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Hate to break it to you, but most of Elena's trip has now been definitively been proven to be a fake, specifically the part where she actually rides through Chernobyl on her bike. She (her husband? can't remember) also apparently re-arranged some kitsch to make a better shot.

Dear Mods, please note that the parent is a troll.

Although it sounds interesting when presented as speculation, it's not presented as such and shows the same signs that are so typical for hoaxes, aka "present enough half-truth to make the rest believable".

I want to make clear, that I don't deny that there might be some small possibility that it is as the parent poster says, but as the saying goes, extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof, and he provides (almost) none. The conclusions he draws are not the most plausible ones for the claims that are presented.

Aside from the lack of any references for his claims, he fails to cover, for example:

- What about all the smart people Google pays. Nobody saw this coming? [I have no particular problem telling years beforehand with an accuracy of 1 month when disk space, CPU, or other design contraints will limit further growth of the services I am responsible for. Google can't do better?]

- There are other reasons that can equally well explain why they are taking stance against duplicate content. A simple one is: complaints by users or content authors (like the amazon reviews case that's discussed all over the postings here)

- The fact that indexes are usually not limited by the amount of indexed entities (here: web pages), but the overall size of the entities.
- The google index could be an exception to that, because they have a distributed file system (which is equivalent to a second index), so they don't need to point to the location of the data, but only the file containing it.
- So if there is some limit, it sounds more probable to be in the number of nodes on the filesystem or such, but the parent presented it as fact: The index is maxed.

- Google is now in the process of dropping millions of link records from its index. Maybe I missed it, but except for the duplicates or other "offenders" I didn't hear of any such process. And unfortunately the parent doesn't provide any references.

- Google is wavering. Where does this come from?

- Gmail is a distraction, a venture into some other space to keep people from noticing that their search product is degrading. Hm, at least I missed what they tried to distract from by all those nice new features they presented within the last years and are still going to add. In other words, he presented no evidence for the claim that this is more than just coincidence, but there seems to be a lot against it.

Well, I'll think I stop now.

tell the time traveller guy about this auction. Maybe he can bear with it instead of the watch model time machine, he has.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that is a very real email. I myself have gotten it once or twice. There's another, more elaborate, follow-up email that explains that the guy is from the future and is trying to get back. The scary part is, he was almost convincing!

Ah, here we are: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/timetravelspam.html

The spaghetti tree story was on BBC, link

> bad harvest of the italian spaghetti crop

Swiss, and it was a bumper crop, not a "bad harvest"

it ranks #1 on the Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time

#1: The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest
In 1957 the respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in, and many called up wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. To this question, the BBC diplomatically replied that they should "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best." Check out the actual broadcast archived on the BBC's website (You need the RealVideo player installed to see it, and it usually loads very slowly).

Actually, it was Panorama, and it was in 1957, e.g. see here

Right up there with the spaghetti harvest.

From Top 100 April Fools pranks you may get some good ideas. For instance, #10 - Planetary Alignment Dcreases Gravity could well be worth recycling this year, due to the planet alignment of recent days. #15 might have possibilities for the more prurient among you.

Perhaps you noted the hint of sarcasm in my tone?

EurekaAlert.org is obviously not a source for serious science news, but they're the ones that presumably broke his story. And there's even debate about whether his publicist, Brooke Jones, exists or not. I find the story and the discussion surrounding it quite amusing.

I personally think that, although there's some value in challenging assumptions, this doesn't cut the mustard. (Some might even say it sounds more like cutting the cheese.)

The museum of hoaxes has some doubts about Peter Lynds claims...

While I don't see any groundbreaking new ideas in Lynds' work, google sure has some interesting links, including the original paper and some strange facts.

Again, they're just proving that the best security method is just to not let anyone on the system at all.

Very true! How can you 0wn a box that...isn't there! I saw this interesting report on 60 minutes (an abbreviated version of it can be found here, and the full story I beleive can be found here, but for a fee to Big Bill) a number of months ago showing this interesting photo of the Korean peninsula. It kind of reminds you of the hoax photo of the 2003 blackout, except that I suspect the Korean photo to be legit. Assuming it it is, maybe NK should start thinking about how to get power to most of their city (I could be mistaken, but I think Pyonyang is their only city and even THAT was just built "for show") and towns before they start getting their boxes online to trade e-mail!

But setting up a "secure e-mail" system for boxes that don't exist is the same sort of logic you would expect from a country that has traffic cops in the heart of their city directing traffic...that ISN'T THERE! It's an absouletly amazing society. Crazy. Loopy. But fascinating at the same time.

I saw that bit about the "traffic cop" in the same 60 minutes report and in it there was also someone from the state department claiming that at the time there was probably 5 machines on the Internet in the entire county!

Next up, Seth Industries & Automobiles! Silksteel cars with diamond windshields and pistons and of course a dimensional warp generator!

We have a book review written by a friend of the authors of the book it reviews, and furthermore the authors of the book it reviews have taken public stances against the subject of the book?

Well, hell, in that case, David Manning said the book was "The most intriguing study of comic books ever written".

Actually, that is a cousin of the great ape. Here's the real one.

Havent you heard of the Fur Bearing Trout?

look here...

Hoax # 8:

"Alabama Changes the Value of Pi
The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0. Before long the article had made its way onto the internet, and then it rapidly made its way around the world, forwarded by people in their email. It only became apparent how far the article had spread when the Alabama legislature began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation"

That hoax is has been done before!!! Read more in Bailey, Borwein, Borwein, and Plouffe's 1996 article "The Quest for Pi". Here is the abstract: This article gives a brief history of the analysis and computation of the mathematical constant Pi = 3:14159..., including a number of the formulas that have been used to compute Pi through the ages. Recent developments in this area are then discussed in some detail, including the recent computation of Pi to over six billion decimal digits using high-order convergent algorithms, and a newly discovered scheme that permits arbitrary individual hexadecimal digits of Pi to be computed." But, in the article one may also read:

"In the annals of Pi, the nineteenth century came to a close on an utterly shameful not. three years prior to the turn of the century, one Edwin J. Goodman, M.D. introduced into the Indiana House of Representatives a bill that would introduce "new Mathematical truth" and enrich the state, which would pofit from the royalties ensuing from this discovery. Section two of the bill included the passage "disclosing the fourth important fact that the ratio of the diameter and circumference is as five-fouths to four"


Thus, Pi is 3.2... It almost became an Indiana law had it not been for a last-minute intervention by an observant prof Purdue!!! I strongly suspect this Bailey et al. article was a source of inspiration for the 1998 perpretrator, 101 years later, but alas then not in good faith.

I read the item about the one-way highway that changes directions with great interest. Like many Northern Virginians, I have many times driven the section of Interstate 95 inside the beltway that is inbound in the morning and outbound in the evening.

... except that Caltech beat MIT soundly in the top 10 college pranks listing with the #1 slot going to the Rose Bowl hoax and #3 going to the McDonald's contest brute force attack. MIT showed only at #10 with Bonsai Kitten.

... except that Caltech beat MIT soundly in the top 10 college pranks listing with the #1 slot going to the Rose Bowl hoax and #3 going to the McDonald's contest brute force attack. MIT showed only at #10 with Bonsai Kitten.

... except that Caltech beat MIT soundly in the top 10 college pranks listing with the #1 slot going to the Rose Bowl hoax and #3 going to the McDonald's contest brute force attack. MIT showed only at #10 with Bonsai Kitten.

... except that Caltech beat MIT soundly in the top 10 college pranks listing with the #1 slot going to the Rose Bowl hoax and #3 going to the McDonald's contest brute force attack. MIT showed only at #10 with Bonsai Kitten.

I read it in the latest Discover

That doesn't prevent it from being a joke. In its April 1985 issue Discover Magazine announced that the highly respected wildlife biologist Dr. Aprile Pazzo had discovered a new species in Antarctica: the hotheaded naked ice borer. These fascinating creatures had bony plates on their heads that, fed by numerous blood vessels, could become burning hot, allowing the animals to bore through ice at high speeds. They used this ability to hunt penguins, melting the ice beneath the penguins and causing them to sink downwards into the resulting slush where the hotheads consumed them. After much research, Dr. Pazzo theorized that the hotheads might have been responsible for the mysterious disappearance of noted Antarctic explorer Philippe Poisson in 1837. "To the ice borers, he would have looked like a penguin," the article quoted her as saying. Discover received more mail in response to this article than they had received for any other article in their history.

Text above stolen from http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/top100.html

Yeah, just so you know, I read it in the latest Discover I got in the mail. I mean, the process could be, and they're taking Discover for a ride (haven't read the article yet), but I doubt it was posted in jest.

Amusing side note: I'm guessing that one of the readers had their own laugh at the expense of the editors. One of the letters about this "discovery" that got reprinted in the next issue purported to be from "Shigatsu Baka" of the San Francisco Small Mammal Zoo and Discovery Center

And Discover would never run an April fools article.

And Discover would never run an April fools article.

I'd just like to review the 'jokes' so far... call it Flamebait, if you want to, but it just annoys me and I have to say it...

1. RFC 3514
   This one was nice. Obvious, but nice... as usual, the RFC people are doing a good job. Too bad Slashdot ruined it with the first April Fools dupe...
2. Gentoo on RPM
   Well, good idea of the Gentoo people, but waaay too obvious... imho a good AF joke is one you believe to be true for at least a couple of minutes until you've looked at it very closely. But OK, this was only number 2, so it was still nice... now AF story bloat yet.
3. Whitespace programming language
   Hm. As has been pointed out, it's not new... and even more obvious than the previous one (and pretty much boring too). I think then CPAN people know how to really make a good AF joke...
4. Microsoft + Security
   Hey... better at least. Nicely combining a true story with a joke story... though the joke was not very believable either. Also, it's number four already, and we're only half-way through the day...
5. The Register's story
   OK. By itself, not all that bad... but not too overwhelming either. And, on Slashdot, we're now at Number 5 and counting.
6. The dupe.
   OK, increasingly stupid... but then again, maybe the best joke today on Slashdot :)
7. Enlightenment 1.0
   Aawwww, come on. Enough. It hurts. And again, blunt joke. Latency between reading and noting the joke: .01 ms. Including the dupe, we're at seven now... and the day is still not over. I think I'll stop reloading the web site until I'm sure April 1 is over in all time zones...

For some quality 4-1 jokes, see here (German), the above-mentioned cpan.org, or even the Freshmeat one which isn't so bad. This ain't so bad either. Kuro5hin points to this interesting link.

Can you /. editors pleease try to come up with a single good hoax and dump the rest? That would be nice.

You'll be asking us to believe they grow on trees next.

here's a write-up of the mcdonalds contest scam here

other caltech stunts including the rosebowl score board prank, and the great barberpole theft. here

Please mod up parent. (Note that the link contains about 100 additional pages scanned at fairly high resolution, but of low quality photos. It also appears that the server is either very or has already been slashdotted.)

By the way I have figured it out. Voynich ManuScript is abbreviated VMS and so clearly isn't meant to be decipherable by humans and is therefore an obvious hoax.

I strongly doubt these were posted on a lobby card with URLS embedded; nor does reposting the message with them gratuitously inserted add anything to the material.

Possibly not; it was an indulgence on my part. While it may not have added anything to the material, I don't think it detracted from it, either.

There are a lot of twenty-somethings and younger who read Slashdot, who may have never even heard of Don Ameche, Ethel Merman, Edward Everett Horton, or even Cary Grant (whose closest still-living analog might be Sean Connery), all of them great entertainers.

It also gives Packard's message some historical context. In January of the same year, Benny Goodman had his triumphant jazz concert at Carnegie Hall. On 30 October, Orson Welles plunged the nation into panic with his famous War of The Worlds broadcast . And just a few days later, Kristallnacht took place, widely regarded as the beginning of the Jewish Holocaust.

So, no, I don't think adding the links was necessarily a bad thing. Of course, as the story's submitter, I'm biased... :-)

Schwab

Compare it to cable and satellite TV. Isn't this the same model? Pay for options. Eventually the equipment will go dirt cheap. Look at Cable boxes, dishes. Heck - Look at 1 cent cellphones.

The way you guys talk, you must all have rabbit ears on top of the TV, and a cabinet full of video tapes!

This reminds me of a April Fools joke local chicago radio station wxrt played when I lived there. Found it documented at museumofhoaxes, 1992 -


Pay-Per-Hear: WXRT-FM, a Chicago radio station, announced that it would turn into a digital, commercial-free "pay-per-hear" station. Its signal would be scrambled and divided into five different program formats that listeners would have to pay to listen to. The five formats would be "'XRT Basic," "'XRT Live," "'XRT Gold," "'XRT Espanol" and "sports-rock." The station announced the format change all day and then switched to a scrambled signal for several minutes. Hundreds of listeners reportedly called in to protest the change, and one listener even showed up with a picket sign outside the station.