Interim Apple Chief Under Fire After Unveiling Grotesque New Macbook:

CUPERTINO, CA — In his first major product release since stepping in for an ailing Steve Jobs last month, interim Apple CEO Tim Cook faced a storm of harsh criticism Monday after unveiling a grotesque new version of the company’s popular MacBook that many in attendance described as “disgusting.”

Cook presented the bizarre, malformed new product to stunned silence during a media event at Apple headquarters, revealing a device that, while vaguely similar to a computer in certain respects, appeared to be encased in a thick, flesh-like coating that was visibly moist and engorged.

“Oh, my sweet God,” Apple employee Kurt Starfeldt said after viewing the MacBook up close. “It appeared to be discharging some sort of mucus-type substance from the headphone jack and making these weird murmuring sounds. And then it started quivering at one point when Tim was demonstrating how to use the touch pad. It was quite upsetting, actually.”

and

One customer, who had been anticipating the release of the new MacBook for months, claimed he felt “nauseous” when multiple software applications running at once caused the computer to started wheezing.

“I tried to force-quit some of the programs, but it got all slow and began to turn this sickly purple color,” Bill DeLain, 39, said. “Finally I hit the eject button and a tray popped open and spit out a bunch of teeth. Why does it have teeth?”

So, about Egypt:

Some kids made a video using real footage and CGI’d first-person shooter graphics.

Update: Actually, turns out they’ve done these for lots of video games.

What happens when when an interested nerd — in high school — starts tinkering with pyrotechnics and his Guitar Hero controller?

FIRE HERO.

Via MeFi.

This video is pretty cool: time lapse footage of a spiderweb being built, plus slow-motion footage of subsequent bug capture, and — as a bonus — some spider-on-spider food theft.

This may be the finest image on the entire Internet.

How many spaces do you put after a period?

If you said anything other than “one,” you are unequivocally and completely wrong.

If you think two is correct, it’s probably because of your (outmoded) typing training:

Most ordinary people would know the one-space rule, too, if it weren’t for a quirk of history. In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology — the manual typewriter — invaded the American workplace. To accommodate that machine’s shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong. And even though we no longer use typewriters, we all still type like we do.

The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type — that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks “loose” and uneven; there’s a lot of white space between characters and words, so it’s more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule — on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here’s the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we’ve all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it.