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Via Gill, we find this remarkable excerpt from the winner of the Literary Review Bad Sex Award:

Slither slither slither slither went the tongue, but the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns...

Gill rightly remarks on the extraordinary inclusion of the term otorhinolaryngological. For those not in the 99th percentile, vocabulary-wise, the term essentially means "pertaining to the ears, nose and throat." Which explains why eye doctors are called opthamologists and ear, nose and throat doctors are known as "my ear, nose and throat guy".

Cory Doctorow: Dano sez, "In 1955 the RAND Corporation published a book of computer generated random numbers that is again in print and available as a downloadable PDF. (Beware, it's over 65MB.) They needed it for their research when using Monte Carlo simulations, and like most all of their research it is freely available to the public." Link (Thanks, Dano!)

Dry, deadly quicksand. Mark Frauenfelder: Mark Hurst sez: "The NYTimes reported today on Dutch researchers whose research suggests that quicksand may indeed exist *without* water. This 'dry quicksand' is so lethal that dropping a weighted ping pong ball on the surface is enough to make the ball disappear almost instantly. See the video material on this site." Link [Boing Boing]

This is really cool and the movies are amazing. Dry quicksand is scary and gives you no chance to 'swim' out of it.