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Biff’s Question Song is a funny YouTube video showcasing a stand-up comedy routine by Tom Wilson, probably best known for playing Biff Tannen in the Back To The Future movies.

Last Monday’s APOD is called In the Shadow of Saturn:

In the shadow of Saturn, unexpected wonders appear. The robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn recently drifted in giant planet’s shadow for about 12 hours and looked back toward the eclipsed Sun. Cassini saw a view unlike any other. First, the night side of Saturn is seen to be partly lit by light reflected from its own majestic ring system. Next, the rings themselves appear dark when silhouetted against Saturn, but quite bright when viewed away from Saturn and slightly scattering sunlight, in the above exaggerated color image. Saturn’s rings light up so much that new rings were discovered, although they are hard to see in the above image. Visible in spectacular detail, however, is Saturn’s E ring, the ring created by the newly discovered ice-fountains of the moon Enceladus, and the outermost ring visible above. Far in the distance, visible on the image left just above the bright main rings, is the almost ignorable pale blue dot of Earth.

Awesome photo…

The YouTube video 3D Deutz engine animation is pretty neat:

This video gives us an animated look at a virtual engine, from bare block to ignition. The inline-four engine is made by Deutz, an independent German machine manufacturer. See every component: casted this, braided that, spinning this, machined that. The animated video shows the engine assembling itself, then gives you an inside look at the combustion compartment, injecting fuel, igniting it and expelling the exhaust fumes.

Wired Magazine has a fun feature entitled Very Short Stories:

We’ll be brief: Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) and is said to have called it his best work. So we asked sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers from the realms of books, TV, movies, and games to take a shot themselves.

Dozens of our favorite auteurs put their words to paper, and five master graphic designers took them to the drawing board. Sure, Arthur C. Clarke refused to trim his (“God said, ‘Cancel Program GENESIS.’ The universe ceased to exist.”), but the rest are concise masterpieces.

The online version has several dozen additional entries not included in the print version.

Highly-anticipated Firefox 2 was released on Tuesday. Although this release does not have any earth-shattering new features, it does consolidate some features that previously required extensions (now termed add-ons), like better tab and RSS feed management, built-in spell checking, a session restore feature, and an improved search box. This new release is faster and rock-solid stable, allaying some of the previous complaints of memory leaks. Check out this review of the new features that also includes screen shots of some of the streamlined UI changes.

To coincide with this release, Mozilla has revamped its Add-ons page, making it easier to navigate and renaming “extensions” to “add-ons” to make their purpose a little clearer for users skittish about customizing their browser experience.

This upgrade is most definitely worth it, and if you haven’t yet tried Firefox out, there’s no better time than now.

David Macaulay, one of my favorite authors, recently won a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.” Good for him…

aspiration posted this awesome image taken from the Space Shuttle Columbia during its last mission on an unusually cloudless period over most of Europe:

Note that the lights are already on in Holland , Paris , and Barcelona, and that’s it’s still daylight in Dublin, London, Lisbon, and Madrid.

The sun is still shining on the Strait of Gibraltar. The Mediterranean Sea is already in darkness.

In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean you can see the Azores Islands; below them to the right are the Madeira Islands; a bit below are the Canary Islands; and further South, close to the farthest western point of Africa , are the Cape Verde Islands.

Note that the Sahara is huge and can be seen clearly both during day time and night time.

To the left, on top, is Greenland , totally frozen.

Very nice…

Update: Upon doing some further research, it appears that this image has been circulating for some time with improper captioning. Snopes.com reports that it is most likely a digital composite of several satellite photos, which frankly makes more sense considering how unlikely it would be for almost all of Europe and some of Africa to be cloudless at once. Oh well, that’s what I get for trusting a post without a source…

Check out the full size image of the Airliners.net long exposure photo of a UPS Boeing 767 taking off.

Part of a hopefully regular feature stolen from inspired by Norman Roberts’ blog innings.

You should definitely visit the Weekly Echo site, as the images have hyperlinks to pertinent news stories of the week…

Battle of the Album Covers (YouTube video) is an animated video with dozens of classic (and not-so-classic) album covers fighting to the death. That description doesn’t quite do it justice, though; just go see it!