The Weekly Review is published every Sunday at 7:00pm EST.

This is the weekly review for May 19th to May 25th. Another week, another slate of great stories. Lessons have been learned and wisdom bestowed, but if you haven’t been keeping up here’s your chance to catch up. We had 32 posts this past week, so let’s go through some of the highlights!

Top Stories:
A lost parrot tells his name and full address, an ex-marine photographer is speared with a javelin, then takes a picture of it, and a British museum covers its mummies for the sensitive public.

Our favorite stories of the past week:

• Grandmas and grandpas are the newest drug mules. No one suspects grandma Betsy, carrying six kilos of cocaine! Speaking of mules, why was a Mexican donkey put in jail for three days?
• The world’s most diehard Indiana Jones fan is not as big of a loser as you’d think, straddling the bridge between sane and crazy. We just hope the communists don’t manage to squash his dreams.
• New York is now home to organized crime, America’s financial centers, and a $175 hamburger. God bless America!
• A guy files a lawsuit because of a fly in a bottle of water, and loses, embarrassingly. Quick summary: The Canadian Supreme Court basically called him a wimp.
• The governor of Montana speaks at a commencement for a graduating high school class of one. At least he got to be senior class president… and vice-president, treasurer, and secretary.
• Think your marriage is going south? One man is in deep trouble after trying to look at his wife’s face. Scandalous!
• We had some pretty neat images to share with you this past week, from the medieval church ruins revealed by drought and a plane landing on another plane. Sound like images from an Indiana Jones movie…

Comment of the week: FakeTV responds to our post on the FakeTV, a flashing light system designed to keep burglars away. After our critical commentary on the usefulness of a flashing object designed to mimic a TV, a spokesperson from the company responded to our post:

For what it’s worth, this was not an “easy” design. For example, we had to design special test instruments to gather the color and intensity variation data from real television, because our professional lab instruments were not sensitive enough. It took a LOT of time to come up with suitable algorithms to emulate the TV characteristics, in all the different sorts of programming that you see. And suitably nuanced. And then it was tough to meet (okay, only slightly miss) the cost target! We used our favorite optical CAD system, ZEMAX, to design the diffuser.

In any of our tests, anyway, nobody could tell the difference between the light from FakeTV and a real, operating television. So, even if the burglar knows that FakeTV exists, that is not likely to help him in his evil quest!

Our minds haven’t changed, but apparently it’s pretty difficult to build a light that mimics a television screen. The more you know.

32 posts in 7 days, that’s like almost 5 updates a day dude! Like, you should totally check us out daily brah!

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