Cross-posted from Facebook

Back in the 1960s, people would practice kremlinology, where people would guess who was in and who's out in the USSR based on pictures. When someone important fell out with the regime, the leaders would literally white them out in official pictures, rewrote history, etc. This allowed the regime to maintain the illusion (at home at least) that the Politburo knew what it was doing and was only interested in advancing the USSR.

Nowadays, we have something called the "Streisand Effect." The Streisand Effect is when someone tries to take something "off the Internet" (ex: a picture of Barbara Streisand's house), and people respond by reposting it almost endlessly, ensuring that the picture/information/whatever is actually far easier to find than before.

Now that North Korea has wiped the Leader's uncle off of the country's official website, the 1984 strategy of controlling the past in an attempt to control the future is competing with the obstinate attitude of the Internet. Wonder what Orwell would have thought about this.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/north-korea-attempts-to-purge-online-memory-of-executed-leader/

Just a fun comic

How about a little fun for the weekend?

When it comes to people mixing and matching their passions of a sort of science and, well, anything else, there are two cartoonists that come to mind: Bill Amend, longtime cartoonist of Foxtrot, and Randall Munroe, best known for writing the XKCD comic.

Bill Amend admits he wasn't the biggest Math guy back in school, but he likes having fun with it now and has been since he was writing the comic Foxtrot when I was in elementary school. One recent example of Amend's geekiness: 

I wish I could give this comic its full due, but I'm a cyber guy, not a physics guy.

This is in stark contrast to Munroe, who was, quite literally, a rocket scientist who left his job at NASA of all places to work full-time on his webcomic. His works have become quite popular among scientists, and there are a ton of examples, such as this one:

This one is based off of one of Zeno's paradoxes, specifically one of Achilles and the Tortoise: In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead. It's been disproven, but it's