I have to ask: how many of you, my readers, actually click on any of the thumbnails of images that I post?

I haven't been mentally keeping track of how long this has been going on, but in going through Leandra's Apache logs periodically I've been seeing entries like these (anonymized for reader's privacy):

a.b.c.d - - [13/Mar/2009:16:31:40 -0400] "GET /pictures/the_last_hope/tn_dcp_2077.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 10813 "http://drwho.virtadpt.net/pictures/the_last_hope/h2k801.html" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) Firefox …

People actually fell for this?

This one's for you, Pegritz.

Worth1000.com has done it again.. this time, the theme of their Photoshop contest is if h4><0rz pwn3d the Earth.

Depending on whom you talk to, the Voynich Manuscript is either one of the strangest books on the face of the planet, the key to the secrets of the universe, an elaborate puzzle by Dr. John Dee/Abdul al-Hazred/the Comte de Saint Germain/$other_mystical_figure, or a brilliant hoax. The text of the book is utterly incomprehensible - if it's a cypher, it's a damned good one. Many cryptographers and puzzle freaks over the years have tried and failed to decode it, though they've discovered a few interesting things. Current thought has it that the script was created from …

By now we've all seen what Photoshop is capable of - just look at Worth 1000 for examples of things that just can't exist, and yet do have a strange sort of life on the screen. People can be added and deleted, colours can be changed, and still scenes can be fabricated from stock images after a couple of hours of skilled effort. Editing moving footage is more difficult, though, because you've got thirty-two frames in each second to edit, times however many seconds long a particular piece of footage is. Impossible? Hardly - video editing technology is an amazing thing. I …