Heh; and I had it in the back of my mind that I was doing
so well, weblog entry frequency wise, this week.
Oh well!
Word-pair o' the day:
Seme /
Uke.
On the "scrod" joke, a resourceful reader writes:
Subject: Scrod limerick
yer tis: http://www.gigfoot.net/lol/limericks/193.html
Ray...
Good find!
I dunno if that's exactly the form I heard it in,
but it'll do
("hence"; heh).
Mutter mutter mutter
"Federal
Marriage Amendment" again mutter mutter.
Finished and
wrote up
a neat old SF anthology.
Lindsay Lohan diet secrets.
It's easy (and fun!) to
razz Our
President for the "human-animal hybrids" line in the State of
the Union Address, but
what
it's actually about seems to be another neocon attempt
to stifle USian biotech.
This is pretty incomprehensible: do the neocons not realize
that biotech is a big deal and holding the US back is eventually
going to cost us bigtime?
Do they realize it but are so desparate to pander to the
Fundie base that they're just gambling it won't be too bad?
Or do they not care since by then they'll be so rich that they
can just fly to Singapore for their treatments and then
hole up in their secret Antarctic bases and who cares what
happens to what's left of the US anyway?
Ya hafta wonder.
(The notion that they realize it'll be bad economically
but feel morally bound to protect human life anyway is
clearly ruled out by the evidence of Iraq, etc.
I know this is obvious, but I thought I should
mention it for completeness.)
Sharp
Blue's review queue is quality stuff, again.
And speaking of people who somehow manage to do something other
than play elaborate video games, I've recently discovered
yet
some
more
Sims
folks, who
make the Sims folks that I previously considered hardcore
look not so hardcore really after all.
I mean, whoa!
(Deception
Pass is up to Episode 18; they're still definitely
hardcore.)
(We're saying "hardcore" alot this week because it sounds
'leet.
We don't much care what it might actually mean.)
Unspeakable
Vault (of Doom), the cast.
A reader sends
the "best spam I've gotten in ages" ("Since I know you're
such a devotee.")
We are indeed, and this is indeed high quality:
From: "Emilio Huyler "
Subject: re: Paperwork
I didn't say it was your fault. I said I was going to blame you.
I wouldn't be caught dead with a necrophiliac.
Really speaks for itself.
(The sentences are no doubt stock, but the
juxtaposition is sweet serendipity.)
And we got some also high-quality spam that speaks
about itself (this is the content; the
subject was uninteresting):
%OFFER a service that helps people get laid!
%TONS %HOTTIES are %INYOURAREA, %READYTOHOOKUP!
%FLOWERS
people here %JUSTCARE ;)
%ALSO, %PERCENTAGE of %MEMBERS %ALREADY!
%ADMIRATION!
The same universe that produced the lovely microfiction(s) the
other day has produced these comforting words:
Nah, I probably can't do it 24 times in a month.
That one took me four days to write.
So we don't have to be too envious.
Currently reading:
Dyson's
"Time without end: physics and biology in an open universe".
Fascinating speculation about how and whether life and consciousness
can go on forever (with numerical estimates, and lotsa classy
math).
I know I'm old, because when I hear someone mention George Clooney
I think of Rosemary; and when I hear someone mention Hugh Grant
I think of Lou.
(And when I hear someone mention Bono, I think of Sonny.)
Although age doesn't explain why when I hear someone mention
Tennessee Williams I think of Tennessee Ernie Ford.
Since the Spam and Sims features have been so popular
with our worldwide audience, here are a couple of extremely memorable
recent spams:
Subject: helix-3
beware poland
orbital,
Shawna
Beware Poland! (Blame Canada!)
Subject: bluff-3
supreme automate
kuhn,
Melba
(Can you imagine a subculture where "kuhn" is a
standard closing?
Hardcore!)
And speaking of hardcore
Note
that fictional re-simulation is strictly forbidden.
If you have reason to believe that you may be a fictional character,
you must contact the City immediately.
[See: James Bond, Spider Jerusalem.]
Failure to comply is a felony.
(Note that only half the story seems to be online, but
for this kind of story, at least for me, the setting is
more important than the plot anyway.)
Oh right, but Sims!
Here's Joan and Peran,
and a new arrival at
the Love Nest.
And speaking of hardcore again, here's the latest from
the Ajax toy:
The first thing she did when she got there was
dismantle the windmill. She was after the rotor,
the heart of the machine, the rest she could fabricate
at the other end. Right now she had to travel light.
It's revelatory to be on the receiving end of microfiction
for a change.
I really really really want to read the
whole thing!
(Even though I know that there may very well not be
any Whole Thing...)
Speculative Grammarian:
The Lifestyle Magazine for Linguists.
So there's this
joke
about "scrod", but the thing is that I know I first heard it as a
limerick, and I can't find that anywhere.
I know the last three lines (roughly) were:
...
"I've come to get scrod."
She replied, "Oh my God,
You've used the past pluperfect tense!"
(Where "She" could be "He", "Oh my God" could be
say "Now that's odd", etc.)
Anyone else know this version?
What are the first two lines?
Oh, and I don't usually pass along straightforward
political
actions, but in this case, I mean really.
Sheesh.
"Oh forget it.
Sure, the hippo racing is every Tuesday night in Calgary. Come naked."
Lots of random scattered snippets today; we're still recovering from
our orgy of self-revelation on Thursday. *8)
Habitat for Humanity
refused to take money
from Pink Aid ("Use your genitals for good!").
I can I guess understand why they might feel they had to
do that, but really; phhht.
How
I stalked my girlfriend:
If you have any reason to suspect that your phone
might have been out of your sight, even for five
minutes, and there is anyone who might want to
track you: call your phone company and ask it to
find out if there is a trace on your phone.
Anybody could be watching you. It could be me.
Looking Out For Our Best Interests Department:
Company
Bypasses Cookie-Deleting Consumers
...
Mookie Tanembaum, founder and chief executive of United Virtualities,
says the company is trying to help consumers by preventing them from
deleting cookies that help website operators deliver better services.
Isn't that nice of Mookie?
Working to prevent people from deleting cookies that he doesn't
think they ought to delete, by hiding them obscurely inside
the Flash player.
Wouldn't you love to express your appreciation to Mookie
in person?
The story points toward
the
Macromedia pages that let you fiddle with the cookie-like
things hidden obscurely inside your Flash player.
Looks like every site can by default store up to like 100K of
data; but you can turn off that ability, or make it smaller, or
have the player ask you when sites try to do it.
One thing I can't find a way to do is see the
contents of the data.
It'd probably be obfuscated anyway, but I'd still
like to see it.
Widely noted:
Western
Union Stops Sending Telegrams.
Pretty weird.
Does anyone else still do telegrams, or is that It?
Dissident!!!
She said she had one arm out of her coat when an officer yelled,
"Protestor."
"He then ran over to me, hauled me out of my seat and roughly
(with my hands behind my back) shoved me up the stairs," she
wrote. She was then cuffed and driven to police headquarters
a few blocks away.
Given that they also ejected (if without the handcuffs) a woman
wearing a "Support Our Troops" shirt, this isn't quite the
"fascist quashing of dissent by the Bushies" story that it
first appears to be; more like "Keystone Cops go to
Washington".
But even incompetent fascism is a bad thing.
Brilliant:
Why
I Hate Frameworks.
Cogent political analysis o' the day:
O, rounded rock!
O, cluster of four marsh weeds!
How my thorax aches for you! There will be no
peace until I perch on the stump again!
From David Mankins:
Words
help deterimine what we see:
The paper suggests that language affects
perception in the right half of the visual field,
but much less, if at all, in the left half. The paper,
"Whorf Hypothesis is Supported in the Right Visual Field
but not in the Left," by Aubrey Gilbert, Terry Regier,
Paul Kay, and Richard Ivry -- is the first to propose
that language may shape just half of our visual world.
Isn't that great?
It's like they find out that it really is Nature rather
than Nurture, but only in Spring and Summer.
From Geegaw
("Winter will contract, like a piece of black plastic
held in the flame from a lighter, and the sky will open
again, unleashing floods of hail or tears"),
to Far Outliers,
and finally to
a
Language Hat entry that points to some work on
"mother-in-law language".
Apparently in (various?) Australian cultures there's a whole
special language, with its own vocabulary, that's used only in
the presence of one's mother-in-law, father-in-law,
and "certain types of cousins".
Whoa.
The film "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" is
rated NC-17.
In other morality news:
On Thursday,
the city sued the firm that makes the video game
"Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" over a hidden sex
scene that can be unlocked by hacking into the computer
coding. The city believes that parents who simply wanted
to buy their boys a wholesome cop-shooting, hooker-killing,
car-stealing game were unfairly duped.
...
Although I wish a teenage boy's world were as full of
innocence and wonder as Delgadillo does, I wondered if
consensual animated sex was really the kind of thing that
would offend a 17-year-old male who grew up in Los Angeles.
So I tracked one down and asked him if this was the kind of
thing that would warp his impressionable mind.
Security geeking:
Windows
Access Control Demystified:
Windows access-control is fine-grained and expressive,
unsurprisingly it turns out that ordinary professional
software developers at commercial software vendors have
difficulty in evaluating the consequences of the access-control
configurations that they choose for their software and services.
The consequence is that commercial software can and does have
privilege-escalation vulnerabilities caused by access-control
misconfiguration.
We propose a solution to this problem. We have a logical model
of Windows access-control, expressed as inference rules in
Datalog which are directly executable in a Prolog system.
We have a scanner that reads relevant parts of the Windows
registry, file system, and service control manager database
on a given host to provide input to our logical model. The
model runs, and prints out a list of privilege-escalation
vulnerabilities, each one with a trace of how each
vulnerability might be exploited.
When we run this on a typical Windows installation
managed by a careful systems administrator, we find
several exploitable user-to-administrator and
guest-to-any-user vulnerabilities caused by
misconfigurations in the default installation
of software from Adobe, AOL, Macromedia, Microsoft
and some anonymous vendors.
Head
of SAP: "India is beginning to get expensive".
Cheery thought o' the day:
some of the anti-globalization people want to slow things down,
so that incomes (etc) in the wealthy countries take longer
to go down as things level out.
But what if instead it happens real real fast, so fast that
people in the wealthy countries can (say) support themselves
out of petty cash between the time their incomes start to go down
due to leveling and the time they recover due to the
overall increase in global wealth?
That'd be nice.
What do you say?
Voyage of the mimi had such a catchy theme song.
Wow. Best ever guide to writing unmaintainable code.
[link]
Meanwhile, "After playing Stacker, there is absolutely
no reason for anyone to want to take boxes, crates, or any other
polygonal object, and place them atop one another, as seen in this
gem of a game," said Laura Keitel of the D.C.-based Center For
Entertainment And The Family. "No kid in the world could
possibly get anything out of it. There's no reason why the
video-game industry shouldn't be making a lot more games
like this."
[link]
[link]
Right. So let me get this straight. The head of the wealthiest
religious institution in the world, the one that cooped Christmas
from Midwinter Festival, says that Christmas has become too commercial?
OK. Just checking.
snow, shmow. snew, shnew.
You are most likely entirely edible, and if the description
on the box is accurate, deliscious as well.
An voice, a word, a sound--fluffypuff marshmellows!
Today you wash
she asked. "What do you say when someone asks you to do
that with a llama?"
Nah, I probably can't do it 24 times in a month.
That one took me four days to write.
Here's what I want for Cthistmas.
[link]
What do you say?
