July 24, 2005

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I Challenge You To An AIM Fight!

• Someone has created a system to measure your AIM popularity. It goes three degrees deep, measuring you by how popular your buddies are. If your buddies are on lots of peoples' buddy lists, you'll turn out to be popular. I was dismayed to find a few people on my buddy list with like three times the number of popularity points as me, but they weren't the people I expected. From now on, I'm setting up a filter on my AIM that won't let anyone talk to me unless they're popular.
• Ars Technica comments on a study that says web surfing costs businesses $200 billion per year. This apparently averages out to about $5000 per employee. I don't know about that, but I can say for certain, based on 11 weeks, 40 hours per week, at $18 per hour, plus $1000 relocation stipend, that National Instruments lost at least $8920 last summer. I love the internets. Every one of them.
• Somewhat related to an earlier post about how porn isn't bad, here is news that in India, patrons at an adult cinema were marched out and made a spectacle in front of their families and peers. "Indian police forced around 200 people caught watching pornography to do sit-ups in public to shame them and keep them away from theaters that illegally screen smutty movies."

  But in a crazy twist of fake-life irony, the joke is on the police, because when they thought the boys were doing sit-ups, they were actually performing self-fellatio, meaning that the police's actions were a public exhibition of pornography, and now it's the police who are going to jail!

• Speaking of cops, read through this hilarious police blotter that appears to have been written by some cop who is also an aspiring writer. Via Boing Boing.

  He had not run for very long before he realized the two cops were only pacing him. They could see something he could not. With each frantic step a sense of dread nagged at him. The more calm and calculating they were, the further behind he left his common sense, and his panic ratcheted up. As he ran, the black and white radio car glided silently along behind like a predatory whale.

• Some experimenters burst water balloons in the low-gravity environment produced aboard some big plane. They took very interesting video and pictures. Apparently they had some sort of important scientific implications, though I'd prefer to think NASA scientists do this sort of thing all the time:

  "Hey, you feel like working on that shuttle valve regulator today?"

  "Nah, damn thing's gonna explode on launch anyway. Hey, I've got an idea! Wanna have a water balloon fight... in zero Gs?"

• A livejournal user has posted a list of inadvertently sexual quotes from the new Harry Potter. Check it out.

  "'There was no need to stick the wand in that hard,' he said gruffly, clambering to his feet. 'It hurt.'" (p. 64)

  "'We need to penetrate the inner place... Now it is Lord Voldemort's obstacles that stand in our way, rather than those nature made...'" (p. 558)

• A man was arrested after attempting to buy spray paint at a home improvement store. Employees noticed something about his appearance that indicated he may not have been using the spray paint as intended. The Smoking Gun has his mug shot and arrest write-up. See if you can spot the small detail that tipped employees off to the man's intention of huffing the paint.

  Also, linked from that page, check out TSG's entire archive of terrible mugshots, for hours of hilarity. It'll make you realize just how ugly humans are.

• The V For Vendetta trailer has hit. Looks good, but I don't think it explains things enough for non-fans. Simply continuing the "Remember, remember, the 5th of November" quote at the end would have helped a bit, since the story is all about "gunpowder, treason and plot." The trailer makes it seems like the movie is about Natalie Portman and Stephen Rea's characters, and doesn't really sell the mystery of V.
• Some Harvard scientists are observing a natural process of speciation in butterflies that may explain one mechanism of why one species branches into two, a question that has remained inadequately answered since Darwin. I wonder what Michael Wilt thinks about evolution. Does he believe in it? Does he "personally see the evidence it has going for it, but would like to stress that it remains just a theory?" Does he think it's a load of liberal mumbo-jumbo that's just plain "bad science," and there's no goddamned way he evolved from no ape!?!? Only time and commenting will tell.
• And in a link related in that it also has to do with ideology as a suitable replacement for science... Read this WaPo Editorial entitled "Hunting Witches" about Congressman Joe Barton (R-Tex) demanding personal and private information from three scientists who co-authored a paper on global climate change. The scientists "were told to hand over not only raw data but personal financial information, information on grants received and distributed, and computer codes." Would this, Zhubin, be a civil liberties issue?
• And, more evidence that the USPTO sucks, Microsoft has just patented the smiley! I have only one thing to say about this patent.   :-(
• McSweeney's has a great article about gratuitous George Bush jokes.

Posted at July 24, 2005 10:01 PM | Comments (7)

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