posted by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
eftychia at 01:16pm on 2003-04-16
eftychia at 01:16pm on 2003-04-16- Uruk-Hai Unhappy with Portrayal in Films
- It's quite interesting to note how the brain attempts to
interpret
this image. (Thanks to
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
broken_gizmo. Discuss the
image
here.) - TV Stars Who Insist On Singing
- Somebody tried to sneak across the Mexico/US border disguised as a car seat
- Top seven "Stella Awards" lawsuits for 2002. (It's probably worth pointing out the caveat elsewhere on that site: "We know quite well that not all of the cases we present will turn out to be frivolous abuse of the American Justice System. Many of these cases indeed involve real issues, real injuries, and deserve real compensation. And some don't. That's why we stress that you should read the cases before you judge."
- plantgirl discovers that those "Shark Tank"
stories
aren't made up. (Pretty trivial goof compared to a lot of
what goes on, but still...)
- Jan Wassenaar in Holland put up a web site
all about two-dimensional curves.
It's sort of like a couple of chapters from the middle of a math
textbook without the surrounding context ... except that being
hyperlinked makes it more interesting to browse, and advanced and
esoteric curves are right there with the conic sections from eighth
grade. The math teacher part of me was interested in the concise
descriptions, the math geek in me was entertained by the curves I
didn't already know. I figure this isn't a site that'll fascinate
everyone, but after poking at it a little while, I decided it was
worth pointing out. (I often lose track of where I got these links
from, but I remember I got this from silmaril.)
-
Sixth-grader arrested for stomping in a puddle. "[...] the
boy was cuffed, put in a patrol car and taken to jail." (Got the link from
broken_gizmo)
- Womdigious selenite crystals (Discovery Channel, February 2001): the largest natural crystals on Earth -- twenty feet long-- in a cave inside a mine in Mexico ... "'Walking into either of these caves is like stepping into a gigantic geode,' said Richard D. Fisher, an American consultant with the mining company to develop the discoveries as tourist attractions."
-
DP Man is a filk of Billy Joel's "Piano Man". (Thanks,
xpioti. BTW, ForTran is best known for its use in
science stuff -- dealing with text strings is not its strong
suit.)
- A nightclub bouncer in New York was stabbed to death as he tried to enforce the city's new ban on smoking in bars. This story has generated a lot of traffic on one mailing list I read. One person commented, "Didn't we learn a single thing from 'air rage'? Take cigarettes away from smokers, turn them into nicotine-fitting lunatics." Perhaps my own ideas about smoking are naive. I never made the connection between 'air rage' and the ban on smoking on domestic flights.
- Remember the article about voting machines by Thom Hartmann that I linked to in my previous 'link sausage' entry? Well here's another, by Dan Keating in The Washington Post: New Voting Systems Assailed; Computer Experts Cite Fraud Potential. "David Dill, the Stanford University professor of computer science who launched the petition drive, said, 'What people have learned repeatedly, the hard way, is that the prudent practice -- if you want to escape with your data intact -- is what other people would perceive as paranoia.'" I'm speaking as a programmer/analyst when I say that this is risky stuff, not as a technophobe or a Luddite. This article points to examples of voting machine failures. It's not all a bunch of hypotheticals. Another significant quote: "'We're not paranoid,' said Mercuri. 'They're avoiding computational realities. That's the computer science part of it. We can't avoid it any more than physical scientists can avoid gravity.'"
- Dissatisfied with the image quality of your digital camera when you want to make large prints? Here's a 340 Megapixel digital camera called "MegaPrime". A catch? Of course there's a catch... A cool feature: "With MegaPrime, astronomers do not even have to visit the telescope to obtain their images. Requests for observations are made over the internet and the images sent to researchers when complete."
- It's a little freaky to see this reported as it happened on a message board, but it probably won't be the last time now that Internet usage has become so much a normal part of life in our culture: the story of a scammer getting found out ... the first two pages are chatter about suspicions, the police get involved on the third page, and at the bottom of the fourth page is the unfortunate climax. I found the whole thing a bit disconcerting, and I wasn't even a participant in the thread.
Oh.
The Internet. You can't live without it, you can't... I don't know.
Re: Oh.
It's like these things are supposed to be "safely on the other side of a television screen or in black type on cheap paper", but here it is in a medium in which I participate, where I and my friends "live".
No, I haven't finished sorting out why this is freaky, or how freaky it "ought" to be, but freaky it is.
Re: Oh.