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26 year old student finds largest known prime number. The number is 6,320,430 digits long and would need 1,400 to 1,500 pages to write out. It is more than 2 million digits larger than the previous largest known prime number. Why? What use is it? How can knowing the next highest prime number be of any benefit?

One word: Cryptography.
Prime numbers are essential in producing keys for cryptography.
posted by DailyBread at 11:54 PM PST - 15 comments

Punch and Judy Everything you want to know about the famous puppet show, ranging from scripts to history. For more Punch, see also The Punch Page (many resources, but not updated since 2000); the Punch and Judy College of Professors (professional Punch & Judy performers); and "Prof." Glyn Edwards' Punch and Judy Page (homepage of a Punch & Judy puppeteer).
posted by thomas j wise at 7:20 PM PST - 5 comments

Screwing the young. American government benefits will give a typical man reaching age 65 today a net windfall of more than $70,000 beyond what he paid in. A luckless 25-year-old, by contrast, can count on paying $322,000 more in payroll taxes than he will ever get back in benefits.
posted by NortonDC at 6:22 PM PST - 36 comments

The Humane Society of the United States rips Dick Cheney on "canned hunting": "This wasn't a hunting ground. It was an open-air abattoir, and the vice president should be ashamed to have patronized this operation and then slaughtered so many animals," states Wayne Pacelle, a senior vice president of The Humane Society of the United States. "If the Vice President and his friends wanted to sharpen their shooting skills, they could have shot skeet or clay, not resorted to the slaughter of more than 400 creatures planted right in front of them as animated targets." According to another news source, "five-hundred pheasants were released in front of Cheney and his men; and the ten-man hunting party killed 417 of the birds. Vice President Cheney alone shot over 70 pheasants. The birds were then plucked and vacuum-packed in time for Cheney's afternoon flight back to Washington, DC."
posted by fold_and_mutilate at 5:59 PM PST - 76 comments

Guide to Philosophy on the Internet .
posted by hama7 at 5:42 PM PST - 14 comments

Is there such a thing as too many Christmas lights? I love seeing lavish displays of lights at Christmas time. Some folks like a few old-fashioned Christmas lights and some like to deck the halls in a blaze of glory (this one boasts 700,000 lights). And how much does it cost to run a fabulous display?
posted by Lynsey at 4:43 PM PST - 23 comments

Project Last Stand, a forest conservation group, has a new spokesman, and he's a hobbit. Monaghan also works with the group Future Forests, and is officially CarbonNeutral. He seems to have taken the warning of the trees to heart. I guess working with an animatronic ent has an effect on a person.
posted by homunculus at 1:48 PM PST - 19 comments

The Best of Hubble Its mission will end in 2010. Four years later it will re-enter the atmosphere and burn up. Many astronomers are calling for Hubble to be refurbished and its mission extended to 2020. Here are some of it's best pictures.
posted by reverendX at 12:02 PM PST - 14 comments

How I Sent My Father to Heaven. A Hindu funeral. 'My non-believing heart had melted and I once again saluted my father's dedication to my mother. '
New content on The Call of Yama, a page about death and dying in Hinduism (and part of Kamat's Potpourri, a huge personal site devoted to Indian culture, history, art and scenery).
posted by plep at 11:55 AM PST - 6 comments

Big Brother Really Exists, And He's Not Who You Think He Is. While most of those in the privacy realm have been focusing on keeping the government from spying on its citizens, the government has made an end-run: Letting the private sector do it for them. ChoicePoint, an Atlanta-based spinoff from credit agency Equifax, now has more than 200 terrabytes of data on us, and as previously noted, they're not always very good at it. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
posted by darren at 11:10 AM PST - 25 comments

A Cappella Holiday is a refreshing alternative to the tired, workaday holiday fare that may be piped into your office. All holiday tunes, but all a cappella, with some real gems you've never heard before. If your ears have been malled by Muzak and it's making you anything but merry, this free, streaming radio station might be the tonic. (There's a non-holiday a cappella station too, if you're just fa-la-la'ed out.)
posted by bradlands at 10:29 AM PST - 12 comments

Build your own snowman using Chris Guy's snowman-builder.
posted by smich at 10:15 AM PST - 26 comments

Welcome Back from Planet Scalia A funny thing happened on the way to declaring bribery a form a free speech...
posted by victors at 9:10 AM PST - 51 comments

An Atlas of the Universe. Sort of like Powers of Ten, but with lots of explanatory content.
via Signal + Noise
posted by Slithy_Tove at 8:23 AM PST - 8 comments

Want a blog that does the work for you? Why waste time filling your blog with the same pointless posts, when with a few clicks you can know that the blog will take care of itself. No need to change your current tool, it supports Blogger, Movable Type and even Nucleus. Zeldman has one, looks like Starvos has one, filepile is in the mix and it looks like Metafilter has been using it since August.
posted by jonah at 8:22 AM PST - 16 comments

Global Attention Profiles. Mapping media focus.
posted by srboisvert at 7:45 AM PST - 4 comments

Walk A Mile project brings policymakers and people on assistance together. One of their programs is Living on Food Stamps, where policymakers try to eat for a month on the same amount of food stamps regular people receive. Here's how it went in Oregon, and some lessons learned by legislators.
posted by amberglow at 7:45 AM PST - 16 comments

Did anyone catch Rudolph last night? (more inside)
posted by jpburns at 6:43 AM PST - 19 comments

Images of the Rom: the Rrom of Romania from an award-winning book by Yves Leresche; The Roma of Central and Eastern Europe by Raulf Bauerdick; David Dare-Parker's Roma - Gypsies of Romania (the second image in the set won "Best Feature Photograph" in the Walkley Awards); the Chergari Gypsies in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria (by Stacia Spragg - background here); and Itinerant Gypsies in Romania by Valeriu Campan. See also the photo-article, Challenging Segregation of Roma schoolchildren in eastern Hungary by Jason Orton (article continues at far right), and an eviction series by Ph.D. student Cosima Rughinis: the Rom in Pata Rat (dump site), Cluj-Napoca, Piatra Neamt, and Targu Mures, Romania. For some context on the last, view some text snapshots (under "issues of Roma Rights") of the situation from the European Roma Rights Center.
posted by taz at 5:57 AM PST - 18 comments

UK bans controversial charity ads In recent weeks, UK newspaper readers have been opening their newspapers to find full-page, colour pictures of a cockroach crawling out of the mouth of a baby. Now the adverts, for children's charity Barnardo's, have been banned. Barnado's maintain that the pre-Christmas ads were justified as "a way of cutting through the apathy."
posted by TheophileEscargot at 4:48 AM PST - 51 comments

Whodunit? Who wrote it? Who'd have thunk it? Bastulli.com is a great little website for all those who love a good mystery, whether ancient or modern. ( My favourites, btw, are Dorothy L. Sayers and Patricia Highsmith. This last website - Stop! You're Killing Me!" - is also well worth investigating.)
posted by MiguelCardoso at 4:36 AM PST - 13 comments

Yin Yu Tang is a late Qing dynasty merchants' home that was transported from its original site in southeastern China and rebuilt at the Peabody Essex Museum It offers a glimpse into the daily life of the Huang family, residents for more than two centuries. The story of the dismantling, transport and reassembly is a fine example of an international preservation project. (flash alert)
posted by madamjujujive at 12:30 AM PST - 4 comments