Having fenced for years, it is perhaps not surprising that your blogger has a romanticized notion of the duel as a means of settling disputes, despite the awareness that it is a blatantly unfair and barbarous practice.

But, you know, swords are cool.

So it is with a little bit of glee that we can report that, in Alabama, an offended party challenged his offender to a game of chess, in order to settle a dispute.

Photo is Dynamic Duo by @slinkachu, from the Little People project.
Webcomic is Rob and Elliot by Clay and Hampton Yount.

Remember the movie Memento? Where the protagonist wakes up each morning with his memory wiped clean? Apparently such things can actually happen — a woman has not formed a new long-term memory since 1994.

The article itself is a bit … poor in quality. It claims the woman has no functioning short term memory, when her problem is clearly adding things to her long term memory. And it compares her condition to the movie Groundhog Day, which has nothing to do with memory loss at all.

But, hey. Neat story.

(Paper Art by Elod Beregszaszi.)

Stanford Magazine offers up an interesting look at the study of how language can influence the way we think.

CSI: Nintendo.

Scientists are pouring over a cold case — very cold, in every sense of the term. Approximately five thousand three hundred years ago, a man dubbed Ötzi Joe was murdered. And then remarkably well preserved in ice. Scientists are now reconstructing his final day.

Like mustaches? Like fingers? Like photos? Then you will be happy to learn of a Finger Mustache Photo Contest.

The first rule of Piracy Club is Don’t Talk About Piracy Club. That’s a good rule to follow in the Netherlands, where merely mentioning from where a film can be pirated is enough to be found guilty of distributing pirated material yourself. As usual, I would like those who come up with these lawsuits to use the precedent created to sue Google. Not because Google ought to be sued, but because Google has deep pockets, expensive lawyers, and the scale of the thing would soon make obvious exactly how ridiculous these things are.