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eftychia at 09:34pm on 2003-05-12
eftychia at 09:34pm on 2003-05-12- This looked like a fun article: Qapla'! Hospital seeks Klingon speaker (CNN.com, 10 May 2003). "'We have to provide information in all the languages our clients speak,' said Jerry Jelusich, a procurement specialist for the county Department of Human Services, which serves about 60,000 mental health clients." But on closer examination, this counter-article by Seth Finkelstein looks even more interesting! "Every once in a while, in order to remind myself of the quality of information typically reported, I trace down the source of a particularly ridiculous story. The 'Klingon Language Interpreter' myth, which is spawning now, provides an amusing case study of the process of pack journalism." Though I did find one of the followup comments amusing: "But you know, prophecies can be self-fulfilling. All you need is an Oregonian who speaks some Klingon, has a good sense of humour, and (optionally :) is in need of some mental services."
- Of course, if you're so inclined, you can use the Klingon front-end for Google to search the web. (But I notice that the "translate this page" button is missing from a search result in French -- it's there for the same item if I search in English.) You can also use "Swedish Chef", "Ewmew Fudd", or l33t h4ckor
- Oh my. the iLoo, or as it's referred to in the article, a "www.c." An "Internet loo" for festivals and such, courtesey of MSN. (Reads like very dry satire, but I'm not entirely certain that's what it is. I do remember when one friend was declared "decadent" for installing a computer terminal in his bathroom back when us geeks had dumb terminals at home.)
- Related to the iLoo, here's an Internet Toilet Roll Browser. "The product allows you to search the Internet whilst sitting on the toilet and print out any pages you are interested in on your toilet roll."
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tcb shows off
what he managed to do with
Clutter to provide a glimpse into his musical
headspace for a day.- This has got to be somebody from talk.bizarre, no? Collected eBay Feedback Comments Left by andy46477. "I once had a fork. It looked like a spoon, so I called it a spoon. Was I wrong?" "When I open boxes of cereal, you should be inside. Yes, you're THAT GOOD!" "I forbid you to wear the blue sock! HEED MY COMMAND!!!!!"
- Somebody tried the monkeys/typewriter/Shakespeare" statistics experiment (sort of): "Give six monkeys one computer for a month, and they will make a mess."
- Inconspicuous Consumption by Paul Lukas is about "deconstructing the details of consumer culture -- details that are either so weird or obscure that we'd never see them, or so ubiquitous that we've essentially stopped seeing them." What I've seen so far sounds like stuff a bunch of my friends would enjoy reading...
- The Monastic Aptitude Test (cartoon). The questions from the sample page in the cartoon are reproduced in this page about the cartoon. "I thought that it would be silly to have a juxtaposition of the rigid standardized tests and the contemplative unsolvable Buddhist koans."
- NASA Warms Up To Maryland's Trash: "The space agency harnesses methane gas from a nearby landfill and uses it to fire boilers that produce steam, heating 31 buildings at the Center. [...] NASA will save taxpayers more than $3.5 million over the next decade in fuel costs. Goddard is the first federal facility to heat its buildings with landfill gas."
- An extremely powerful essay about affirmative action by Bee Lavender. Hard to decide what to quote from this, but I'll start with "I want to be extremely clear: it took the threat of a lawsuit to gain access to the classes I should have been enrolled in automatically. The simple existence of the federal law protecting my rights did not mean that I was safe." And, "I was a good student, a decent and honorable girl with a serious illness. The system should have worked for me instead of against me." And the kicker: "I confronted and lurched over many illegal barriers on my path to higher education; but the critical, fundamental truth is that I would not have been able to achieve my goal if not for affirmative action." But the essay is worth a whole lot more than the sound bites -- go read it.
- crackmonkeyjr stirred up a hornet's nest by
asking "what is it about being gender queer, or transgendered that
makes it a different sort of classification than being a nerd or
jock, and should they be given any more protections than a person
of one of the more traditional social groups?" in
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debate. Much of what follows shows how much ignorance
there is about what genderqueer and transgendered mean. On one
side I see a mixture of willfully refusing to "get it" (does that
count as a form of "trolling"?) and folks simply waiting (and asking)
for an explanation phrased so that it makes sense to them. On the
other side I see a mixture of "you can't understand", real attempts
to find better ways to get the point across, and some banging of heads
against the wall by trying to use the same explanations over again
and hoping that they'll sink in with repetition. At the same time,
some interesting questions have been asked. I'm seeing it as a
reminder of just how far from "getting it" many people are. It's
a long thread.
Google Me This!
You can also see Holiday Logos and Fan Logos -- wait, now we know what to do with the "Cheese Weasel Day" Google logo!
Re: Google Me This!
(BTW, when I tried the pig latin URL before, it didn't work, so I left it off the list. Works perfectly now. Odd.)
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