"Navy's Next Laser Mashes Up Machine Guns and Death Rays"

"What some other planets would look like if they were the same distance from the Earth as the moon":



(Via BBspot.)

Hotels offering "snore absorption rooms". (Via MR.)

StrategyPage has an update on EMP weapons.

"If social media were a high school". Click on image to see full size. (Via @LyndsiM.)

fMRI of the "uncanny valley". (Via @rcalo.)

Very clever (and very nasty) scheme: "Smuggling Drugs in Unwitting People's Car Trunks". More details at NPR news.

The bizarro world online market for stolen credit card numbers. Fascinating podcast.

Here's a shorter version.

MacDonald's WiFi setup guide: Windows vs. Mac. (Via @seven2521)

CarTalk.com has a humorous list of "famous last words". Some of my favorites include:

Pull the pin and count to what?
I wonder where the mother bear is.
These are the good kind of mushrooms.
What does this button do?

Quantum weirdness update: "Making something exist in two places at once".

"Why Borders Failed While Barnes & Noble Survived". (Via @jeffbradynpr.)

American English phrases that the British apparently hate. (Via @shlevy.)

Hidden camera experiment reveals "Which City has the Most Dis-Honest Tea Drinkers?"

50 completely useless signs. (Via VAViper.)

"American Airlines finds that the fastest way to board passengers is randomly"

"21 Google Plus circles you can actually use". (Via BBspot.)

Today's Big Brother: "Automatic License Plate Readers track your every move":

ALPRs are not ordinary cameras. Attached to police cruisers, or fixed on telephone poles or other stationary places, the cameras snap an image of nearly every license plate they encounter. The device produces a file for each image captured, which includes searchable text displaying the time, date and GPS location of the car when and where the plate was 'read'. This information is fed into a database, where it can be shared with other agencies and databases, and "mined" or analyzed.

One of the major problems with ALPR technology is that it sucks up all license plates, not simply those associated with people suspected of wrongdoing. Therefore as the technology expands, it is possible that law enforcement will be able to track your movements with incredible precision as you go about your daily life in your car. Without proper privacy protections backed by the force of law, ALPRs become yet another tracking technology...

Well-done baseball infographics. (Via GMSV.)

I especially liked ‎"An Etymological Venn Diagram of Baseball Team Names" and "How Often Does the Best Team Win the World Series?" (click on images to see them full-sized):

This court ruling is going to cause a huge debate: "Man's call for Obama assassination is free speech, not crime, court rules" (Los Angeles Times, 7/19/2011.)