Sea of Plastic. "Yet as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments." more inside

Google Maps spots UFO over Florida (via Jorn)

The politics of backlash. Great article on why blue-collar America is going over to the Republicans and how liberals still don't get it. more inside

Life Just Got Easier™ And Soylent Green is people. (video) Spotted at Collision Detection.

Finally, a use for that dormant GMail account. Use it as a great big hard disk that can be accessed from anywhere. more inside

Vodka Pipeline running from Belarussia to Lithuania uncovered. The thin three kilometere long plastic pipe, buried a few centimeters underground, ran under several roads, along a riverbed and ended next to the home of a Lithuanian citizen.

Faith-based Zoology. A man was attacked and injured after jumping into a lion's den at the Taipei Zoo and trying to convert the lions to Christianity.

The Spite Vote. "IT CAME ON suddenly and without warning. Fuck the Democrats. Fuck the liberals. I hope Bush wins. I hope Bush steals another election and urinates into everyone's wounds…" A wonderfully spiteful rant by Mark Ames, link coutesy of the equally vicious Steve over at Ethel the Blog. more inside

A tutorial in Isometric Pixel Art. And another. And and an isometric map of Washington DC. And an isometric street corner in New York City. Some isometric views of key events in recent history. An Isometric Constructor app (Flash). And the Mr Wong's incredible Soup'Partments.

Robo-One 2004. Video (3.90MB MPEG) of a fighting robot pummelling a smaller one and then flexing its arms in celebration before falling off the table. more inside

Women who believe that they'll live for a long time have more sons. I guess nature has a way of upsetting even the best laid plans...

Spacecraft Cassini-Huygens will pass through Saturn's ring today and then go into orbit around the planet. At 7:11 PM US Pacific time (that's 2:01 AM GMT or 12:11 PM East Coast Australia) the spacecraft will cross the ring before swinging around the planet and crossing it again about four hours later. Hopefully it won't hit anything along the way... more inside

Spider-Nan? Pavitr Prabhakar has a secret identitity, he is a licensee of a Marvel Comics property and India's first web-slinging superhero. He gets around by swinging from Mumbai's various monuments (such as the Gateway of India and the Taj Mahal Hotel), bouncing off the roofs of auto-rickshaws and fighting his arch-nemesis, the Green Rakshasa. One only hopes that Mumbai's skyline is high enough for this transcreation to get off the ground.

Looking for webcams of the Transit of Venus that actually work? The ones in Norway seem to be doing the best job of it so far: more inside

Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet is a compilation of proverbs about women from around the world. I don't know if this one's in it but I'm sure you'll be pleased to learn that: "A man at thirty is like a freshly picked flower A woman at thirty is like used tea leaves." -- Chinese Proverb

Whispering keyboards. No need to get completely paranoid but did you know that eavesdroppers could be reading every word that you type into your computer simply by listening to the sounds of your keystrokes? Every key on your keyboard emits a unique sound and a computer with a microphone and some neural network software could be set up to recognise it and record it with an accuracy of 80%. This issue also applies to keypads on door locks, ATM machines and telephones. more inside

iruses share a common ancestor that existed over 3 billion years ago and may even have even preceded cellular forms of life. Researchers at Montana State University have come to this conclusion after comparing the protein coating of an exotic virus strain, recently isolated from a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park, with a range of vastly different virus types. Unlike most viruses, this new virus doesn't reproduce by infecting living cells but through a chemical reaction and yet it has been found to share a common protein structure with the other viruses. Furthermore, these proteins have shown no significant similarities with the proteins of living cells and this suggests that viruses must have split of from other forms off life very early on. There are even wilder possibilities: that viruses may have preceded cellular life on Earth or even arrived here from outer space.