Breastfeeding? avoid JFK Airport: “A Long Island mother is fuming that JFK Airport security guards forced her to drink her own breast milk in front of other passengers before boarding a flight”. (via BoingBoing)
Category: Uncategorized
I’ve just discovered Joystick 101, a great talking-about-games site. Highlights include Follow the Bouncing Breasts:
Just think — it was someone’s job to perfect the panty peek in Soul Caliber, or the (breast) jiggle motion in Ready 2 Rumble. It seems like a lot of effort for something so unrelated to gameplay. Particularly when the gameplay left so much to be desired. … We joked that these designers were reminiscent of Gary and Wyatt in Weird Science, wearing the bras on their heads and working hard on perfecting the breast size of their fantasy women. Is this analogy far from the mark?
(ha, that headline should generate some interesting referrals from Google ;)
“Despite the seemingly ubiquitous admonition to “drink at least eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day”, rigorous proof for this counsel appears to be lacking. This review sought to find the origin of this advice (called “8 x 8” for short) and to examine the scientific evidence, if any, that might support it.
No scientific studies were found in support of 8 x 8. Rather, surveys of food and fluid intake on thousands of adults of both genders – analyses of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals – strongly suggest that such large amounts are not needed”. (/.)
Forty years ago, two psychiatrists administered history’s largest dose of LSD. Johan Jensen reports on the epoch-defining experiment. (from The Guardian)
Two weeks ago, an Indonesian woman attended the funeral of her husband and son, passengers on a plane that crashed deep in the jungle. But even as she wept, her son – barefoot and bleeding – was fighting his way back to civilisation. Bangau Samuel tells John Aglionby how he made it home. (from the Guardian)
A great article on Kevin Warwick from Danny O’Brien via the BBC.
A great quote from a CBS article on spammers.
Bernard Balan, 51, who operates a bulk mail site … says he’s gone through “unbelievable hardships” to keep the spam flowing. … “My operating costs have gone up 1,000 percent this year, just so I can figure out how to get around all these filters”.
Best news I’ve read all day ;) Full story at CBS.
The SliMP3. I’ve been trying to figure out how to get my MP3s playing downstairs, without a noisy PC with fan to do it. This looks like a good way to do it; stream them from your PC upstairs!
- Supports all MP3 bit rates and VBR, plus MPEG2
- Communicates using IP over Ethernet, open streaming/control protocol
- Infrared remote control
- Small enough that you can put it anywhere – on a shelf, bedside table, etc.
- Open-source server, written in Perl (GPL)
- Optional HTTP interface – control the player and manage your playlists from a web browser!
Only $249. (Shipping may be a different matter, though…)
Jon Ronson at the Guardian investigates making a “dirty bomb”. It turns out to be not quite as easy as all that:
I log on to Ask Jeeves and type, ‘Where can I buy some uranium?’ Jeeves responds, ‘You can find anything at eBay. eBay has everything you’re looking for. Find it all at eBay.’
Man ends up with barnacle stuck to his penis. Forwarded from forteana.
Hey, Graham Barr is wearing my shirt!!
The “bloke dies on Stag Night and nobody notices” urban legend comes true:
An inquest has heard how a man in a pub died while friends partied around him and played practical jokes on him. (Link)
Some nerd humour courtesy of Verity Stob at DDJ. This will be familiar to anyone who’s used Windows, I should think.
Cruft Force 2. Comfortable. Description: User has now got around to resetting Explorer so that “web content in folders” is suppressed. Something has made a C:\TEMP directory in the proper place unasked, for which mercy the user guiltily feels grateful.
A strange entry is found in the System event log: MRxSmb: The redirector was unable to initialise security context or query context attributes. Assiduous googling of the key phrases, up web site and down newsgroup, establishes that, although many have wondered, nobody knows what this means. (jm: …time passes…)
Cruft Force 5. Worn out. Description: Some time after bootup, always get a dialog “A service has failed to start – BLT300.” What is BLT300? Nobody knows. Although one can manually remove/disable this service, it always reappears two or three reboots later.
If one double-clicks a document icon, Word takes 4 minutes 30 seconds to start up. But it still works fine if started as a program. Somebody opines that this is due to misconfigured DDE. Or the Mars-Jupiter cusp.”
P.J. O’Rourke on corporate corruption:
However, if corporate corruption does exist, it has benefits as well as liabilities. Auditing scandals will no doubt improve the sex lives of accountants. Bean counters were previously thought to be drab and unattractive creatures. Now accountants are considered cute–by their fellow prison inmates.
Sunday Times: Tourists to invade Kabul on ‘axis of evil’ holidays:
“Seven weeks after the Royal Marines pulled out, the tourists are going in. Despite Foreign Office warnings and the threat of kidnap, landmines and US airstrikes, two British tour companies are offering holidays to Afghanistan. … The trips are the ultimate in a new trend dubbed hardship holidays. Booming numbers of western travellers are searching ever harder to find authentic off the beaten track experiences, and enterprising tour operators are answering the demand with trips to the slums of Rio, sweatshops in El Salvador and South African townships. ”
I doubt it’s the same. I’d love to visit Afghanistan, although I’m happy to wait a few years until everything’s settled down a little. Also, from the sounds of it, most of the visitors want to go for the same reasons, or because they visited in the 70s — like these folks did.
The city of Rome has admitted defeat in a long battle with a disabled man who is believed to make £100,000 a year collecting coins from the Trevi fountain.
“ Kangaroo scrotum pouches are unusual sentimental little gifts that last and remembered for a long time because of its uniqueness.” Well, I can’t argue with that… (fwd: Bob Rickard’s forteana post)
Irishman could face 10 years in jail for helping asylum-seekers to escape from Australian camp:
His solicitor told the court that he was pleading guilty to the offence. However she asked the court not to jail her client, who has no previous convictions, and who is due to leave Australia when his visa runs out in a few months time.
However the crown prosecutor said that the offence was such that it required a stiff penalty, both to punish the offender and as a deterrent to other would-be criminals considering similar action.
…
Insp Des Bray confirmed that Mr O’Shea had been arrested and charged at a campsite in Port Augusta on July 2nd. In a court appearance on July 3rd, Mr O’Shea was refused bail, and has been in jail since.
“Criminals”? In my opinion, Jonathan O’Shea’s a hero. Personally, I don’t miss the anti-refugee feeling in Australia.
A classic byline:
FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (July 24, 2002 9:37 p.m. EDT) – Losing your job, quitting school, going broke and moving back home with your mother after living abroad for years would be tough on anyone.
It’s even tougher when you’re a former military dictator who once had the power to execute opponents at will.
“An obsessive anti-abortionist who murdered a security guard has quoted Bible passages to a Supreme Court judge to try to prove he is not psychotic.” Fwded from forteana…
EBay comes in handy as a “source of evidentiary ephemera for asbestos litigators”:
After a heated bidding war on EBay, Mark Lanier recently paid $2,125 to win a 1941 naval machinery manual. It sounds like a peculiar collecting hobby, but to Lanier it was serious business. The Houston lawyer, who sues companies on behalf of asbestos exposure victims, was bidding against a defense lawyer to get his hands on an evidentiary trophy filled with details on where and how asbestos was used aboard ships.
LA Times, via Gary Stock on the Irregulars list…
Here we go again — the Dead Russian Composer Personality Test. My result:
If I were a Dead Russian Composer, I would be Igor Stravinsky.
Known as a true son of the new 20th Century, my music started out melodic and folky but slowly got more dissonant and bizzare as I aged. I am a traveler and a neat freak, and very much hated those rotten eggs thrown at me after the premiere of The Rite of Spring.
Har har… a tale of two emails. Take one April 3 2000 post to ILUG:
The concept of revocable email addresses has been around for ages – once you’re set up to do subaddressing (such as user+foo@bar.com), it’s dead easy to do all by yourself, with the added bonus that you’re not dependant on some third party service provider.
Yep, sure I do it myself using virtusertable: jm-latestdodgydotcomstock@jmason.org gets deleted once it gets spammed.
Forget all about it for 2 years…
… and eventually follow up with a 20 July 2002 spam to me:
Long Beach Film Festival – Now Accepting Films & Screenplays
The Long Beach Film Festival is now accepting screenplays and films (short, documentary & feature) in all formats. The winners’ work will be reviewed by a committee of established production companies. This is a great way to get exposure and even discovered in Hollywood.
What address was it sent to? Yes, that’s right — jm-latestdodgydotcomstock at jmason.org. Oh the irony.
Good article explaining why the ‘distributing objects by class’ model doesn’t work – found at Morbus Iff’s blog.
Collatoral Spammage 2002, a “How much spam do you get?” survey, results here. (found via aaronsw’s blog).
Currently there’s a neat curve around 21-50 per week, and then a big jump at the 201-400 range, where I find myself (spamtraps not included — they get more like 30k spams a week ;)
I reckon this jump in the graph is a result of the poll URL being passed around people who are interested in the subject — who, if my experience is anything to go by, generally find themselves interested because they’re snowed under by the stuff.
Anyway, some further reading brings me to two TidBITS articles on the
subject: Content
Filtering Exposed and Email
Filtering: Killing the Killer App.
For what it’s worth, I agree to an extent with Adam and Geoff on the subject: the mail delivery infrastructure should not be clogged up with content filtering, with two caveats. (read on for more)
The Spam Has Got To Go — (link via HtP) —
“I used to think that spam was akin to junk mail that we all get in our physical mailboxes. I once even argued that I got more junk postal mail than junk email. Those days are long gone. It has now become a daily deluge. It is analogous to people driving by your house and stuffing your mailbox with trash and pornographic materials and other insults to your intelligence and your morals. People are advised to get a new email address to avoid the problem. That is analogous to having to pick up your furniture and family and move to a new house. And then within days if not hours, be found and have your mailbox stuffed once again.”
The author gets it right, until they hit the paragraph at the end stating (along with Jon Udell) that digital IDs and signed emails are the solution. That’s the problem — one can’t wander around telling all your correspondents to rebuild their email systems, and use new methods simply to talk to one. And even then, a whole new — and scary — layer of infrastructure needs to be built to issue, guarantee, and revoke the IDs, and let’s hope to ghod it’s not Verisign ;) It’s just not viable.
Damn, the Simputer development effort is running into money problems.
THE SIMPUTER — whose name is an acronym for Simple, Inexpensive, Multilingual Computer — was launched in April 2001. … Running on AAA batteries, they included a built-in speaker, microphone, telephone jack and modem as well as USB and smart card connectors. Internet browsers and e-mail applications would be standard. Among software that has been developed for the Simputer are applications covering electronic governance, literacy initiatives and dissemination of health information.
‘Nobody has built a computer for the rural and poor people. Also, there is no license for the hardware or software. That is probably the reason for their hesitation.’
Sweetcode.org: haven’t looked at it in 6 months, but it’s got great stuff, like:
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CRM-114 “is a system to examine incoming e-mail, system log streams, data files or other data streams, and to sort, filter, or alter the incoming files or data streams according to whatever the user desires. Criteria for categorization of data can be by satisfaction of regexes, by sparse spectra, or by other means. Accuracy of the sparse spectra function has been seen in excess of 99 per cent, for 10+ megabytes of learning text”.
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Panorama Tools : “Software to View, Create, Edit and Remap Panoramic Images”. If I can ever afford to get all my photos printed, I’ll need this.
According to BrightMail, spam volume to their traps has quintupled in the last year; from 879,253 messages per month to 4,825,144. Insane. PDF graph here.
Bake, Don’t Fry: Aaron Swartz has written a good article about static page generation vs. database-backed websites, with a hefty plug for WebMake.
But he seems to miss the fact that WebMake does all the dep-tracking tricks described in Building Baked Sites — modulo the odd bug in the dep-tracking code. ;).
“(On July 4) Israeli officials reported that a missile may have exploded a few miles from an EL-AL plane flying over the Ukraine. Over the weekend, however, both the Ukrainian Defense Ministry and Ukraine’s National Space Agency indicated that a meteor rather than a terrorist attack may have been the cause of the atmospheric fireball explosion.”
Random musing: I saw a memorable meteor strike while I was visiting Fraser Island in Australia — while walking along in bright sunshine, without a cloud in the sky, a burning fireball streaked across the sky from west to east. It burnt up before it hit the sea, however. Wish I’d got a picture.
–Benny Peiser, 8 July 2002
Hooray! Dug my headphones out from the box where they’ve been stowed for the last 6 months, found my mp3 backups, and I can finally listen to music again! Current top picks (in a retro style):
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Tribe of Issachar – original dubplate
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Barrington Levy – Under Mi Sensi
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Congo Natty – Champion DJ
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Hyper-On Experience – Lords of the Null Lines
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Sizzla – Praise Ye Jah
Man, I missed good reggae on my holidays — there’s only so much Bob Marley you can take ;)
Biological Warfare and the “Buffy Paradigm”.
Any structured intellectual approach to describing this situation (biological warfare) — and planning for it — is so uncertain that a valid structure can only be developed as an exercise in complexity or chaos theory. I, however, would like you to think about the biological threat in more mundane terms. I am going to suggest that you think about biological warfare in terms of a TV show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that you think about the world of biological weapons in terms of the Buffy Paradigm, and that you think about many of the problems in the proposed solutions as part of the Buffy Syndrome.
My ghod. It’s not quite as bad as Jerry Pournelle and SDI in the 80’s, but it’s getting there…
“Archaeologists can now say with confidence what life was like for the Roman legionaries stationed at the end of empire: in Carlisle, almost 2,000 years ago – it rained all the time and it stank of fermented fish.”
Synchronicity! The fermented fish paste cropped up at the weekend, too. Described in the article as “a luxurious import from Spain and undoubtedly one of the most prized possessions of a wealthy Roman officer” and (in Latin on the amphora) “Tunny fish relish from Tangiers, old”, this was made near my parents’ house in Torrox in Andalucia, Spain — or at least, if it was common across Spain, the Torrox version was much prized by the Romans.
Sadly, it’s no longer made. But I’m a bit of a fish paste fan — you can’t make decent Thai or Laotian food without nam pla, and for a taste sensation on toast, Patum Peperium (“The Gentleman’s Relish”) is unbeatable in a steampunk-breakfast kind of way. In fact, the Roman paste sounds very similar. (Link)
Phew! That took a while, and it was only the watch-camera pics. The 1000 “proper” photos may take a while longer to get up. But without further ado, here’s some shots from my travels:
BTW regarding the Nepal image above: we must have just missed these guys, but their MS-sponsored patches (surely “service packs”? snicker) were much in evidence along the trail.
Mac Websites have this quality of I’ve been exploring and stumbled upon this cool (yet mysterious) trick! How endlessly curious is my strange friend!. Linux sites have much less of this idea of PC as mysterious black box. Tips tend to come with long explanations attached as to why they work, and why all other ways of doing it are Considered Dangerous.
(both via BoingBoing.) BTW I’ve removed swhack — which seems to have 404’ed — and replaced it with Oblomovka and Aaron’s blog.
One for Ireland Offline — the Pew Research Center’s report The Broadband Difference: How online Americans’ behavior changes with high-speed Internet connections at home.
For broadband users, the always-on, high-speed connection expands the scope of their online activities and the frequency with which they do them. It transforms their online experience. This has led to steady growth in broadband adoption among Net users. Since the Pew Internet Project first inquired about the nature of users home connection in June 2000, the number of high-speed home users has quadrupled from 6 million to 24 million Americans. This places home broadband adoption rates on par with the adoption of other popular technologies, such as the personal computer and the compact disc player, and faster than color TV and the VCR.
The Open Web Application Security Project’s Guide to Building Secure Web Applications:
The Guide covers various web application security topics from architecture to preventing attack specifics like cross site scripting, cookie poisoning and SQL injection.