This bottle was found in Mika's biosafety level 2 laboratory.

To address any confusion, isoamyl alcohol is not drinking alcohol and this bottle was bought for use in a scientific lab from a scientific lab supply company. Explanations are welcome.

At Kinokuyina in New York, I noticed that Playboy was sorted into the "Men's Fashion" section of the magazine rack.

Funny. I wasn't under the impression that Playboy's primary selling points included either either men or clothing.

I spent more time than I would like to admit massaging the process that ultimately led to the release of the the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 (GFDL) by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Hours counted, it was probably one of my biggest personal projects this year.

The effect is to allow wikis under the GFDL to migrate to the Creative Commons BY-SA license or, as Wikimedia's Erik Möller has proposed, to some sort of dual-license arrangement.

Many of the gems from the newspaper correction blog Regret the Error qualify as a revealing errors. One particularly entertaining example was this Reuters syndicated wire story on the recall of beef whose opening paragraph explained that (emphasis mine):

Quaker Maid Meats Inc. on Tuesday said it would voluntarily recall 94,400 pounds of frozen ground beef panties that may be contaminated with E. coli.

Of course the article was talking about beef patties, not beef panties.

Earlier in the summer, Iran released this image to the international community -- purportedly a photograph of rocket tests carried out recently.

There was an interesting response from a number of people that pointed out that the images appeared to have been manipulated. Eventually, the image ended up on the blog Photoshop Disasters (PsD) who released this marked up image highlighting the fact that certain parts of the image seemed similar to each other. Identical in fact; they had been cut and pasted.

The blog joked that the photos revealed a "shocking gap in that nation's ability to use the clone tool."

I've beat up on Google News before but something happened this week that made me (and many of you who emailed me) believe it worth revisiting the topic.

On September 9th, a glitch in the Google News crawler caused Google News to redisplay an old article from 2002 that announced that that UAL -- the company that owns and runs United Airlines -- was filing for bankruptcy. The re-publication of this article as news started off a chain-reaction that caused UAL's stock price to plummet from more than USD$11 per share to nearly $3 in 13 minutes! After trading was halted and the company allowed to make a statement, the stock mostly (but not completely) recovered by the end of the day. During that period, USD$1.14 billion dollars of shareholder wealth evaporated.