Given the money a woman’s beauty can shine.  In the below pictures that where emailed too me, a number of women were offered and given an extreme makeover.  In some cases I can tell the change was really minor, and just cleaning up.  But some surprised me, and made me wonder what all was done.

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This is the first watch I’ve gotten that doesn’t require a battery, I don’t have to wind it each morning, and it won’t degrade as its solar panel slowly dies.  Plus its cool to watch the little generator (which shows on the transparent back side) swing around and add to its 40 hour backup.

I love Top Gear, as you can tell.  Which makes me hope that this announcement from NBC doesn’t mean they’re attempting to ruin it.

NBC’S ‘TOP GEAR’ BUCKLES UP ITS HOSTS FOR HIGH-OCTANE PILOT FROM BBC WORLDWIDE AMERICA BASED ON INTERNATIONAL HIT FRANCHISE

BURBANK - June 16, 2008 - Television and radio comedian Adam Carolla, champion rally and drift racer Tanner Foust, and TV construction guru Eric Stromer, will lead NBC’s pilot of the international smash hit series “Top Gear.” The production will begin later this week.

Produced by BBC Worldwide America, the U.S. version of the hit franchise will mirror the UK show’s irreverent humor and camaraderie between the three presenters, epic races, outrageous stunts and challenges, unique celebrity guest participation and eccentric methods of testing cars.

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Encarta prides itself on being a good one stop source of knowledge for families. And as one of the Microsoft products it has been used quite a bit, but never really caught on. As such, I never really used it and when doing searches I can’t think of a time that the answer was on it.

But that said, I got sent an interesting tidbit that came from there I thought I’d share a little of.

The 26 letters of the English alphabet can yield billions of combination, yet we still bump into words that appear to be reincarnations. Sometimes we recycle an old word for new purposes, sometimes we coin a word not knowing that a word with the same spelling existed earlier. I often hear from people who believe they have just coined a catchy word: e-dress for e-mail address, until I ask them to Google it. And sometimes words that may look alike actually have different origins.

With the start of the Harry Potter mania in 1997, a new word entered the popular culture: muggle. In the Potterworld, a muggle is an ordinary person, one with no magical powers. By extension, we use the word to indicate someone lacking a particular skill; one, who doesn’t have a special ability, a novice, one outside a field, one uninitiated in a field. Before J.K. Rowling made “muggle” a household word, it has had nearly as many lives as a black cat. The Oxford English Dictionary shows the first citation for this word is from the 13th century, and defines it as “a tail resembling that of a fish.” Since then it has been used to describe a young woman, a sweetheart and later marijuana. Over the years many writers (including Lewis Carroll) have used the word Muggle as a name for their characters, it’s just that with the popularity of the “Harry Potter” books it became better known.

When did the words google, yahoo and pixilated first appear in English? The last few decades? Here are the years of the first known citations for these words: google (1907), yahoo (1726) and pixilated (1848). Welcome back to the future.

Even I didn’t realize the age of some of those words. And now you do too.

…and want something more to kick you over the edge? I recently switched this blog over to private servers from Dreamhost and they gave me some codes to allow friends (or acquaintances) to get a few extras if they sign up and use a special one time code.

* They will get four (4) times the normal disk and bandwidth!
* If they choose our five-year plan, they’ll get $150 off!
* If they choose our ten-year plan, they’ll get $200 off!

So if it sounds interesting, go ahead and leave a message in the post and I’ll email back with the code (so please use a working email addy*). After all I know all of you, right?

As a side - The site should seem faster, but if anyone receives a weird error or you get a 503 at any time. Please let me know.

*I’m not going to save, use, collect, sell, lend, borrow, or print out and smoke your email address.

Just a couple days ago I mentioned the tiny blue dot. The picture from Gallelio that showed Earth alone as a little blue dot. Well here is a great, and humbling, picture of The earth and Moon as seen from telescope on Mars Orbit.

Earth and Moon as Seen from Mars

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera would make a great backyard telescope for viewing Mars, and we can also use it at Mars to view other planets. This is an image of Earth and the moon, acquired on October 3, 2007, by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

At the time the image was taken, Earth was 142 million kilometers (88 million miles) from Mars, giving the HiRISE image a scale of 142 kilometers (88 miles) per pixel, an Earth diameter of about 90 pixels and a moon diameter of 24 pixels. The phase angle is 98 degrees, which means that less than half of the disk of the Earth and the disk of the moon have direct illumination. We could image Earth and moon at full disk illumination only when they are on the opposite side of the sun from Mars, but then the range would be much greater and the image would show less detail.

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This lady shows a video on how a squirrel quickly figured out a complicated maze to get its prize… and then showed the video that gave her the idea.

I never knew there was a Sarcasm Society but they had a great collection of quotes that I’m sharing here.

» Sometimes I need what only you can provide: your absence.
- Ashleigh Brilliant

» It’s always darkest before it turns absolutely pitch black.
- Paul Newman

» It’s a catastrophic success.

» I feel so miserable without you, it’s almost like having you here.
- Stephen Bishop

» History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
- Abba Eban

» No, Groucho is not my real name. I am breaking it in for a friend.
» I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception.
» I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
» I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.
» I didn’t like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions - the curtain was up.
- Groucho Marx

» The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.
- Frank Zappa

» The 100% American is 99% idiot.
» The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
- George Bernard Shaw

» He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
» Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
- Oscar Wilde

» He was happily married - but his wife wasn’t.
- Victor Borge

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Marcus Walker of the Wall Street Journal
pointed out an interesting… issue. How solving the worlds problems of not having enough food, and the food price complications related to the Bio Fuel issue, wasn’t the only major issue the UN has had to deal with. In Rome one hard issue at this week’s U.N.-sponsored summit on the world food crisis was what to feed the guests. They had done a major faux pas in the past. At previous world food summits in 1996 and 2002, the catering was too haute cuisine. The FAO served heads of government, gathering to discuss global hunger, ate sumptuous fare such as lobster and foie gras, and got roasted by the media.

So this time the FAO made sure the menu at Tuesday’s lunch was a bit more spartan. Heads of government including French President Nicholas Sarkozy dined on pastry stuffed with sweetcorn, thin slices of veal, and fruit salad. Lower-ranking delegates ate at the self-service canteen normally used by FAO staff.

Blender Org… a Open Source team who has been developing the free and Open Source 3d Animation software Blender has come out with a new and very nicely done animated short movie called Big Buck Bunny in which a Big bunny deals with some mischievous pests.  Besides animating the entire film, and providing free to view and show as a Creative Commons Movie (and selling DVDs as a fund raiser) they also provided all the source files so you can learn how they did it, and how much can be done in Blender.

Big Buck Bunny tells the story of a giant rabbit with a heart bigger than himself. When one sunny day three rodents rudely harass him, something snaps… and the rabbit ain’t no bunny anymore! In the typical cartoon tradition he prepares the nasty rodents a comical revenge.

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license

Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.

(c) copyright Blender Foundation | www.bigbuckbunny.org