And he was drunk, too.  Sigh.

Michael Cole, 28, of Orlando, was arrested on felony charges of resisting arrest and battery on an officer.

According to the FHP, a construction worker informed the trooper around 2:45 a.m. of an intoxicated man wearing a Darth Vader mask who was walking in the middle of a road near Summerlin Avenue and Anderson Street.

The trooper approached the masked man, later identified as Cole, and repeatedly asked him to get out of the road, the FHP said.  Cole instead cursed at the trooper and laid in the roadway, authorities said.

The trooper then told Cole to get up, but he attemtped to punch and kick the trooper, who deployed his Taser, according to the FHP.  Officials said Cole’s thick jacket prevented the Taser from working, so the trooper used pepper spray to subdue him.

[Via FilmDrunk]

A team of biologists has discovered that male spiders spy on their rivals during courtship ceremonies, so they can mimic and pinch their most successful dance moves.

The researchers put male wolf spiders (Schizocosa ocreata) in front of tiny television sets and made them watch videos of other males perform a sexy, leg-tapping mating dance. The test spiders copied the on-screen males, adjusting the rate of leg-tapping to match and even outperform their rivals.

The next Step Up or You Got Served type movie should be about anthropomorphic spiders.  I can see the poster: “One Beat. One Shot. Eight Legs.”  You’re welcome,  Hollywood.

via Wired

I have watched Dr. Who all out of order, but I am completely hooked.  It’s just one of those things that somehow slipped through, that I watch and wonder why I hadn’t seen it before.  I think what I’m trying to say is, I’d like a cookie.

via Boing Boing and Mad Art Lab

How is it that a crumpled paper ball, with nothing else to support it but its own folds, is somehow a useful packing tool?  Why is it that you can crumple a piece of paper, and toss it, and it suddenly becomes a heavy projectile?  Apparently, though these questions might seem simple, the answer is complex.  More complex than the most sophisticated software, apparently:

Despite technological advances, it is still extremely difficult to peer inside a simple scrunched-up paper ball with any detail. Computer science hasn’t been much help. It has been impossible to pinpoint the physics involved because even the most sophisticated hardware and software fail when trying to recreate the sheer complexity involved. There are simply too many variables.

[Read More: New Scientist]

Yes.  Oh yes.

[Via Geekologie]

What you see above is a rough diagram of how to achieve invisibility, and it’s basically saying one thing: invisibility cloaks are still a far way off.  If we need an 18,600 mile-long machine for just a second of invisibility, how big is the machine that lets me sneak into your house and watch you sleep?

“This approach is based on accelerating the front part of a probe light beam and slowing down its rear part to create a well controlled temporal gap – inside which an event occurs – such that the probe beam is not modified in any way by the event,” the team writes. “The probe beam is then restored to its original form by the reverse manipulation of the dispersion. These results are a significant step towards the development of full spatio-temporal cloaking.”

If the period of time during which the effect can be achieved is extended, the system may provide a new way for computer networks to be monitored and attacked. The team estimates the effect could be stretched to a single second, long enough to allow code injection, most effectively in a quantum-computing system. One catch: the machinery needed to accomplish this feat using their current scheme would have to be 18,600 miles long.

via The Register