The interrogation dragged on for hours. Fulton remained outwardly calm, and denied everything. Inwardly, though, he felt sick. He’d been spying on the IRA for a decade and a half, and he knew that if Scap broke him—if he admitted anything—he’d be a dead man—own a hole,” in IRA slang.

So throughout the interrogation, Fulton sat stone-faced, blindfolded, and facing the wall. Double blind. He held tight to his secret: yes, he was a British spy.

But then, so was his interrogator.

Found via Kottke, Longform.org is collecting great pieces of long form journalism. This is taken from an article about British counter-insurgency in Northern Ireland during the Troubles that makes for an interesting read.

By early 1993, Fulton and his team of bombers had found something less clumsy than wires to use in bomb and rocket detonation. They rigged bombs with photo sensors, which they triggered by popping off camera flashes. The results were lethal. Trouble was, other lights—bright headlights, or a tourist’s disposable photo flash—could set off a bomb prematurely.

British intelligence services, in an effort to control IRA techniques through collaboration, secretly passed along a solution for the problem: a new technology—the infrared flash—that could be acquired only in America. Fulton’s handlers offered to facilitate an undercover IRA shopping mission to New York, and an MI5 officer flew across the Atlantic on the Concorde to make arrangements with American services in advance of Fulton’s arrival. “This was a terrorist organization operating in the United States,” Fulton told me, and it required cooperation. “It was a pretty big thing.”

Fulton traveled to New York with several thousand dollars, met secretly with his handlers, arranged the purchase, and returned to Northern Ireland, ready to create a deadly new weapon. The IRA embraced the innovation, and it worked so well that other terrorist groups soon took notice and adapted the infrared photo-sensor bomb to their own wars. Today, Iraqi insurgents wield it against British and American troops in Iraq

(via Rocketboom)

I was thinking just the other day (Halloween in fact) that Jesus must (technically) be the world’s most famous zombie and then today I spotted this:

(via Rocketboom)

Justin sent this to me on Monday and it still makes me chuckle. It’s probably as good a way as any to choose your religion (though obviously all you heretics out there are going to be a little screwed* come the afterlife…)

(thx to Tino)

*Or not. Or whatever.

I remember a riddle book I had when I was younger had a riddle that ran something like:

A man come across two human bodies frozen in ice and instantly knows he has found Adam & Eve. How?*

The Omphalos Hypothesis is the idea that God created the world with all its signs of age and as such any evidence for the (presumed) age of the Earth/Universe cannot be considered reliable. Which leads to the idea that although the original hypothesis proposes that in Genesis God created the trees with their rings even though they’d never grown etc., creation could technically have happened anytime:

Though Gosse’s original Omphalos hypothesis specifies a popular creation story, others have proposed that the idea does not preclude creation as recently as five minutes ago, including memories of times before this created in situ. This idea is sometimes called “Last Thursdayism” by its opponents, as in “the world might as well have been created last Thursday.” The concept is both unverifiable and unfalsifiable through any conceivable scientific method…

Which if you believe such things means that I may never have written this post, I was just created with the memory of doing it. Similarly you may never have read this post, you were just created with the memory of it…

*The bodies didn’t have navels – as neither Adam nor Eve were carried in a uterus they wouldn’t have had umbilical cords, though in art Adam & Eve are generally depicted with navels as apparently it looks a bit weird otherwise.