Rumor has it that the Grand Opening of the Fry’s Electronics in Renton will be the 29th of August. It’s the first one in Washington.

A couple guys got together and developed an algorithm to guess the gender of a writer from the writer’s text. Some other folks put together a web-accessible implementation of that algorithm. It thinks more than half of the Craig-written blog entries that I tried it on were written by a female. I’m too self-absorbed to have tried it with Sarah-written entries.

A moderately cool collection of recordings of many people from different places reading the same paragraph. The IPA transcriptions of the readings are pretty interesting, too.

Wow, I don’t think I’ll be porting a huge number of text entries into a new format again anytime soon. But if you must port your blog, do it this week while watching I Love the 70s on VH1 (which also has a whole new look).

The long-threatened conversion to Movable Type has finally happened. Sorry to all you search tool users who got here off the old GM links. If you’re interested in what we said about something, try a search from here.

Of the cool Friendster-backlash pages mentioned yesterday on memepool, The Onion’s is my favorite.

Not three days ago, a friend of mine told me that the German word for a song stuck in your head is ohrwurm (earworm). And now, This article about the phenomenon shows up on Blogdex. I have found in my research that the implantation of the parasites is more effective if the recipient’s brain has to go looking for the song. So, if I say “Laughter, tears, hopes, fears,” you’re more likely to want to punch me than if I just whistle the tune.

In other toe-tapping news, we have Eigenradio: the music without the redundancy. ‘Eigenradio plays only the most important frequencies, only the beats with the highest entropy. If you took a bunch of music and asked it, “Music, what are you, really?” you’d hear Eigenradio singing back at you. When you’re tuned in to Eigenradio, you always know that you’re hearing the latest, rawest, most statistically separable thing you can possibly put in your ear.’ 100% of visitors to my office have asked that I turn it down. It’s really effective for killing earworms.

It’s been on Blogdex too long for me to ignore:

The most common match is Galadriel, apparently.

Based on the “Human Battery” headline, I’m guessing much of the blog action regarding this article has people discussing whether The Matrix was stupid after all. Trust me, it was stupid (fine film, but that bit was stupid, and making it all another dream doesn’t make it any smarter). What I like about it, though, is the possibility of an external calorie sink, so everything you don’t need to live runs your iPod or something. I’ve been thinking for a few years that nano-bots wandering around converting fat to energy would be a nifty idea (except for the raging, brain-damaging fever).

The Pest Risk Analysis group in the USDA has the best logo I’ve seen on any federal website. The Homeland Security guys should take a hint from those threatening-looking bugs.