Gilligan meets Led Zep

Ever wonder what the theme song from "Gilligan's Island" would sound like if it were set to the tune of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven"?

Well, wonder no more.

(From the Viral Marketing Blog.)

Too grand a challenge

No one took home the $1 million prize in DARPA's Grand Challenge robot road race. In fact, none of the entries even finished -- the most durable autonomous vehicle broke down just 7.4 miles into the 142-mile course.

But the Pentagon program backing the contest deemed it a success nonetheless, MSNBC.com's Alan Boyle reports:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has already gotten a fourfold or fivefold return on its $13 million investment in the yearlong process, said Anthony Tether, DARPA’s director. He said the innovations demonstrated over the past week would help the U.S. military push toward its goal of having a third of its vehicles operate autonomously by 2015.

In other DARPA news, Wired News reports on the agency's even more ambitious plans for space.

Laughs in translation

A while back, I wrote about the potential pitfalls of online translation engines. But sometimes, you want a program to mangle your prose.

For example, check out these fun sites:

• The Dialectizer can "translate" any given Web page or text block into the lingo of rednecks, Cockneys, Elmer Fudd and the Swedish Chef, among others. (Hm, stories about nuclear missile accidents take on an entirely different feel when in the voice of the Swedish Chef.)
• Tha Shizzolator, on the other hand, only renders Web pages in the distinctive speech of rapper Snoop Dogg (complete with occasional profanity). Running NYTimes.com's home page through it generated, among other things, this memorable news update: "Spain has arrested five muthas in connection wit terrorist train bombings that capped 200 muthas 'n injured 1,400 others."

(Links from MacAddict.)