Hulleye Comes By!

the week that you missed via sciam.

* Geeks who have been in the game long enough to remember the original flying toaster screensaver, rejoice! It’s back, and it’s free.

* Worldwide, consumers throw away between 500 billion and 1 trillion plastic bags per year. (Think about that the next time you pick up a drink at the corner store and they hand you a disposable cup, straw, napkins, and paper bag.) The solution is devilishly simple–bring your own.

* The World Champion of Chess may be a cheater–word is his coach has been texting his moves to a remote location, where the entire game is played out on a computer–later the moves are telegraphed back to the cheater in question, Veselin Topalov, via some kind of as-yet-unknown signaling system.

* Inbreeding isn’t always a bad thing.

* That old bogeyman is back: Turns out it doesn’t take a planet-ending war to get the nuclear winter ball rolling–even a limited nuclear exchange between, say, India and Pakistan could do the trick.

* This man loves colonoscopies. “i’ll be having my 16th colonoscopy in march, 2006. i’m looking forward to it because i love telling colon cancer to get lost.”

* Every bottle of Fiji water requires 7 bottles’ worth of water to produce.

* Attention All Scientists Who Could Use $10,000 Exxon-supported think-tank would like to pay you to say bad things about the IPCC’s latest report on climate change (you know, the one that says it’s definitely happening). (Update: for the full debate over the Guardian’s partly-botched attempt to uncover this, see the comment thread on this post; looks like there was no bribery involved, just the usual attempts to throw sand in the face of the best science we have on the subject.)

* Digital sundial described in 1991 issue of Scientific American has been built–it’s entirely mechanical!

* Vintage: Watch as The Amazing Randi exposes fraudstulent “I bend spoons with my mind” Uri Geller for the charlatan he is (on the Johnny Carson show, no less).

* If you like to bandy about the phrase “Web 2.0″ but have never actually seen Joi Ito speak, here’s your chance to see one of the most inspiring talks on new media, the internet, the future of capitalism and the nature of copyright you’ll ever encounter.

* prez says, Our economy was built on the back of Windows piracy.

* Rent-a-womb in India fuels surrogate motherhood debate

* The U.S. government is going to start assembling a database of every felon it gets its hands on. Mostly illegal immigrants.