Take 5
Created | Updated Jun 20, 2003
Every day five new approved entries are recommended on the
h2g2 Main Page. These go by unnoticed to most users as they focus around their own page. This weekly article points out and reviews the five most entertaining and interesting entries of the week.
Physics and the Knowledge of Ignorance is a very interesting entry describing the many
different foundational physical theories - from the 'simple' Newtonian Mechanics through Relativity and Quantum. Unfortunately, the repetitive humour gets a bit weary (I do not like stereotyping scientists as sandal wearers). It is a great entry making scientific theories look as if they constantly contradict each other. It even mentions the chaos theory (on which that cute animation is based). A fun read masquerading as information ;-).FiveEasy Ways to Prolong Payment
provides (useless) tips on how to avoid paying your bills. Very useful in certain extreme circumstances but the actions do come with a certain risk. It would be interesting to hear from someone who tested them out - see if the companies permit such idiocy as an excuse :-). It is fun to mess with big nasty co-operations - especially monopolising evil telecommunication companies (i.e. BT).Screen Savers - oh how I hate
them. This entry explains exactly what those darn things do. Oh how irritating it is when you're trying to think and suddenly that scrolling marquee pops up without warning. How true it is that this leads to compulsive mouse moving. Oh why can't all screen savers be destroyed - who needs them anyway? These days our monitors are much less sensitive to permanent damage and most have power management - so why the stupid savers? WHY!?! (Ok. Three... deep... breaths...)Getting Lost on Your Way to
Somewhere New explains what to do if you find yourself in such a situation. The wonders of GPS (of which I have little to no knowledge of) revolutionise the solution to this problem.
However, this entry advises on how to do it the good ol' archaic way - asking for directions and fumbling around with an atlas - who needs the Microsoft Car? Right? Well, I for one would like it if it were guaranteed not to run on Windows. Imagine - you slam the brakes down in order to avoid an accident and up pops the 'This program has performed an illegal operation' dialog box - Ahhhhh...Genetic Weapons informs of
this horrific concept - race specific weapons. Imagine what would happen to warfare! What we find with wars these days is that they're becoming more and more terrorist-based, so who would dare to use these weapons? Well, the Israelis are known to be developing them, but why? Haven't even the extreme right-wingers realised they're fighting a small group and not a denomination? What's even more worrying is that if any fanatic did get hold of the technology
they could kill off an entire race. Well, that's enough annihilative thoughts for one article.
