The code of Carl Munck

If you’re interested in history and ancient monuments like Stonehenge or the pyramids, and you like fiddling around with numbers, take a look at this site.

It’s about coordinates of these monuments, ancients weights and measures, mathematical constants, and even “monuments on Mars”, such as the famous “Face on Mars”. There are all kinds of relations between all these numbers, or at least – we are led to believe that. It sounds all a bit too far-fetched, if you ask me…

Self-referential aptitude test

I have already seen (and solved) this puzzle quite some time ago, but yesterday I came across it once more. So I decided I would share it with you, dear reader. :-)

It’s an interesting puzzle, which requires some logic reasoning, but it can be solved. I challenge you to solve it. Please let me know if you succeed, and how long it took. Don’t forget to check all answers after finishing, because changing one question can have consequences for some of the other questions.

Good luck!

Self-referential aptitude test (link updated)

Digital television

Last week I was called by someone from KPN, telling me that I could try out digital television for free, for eight days.

With digital television, of course, the image quality should be better than with normal, old-fashioned, analog tv. It also includes digital radio, providing superior sound quality. And all that for less than what I pay to my (analog) cable company!

So I said yes. Why not try it for free?

Queen Mary 2

Yikes! What a huge ship that is!

If you have the opportunity, you should really go and see it, at the Wilhelminapier in Rotterdam. But you have to be quick, it is leaving for its home port Southampton this afternoon.

Check out the home page of the QM2 and the information about the current voyage “Northern Europe & Fjords”.

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

In the category “Remarkable News” today, this item found on the Dutch teletext:

Astronomers have found a diamond in the sky. It’s actually a star (a white dwarf) that died a couple billion years ago, in the constellation Centaurus, 50 light years from the Earth. The core of the star collapsed and the carbon crystallised due to the huge pressure.
The diamond is half the size of our moon, and weighs 10 billion trillion trillion carats!

A press release by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics can be found here.

van16hoog.nl

My good friend Vincent has been blogging for about half a year now, and he pointed me to the new weblog of one of our mutual friends, Arjan, who launched his weblog Van16hoog.nl just a week ago. Enjoy!

Six parents?

A strange news item on nu.nl (in Dutch): “Redhead women threatened with extinction”. It says in the article (translated by yours truly): “To get red hair, 6 specific genes are necessary, of which each parent has to provide one.”
A simple calculation tells me you would need 6 parents to get red hair! I can imagine why they’re threatened with extinction, now…

(BTW, I found an English article here.)

Makro

Just for the fun of it: here is a link to the latest Makro folder.

The story in short: weblogger Edward Breedveld got an email from the webmaster of the Makro site telling him to remove hyperlinks to this folder from his website, because he didn’t have permission to deeplink to the Makro site!
This resulted in a very funny email discussion.

Read more of the story at WebWereld, or in German at intern.de, or simply search google for more info.

And if you have your own website or blog, add a link to the Makro folder, just for the fun of it!

Weblog Del Benjamin

I noticed in the NedStat statistics that people found my weblog through the German and French versions of google.

I couldn’t resist trying the translate options of google. Besides the English original, it is now possible to read my weblog in German, Spanish, French, Italian and Portugese!

Astronomy Picture of the Day

I came across this site a few days ago, with the “Astronomy Picture of the Day”.
There are a lot of really nice photos, and an archive starting in June, 1995!

So I immediately added the site to my bookmarks, and it is now part of my daily ritual, just like this selection of comic strips, Tweakers.net and Slashdot.