During the first week of May, something very unusual happened in coastal Maine. Normally seismically boring, Maine experienced about a dozen tiny earthquakes that rippled across the region. In their wake, the cracking earth sounded like explosions or gunshots in the distance.

Far from being the precursor to an impending disaster, these pint-sized earthquakes (all under 2 on the Richter scale) are the result of the massive Laurentide ice sheet that once covered huge swathes of North America during the last ice age. Under the weight of all that ice, over a mile thick,  the crust of the earth was squished down. Some places, as much as 500 feet. Since the ice sheet receded some 14, 000 years ago, the ground has been springing back up.

Earthquakes and other seismic fallout from eons of icey repression are not uncommon in Maine, but a cluster of a dozen is rather unusual for the region. It’s a surprising reminder that although we may think of the landscape as unchanging and eternal, it is constantly in flux and responding to forces that stretch far beyond our lifetimes.

(image and story via Wired)

It’s been a rough week for Apple, since a pair of researchers put forward the shocking claim that iPhones and 3G iPads were keeping a log of user’s movements in an unsecured file. After seven days of near-silence, Apple has finally issued a Q&A on how, exactly, the location data stored on iPhones is used. Their answer is, to say the least, quite intriguing.

The thrust of Apple’s argument is that they have never been tracking your location, and that the information within consolidated.db is actually not even your data. Confused? Understandable.

It was announced last summer that 1980s teen sensations Debbie Gibson and Tiffany would be appearing/battling each other in a SyFy movie called “Megapython vs. Gatoroid,” which is scheduled to air this Saturday. Just try and tell me what’s wrong with this sentence, because for me, a girl who sang “Electric Youth” into a hairbrush the year I got my first pair of glasses, this is proof that all is right with the world. Everything is going according to plan.

Crayons rock. Way more than colored pencils. But eventually, they’re all worn down, and sometimes you sharpen them and they’re just never the same, and you end up with all these crayon nubs that you’ve rendered impossible to hold. Until now, because now there’s a thing that lets you melt them and create new crayons. It’s supposed to be for kids to teach them recycling, but feel free to go ahead and borrow it.

This week the director of business intelligence at Warner Bros‘. anti-piracy unit, Ben Karakunnel, gave paidContent a look at the year and a half study that the studio has been making on the behavior of content pirates, and the surprisingly unsurprising conclusions that they are drawing from the data.

For example, lots of people pirate because there’s no foreign language dub:

In the international markets, illegal WB content in which pirates dub or subtitle themselves is increasingly popular. For one unspecified program Karakunnel used as an example, it wasn’t until the third day after its initial airdate that one such pirate-created translated version accounted for 23% of pirated files of that particular program. By day 10, it accounted for 74%.

Said Karakunnel, “If we can get dubbed or subtitled language versions in the first two days, we can beat them to the punch.”

Remember MySpace? It was that thing that was big before Facebook was big. It had all those wacky custom mouse cursor sets and everyone’s page had a bunch of music videos they liked and you hated? No? Well, it existed, and believe it or not, was once the be-all end-all of social networking. Aside from fading into relative obscurity once Facebook hit the scene, the biggest problem currently facing MySpace is a threat from News Corp.–who bought MySpace in 2005–saying that MySpace’s business better be fixed soon.

Just as the dust settles from the iPhone 4 press conference, we are greeted with the news that San Mateo Superior Court Judge Clifford Cretan has granted an application from San Mateo County D.A.’s office to withdraw the warrant to search Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s home. You’ll recall that in April, Chen claimed to have purchased an iPhone 4 prototype for $5,000 after the smartphone was left at a bar by a poor (ex-)Apple engineer, and controversially had his house raided by California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team.