Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

• Today's Front Pages -- front pages of 221 newspapers from 29 countries, courtesy of the Newseum. (Got the link from geekchick.) Unfortunately they use JavaScript to get anywhere, including looking at the PDF "closer look" at each newspaper, so it's less useful to me than it will be to a lot of y'all.
• How to make a model of the starship Enterprise out of a 3.5" floppy ... yeah, you read that right.
• BookCrossing looks interesting -- "You know the feeling you get after reading a book that speaks to you, that touches your life, a feeling that you want to share it with someone else? BookCrossing.com gives you a simple way to share books with the world, and follow their paths forever more!" Not that I often think of giving up a book, but it does seem like an interesting idea. (Then again, I've given away several copies of one particular novel I like over the years, and even took to buying multiple copies so I'd have spares to give away, for a while...)
• RFC 3514 is an intriguing advance in network security. Implementing the "evil bit" (properly, the "security flag" in the IPv4 header), could make DDOS attacks a thing of the past, along with several other security problems.
• Not especially significant, but interesting: a news story from 26 March, Saddam Hussein: Honorary citizen of Detroit, Michigan. Back in 1980 folks didn't see him as so evil yet.
• Article in Nature (2001, but I hadn't seen it until now), "Pi Shared Fairly: two mathematicians have taken the first steps (the article quotes one as saying, "laid out a road map") to proving that any sequence of digits can be found in the digits of pi.

  The new work brings the question of pi's normality in contact with a much broader field of mathematics, says Jeffrey Lagarias, a mathematician at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, New Jersey. "It also indicates connections with areas not previously thought to be related," he says.
  
  "I'm not aware of any other link between chaos theory and number theory," Bailey agrees. "One field arises from computational physics, and the other is the purest of pure mathematics."

• More recent (24 March 2003) article in Nature about how the distribution of prime numbers may not be random
• Bush puts his ass on the line for his beliefs (Every day is today in The Onion.)
• "Downloaders Will Pay For Ownership" (CyberAtlas, 14 March 2003), an article about how consumers are willing to pay more for entertianment that doesn't come with copy protection (they concluded that "Nearly twice as many online consumers are willing to pay $17.99 for a CD that has unrestricted copy abilities versus a CD at only $9.99 that cannot be copied", and warn, "The message for content providers is to be extremely careful about introducing copyright restrictions without considering sigifnicant reductions in price."
• Gothic Miss Manners discusses questions of ettiquette in the Goth community. That site has older columns; newer writings are on gothic.net, but they seem to be mixed in with all the other general postings, so try the site search button. I don't remember where I got the link originally, but the URL I had was for her Feb. 2002 column about subculture cross-overs between two groups whose attire can sometimes be confused for each other (which it would've been good for me to know many (a possible embarassing number of) years ago, before I'd heard of Goth and didn't understand the mixed signals I was getting from some of the leather-and-chains-wearing folks I ran into). Note that I still want to round up a bunch of folks in historical clothing of the real Goths (y'know, those Germanic folks who gave the Roman Empire so much trouble) to go to a Goth club someday (hey, some batch of SCAdians should do that tonight!), but that's just because I'm kind of silly and contrary, and doesn't say much about how I feel about modern Goths. (And yes, I know that's not what the name refers to.)
• This just in: one of my friends in 3LF had an amazingly bad morning.

Helicopters sound different when they hover.

I heard a sort-of-helicopter sound, but it sounded wrong. And it didn't change direction (as it does when they circle) or go away. So I finally went upstairs to see what's there to see.

The first thing I noticed is that the horizon is brown. WTF? Then I saw the helicopter (I don't think it's the police this time, but I haven't gotten a good look at the markings yet). It's hovering a couple blocks north and west of my house. And it seems to have been hovering a good long time. It's been explained to me that helicopter pilots Generally Do Not Hover because it uses vastly more fuel than moving forward even slightly does, so I'm wondering what's so important that they're hovering for so long (like, uh, twenty minutes, I think?).

I snapped some helicopter shots with a 300mm lens (actually a 100-300 zoom), which will have the blades frozen because I picked a high shutter speed to compensate for the difficulty of hand-holding a long lens out the window. I'm wondering whether they'll still be there long enough for me to put an even longer lens on one of my screwmount cameras, and whether Yet Another Helicopter Shot is worth loading up another roll of film (the camera I just used already had film in it).

Still not sure about that brown horizon. (Seemed more pronounced over downtown (east of here), but I noticed the tint in other directions as well.)

tcb wrote "I'm not sure how I feel about seeing HAPPY APRIL FOOL'S DAY! printed on my paycheck.".

I had something else in mind for a quote-of-the-day, but when I saw that, I figured the other thing can wait, if I remember it later.

Too timely to save until my next "link sausage" collection: Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time. Enjoy! (Uh, it was obvious which two of today's "link sausage" batch were hoaxes, right?)

#blink# Wait a minute ... the kremvax hoax was in "the stone age of the Internet"??? Hey, I knew I was an official net.old.fart for having been around before the Great Renaming, but I'm not a net.fossil!!! Hmph!