelated questions meant to spark conversation in the comments. Answer one, answer all, respond to someone else’s reply, whatever you want. On to this week’s topics of discussion…

1. In Clifford the Big Red Dog, the Howard family picked up and moved to Birdwell Island when Clifford outgrew their apartment. You may not have relocated for a pet, but perhaps you significantly altered your routine, gave up something you really enjoyed, or ended a relationship. What’s the biggest sacrifice you’ve made for your pet?

2. “Underway” instead of “under way”? “Led” spelled “lead”? “All intensive purposes”? What’s your grammar or word usage pet peeve?

3. Growing up, the twins next door did a lot of stupid things. One day they decided to light a tennis ball on fire and play Hot Potato with friends. The game lasted one throw, when the would-be recipient bailed out and watched the flaming sphere bounce into (and set ablaze) the bushes. What’s the dumbest thing your neighbors have done?

4. It’s time for another edition of What Are You Reading Right Now? (I don’t mean “now” now. Nobody say “your blog post.”)

Enjoy the weekend!

Last year we had a fun time sharing awesome things to celebrate the release of Neil Pasricha’s The Book of Awesome. So much fun, in fact, that Neil decided to write a sequel, which comes out today. And we’ve got a copy to give away! Before I get to the details, here are a few (Even More) Awesome excerpts:

Coming back to your own bed after a long trip

Power-napping on bumpy airplanes, crashing on a flabby futon or jabby mattress, sleeping in a rainy forest in a leaky tent, you’ve had your fair share. Bad sleeps, sad sleeps, sack- pillow heaps, weird alarm clock beeps, and through it all you enjoy long, fidgety nights of groggy pillow turns and fuzzy blanket burns.

But after those killer sleeps in nightmare paradise, it’s always a great feeling to return to the warm and cozy comfort of your sweet, heavenly bed. Yes, you’re like a bear scraping together filthy leaves and warm mud for a long winter of hibernation or a soaring eagle swooping home from the windy treetops to the twiggy goodness of your comfy nest.

Your dented pillow, warm flannel sheets, and preset alarm clock wait for you.

So welcome home, baby.

You made it.

AWESOME!
*
The Kid’s Table

(more…)

So last week, I told about half the story of my recent adventure to Belgium and Luxembourg, where I was looking for atmospheric abandoned chateaus to film inside for a book trailer I’m making for a novel I have coming out in June called Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. I was, ostensibly, looking for the Home, trying to find an exterior and some interiors that looked something like the grand-but-decaying house that figures somewhat centrally in my book. I found the perfect exterior right away — you can see it at the top of last week’s post — and while the long-disused garden statuary workshop we discovered further down the road from it was fascinating, it wasn’t really what I needed for an interior. I was looking for that rarest of abandonments: a place filled with objects from another time, gathering dust but more or less undisturbed.

Usually, when a place is abandoned for awhile, local kids and vandals find it before explorers do, and all the original character of the place disappears: things get broken or stolen, spray-painted, and generally messed-up. But my explorer friend and I would get lucky on this trip. We found a couple of places that really and truly seemed like time capsules.

Before we crossed into Luxembourg, we stopped in the dark and forested Ardennes in Belgium, where American tanks still rust on the outskirts of some towns, vestiges of the fierce Battle of the Bulge that was fought here against the Nazis during WWII. But the forests have secreted away much more than just tanks. Take, for instance, this disused train station we found. The story I heard (but couldn’t verify) is that it was built more than a century ago for the private and sole use of the king of Belgium — and then left to the elements when he didn’t take to it. It’s been empty ever since, trees growing up through the middle. Trains still run past it, but never stop. Today, explorers use it as a camping and party spot. Scenic, no?

(more…)

In 1999 NASA lost $125 million because a team of engineering contractors erroneously used English measurements rather than metric. Let’s hope today’s Space Shuttle launch goes a lot more smoothly.

Related Fact: The United States, Liberia and Myanmar are the only three countries in the world that don’t use the metric system as their primary system of measurement.

[Sources: CNN and Gizmodo . See previous Numbers of the Day here. ]