"If you understood everything I said, you'd be me" - Miles Davis
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell
"Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government." - Lenny Bruce
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!" - Homer Simpson

Utility Fog Banner

RT @daviddlevine: Top 10 Reasons the New Google News Sucks:
RT @daviddlevine Top 10 Reasons the New Google News Sucks: Top 10 Reason the New Google News Sucks

Twitter Fri, 09 Jul 2010 23:07:53
Tweet 18180638125

I'm calling it: There will be a twitter outage after the World Cup Final
I'm calling it: There will be a twitter outage after the World Cup Final

Twitter Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:55:17
Tweet 18119619387

The only alcohol you can drink at the World Cup is Budweiser? Great, another reason for the rest of the world to hate us.
The only alcohol you can drink at the World Cup is Budweiser? Great, another reason for the rest of the world to hate us.

Twitter Mon, 21 Jun 2010 07:51:23
Tweet 16702799868

The Facebook Suicide Bomb Manifesto
The Facebook Suicide Bomb Manifesto - The Facebook Suicide Bomb Manifesto -

Twitter Thu, 17 Jun 2010 08:03:18
Tweet 16399475942

Dear South Africa: Enough with the stupid horns
Dear South Africa: Enough with the stupid horns

Twitter Sun, 13 Jun 2010 22:06:16
Tweet 16127389879

I want cash back, but only if it's somebody else's cash
I want cash back, but only if it's somebody else's cash

Twitter Tue, 25 May 2010 23:56:42
Tweet 14749275138

Problem #1: Oil spill. Problem #2: Collecting and selling spilled oil isn't profitable.
Problem #1: Oil spill. Problem #2: Collecting and selling spilled oil isn't profitable.

Twitter Wed, 12 May 2010 07:49:26
Tweet 13857914526

Twitter Sun, 21 Mar 2010 17:21:59
RT @TaraBusch Dreamt I had an all girl prog band and we were all dressed up like hitler..?

Tweet 10848163901

Twitter Sat, 06 Mar 2010 20:57:42
I love the smell of thermite in the evening

Tweet 10106470528

Ho Ho Heil

He's making a list...



Post-Apocalyptic POTUS Ahoy
Doomsday Ships
Via Cryptome

The What Now?
I listened a bit to Defense Secretary Robert Gates talk about the rebidding of the tanker deal (this is big news around here because Seattle hasn't figured out yet that Boeing has moved to Chicago) and I was struck by a one question: How did we fight World War II without the use of the term "warfighter"? Because Gates can hardly get through a sentence without it.

No Reason...Just Wondering
Zombie bites a Vampire

Idiot Commercial
"You don't leave town to buy a cup of coffee, why do it to buy a car?"
Ah, because cars aren't cups of coffee ?

Polite, Calm Canada
"Three severed right feet have washed ashore on the Gulf Islands (British Colombia) in the past six months, in what police say is one of the most bizarre cases in recent memory.

The latest foot, still in its sneaker, was found last Friday on Valdes Island, a small community near Nanaimo that does not have regular ferry service and is accessible only by private boat or float plane.

RCMP say they're not sure whether foul play is involved and are trying to match any missing-person cases to the severed foot.

Two other right feet, both in size 12 men's sneakers, washed ashore on Gabriola and Jedediah islands last August. RCMP collected DNA from the grisly remains but could not match them to anyone in police databases. The three islands are within 60 kilometres of each other.

"We'll be using pathology examinations and anthropology examinations to garner as much information as we possibly can about the remains," said Jeff Dolen, B.C.'s assistant deputy chief coroner.

Although it is somewhat common to find individual body parts (Well yea, if you're an assistant deputy chief coroner it is,) , Dolen said this would be "the first instance of three such similar remains being discovered" in such proximity."
Third right foot discovered in Gulf Islands
Via But Wouldn't It Be Cool?

Etymology

The other day I began to wonder about the relationship between the words "Polynesia" and "Amnesia"-why did they have the same ending? Was amnesia poetically considered an "island of the mind"? It turns out that although both are from the Greek, they have different roots.

Polynesia : Nesos - "island
Amnesia: Mimneskesthai - "to recall,"

Yummy
Lung Gun
Via Boing Boing

All Hail Google

"Why would Google need two data centers in a state with only four million residents? Why would they need to buy 520 acres in a Goose Creek industrial park when that's probably 100 times as much land as any conceivable data center would require?

Google is building a LOT of data centers. The company appears to be as attracted to cheap and reliable electric power as it is to population proximity. In Goose Creek they bought those 520 acres from the local state-owned electric utility, which probably answers the land question posed above. By buying out all the remaining building sites in an industrial park owned by an electric utility, Google guarantees itself a vast and uninterruptible supply of power, much as it has done in Oregon by building a data center next to a hydroelectric dam or back here again in Columbia by building near a nuclear power station.

Of course this doesn't answer the question why Google needs so much capacity in the first place, but I have a theory on that. I think Google is building for a future they see but most of the rest of us don't. I'll go further and guess that Google is planning to build similar data centers in many states and that the two centers they are apparently preparing to build here in South Carolina are probably intended mainly to SERVE South Carolina. That's perhaps 100,000 servers for four million potential users or 40 users per server. What computing service could possibly require such resources?

The answer is pretty simple. Google intends to take over most of the functions of existing fixed networks in our lives, notably telephone and cable television."

When Being a Verb is Not Enough: Google wants to be YOUR Internet.


Living In Science Fiction
William Gibson:
Glancing sideways is becoming more generally recognized as about the best way of doing what we used to call futurism.


Firefox Tip
If a web-site removes your Firefox toolbars, and you have the Web Developer extension installed, just "Right-click/ Web Developer/ Miscellaneous/ Show Window Chrome" to get your buttons back.

Liquidity
Bruce Sterling riffing on "The Futures of Money"

Blasphemy!
"The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect "total accuracy" from the Bible.

"We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision," they say in The Gift of Scripture."
I for one am shocked, just shocked.

Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible
Via MonkeyFilter

Evolution
"Losses from organized retail theft have topped $30 billion annually, triple what they were a decade ago, according to the National Retail Federation, leading to higher prices, frequent out-of-stock problems and a more cumbersome shopping experience for consumers."
Retail gangs take growing toll on sales
Via Beyond the Beyond/Bruce Sterling

Bread Crumbs

I start out reading about the New Battlestar Galactica (NYT)
and end up with obtuse literary theory
"For de Man, literature or texts--works or configurations that as signifying structures require reading--undo claims of authority, claims based on assumptions of the continuity of form with meaning and the possibility of totalizing a structure and, in a dominant philosophical tradition, on the category of the aesthetic or the continuity between perception and knowledge supposed to be guaranteed and exemplified by works of art."
Whatever you say, buddy
Via
linkfilter

Technorati Tags:,

We Live In Science Fiction

I haven't thought this all the way through, but if the economies of Massive-Multiplayer-Online-Games are interacting with the "real-world" economy, then wouldn't it be possible for a virtual currency to function like a real one?
"Farming" MMORPGs for real-world money

Technorati Tags:MMORPG

I Just Wonder
" leave no property behind me of which it is necessary to dispose. As for the everyday objects that were of use to me, I ask they be distributed as seems appropriate. My personal notes are to be burned. I ask that this be attended to by Father Stanislaw (Eds: his personal secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz), whom I thank for his collaboration and help, so prolonged over the years and so understanding. As for all other thanks, I leave them in my heart before God Himself, because it is difficult to express them."
Why did John Paul II want his personal notes destroyed? It just seems odd to me, especially since I suppose he could easily have had them locked away for say, 100 years or so. I also find it interesting that throughout all of NPR's painfully extensive coverage I've heard no one comment on the Pope's request.
Complete Text Of Will

Redoing The Math
About my earlier Post about the "never sleep with anyone with more problems/crazier than you" rule. I realized had 2 hidden assumptions:
1: Everyone could tell how many problems they and other people had.
2: No one used deceit.

Doing The Math
If you follow the old adage "never sleep with anyone with more problems than you" you have 2 sets of possible partners:
1:People who have less problems than you that don't follow the rule.
2:People who have exactly the same number of problems as you. This is the also the outcome if everyone follows the rule.

World-Class Packratting
Jason Scott is archiving every Podcast ever made.
"So one day I looked at Podcasts. I liked some aspects of them, so I am downloading all of them. Every one. I am going back and swiping older ones as I can find them, but I'm still in the process of getting every single one, so it's taking some time. I have them in languages I've never spoken, and I have listened to less than one tenth of one percent of them. At last count I'm at 75 gigabytes of podcasts which works out to roughly 7,500 individual files. I suspect there are doubles and many missed files, but we'll see if that comes with time.

I'll take a moment to describe how I am doing this. Obviously, I need some space to store all these podcasts, but space, these days, is very cheap. I watch sites that provide specials for hardware, and can purchase a 250 gigabyte hard drive for $100. It's a drive type that is prone to failure, so I buy two. At home, I run these drives on USB2 enclosures, on two separate machines, and I use a program called rsync to keep them synchronized. I download podcasts using a program called doppler, which has several advantages to its approach that are useful for archiving. I have the podcasts on a network drive, so I am not beholden to a specific machine to download the podcasts. I found very quickly that Doppler Radio didn't check to see if you had pointed it to multiple copies of the same feeds (it assumes you're using such a small amount of feeds, that you would always notice the doubles yourself), so I wrote a perl script that yanked out doubles. This has held up for the time being, and while I don't have firm numbers on how much disk space per day this process is taking, I'm not too worried about it."
Via Boing Boing

Faux Pas
So Prince Harry is in deep kimchi for wearing a Nazi "uniform" to a costume party. This got me wondering about the semiotics of wearing a costume. Apparently it's bad for Harry to appear in Nazi regalia because of who he is. Other than that I can't figure out how exactly he gave offence. People wear Nazi uniforms all the time for movies and nobody gets upset. People dress as Satan and they aren't berated for it. If wearing a Satan costume doesn't mean you side with the embodiment of evil then wearing a Nazi costume doesn't mean you like the Nazis. That said, Harry wore the lamest Nazi costume I have ever seen. They may have been evil, but they had cool looking clothes.