The "slaves didn't build the pyramids" bit is also a highly debatable point.

There is a certain political agenda for Egypt if they proclaim that slaves didn't build the pyramids. The descendants of those slaves happen to control a country next door that Egypt doesn't like very much.

Yeah, it's been 3 days since Endeavour launched, and 24 hours since it docked at the ISS, and this still reads 6, not 12.

So, as a example of "a webpage that performs one function well"... well... what is that one thing, gives out inaccurate info?

Assuming there is some automation to this (if it's pulling the number off NASA's website), next Monday the 23rd Soyuz TMA-20 will be landing, so even if it can't keep track of the shuttle astronauts, that 6 should change to 3.

Then 3 more will be going up in June 7 on Soyuz TMA-02M, bringing the number back to 6.

For the record, back in 2008 I started this blog with a similar idea:

http://whoisinspacerightnow.blogspot.com/

Because, even with NASA's website, and wikipedia, I found it surprisingly time-consuming to glean Just.Who.The.Heck.Was.Up.There.RIGHT.NOW. You could find crew manifests for various Space Station Expeditions, but sometimes they'd list people who'd landed a month ago, or weren't going up for another couple of months.

Of course, entropy set in, and I sort of forgot about the blog in 2009 and 2010. But I'm updating it now.

NASA's ISS page does list the current ISS crew:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

So presumably it'll change next Monday (when the 3 depart on the Soyuz), but it doesn't keep track of the guests (shuttle astronauts) on the ISS right now.

Once some of these private space ventures get off the ground, they'll be whizzing around up there like softballs.

I think some of this list is Internet baloney:

The claim is that THE MATRIX was released in France as Les jeunes gens qui traversent les dimensions en portant des lunettes à soleil (THE YOUNG PEOPLE WHO TRAVERSE DIMENSIONS WHILE WEARING SUNGLASSES): Funny, but seemingly not true; there are French movie posters where it's just called MATRIX.

I'd take my fire extinquisher, because I paid a lot of money for that!

Hummingbirds are pretty small. At 5.1 centimeters [2 inches], I think you could still take one of these out with a shoe.

I'm not belittling the heebie-jeebie effect if a time-traveller goes back 50 million years and stumbles over an ant-hill of these things.

Which reminds me of a crackpot theory of mine which even I don't take seriously, but I'm going to mention it anyway.

At various times we see fossils of giant insects like dragonflies.

What if the fossilization process causes them to swell, sort of like the way a true Gummi Bear will get bigger if you leave it in a glass of water overnight?

By extrapolation, maybe huge dinosaur fossils were actually the size of cattle in life.

In the Michael Palin series HIMALAYA he visits this town and the gunshops.

It'd be better if it actually gave their names. But perhaps that's out of scope!

I recently saw a woman give a talk about diabetes, and she had a sort of apron that had plushy internal organs attached, so she could demonstrate stuff being digested, etc. Some were attached with velcro, others had velcro so that things could be attached to them (insulin, etc.) It was cuter than this depiction. She'd lost one of the kidneys, or, as she put it, she'd donated the kidney.

Texlenin: I was going to make a Larry Niven Known Space assymetrical beard reference, but you beat me to it. So I'll just have to take solace in my +5 interwebs.

Well, the Gauss gun is named after him.

Cool, it's got a Stargate!

My friend in England recently took a picture of this historic marker for a mousetrap inventor, Colin Pullinger, 1814-1894:

http://edenlynn67.livejournal.com/5057.html

And how does the microwave smell now?

We made CO2 cars in shop class in junior high.

Strangely, James Franco in the news seems to have no effect on sales of Franco-American Spaghettios!