Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"I don't think Gargamel knew what he wanted to do, either. I think he'd been trying so long that senility had set in, and he was like that old man at the nursing home who keeps peeking under the skirts of the nurses out of habit. Give him the full opportunity, and like Connecticut drivers in their first snowstorm he'd stare at you dully and go, 'What now?'" -- theferrett, 2003-12-06

I'd planned to do these about once a week, maybe less often, but basically whenever I had ten items lined up and ready to post. But a whole bunch of things caught my eye this morning, so here's a second dose of link sausage this week.

• Most of us have heard of the problem facing lesbian sheep, or heard metaphorical references to it. Howard A. Landman turned it into a poem.
• A UseNet classic, recently reposted to Slashdot, about places where a VAX does not belong: Watch Out For Bad Electricity Days
• yesthattom started off a thread about "GNU packages I never want to see" by suggesting OpenEKG...
• M&M's obsession leads to physics discovery (thanks to aiglet for pointing it out). Actually it's more math than physics (okay, okay, it's in that area where they overlap), but it was a physicist who noticed it.
• The Official Rules of Calvinball (thanks to aiglet again).
• Parents name their daughter Diot Coke ... in 1379. (Found on rec.org.sca, where there is followup discussion regarding what is and is not surprising about this, pronunciation, and the idea of a fortune teller saying, "... but 600 years from now, people on the other side of the world will amuse themselves by making fun of your name." Diot turns out to have been a common "pet name" for Dionisia.)
• Fashion that horrifies some RABbits and amuses others: Clothing that makes you look extensively tattooed. I think it's pretty, but... (Shannon Larratt wrote a reasoned rant explaining what folks consider troubling about this.)
• Another of those ideas many of us have read in science fiction and thought would be cool to have in real life is a few steps closer: subvocal speech recognition. You think about saying something but don't actually make any sound, and "sensors under the chin and one each side of the Adam's apple pick up the brain's commands to the speech organs, allowing the subauditory, or 'silent speech' to be captured." (link via Elbows)
• Since I've nearly got a full set of ten items stacked up already, I'll round this out with a cat photo that's sort of an antidote to some of the cute cat pictures I've linked to in the past. (Thanks to Fred for the URL.)
• Finally, thanks to speaker2animals, some skywatching news for 2004-03-22 through 2004-03-28: "a rare opportunity to see all five of the naked eye planets at the same time plus each will be paid a visit by the Moon." (text) (RealPlayer version available here.)