Attention, Private Casper!

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FUSAG: The Ghost Army of World War II

The Allied intelligence services created two fake armies to keep the Germans on their toes. One would be based in Scotland for a supposed invasion of Norway and the other headquartered in southeast England to threaten the Pas-de-Calais. The northern operation relied mainly on fake radio traffic and the feeding of false information to double agents to create the impression of a substantial army. Fortitude South, though, was well within the range of prying German ears and eyes, so fake chatter alone would be uncovered too quickly. The Allies would have to make it look and sound like a substantial army was building up in southeast England. They needed boots on the ground there, without actually using too much of their precious manpower.
When intelligence officers learned that the First U.S. Army Group (FUSAG) was to be redesignated the 12th Army Group, they knew they had their Pas-de-Calais invaders. The FUSAG was kept alive on paper, and the phantom army was given a few real soldiers and placed under the command of one of the era’s great military leaders.

Don't Take a Slice of My Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai

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Canada’s New Quarters Will Have Glow-in-the-Dark Dinosaurs on Them

Each of the quarters, which will retail for $29.99, will feature an image of a Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai, a dinosaur discovered in Alberta. But take it into the closet under the stairs or wherever your favored glow-in-the-dark viewing site is, and the creature’s skeleton glows.

But hey, we have presidential dollars that you can buy for $2. And they’re invisible. You don’t see any in circulation, do you?

Stupidity Captured at 2500 fps

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The post title is the subtitle of the video, with the obvious disclaimer of don’t try this at home (or work). The flour catching fire and waterbed defect propagation are particularly cool, and there’s something surreal about a chunk of watermelon flying directly at the camera in slo-mo.

(A little peeve of mine — I know that a camera capable of this level of speed and quality is not something that my allowance will permit me to buy, but I really hate websites that tell you request a quote rather than just giving the list price of the item. I ran into this a bit when I did purchasing as a collateral duty, and it just meant I was going to try and buy from someone else. Anyone, as long as I could place the order and be done with it.)

The Porcupine Handshake Effect

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Anyone else nervous that they quote “miles per hour”, worried perhaps there’s a metric conversion they missed? I kid, JPL, I kid. I kid because I love.

Along those lines, nobody I talked to at JPL (way back when) thought this was funny

Shut Your Pot Hole!

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Silly Putty for Potholes

So we were putzing around with different ideas and things we wanted to work with—and we were like, what’s a common, everyday problem all around the world that everybody hates?” explains 21-year-old team member Curtis Obert. “And we landed on potholes.” He and four other students decided on a non-Newtonian fluid as a solution because of its unusual physical properties. “When there’s no force being applied to it, it flows like a liquid does and fills in the holes,” says Obert, “but when it gets run over, it acts like a solid.”

Thar She Blows!

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Shuttle flyby in the DC area this morning, so there were several of us on various (horizontal and flat) rooftops

Never even noticed the chase plane until I looked at the pictures.