There is this story on Metro (which I actually found on digg) about Japanese women buying sheep thinking they were poodles.

Entire flocks of lambs were shipped over from the UK and Australia to Japan by an internet company and marketed as the latest ‘must have’ accessory.

But the scam was only spotted after a leading Japanese actress said her ‘poodle’ didn’t bark and refused to eat dog food.

This is hillarious.

While I was browsing in Wikipedia, an article about a chess-playing machine called The Turk caught my eye. It turns out that in 1770 a guy named Wolfgang von Kempelen built a machine which would play chess. The only downside (or rather upside) being that it was actually a human who was hiding inside and not the machine who played. Sounds like a scenario a movie but it actually was so. But that’s not the best part. The machine had travelled Europe, it (or rather he) even played in the USA, etc but it was not until about 1850 (well, that’s a rough estimate) that people finally revealed it was not a machine but a person playing. How strange is that? It took almost a century to find out it was a hoax…

In any case, you can read the full story of Turk in the Wikipedia.

Oh, and yeah, I play chess. Ocasionally. Mostly for the fun of it. I just need to extend it to Go, err…

A well-known physicist Feynman once said:

If, in some cataclysm, all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is <…> that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence you will see an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.

Well, I am not sure. But if I had to make one last sentence, I would make sure there is a hell lot of semicolons in it, duh…

P.S. Yeah, I know, it does relate to the two things concept. I wonder which came from which.