Check out the vital stats and compare and contrast various IRC networks such as EFNet, DALNet, Undernet, etc...

An oldie but goodie: Recursive Make Considered Harmful
"Symptoms that the UNIX community have long accepted as a fact of life, but which need not be endured any longer..." "...recursive makes which take ``forever'' to work out that they need to do nothing, recursive makes which do too much, or too little, recursive makes which are overly sensitive"

One good thing about all the attention the demise of the Mir space sation is getting is that it gets people interested in science who otherwise would not have been interested in it at all. Another good thing is the popularization of cool satelite tracking Java applets like this one. Its particularly convenient because you can use it from within your browser. You can rotate the globe in 3D, zoom in and out, and track various sattelites, like Mir and the ISS.