Since I’ll be spending most of today and tomorrow in the air, as it were, there probably won’t be much in the way of other articles posted to the site. That said, I’ll try and check comments from time to time, and will have access to email whilst in airports. Provided said airports offer free wifi. Or if the planes do. But Emirates didn’t offer in-flight wifi on the way to Saudi Arabia, so I don’t imagine they’ll offer it on the reciprocal flight.

That said, here’s a couple of amusing things I’ve tripped over in the last few hours.

Drinking an average of six cups of coffee a day reduces the risk of prostate cancer in men.

By up to 20%, no less! And if coffee drinkers do get prostate cancer, they’re up to 60% less likely to die from it.

I’ll be at Starbucks. Do you think the Canadian health care system would pay for my preventative daily venti Pike Place?

Skyrim will break you with dragons!

The game will evidently boast an “unlimited” number of the fearsome flying beasts; they won’t just be area bosses and suchlike.

That’s good…I always wondered what it would be like if the inhabitants of Destard decided to make all of Britannia their playground. Now I guess I’ll get to find out, if somewhat vicariously.

Some contaminants in water can flow upstream, and even up (small) waterfalls.

This puts a new spin on reading tea leaves.

A 20-gigapixel panorama of Wembley Stadium…

…during the FA Cup Final last Saturday. It’s a truly amazing photographic work; check it out. And if you happened to be at that game, find yourself and tag yourself on Facebook.

This is just awesome: a blood turbine.

Read thou of this:

Engineers at Switzerland’s University of Bern have been working on tiny turbines; turbines small enough, in fact, to fit inside a human artery. Working like a blood powered hydroelectric generator, a working prototype — tested in a simulated artery — has been able to produce 800 microwatts of electricity. That’s roughly eighty times the power required to power the average pacemaker; such a device could provide independent, sustainable power to neurostimulators, blood-pressure sensors, and other implanted medical gizmos. Researchers are concerned, however, that a blood turbine’s adding agitation of blood flow might lead to clotting, and are continuing to tweak and rework the design to minimize this risk.

In essence, with one of these installed, pacemakers would become self-powering. Which, if you think about it, is about as close to a perpetual motion machine as we’re going to get, ever.

It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from there.

An Israeli couple have named their newborn baby girl “Like”, after the Facebook approval mechanism.

She’s going to, like, have, like, serious issues in, like, school and stuff. Like, really.

Seriously, though: what the hell, Lior and Vardit Adler? What. The. Hell?

And speaking of “what the hell?”, look what Zynga’s been up to!

They have wrought GagaVille, a Lady Gaga-themed farm in Farmville.

“There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of Men for this treachery.”

Netflix, not piracy, accounts for the lion’s share of North American internet traffic.

Too bad Netflix’s catalogue sucks in Canada.

Intel goes 14 nm. Moore’s Law groans under the strain.

Is it just me, or is it getting ridiculous (and yet awesome) just how small they can make transistors these days?

Trick pancakes!

There’s a whole blog devoted to them!

Dragonlet #1 loves pancakes, so of course I’m going to have to try and make some of these now.

Entropy is universal across all languages.

Just regular-type awesome, but still:

The amount of information carried in the arrangement of words is the same across all languages, even languages that aren’t related to each other. This consistency could hint at a single common ancestral language, or universal features of how human brains process speech.

Matt Drudge is still the force to be reckoned with online.

He drives more traffic to news sites than Facebook and Twitter combined.

So you’re a rogue state with a great plan: hack the US!

The Americans would like you to know that they’ll respond in a somewhat more low-tech fashion: with bombs.

Ever wonder how Windows 7 knows it’s connected to the Internet?

It downloads a small file from Microsoft, which of course exposes your IP address to the software giant. If that doesn’t sit right with you, there are apparently ways to change where Windows goes looking for the file; you can even point it at your own server.

But was he drinking a nice Chianti?

A Moscow man is busted for eating his friend’s liver…with a side of potatoes. Which, as we all know, is just wrong: the appropriate side is fava beans.

Do be sure to read the comments at the article.

The “crowd effect” — the wisdom of crowds — is a real phenomenon.

But it’s easy to “poison the well”; “even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect in simple estimation tasks.”

This is a real problem in the era of Twitter, it should be noted.