A couple of people have already pointed it out, but the following statement is an oxymoron and it drove me nuts enough that I had to point it out a 3rd time:

He anticipates that the craft's body will be made from a material that is an insulator such as ceramic, which is light and a good conductor of electricity.

Insulation and conductivity are opposing properties!

Those aren't cryptograms, they're just negatives of the digits that probably act as masks that block the light from showing through in the appropriate places.

Joel,

My brother and I were huge lego fans as kids. We have dozens of sets of all types (although space was our favorite theme, and we have pieces from all the space series you listed). We still have them all in a couple of rubbermaid bins in a closet somewhere, in hopes that we will someday pull them out again to vicariously re-live the fun we had when we have children of our own. Sadly I lost interest in actually buying new Legos as a teenager in the early '90s due to a combination of being more interested in video games, computers, more realistic plastic model kits, and being disappointed by the explosion of overpriced Lego kits with huge parts that were useless for making things other than what was pictured on the box (e.g., the pirate ships). I totally missed out on the Lego Star Wars series as a result :(

Anyways, I remember we have that siren piece as well - I think it came with an ambulance or something. It worked off a 9V battery pack with special brick studs that had metal in them, and there was also a piece with flashing lights with colored caps to change the color.

I wonder what pollutant is all over China that is causing all these weird birth defects? Or maybe they just make a bigger deal about them than other places?

Wow, that was great.

a German caffeine-laced vitamin beverage intended to improve your performance at playing first-person shooter games

I'd be skeptical of that claim in regards to any caffeine product. Caffeine jitters aren't going to do much for accuracy :p

Also, I doubt it's really intended to do anything other than sell well with gamers. I'm sure that the "guarantee" they're offering requires little if anything to live up to.

I've known several people who have regularly consumed a lot of caffeine. While under the influence of heavy amounts of it, they experienced poor sleep quality and fatigue; after stopping for even a day they get chronic headaches. As a result (well, that and it acts as more of a diuretic than a stimulant for me :P), I prefer to avoid caffeine as much as possible.

Mario was actually a carpenter in Donkey Kong, look it up :p

I know Keith David mostly from the Pitch Black movies and John Carpenter's The Thing, but apparently his voice talent was also used in the PC games Planescape Torment and Fallout 1 :)

Oh my God that was the funniest thing I've read in a long time. I'm trying to hard not to crack up laughing.

Why is the link to a .jpg file if it's supposed to be an animated .gif?

Followed all the links in the comments here except the one to a video, and was disappointed to find zero photographs of the actual area. Everything links to diagrams or photos of garbage on beaches or in rivers.

The last sentence in the first paragraph of the summary is incomplete. Interesting story though.

@jrishel: I totally thought about Super Pursuit Mode when I saw that button, hehe!

I really dislike how pictures on BoingBoing are occasionally posted with width parameters that tell browsers to stretch the image, because Firefox and IE use nearest-neighbor interpolation to expand images - with unsightly results.

It's also unnecessary in the case of this particular image because BoingBoing is embedding a thumbnail when there is a larger source image available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tenzin_Gyatzo_foto_1.jpg