Pratchett Knighted; Forges Sword

This year, he took his new station of Knight Bachelor seriously: Pratchett took it upon himself to forge a sword using more than 175 pounds of iron ore found in a deposit near his home in Wiltshire. For good measure, he added several chunks of meteorite — “thunderbolt iron” for their “highly magical” properties: “you’ve got to chuck that stuff in whether you believe in it or not.”

Never Work With Children Or Animals

Watch at YouTube.

This is apparently Take 74.

Thanks to Cute Overload.

I Don't Think It Works That Way

"Sie sind unter uns" means "they are among us." I think you can probably think too much into that.

Watch at YouTube.

Nerd Shirt!

WANT.

Oh, Wow, You're Still Here?

Whoops, did I leave the lights on all this time? :)

Here's some content for my faithful readers:

Bob Kessel's Square Superhero Art.

I had a lot of trouble identifying some of the more complex art here as to whom it represents. But don't worry, the post tells you who it's supposed to be.

The Wit & Wisdom of Stephen Fry

My favorite bit is where the bailiff faints.

08:15 a.m., August 6, 1945: 80,000

This atomic explosion was an underground or ground-level test performed in 1953 with a weapon that is roughly the same as the Hiroshima bomb.

This Is Why Internet Polls Don't Work

The photo, from Roger Ebert's Twitpic Feed, shows two sets of the Top 10 Best Novels in English, one determined by experts hired by Modern Library, the other determined by popular poll.

Four of the reader's poll entries are by Ayn Rand; three are by L. Ron Hubbard; and the rest are Tolkien, Harper Lee, and George Orwell.

The Modern Library's list includes Fitzgerald, Joyce, Nabokov, Huxley, Faulkner, Heller (oddly not specified), Koestler, Lawrence, and Steinbeck.

Reminder: Just because it's popular doesn't mean it's good for you.

Cost 'Em Some Money

So it turns out that there's a raft of really badly-placed ads on Scienceblogs right now -- for creationism, medical woo, and Hubbardology.

But the thing is, SB's ad policy is on a page-view basis, not on a click-through. When you load an SB page, the people who want ads on that page get billed a small micropayment.

So I'm going to go over there and refresh Pharyngula several hundred times this afternoon, and if I figure this right it's going to cost the Church of Hubbardology money.

Eh, it ain't Anonymous, but it helps.

Ricardo Montalban:

Less sexy in German.