Getting screwed by your ISP

My long-ago contributions to the Everything website weren’t anywhere near this interesting — Penises have higher bandwidth than cable modems:

Putting these together, the average amount of information per ejaculation is 1.560*10⁹ * 2 bits * 2.00*10⁸, which comes out to be 6.24*10¹⁷ bits. That's about 78,000 terabytes of data! As a basis of comparison, were the entire text content of the Library of Congress to be scanned and stored, it would only take up about 20 terabytes. If you figure that a male orgasm lasts five seconds, you get a transmission rate of 15,600 tb/s. In comparison, an OC-96 line (like the ones that make up much of the backbone of the internet) can move .005 tb/s. Cable modems generally transmit somewhere around 1/5000th of that.

(Via Boing Boing)

Searching for "purple" in Google News

There’s this amateur photographer in San Francisco who took photos of the Columbia as it went by. Supposedly one of his photos shows the some kind of odd purple light near the shuttle, described in some news reports as “a purple bolt”. Here’s an SF Chronicle staff writer describing the photo:

In the critical shot, a glowing purple rope of light corkscrews down toward the plasma trail, appears to pass behind it, then cuts sharply toward it from below. As it merges with the plasma trail, the streak itself brightens for a distance, then fades.

The photographer (whose name hasn’t been released, and who won’t be releasing the photos till after NASA’s had a look at them) said that the photos “clearly record an electrical discharge like a lightning bolt flashing past”. He also was originally quoted as saying that he “couldn’t see the discharge with my own eyes, but it showed up clear and bright on the film when I developed it”, but the Chronicle later clarified that he was using a digital camera, a Nikon 880. A product manager at Nikon has said that some customers have complained about purple aberrations sometimes showing up in their photos.

So, camera glitch? Alien attack? The Royal Canadian Space Force hopped up on amphetamines and looking for payback?

Update: Or, possibly not something hitting the shuttle at all, but burning debris breaking away from the shuttle.