Some good advice from Patrick Hughes. No, I haven't heard of him either, but his advice seems sound.
"Dungeons and Dragons never goes away. Girls will still sense that shit 20 years later."
FBI endorsement of Macs' hardness. I'm confused by the assertion that Macs are somehow harder to recover data from than "Unix-based machines", what with MacOS X being Unix and all.
In addition to language, the FP crew are fascinated by squalor and its related phenomena.
Yes, the FP crew are a bunch of language nerds, so it is with confidence I direct you to Word Spy. Neat! There is a Word Spy book coming out next week.
Also, if you have access to the online OED (check your local library if you live in Washington state, hooray for the statewide database initiative), if you poke around a bit, you can see a list of words introduced into English in a particular year. It's a pretty cool snapshot of a time.
Sure, it's a new (sixth) form of matter, but what are the implications? "If you had a superconductor you could transmit electricity with no losses." Mmm, yes. In much the same way that if you had a camera, you could capture images. Thanks, Deborah Jin, of the U of Colorado, for stirring up those thrilling visions of the future.
Bonus phrase (from the Jin Group's page): "quantum degeneracy."
GM cress changes color in the presence of the by-products of explosives' decomposition (NO2), giving a handy map to the minefield beneath. If I weren't such a cynical bastard, I wouldn't interpret the land-mine-clearing charity's objections as "Hey, we've got a good thing going here; don't rock the boat."
All my minefields are already sown in lilacs and iris.
Nigeria is cracking down on 419 fraud. And who am I to doubt their sincerity in wanting to eliminate one of the top five industries in their country?
It took nearly a year since the last time my entity-reference-encoded email address got spam, but it's happened again, so I guess it's time to change it. fpcraig is dead; long live blogboy.
As an experiment, and because I knew I'd be deactivating fpcraig soon anyway, I tried the "remove me" link provided in the first piece of spam fpcraig received. Within three and a half hours, the second piece arrived, and within 15 hours, the address received the latest worm. By comparison, my primary email address receives an average of one piece of spam a week, and has never been sent a worm (other than from a dear, but somewhat careless, friend). And yes, I can read the headers: the spam and the worm all came through standard spammer channels (originating on (or at least relayed through) machines in dialup IP space, and sent to my secondary MXer); so far, my dear friend seems to be clean.
On the downside, now I'm getting dictionary-spammed. Crap.
I can't imagine this comes as much of a surprise to anyone, but a Sundance Documentary Award Winner called The Corporation documents the diagnosis of a corporation as a psychopath, using DSM-IV (one-third cooler than DSM-III, with the same number of lines!) criteria.
As previously reported, the AFA was doing a poll about attitudes toward gay marriage, with a view to reporting the results to Congress. But now that the poll's results aren't reflecting the AFA's religious-political-extremist agenda, they're declining to follow through.
From 1916, a book that tells you all about the kind of thrift where you pay less money instead of more, Adventures in Thrift. Yes, the tips are told as the thrifty adventures of Mrs. Larry!
"Mrs. Larry was not her real name. She was Mrs. Lawrence Hall, born Gregory, christened Elizabeth Ellen, but from the day of her marriage she had been nick-named "Mrs. Larry" by all those fortunate enough to count themselves as friends or acquaintances. And she loved the name. She said it made her feel so completely married to Larry."
As all educated folk know, love is addictive as hell, and simply a trick your body and brain chemistry play on you to get you to spawn. Still, it's more fun than the alternative.
If you're of a technical bent, and looking for a place to apply your skills in the community, check out NPower (or, if you're near the center of the universe, try their Seattle affiliate). They're dedicated to "Putting technology know-how in the hands of nonprofits." In the Rose City, farther from the sway of the Evil Empire, they have FreeGeek.
From Israel21c:
Jan. 21 - The chief rabbi of the city of Safed, Shlomo Eliyahu, has composed a special prayer for those who have accidentally entered pornographic sites or have had those sites pop up unannounced on their screens. Yediot Aharonot reported that concerned religious surfers contacted Rabbi Eliyahu,telling him that they had accidentally entered pornographic sites while surfing. On hearing this, Eliyahu composed a special prayer for protection from entering pornographic sites by accident: "Please, God, help me to cleanse my computer of all sorts of viruses and evil images that spoil and interfere with my lawful work, and allow me to cleanse myself so that I may be pure of mind and may pray with a perfect heart, and that I may raise a family in true, stable love." Eliyahu said that the prayer should be said every time one goes onto the Internet.Me, I'm sticking with AVG.
From the jacket of the book Letters to Henrietta, another potential miracle cure:
"Until the middle-aged, unmarried Isabella Bird (1831-1904) left her native Scotland for an independent life of travel, she was debilitated by illness, suffering from "neuralgia, pain in my bones, pricking like pins and needles in my limbs, excruciating nervousness, exhaustion, inflamed eyes, sore throat, swelling of the glands behind each ear, stupidity." Bird was so weak that she required a steel support to hold her head up and spent most of her time confined to bed. Desperate to find a cure, her doctors finally packed her off to the Pacific and Switzerland. Once abroad, the forty-year-old invalid miraculously recovered, and became determined to seek any adventure that allowed her to see the singular beauty of nature. In Hawaii, she was the first woman to climb the world's highest volcano; in Perak, she rode elephants through the jungles; in Colorado, she scaled 14,000-foot mountains, spent six months traveling mostly alone on horseback, and fell in love with a one-eyed
desperado named Rocky Mountain Jim. But whenever she went home to Scotland, her symptoms returned, making another trip essential. Bird's remarkable journeys took her to the remotest parts of the world and brought her considerable fame. In this fascinating collection of Bird's previously unpublished letters to her homebound younger sister Henrietta, one experiences her journeys firsthand and gains insight into the ambiguous private life of a woman who often invented her public face.
Containing correspondence from her first two grand tours to Australia, Hawaii, and Colorado in 1872-1873, and to Japan, China, Malaya, and the Holy Land in 1878-1879, Letters to Henrietta provides a fresh view of the legendary Victorian traveler."
musicplasma tells me that Norah Jones is close to almost all my favorite artists. As with many such "if you like this, try this" tools, it has an inadequate understanding (or perhaps representation) of the many ways two things can be similar (or one thing can be different). The belief that someone who likes Queen will also enjoy Roger Taylor's solo work doesn't take into account the fact that Roger didn't especially like a lot of the music that Queen put out, especially in the later years. Or even the perfectly reasonable expectation that a solo record would be substantially different from the group's work (otherwise, why bother?).
National Hugging Day is on hump-day this year. I would have had no idea, had I not gotten the Oopsy-Daisy calendar for my office.
I was wandering through Vonda McIntyre's site the other day, and ran across her list of pitfalls for writers. Then Pat Holt's Ten Mistakes Writers Don't See showed up on Blogdex. Maybe someone's actually trying to literally tell me something.
I've always liked the idea of a hot tub without all the fuss and expense, so had my eye on furo-type heater that can be hooked up to a tank of your choice, such as an affordable stock tank. I don't know how I feel about the Ikea-like plastic tub-ette, but check out the convection heater! Anybody know how to weld?
Scanner art is cool. And sometimes goofy.
I hadn't looked at McSweeney's for a while. Here are some jokes somebody may not have remembered quite right.
For reasons that don't bear scrutiny, I also found this pretty funny. I found the idea of it even funnier than the execution, though.
The cypherpunks have registered the username/password combination cypherpunks/cypherpunks at a number of places. Feel free to use it and/or register it yourself (the password may be "writecode" if the registration is old enough). If they want an email address, the convention is to use cypherpunks@toad.com.
Spalding Gray has gone missing, under circumstances that don't foster optimism in me. He has been suicidal recently, and left his home without wallet, baggage, or medication.
All I'm asking for is deli-counter guys with frickin' lasers on their heads.
Update: for technical specs of the laser (and the disappointing 1mm/sec cutting speed), see the optics.org report.
Alyson Hannigan in When Harry Met Sally. Yes, Luke Perry's in it, too; but still, Alyson Hannigan!
I hadn't heard that Brazil has been photographing and fingerprinting US visitors. Chamber of Commerce-types there are unhappy that it might discourage American visitors, but I say more power to them.
Opera sopranos' excellent pitch comes at the expense of clarity. The only reason I mention this is because the article provides today's Bonus Phrase: "fleshy tunnel".
Every so often, I feel obligated to remind myself and others that I really am a geek (yes, it's probably hard to forget). To that end, Groklaw is the place to go if you want to know the latest in SCO's battle to drive themselves out of business by attacking Linux users everywhere.
On the old blog, Sarah posted something about this Economist article about T9. That post is mysteriously gone, but I'm re-running my follow-up, because I love quoting myself:
Perhaps underscoring the difficulties associated with using (or learning, more to the point) T9, the article cited in the previous entry makes this statement: "Abbreviations such as 'can't' and 'won't' are difficult to type." Leaving aside, of course, that the writer meant "contractions," s/he must have been using a different T9 layout from the one I have, since "can't" and "won't" are no harder to type than any other five letter combination, and each is the first guess for its sequence.
There's also no mention of the fact that T9 was not designed for cellphones, as such, and works better when freed from the phone keypad mapping.
One wonders if wandering radium is a bigger problem than previously suspected, but is only noticed when we're on the lookout for radiation.
Radium has been attractive to the indigent in the past.
Acid is cool. I mean, how else can you temporarily simulate such interesting brain damage?
If you've been looking for a good source for non-latex condoms with non-spermicidal lubricant, try Shop in Private. They have a variety of other products as well. Yes, they sell questionable items (including herbal supplements), but they mostly seem not to claim that anything that's bullshit isn't bullshit. I'd feel better if they warned against using benzocaine for anal sex.
Cory Doctorow talks about how he conquered back pain using the power of the mind. I trust Doctorow enough to run and get the books. He describes it thusly:
"Your mileage may vary, but after more than a year of this, I'm ready to start talking about it. Like Atkins for weight loss and hypnosis for smoking cessation, Sarnoid back-therapy feels something like getting root on my body, like being able to move into user-controlled space stuff that the OS was badly mismanaging in the background."
I would very much like to get root on my body, how about you?