Rugby World Cup

Don't even bother trying to get New Zealand's attention for the next couple weeks.

Follow the action at the New Zealand Herald:

Walking On The Moon

Not just a great song from The Police, now the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter has provided the best pictures ever of the paths taken by astronauts on the moon:

Good News, Bad News

Okay, global warming is bad, I get that, but ..... it's a million new King Crab, that isn't entirely bad news to me.

King crabs have been found on the edge of Antarctica, probably as a result of warming in the region, scientists say.

Writing in the journal Proceedings B, scientists report a large, reproductive population of crabs in the Palmer Deep, a basin cut in the continental shelf.

They suggest the crabs were washed in during an upsurge of warmer water.
The crabs are voracious crushers of sea floor animals and will probably change the ecosystem profoundly if and when they spread further, researchers warn.

Related species have been found around islands off the Antarctic Peninsula and on the outer edge of the continental shelf.

But here the crabs (Neolithodes yaldwyni) are living and reproducing in abundance right on the edge of the continent itself.

Too True

Working life ...

Tuesday Night Football

The biggest international football (soccer) tournament is the World Cup. Midway between World Cups is the 2nd biggest international tournament, Euro.

Euro 2012 takes place next year in host nations Poland and Ukraine. Qualifying is taking place now in the early rounds of Europe's soccer championship.

At the Leidseplein sports bar where I go to see "any game that's on" (NFL late on Sunday) there were 5-7 games on at once between European national teams. I was there to see England vs. Wales, but the Netherlands were finishing up against Finland so the whole downstairs bar was watching that game. Upstairs were a big crowd watching Denmark v. Norway (happy loud drunken Viking fans), Germany v. Poland, France v. Romania, Italy v. Slovenia, Scotland v. Lithuania, and Austria v. Turkey.

Unlimited ribs w/fries or baked potato, 10 euros ... not the best ribs ever but really decent (there is a full rack stacked there).

Holland Hacked

Attackers who hacked into a Dutch Web security firm have issued hundreds of fraudulent security certificates for intelligence agency Web sites, including the C.I.A., as well as for Internet giants like Google, Microsoft and Twitter, the Dutch government said on Monday.

Experts say they suspect the hacker — or hackers — operated with the cooperation of the Iranian government, perhaps in attempts to spy on dissidents.

The latest versions of browsers including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox are now rejecting certificates issued by the firm that was hacked, DigiNotar.

But in a statement on Monday, the Dutch Justice Ministry published a list of the fraudulent certificates that greatly expands the scope of the July hacking attack that DigiNotar acknowledged only last week. The list also includes certificates that were sent to sites operated by Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, Skype, AOL, the Tor Project, WordPress, and by intelligence agencies like Israel’s Mossad and Britain’s MI6.

N.Y. Times

JAWS

A hunt is under way for a shark that killed a 21-year-old man in Australia as police praised the courage of two surfers who brought his body back to shore.

The victim was in the water off Bunker Bay, a popular tourist spot on Australia's west coast, when the shark attacked on Sunday, biting him so badly the lower half of his body was torn away, police said.

Local reports said a Great White Shark, up to 4.5 metres long (14.7 feet), was thought to be responsible, with a plane and boats scouring the coastline to find it with the beach remaining closed.

Sergeant Craig Anderson from Dunsborough police told reporters it was "perfect shark conditions".

"It was dark and gloomy water, overcast skies, light rain falling, there was whale action in the bay and some seals about," he said.