I had not heard of Nicholas Flamel before Harry Potter. Here is an article about him from Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness Of Crowds.

Ftrain: Robot Exclusion Protocol. A story about the Google of the future.
(From Amygdala. Scroll down a bit to see a rant on Star Treks past and present.)

From Jason Soon, the tale of an ingenious group effort to confound the State in a case of assisted suicide.

Last week I moaned about unemployment. So now I’m all-but-offered a job: doing work even more mechanical than before, at 3/5 the wage. Naturally the client won’t want to invest three weeks of training (on a proprietary system; the last thing my résumé needs) unless I’m ready to make an “indefinite” commitment to a “friendly” environment where one is expected to “take ownership” of one’s work.

Dilbertland here I come.

Got an approximation to a real number, and want to know what formula is hidden behind it?
Try Plouffe’s Inverter.

a chuckle from John and Antonio:

We once knew a woman who got a job translating three porn flicks from Italian to Spanish. Why did they bother, you ask. Because they were done in (well, mostly out of) Renaissance dress and the dialogue was in hexameters.

Three such flicks?

Cintra Wilson raises the alarm:

I must warn the world about Tom Cruise. I feel he is an utterly terrifying Superior Life Form, with the power to melt heads and braid spines. His eyes are as hard, shiny and brutally penetrating as diamond drill-bits. . . . Tom Cruise is becoming the Scary Flaming Eye from “The Lord of the Rings,” and I fear that nobody can stop him.

See what Scientology can do for you?