No Cats?: The First Picture Uploaded To The Internet

Apparently this is the first picture ever uploaded to the internet. Surprisingly it's not a cat, tit, or man's peenor. Hey -- I'm as shocked as you are. Apparently the internet was born much maturer than it is now and has been digressing ever since. Think Benjamin Button, but with no "smexy Brad Pitt in his prime" stage in the middle.

Taken by IT developer Silvano de Gennaro, the photo is a shot of Les Horrible Cernettes, a comedy band that rocked out nearby Geneva's CERN laboratory from 1992.

The story goes like this: Gennaro had shot the photo with a Canon EOS 650 and it just so happened Tim Berners-Lee (father of the Internet) was also working on a new version of the Web (one that could handle photos). Berners-Lee, desperate for a good test photo to try out on his new Web hit up Gennaro's desk. Lucky for Berners-Lee, Gennaro was fooling around with a scanned GIF of the photo on Photoshop 1.0 on a Mac.

Wow, that was anticlimactic. Also, I guess you could LOOSELY classify the image as boobs since the ladies are kind of putting their chests on display. There's just...not a lot of chest to go around. Even Jesus would have a hard time feeding 5,000 people with those things.

Hit the jump for a BONUS Los Horrible Cernettes (LHC -- just like the collider!) music video from the era just in case you forgot what the 90's were like.

Thanks to Brandon, dunc, hAirwolf (don't think I don't see what you did there) and Alan, who agree a shot of a cat hiding between the cushions of a couch really would have set a better precedent for the interwebs to come.

• You Handsome Devil, You!: Bill Nye Yearbook Photo

  September 15, 2012

  This is one of Bill Nye's highschool yearbook photos (Bill Nye the Science Adolescent). I'm not sure what year it was, but he was already wearing bow ties. Good lord, I didn't even learn how to tie my own shoes until college. Thanks to Karsten, who can't even imagine how man... / Continue →
• World's Longest Word Has 189,819 Letters, Takes 3.5 Hours To Pronounce (Now With Video Pronunciation!)

  November 20, 2012

  Note: You can download a 65KB text file of the entire 189,819 letter word HERE. This is a video of some guy pronouncing the longest word in the world, which is the chemical name for titan (aka connectin), a human protein, and the largest known protein. It takes brobro 3-hou... / Continue →
• Grainy: An Atom's Shadow Spotted For The First Time

  July 9, 2012

  This is a picture of the shadow cast by a single atom, captured by scientists for the first time. How did they do it? Science. Ooooooooor drew straws and the shortest had to sell their soul to the devil. Not worth it, bro! To get this to work, an atom of Ytterbium was cool... / Continue →