Why the Space Shuttle sucks is a clear explanation what's wrong with the Space Shuttle. In short : it was all about money cuts, which lead to a crappy design. Sounds familiar, isn't it ?

Hitler wanted a gun able to pierce a meter of steel, seven meters of concrete, or thirty meters of dense earth. The Dora Gun was the result of this. You know the "bang" a rifle does, so try to imagine the sound of apocalypse when a 7 ton shell is fired, using thousands pounds of gun powder.
The Palpatine site has some more info on WW2 weaponry.

The Perl Advent calendar is back with an edition for 2006 on a new homesite !

Feeling lost ? Here's a map of the known universe as in the Star Trek series. A pretty cool map, but it doesn't explain the "Quadrant" thing very well. I guess they defined the transition from Alpha to Beta quadrants as the line straight out from the galactic core that intersects with Sol. (In basically the same manner as defining the Prime Merdian to be the line running from North Pole to South Pole passing through Greenwich, England.) Thus, the Alpha and Beta quadrants are the area where most of the series takes place, because Sol is right on the border between them.

The borders for the Gamma and Delta quadrants are, as a result, the 90 degree perpendicular lines from that line, also starting at the galactic core. Since Sol and its neighbors are out in the arms, this makes the Gamma and Delta quadrants literally on the opposite side of the galaxy.

The game of petals around the rose took Bill Gates 30 minutes to solve. All I can say is that I solved it way faster, in about three minutes. The game is part of a special kind of guessing games, called Look-and-say sequence. Can you solve the following sequence :

1 11 21 1211 111221 312211 13112221 ...