IE6 not displaying images

Here's a bug in IE6 that is worth remembering.

Situation:
All the thumbnails in a site I am working on display in FF, but some of them do not display in IE6. (Note: they all display fine in IE7).

I've ruled out mistakes in the img src field, and the images preview fine in the standard Windows preview utility.

Diagnosis:
Turns out some of these images are GIFs that have been saved with a .jpg suffix (i.e. someone has tried to convert them to JPEGs by changing the extension).

Now, Firefox can handle this little mistake fine, since it takes it's cue from the encoding of the image (I presume), but IE6 simply refuses to display the images.

How to tell:
If you suspect this may be the problem you're having, a good way to check is by trying to open the offending image in Photoshop, which is also incapable of handling this ambiguity, and throws up the following error

Could not complete your request because reading arithmetic coded JPEG files is not implemented.

Ah yes, the old arithmetic coded JPEG file... aka a GIF!

Dirk Gently and the new Internet Radio

Is it just me or are internet radio stations like Pandora and last.fm based on an idea that resembles Dirk Gently's method of holistic navigation: i.e.
When trying to get somewhere, follow a random car.
You may not end up where you were going.
But you'll certainly find yourself somewhere you needed to be.

The only difference being on these stations, you don't follow one car, you follow the traffic.

Owning an Idea

Ideas cannot be owned. They belong to whomever understands them. - Sol Lewitt

(thanks to dataisnature for the quote)

Maybe ownership of ideas should take into account the way they are acquired - i.e. by understanding them.

Mars Bar bombs

Ok. Here's a bit of trivia that puts the energy needs of the human body into perspective.

1 Mars bar contains about 1 megajoule (239,000 calories) of energy, which is about a 1/4 of the energy released by explosion of one kilogram of TNT, and about 10 times the kinetic energy of a car travelling at highway speeds.

The mars bar isn't that special, by the way. There's an equivalent nutritional energy to be had in 150g of rice!

(Source: Wikipedia "Orders of Magnitude (Energy)")