A goose fitted with a £3,000 electronic transmitter to chart its migration has been tracked 4,500 miles (7,245 kilometres) by satellite – to an Eskimo hunter’s freezer. —Satellite Tracker Finds Goose in Freezer (BBC) Similar:My daughter found where all the missing pens and pencils end upAmusingMaybe I'll just delete these QUARTER OF A MILLION spam…
“Science fiction has often featured ‘evil empires’ against which are set utopian ideas whose survival must be fought for against the odds by a small but resourceful band of men. Such empires often turn out to be amazingly fragile when faced by intelligent idealists.” —War of the WorldsGuardian) The argument that Osama Bin Laden was…
“U.S. federal Judge Colleen McMahon has dismissed a claim by British Telecom that it developed and holds a patent to the hyperlink technology used to whisk Web users from one site to another. ” Michele Delio —Judge Tosses BT Hyperlink Case (Wired) Similar:LLM error rates I worked on LLMs, and now I go…Academia'New York Times' considers…
“Counter to the stories about tainted candy, the only conclusion that might be drawn from social science research is not ‘don’t take candy from strangers’ but perhaps ‘take candy from strangers, just not from your parents.’” —Emotional Selection in Memes: The Case of Urban Legends (Personality & Soc. Psych.) Similar:Cockatoos start sipping from Sydney’s drinking fountains…
I am Brazilian!I’m here on tourism!I really feel bad and sorry for what they’ve done to this the World Trade Center!!This is such a blessed country!God bless America!God bless this land!I’ve always loved America!I wish this was my country!!!! I just love the States!via E-mail) E-mail I got from someone who read my tribute to…
Not! The headline says “Millions Behind Bars,” but paragraph 4 says there are 1.3 million in prison. The lead paragraph counts not only prisoners but also those on probation or parole, to come up with a total six times larger. —Report: Millions Behind Bars in U.S. (AP)) 1.3 million is still a staggering number, but…
“For six years in the 1990s, Lewis was a principal member of the MIT Blackjack Team, an infamous cabal of hyper-geniuses and anarchistic whiz kids who devised a method of card counting that took the gaming world completely by surprise. ” Ben Mezrich —Hacking Las Vegas (Wired) Similar:Melissa Terras Reports Her Success in Making Digital Humanities…
“The aim of this essay is to explore the complex relationships that exist between Monkey Island, Postmodernism, Cultural Materialism, Roland Barthes’ concept of the Death of the Author and the twin phenomenon’s of corporate capitalism and globalisation. I shall attempt to resolve the antagonisms that exist by analyzing the Monkey Island texts using the tools…
Two short items appeared recently in Associated Press reports. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – One of four Democrats seeking a Sarasota-area congressional seat sued an opponent over the punctuation in her name. Patrick Feheley objects to his rival being listed as Candice Brown-McElyea because if left hyphenated, the name would appear before Feheley’s on the ballot. A…
“In a surprising departure from other findings that point to a warming planet, a NASA researcher has found that the amount of ice in the Antarctic increased from 1979 to 1999, as measured by satellites.” —Antarctic Sea Ice Increases over Past Two DecadesSpace.com) It’s not too surprising if you’ve read anything by Julian Simon. Similar:Small…
The recording industry blamed cassette tapes for killing disco in the 70s. Along came MTV, which found a brand new way to make money off of music. The recording industry is blaming file-sharing for the slumping sales in teen pop. Sound familiar? Mark Jenkins —Hit Charade: The music industry’s self-inflicted woundsSlate) Similar:Email (finding the right…
“One by one, the [waste-bearing] casks smack into the Moon. The soft deep lunar regolith in the impact area should ensure proper waste burial. Plowing into the lunar surface at high speed, the waste would be buried under several feet of glassified regolith…” —Moon Seen as Nuclear Waste Repository (Space.com) Space:1999. Moonbase Alpha… Nuclear Waste…
“Tiny text tyrannizes users by dramatically reducing task throughput. IE4 had a great design that let users easily change font sizes; let’s get this design back in the next generation of browsers.” Jakob Nielsen —Let Users Control Font SizeUseIT.com) This apparently the Week of Cute Headlines. Why not “Tiny text type terribly trashes task throughput”?…
“What happens to friendship when everything goes wrong all the time? Laurel and Hardy perpetually get in each other’s way, they get on each other’s nerves, and while the general battle is against humiliation, they are always busy with the effort to extricate themselves from the fine mess they bring about in one another’s lives.…
“They wanted to have an intelligent discussion, to avoid sensationalism, to give me a chance to make my arguments. They would have some representatives of the games industry and someone from one of the media reform groups. One producer almost convinced me that “Donahue” was a serious news discussion program.” Henry Jenkins —Ambushed on “Donahue” (Salon)…
“What is a hoax, exactly? When does a good deal become too good to be true, and where does belief end and credulity begin?” Thomas Hayden —The Art of the HoaxUS News) Similar:Journalism Tips: Newsworthy vs SnoozeworthyA newsworthy story is recent (rather tha…CultureWhen Students Won't Do the ReadingReading this story from IHE recalled my …AcademiaWhy…
“We asked police why we were being arrested, and they said, `Everybody is receiving equal treatment from the Houston Police Department tonight.’ It didn’t matter what you were doing; they arrested you.” —450 peaceful teens arrested in K-Mart raid (Houston Chronicle) Similar:Omaha schoolgirl dresses as a different historical figure each day Voilà , she is Billie Holiday,…
“Welcome to the world of a half million (and counting) Weblogs, where anyone can instantly publish his passions and favorite Weblinks. And the fun’s just begun.” Steven Levy —Living in the Blog-osphereNewsweek) Levy is a computer historian and insightful observer of geek culture. Similar:Facebook "Grid View." Is this new? My first thought is that I…
Latest weapon against junk e-mail: poetry. —Haiku’da Been a Spam Filter (Wired) The title of the article wins the prize for “Most Obscure Reference to Marlon Brando.” Similar:In August, 2000 I was blogging about poetry, presidential wordplay, home-schooling, online…In August 2000, I was blogging about …CybercultureHacking the Attention EconomyThe techniques that are unfolding are ha…CultureThe…
“The passion, if not the logic, of her argument is clear and perhaps casts a new light on the deliberate destructiveness of the motives that lay behind her literary innovations. She was nothing if not a great hater of all that had gone before her.” Theodore Dalrymple —The Rage of Virginia Woolf (City Journal) Dalrymple is…