Format stuff is one of my technology hobby-horses, and it looks like it’s one of Soderbergh’s, too. He makes a good argument for directors and producers banding together to demand their work not be cut to pieces in order to fit on a screen.

This is interesting. The international standard for a kilogram (as well as other measurements) is actually based on a single object, defined as being exactly a kilogram, which is kept very safe at a center near Paris. The thing is, since the object is defined as the kilogram, it doesn’t matter what weight it actually is. If it changes weight over time somehow, the actual quantity known as a kilogram changes. This appears to be happening.

Interestingly, if you were to sneeze on the kilogram, or hack a piece of it, by international law you would have just revised the definition of a kilogram. All the weights in the world would have to change in order to reflect your new sneezed-upon weight. Scientists are working to create a constant instead of a weight, but until then the risk remains.

Worried that TPB may disappear overnight? It’s a real risk, so why not help out in the backup effort? A user has collected all the torrents on the site (about 850,000 – another 1.2 million are not hosted on TPB) into a single torrent totaling 21.3GB. It’s still only got one seeder (the guy) but having a few copies of this around will mean that imitation and temporary Pirate Bay-ish sites will have much of the original’s content to start with.