With there being millions of organized sports teams out there in the world, the laws of statistical variation - combined with hilarious human error and stupidity - tell us that at least a few of those teams are bound to have truly weird names.

Sam Bradford is back in his comfort zone, hanging out with his Oklahoma teammates. He is happiest when he’s just “one of the guys,” quarterbacks coach Josh Heupel said. That, however, is becoming harder to do.

Throughout the history of human civilization, different cultures mourn and treat the dead differently. Some, like Tibetan Buddhists, have no use for burials as they dispose the dead by feeding corpses to vultures or by burning them in funeral pyres. Most cultures, however ...

It's that time of year when critics make the often futile attempt to sum up hundreds of movies and twelve months of viewing into a nice, neat package. How do you define 2008 in movies? Movies mentioned include Wall-E, The Dark Knight, The Wrestler, Milk, Rachel Getting Married, Let the Right One In, and more.

The potency of marijuana, measured by the presence of its psychoactive ingredient, THC, has tripled since 1987, according to the latest figures from the Department of Justice's National Drug Intelligence Center.

ONE computer program would allow vision-impaired shoppers to point their cellphones at supermarket shelves and hear descriptions of products and prices. Another would allow a physically disabled person to guide a computer mouse using brain waves and eye movements.

Flight of the Conchords are the musical pimps of our generation, lyrically making love to the women of the world song after song. They're a sexually charged combination of the Bosom Buddies meets Hall & Oates and their pens are truly mightier then their swords.

Roland Piquepaille writes "An international team of researchers has begun collecting imaging data on the Soufriere Hills Volcano in Montserrat, which has been erupting regularly since 1995. They're using the equivalent of a CAT scan to understand its internal structure and how and when it erupts. The experiment is dubbed SEA-CALIPSO and 'will use air guns and a string of sensors off the back of a research ship combined with sensors on land to try to image the magma chamber.' Early results are surprising. Quoting one of the leading scientists: 'The interesting thing is that much more magma is erupting than appears represented by the subsiding bowl. ... The magma volume in Montserrat eruptions is much larger than anyone would estimate from the surface deformation, because of the elastic storage of magma in what is effectively a huge magma sponge.'"

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Who needs Christmas when you've got the Star Festival and Life Day?

Israeli archaeologists are having a particularly happy Hanukkah after discovering 264 ancient gold coins in a car park in the City of David, a Jerusalem National Park. One of the customs of the holiday is to give coins to children, and the archaeologists are referring to the 1,400 year-old coins as "Hanukkah money."

Egyptian archaeologists have found the tombs of two court officials, in charge of music and pyramid building, in a 4,000 year old cemetery from the reign of Pharaoh Unas. The tombs were found buried in the sands south of Cairo and could shed light on the fifth and the sixth dynasties of the Old Kingdom, said Zahi Hawass, Egypt's antiquities chief.

NASA's space shuttle Endeavour recently returned to the Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, after its successful mission to the International Space Station.

Photographer: Thor Hakonsen

Previously thought to be limited to HTTP and HTTPs web traffic, the touted Australian ISP filter will also target P2P traffic. In response to a comment posted by a user on his department’s blog, Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy has admitted that BitTorrent filtering will be attempted during upcoming trials.

Preedit writes "Mac cloner Psystar is claiming in new court papers that Apple's copyright suit against it should be dismissed, because Apple has never filed for copyright protection on Mac OS X 10.5 with the US Copyright Office. Infoweek is reporting that the claim, if it holds up, could open the door for third-parties to enter the Mac market without fear of legal action from Apple. In its latest set of allegations, Psystar is also accusing Apple of bricking Macs that don't run on genuine Apple hardware." We've been following the Psystar-Apple imbroglio since the beginning.

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joabj writes "Virginia Tech researchers have found that the performance of programs running on multicore processors can vary from server to server, and even from core to core. Factors such as which core handles interrupts, or which cache holds the needed data can change from run to run. Such resources tend to be allocated arbitrarily now. As a result, program execution times can vary up to 10 percent. The good news is that the VT researchers are working on a library that will recognize inefficient behavior and rearrange things in a more timely fashion." Here is the paper, Asymmetric Interactions in Symmetric Multicore Systems: Analysis, Enhancements and Evaluation (PDF).

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theodp writes "You know times are tough when the best place to work in America replaces holiday bonuses with a request for unpaid labor. Blaming the economic crisis, Google management has canceled the traditional cash holiday bonus — reportedly as much as $20K-$30K per Googler — and substituted an unlocked Google Android cell phone, retail price $400. An accompanying email calls for employees to celebrate the 'chance for us to once again dogfood a product and make it even better!'" Update: 12/23 01:09 GMT by KD : A reader pointed out that comments to the article note a couple of inaccuracies: the Android phone being offered is an unlocked dev model, which goes for $400; and the reporter may have confused holiday bonuses with performance bonuses. The former have traditionally been in the range of $1,000, according to two comments.

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Frosty Piss writes "Police in Finland have made an arrest for car theft based on a DNA sample taken from the blood found inside a mosquito. 'A police patrol carried out an inspection of the car and they noticed a mosquito that had sucked blood. It was sent to the laboratory for testing, which showed the blood belonged to a man who was in the police registers,' a police officer told reporters. The suspect, who has been interrogated, has insisted he did not steal the car, saying he had hitchhiked and was given a lift by a man driving the car. I'm wondering if the suspect should have denied any association with the car at all. After all, who knows where that mosquito had been?"

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narramissic writes "The three MIT students who were sued earlier this year by the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority for planning to show at Defcon how they had had reverse engineered the magnetic stripe tickets and smartcards said Monday that they are now working to make the Boston transit system more secure. 'I'm really glad to have it behind me. I think this is really what should have happened from the start,' said Zack Anderson, one of the students sued by the MBTA."

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MojoKid writes "Shortly after Intel released their new Core i7 processors about a month ago, Dell announced a new update to the XPS 730 with Core i7 tech under the hood. The new Dell XPS 730x is first and foremost a technology update but the chassis has also been buffed up a bit. The Intel Core 2 processor and NVIDIA 790i Ultra SLI chipset powering the original XPS 730 line have been swapped with the new Core i7 processor and an Intel X58 Express chipset based motherboard. The XPS 730x retains the original 730's ability to support both Crossfire and SLI multi-GPU graphics. Like all XPS 700 series machines since the XPS 710, the XPS 730x is available with optional factory overclocking and a H2C edition featuring a two-stage liquid cooling system. And yes, it rips through Crysis quite nicely and puts up rather impressive benchmark numbers."

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