A lovely idea, not very well executed: The Victorian sex cry generator.

This actually happened yesterday, but one of the friends to whom I sent the story recommended I share it with the world, so here it is:

So, the receptionist comes into my office (actually, she stood in the window beside the door to my office) and asks “Are you squeamish?” I suggest that’s too broad a question, and she asks me to come with her to look at something, and says something about “fish”. So I follow her, and outside the lunchroom door there’s a fish on the floor. The only fish tank in the office is a couple doors down, but on closer examination there are little droplets on the carpet. The fish is looking very departed, but I’m sure that if I touch it, it’ll twitch, and I’ll jump and/or scream. So she finds me the dustpan and some napkins, and I slide it onto the one using the other, and it doesn’t twitch as violently as I expected, but there is some movement, so I drop it into the fish tank, and it just hangs there, but then it moves a little, and looking closely I can see some gill movement. But still, it’s just hanging there, not moving other than the breathing. But when I close the lid, it flips into action, swimming around briefly for real. I don’t think it really wants to live (it did, after all, push open the lid to escape), but at least I’ve given it the opportunity if it changes its mind.

Rather than having to carry your SecurID around, why not put it on the web? As security god Bruce Schneier says in this week’s Crypto-Gram, "Here’s the strange thing: unless you know who the webpage belongs to, it’s still good security." Coming soon to a site near you?

The Perseids are expected to be extra good this year. Just right for setting up a hammock in the back yard and watching the fireworks.

In a reversal from an earlier announcement, there will be Daleks in the new Dr Who series. I hope the Nation estate lightened up, since I’m more interested in seeing something new out of them than the same old thing. I mean, gee, maybe we’ll learn about the terrible loneliness of the cyborgs.

I’m stunned and amazed: sheep get smart.

I briefly fancied that the Asperger’s tilt test might be related to nose-avoidance tilting, but no: it turns out babies who are likely to develop Asperger’s (or possibly other autism-spectrum disorders) tend to keep their heads upright when their bodies are tilted (I imagined that this was a back-and-forth (or maybe I mean side-to-side…) tilting, but the article doesn’t actually specify—maybe it doesn’t matter which axis the tilt is around). I rather would have expected a desire to keep the input system stabilized would be a good thing, but maybe it’s better to be able to adjust to different input orientations and understand that even though it’s been translated in some way, it’s still the same input.

Microsoft has just launched a competitor to Google News: I haven’t tried out Newsbot yet, but I’m hopeful it will allow the same access to WaPo and NYT articles as Google news, so I can search for that stuff without contaminating my Gmail cookie.

I’m suddenly less enthusiastic about the new Dr Who, after reading in this piece that Mr Eccleston wants to ‘concentrate more on the part’s “melancholy side.”‘ Ugh. I’m prepared, and happy, to believe that the Doctor has an inner emotional life, but I don’t think it will enhance my enjoyment to see evidence of it. Rather the way I prefer the calm Wash of “Serenity” to the panicky Wash of “The Message.” They’re both shit-hot pilots, but calm Wash does what he needs to do without a lot of fuss.

I would so like to believe that this story of Nigerian credulity is due to a scammer-scam, but the evidence just isn’t there.