Super-heavy elements "discovered".
A "time of new beginnings"
Happy Candlemas. I seem to have observed it on the following Monday last year.
Top Ten Names (distasteful)
Top ten toxic substances listed in ToxFaq that could be good female first names, possibly good gaming names.
10. Ethion
9. Toluene
8. Toxaphene (“Toxie” for short)
7. Beryllium
6. Cadmium
5. Phosgene/Phosphine (tie)
4. Mirex
3. Endrin
2. Dichlorvos
(drumroll)
1. Antimony
Good Advice, Learned the Hard Way
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.”
Yet another compulsory-registration workaround
BugMeNot.com is your friend.
One more reason to get a Mac
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.
More about us than you want to know
In addition to language, the FP crew are fascinated by squalor and its related phenomena.
Classic Comedy
Mel Brooks should be laughing right about now.
Word Nerd Fun
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.
Science excites the imagination
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."
