Fantastic essay by Errol Morris about the mystery surrounding two photographs taken during the Crimean War.

Splice many images together and access them with a background position offset.

So, whose book is the biggest? The controversy will soon be put to rest, possibly for all time, when writer Richard Grossman installs his 3 million-page novel Breeze Avenue on a remote mountain in Kaha, Hawaii. Although it is unclear how many words Breeze Avenue comprises, an educated guess puts the count at over 1 billion.

1. Mel Gibson

"It would take place in ancient Egypt, be performed completely in hieroglyphics, and consist of 117 minutes of a slave being beaten to death."

About time, too.

As we always feared, without finishing The Wheel of Time.

But when I checked the 1877 translation against the original my heart sank. It was garbage. On almost every page the English translator, whoever he, or she, was (their name is not recorded), collapsed Verne's actual dialogue into a condensed summary, missed out sentences or whole paragraphs. She or he messed up the technical aspects of the book. She or he was evidently much more anti-Semitic than Verne, and tended to translate what were in the original fairly neutral phrases such as "...said Isaac Hakkabut" with idioms such as "...said the repulsive old Jew." And at one point in the novel she or he simply omitted an entire chapter (number 30) - quite a long one, too - presumably because she or he wasn't interested in, or couldn't be bothered to, turn it into English.

Edit textareas using an external editor, because it's all text! Right click on a textarea, select "It's All Text!" and edit the text in the editor of your choice.

Short version: of course you need salt, but the real goal is to make brute-forcing infeasible. The best way to accomplish that task is to make your hash function as slow as possible, and able to be slowed even further to compensate for advances in hardware.

Officers involved in the APEC security operation revealed last night that police manning CBD roadblocks are frequently not told whether motorcades coming toward them are legitimate.

"We're amazed at the lack of communication that allowed this to happen but how are they to know whether a motorcade is legitimate when they're not supposed to stop them and nothing is broadcast over the (police) radio," an officer said.

Also: Bruce Schneier link roundup.

Most of the first-generation mashups have been limited to the data freely available from governments, sites with APIs etc.; I can't wait to see what we'll get now that they can use Freebase. I can't wait to use it myself, for that matter. Best of all, those magical letters: "CC-BY".