It turns out I’m a geek. 40.63116% – Major Geek. If I got to include the whole Collective, the score would increase noticeably, since (inter alia) I’m not a librarian and didn’t marry a geek.

She got out of the journal biz a while ago, but Ali Davis’s True Porn Clerk Stories still makes entertaining reading (and at least until This American Life reruns the show featuring her, it’s not overwhelmed with traffic).

I wonder if there are any video stores out there that don’t keep rental histories. As with library materials, there’s no reason to keep track of what’s no longer pending, so having the history serves no good purpose.

My favorite quote from this story about the discovery of a new particle is from Marcello Giorgi, from the University of Pisa, Italy, who leads the BaBar collaboration:

“We have discovered a new charm particle in an experiment designed to probe the difference between matter and antimatter using bottom quarks.”

I’ll just nod sagely. As usual, though, I love science stories that mention antimatter.

There’s a page with the Big Mac Index listed all the time. It does a good job with the currency variations, but not so good a job with the Big Mac price variations.

Spammers are apparently using trojan horses to get more hosts through which to deliver their shit. I first observed what looked like distributed spam attacks early this year, but I couldn’t find any reference to malware being used to recruit hosts to the effort. I now feel vindicated. For what that’s worth.

fatherdan at memepool seems to be a thoughtful person. I’d like to link directly to his bit about Tim Robbins’s speech at the National Press Club, but I don’t see a way to do it. It was posted to Commentary on 17 April.

Cisco has prepared a draft of “lawful interception” capability, to be offered as an option on “any product that a service provider is likely to purchase[.]” I’m given to understand that their Catalyst products already supply monitoring capability, but for all I know that’s an ad-hoc capability that’s been hacked together by service providers. To my mild surprise, I buy the argument that if Cisco doesn’t supply the capability, somebody else will, and it might end up casting a wider net. It just underscores that if you care about the privacy of your data, don’t send it in the clear across the wire. And if what you’re doing is likely to attract the attention of anybody serious, don’t send anything across any wires (or over the air) at all. Or at least no wires or air that can be traced to you.

A co-worker just forwarded me this article about a machine that will turn just about anything into oil and other useful products. It’s like a cross between a Sampo and a Mr. Fusion. It sounds unbelievably promising.
Update: the article above now requires payment to read, but Discover magazine published an update in July 2004 that (as of January 2005) is free to read.

I’m sure this avian flu thing will burn itself out without jumping the species barrier (oops, too late) and killing us all. No need to panic.

My first thought on seeing this story about a suspicious powder (later determined not to be BoTox or plague) shutting down a Tacoma postal processing facility: “Shit, that better not slow down my Netflix shipments.”