Scientists, whose life is basically spent telling people what they already knew, have confirmed: Whining is the most annoying sound, ever.

Scientists have definitively proved that overhearing a cellphone conversation is more distracting than overhearing a normal conversation. It's because you only hear a "half-a-logue," which is less predictable and therefore requires more mental power to parse and ignore.

When you go to work out should you be all focused and intense and hardcore, or should you just be flipping through some magazine on the elliptical, while sexting? Well, look at it this way: Do you want to die?

We've survived through another wonderful, crazy Saturday. Seriously: crazy kids, crazy rock stars, crazy politicians, and just straight-up crazies. Glad we made it out okay. Here's your SNL open thread.

This from-the-archives Hugh MacLeod comic pulled 1,181 diggs this morning. Timeless, Hugh, timeless.

Good luck getting your computer fixed today. Is there some strange flu that only infects sysadmins sweeping the nation? No — but Blizzard Entertainment did dump Wrath of the Lich King, an update to its online World of Warcraft videogame franchise, on the Internet at midnight last night. What this means: A lot of engineers are going to be calling in lich this morning, having stayed up to download the update and then level their new Death Knight for a foray into Northrend. Yes, World of Warcraft players actually talk like that.You don't need to be able to talk gold and swords to understand that WoW, as it's abbreviated, is a "massively multiplayer online role-playing game" — which means that it's a group timewaster through which people bond. (A lot of people: The game, for which Blizzard charges a monthly subscription fee, has 11 million subscribers.) Sort of like golf! Venture capitalist Joi Ito has called World of Warcraft "the new golf," the social glue connecting a new generation of Silicon Valley businessmen. True enough, I suppose, for the overpaid, underemployed investor class. But for the people who are trying to pick up the slack for coworkers who overdid it on a raid last night, here's what World of Warcraft really is: the new binge drinking.

Stock market be damned, it's Fleet Week. While Owen grumbles about the racket overhead that drowns out his phone calls, I'm up on the roof screaming Yeeeeeeeeeah baby YES WE CAN!! The Angels are doing practice runs for this weekend's performances, Saturday and Sunday from 3-4 pm. I feel kind of sorry for the guy flying the little red Oracle biplane. Larry Ellison clearly needs an F-18. Four of them.

Stupid yet clever enough for Monday-afternoon viewing is this Nintendo Wii ad on YouTube that shakes apart the whole page during gameplay. Drill into it and you'll find it's not a standard YouTube video page, but an oversized Flash animation. Well done! But if the Wall Street Journal's Ahead of the Tape page does this tomorrow, I'm unsubscribing.

Click to viewStartup incubator LaunchBox gave JamLegend founder Andrew Lee $25,000 to create a Web-based Guitar Hero clone. This is bad news for you if your boss expected you to get anything done today. Lee's giving away invites to Twitter and Facebook users; instructions are on the homepage. Tell your boss I said I'm not sorry.

Internet video darling Veronica Belmont's

On Wednesday, the world saw a spine-tingling photo of an Iranian multiple-missile launch. On Thursday, we learned the image had been altered, apparently by Iran's Sepah News agency, to add another missile and make it scarier. Today, Wired rounds up the free world's response.

Transcribe quickly, for FUN. This reminds me of that Japanese videogame where you drive a cab. Still, it's addictive. [TypeRacer via Cabel]

"Twenty-three years ago, twelve strange children were born in England at exactly the same moment. Six years ago, the world ended. This is the story of what happened next." FreakAngels is a new graphic novel published online in weekly installments by Warren Ellis. The zany, dog-hating author is best known for Transmetropolitan, from which Valleywag cribbed the "I Hate it Here" tag and the Spider Jerusalem Award. FreakAngels opened last week with a blackout-drinking young lady and her steampunk helicopter. This week: Shotguns and jerricans. Next week, I predict, something bad happens to puppies. (Image (c) Warren Ellis 2008)

I miss John Brownlee's deliciously twisted Table of Malcontents blog at Wired, with its weekly Cthulhu Cthursday post. So I was happy to find a Cthulhu reference in the enigmatic Perry Bible Fellowship comic strip this morning. It's not the funniest of the series, but hit the Random button on PBF's website a few dozen times and I promise you'll get no work done today. Ok, back to Owen's posts about Yahoo vice presidents you've never heard of, but now they're fired.