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.

Mel Brooks should be laughing right about now.

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.