venomous porridge

BREAKING: Amazon Patents Antigravity Cardboard

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:55:17 -0500

BREAKING: Amazon Patents Antigravity Cardboard

whileyouweresleeping: “I could be totally wrong about everything. But we could also do nothing and...

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:53:17 -0500

“I could be totally wrong about everything. But we could also do nothing and I think that’s pretty silly.”

— Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Institute*, breaks it down for the Times who just asked whether she ever has any doubts about their mission.

— From London.

*Well fancy that, I just discovered SETI stands for Signals of ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence.

Actually it’s Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

About ten years ago, the topic of SETI came up in an email conversation. My then-boss’s husband said something like this: “Passive SETI [in which we just scan the skies for signs of intelligence] is OK, since it may someday tell us how long we have until we get invaded and slaughtered. Active SETI [in which we send out signals hoping that some intelligent life will respond] is probably the worst idea humanity has ever come up with, because every example in recorded history of two civilizations of vastly different levels of technological advancement meeting for the first time has resulted in the genocide or enslavement of the less-advanced by the more-advanced. What do you think are the odds of finding another intelligent species that is less advanced than we are?”

I’ve been kind of unenthusiastic about SETI since that conversation.

Hey, Twitter? Feature request.

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:23:40 -0500

Hey, Twitter?

Feature request.

yourmonkeycalled: “This isn’t war, we don’t have to ration.” Just some words from that song whose...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:02:26 -0500

yourmonkeycalled:

“This isn’t war, we don’t have to ration.”

Just some words from that song whose video I can’t stop watching.

So damn good.

I bet most of you assumed I was talking about “Brown Eyed...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:13:47 -0500

I bet most of you assumed I was talking about “Brown Eyed Girl.” Sure, that one’s a gimme. But have you actually looked at this guy’s discography? For shame:

“The Back Room”
“Take Me Back”
“Goin’ Down Geneva”
“Foreign Window”
“Moondance”
“Rough God Goes Riding” (album: The Healing Game)
“My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It”
“Oh the Warm Feeling”
“Come Running”
“Take It Where You Find It”
“Wherever God Shines His Light”
“Close Enough for Jazz”

And those are just titles. I mean, you might think you’re safe with a song called, say, “Astral Weeks.” You are so not:

If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dream
Where immobile steel rims crack
And the ditch in the back roads stop

From the far side of the ocean
If I put the wheels in motion
And I stand with my arms behind me
And I’m pushin’ on the door

Really, George Ivan? Really?

Penn Jillette, a hero of mine, proposing “Bacon and a Kiss...

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:08:54 -0500

Penn Jillette, a hero of mine, proposing “Bacon and a Kiss Airlines” on his old radio show. (Five-minute excerpt; full episode here.)

The idea: no security. Bring whatever you want. Guns, knives, box cutters, Pope hats, anything. But in order to board, you have to eat a piece of bacon and kiss someone of the same sex on the genitals.

Cynicky McCynicpants thinks body scanners are the same thing.

Regarding airport body scanners

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:55:42 -0500

If I were not very cynical, I might say that body scanners represent a misguided attempt by a desperate, well-terrorized government to do something—anything—to keep 9/11 from happening again, despite the fact that locking the cockpit door pretty much solved that and besides, the next attack won’t look like the last one, so they must not have thought this through.

If I were a little bit cynical, I might say that our government favors body scanners even though they violate Islamic law because after all, potential terrorists don’t deserve to have their religious views respected.

If I were somewhat more cynical, I might say that our government favors body scanners even though they violate Islamic law because after all, potential terrorists don’t deserve freedom to travel about the country conducting business and visiting their families and contributing to the economy and doing all the other things ~~white people~~ law-abiding citizens do.

But if I were really, really cynical—we’re talking total Cynicky McCynicpants here—I might say that our government favors body scanners because they violate Islamic law, so practicing Muslims will be forced to request alternative and often more thorough and invasive screening procedures and that’s just fine, because then we won’t have to do any of that unseemly racial profiling.

This is why my entire family calls it Fucking Duane Reade

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:22:02 -0500

Years ago…

My sister’s friend: Oh my god I have had the worst day. You will not believe what happened. I just got home from fucking Duane Reade—

Her mom: Whoa, slow down, sweetie. Just a minute. Duane who?

atsween: Twitter: The Criterion Collection What if Twitter…...

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:59:36 -0500

atsween:

Twitter: The Criterion Collection

What if Twitter… came to life?

We asked some of our friends to film their favorite tweets. We didn’t care how they did it. They could read it. They could act it. They could do it with puppets. Whatever they wanted. The only rules were it had to be a tweet written by someone else and it had to contain the entire tweet and nothing but the tweet.

This is what they gave us.

We hope you enjoy it.

@poeks & @sween

I’m so proud to know all of you weirdos.

(Inside Baseball: I have it on good authority that @antichrista spent six hours animating that dumb toot of mine, and most of it using—shudder—Adobe software. All for an eight-second payoff. I’m so sorry, Christa. You do amazing work, but if I’d known what I’d be putting you through I’d have written a better joke.)

So if we ignore selection bias, restraint bias, small sample...

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:33:34 -0500

So if we ignore selection bias, restraint bias, small sample size, and the general lack of any sort of scientific rigor — I think we may have something here: charts are pretty.

Informal poll (reblogged for morning viewers)

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:51:35 -0500

Do you think you’re going to get an iPad?

(Reply/answer via Tumblr Dashboard or click through and leave a comment.)

Informal poll

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:26:00 -0500

Do you think you’re going to get an iPad?

(Reply/answer via Tumblr Dashboard or click through and leave a comment.)

itsfullofstars: a Virgin Galactic business card each employee...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:12:57 -0500

itsfullofstars:

a Virgin Galactic business card

each employee has theirs personalised to show their own iris on the front

welcome to the future

Math!

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:11:14 -0500

whileyouweresleeping:

Steven Strogatz, in Opinionator:

… suppose we add all the consecutive odd numbers, starting from 1:

1 + 3 = 4
1 + 3 + 5 = 9
1 + 3 + 5 + 7 = 16
1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 9 = 25

The sums above, remarkably, always turn out to be perfect squares. (We saw 4 and 9 in the square patterns discussed earlier, and 16 = 4 × 4, and 25 = 5 × 5.) A quick check shows that this rule keeps working for larger and larger odd numbers; it apparently holds all the way out to infinity.

Did that just blow your mind, too?

— From London.

Neat, huh? But there’s a pretty intuitive explanation: suppose you have a bunch of pennies arranged in a square, and you want to increase the dimensions of the square by one. To do so, you have to add an L-shaped collection of pennies, and the L-shape always has an odd number of pennies in it.

The Wikipedia page on square numbers illustrates this perfectly:

Count the pink diamonds in each figure: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9…

QUIZ: Typeface or Body Part?

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:55:33 -0500

Do YOU know the difference between a ligament and a ligature? If someone said you had grotesque descenders, would you thank them or slap them?

In today’s fast-paced design world, you’re always just a tiny misunderstanding away from either a harassment suit or the best Rotary Club newsletter ever printed. Take our simple quiz and see if you’re ready for the challenges of modern typography.

FONT or ANATOMICAL TERM? (Answers next month!)

Herculanum
Duodenum
ITC Vas Deferens Premier Pro
Helveticles Neue
Zapf Dingbladder
Bitstream Vera Sans Mono Bold Oblique Clubfoot Regular
VAG Rounded

I’ve been alerted that this tweet of mine is on display at...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:21:03 -0500

I’ve been alerted that this tweet of mine is on display at Protospace, a “meeting place, social area, workshop, and general home base for techies, geeks, artists, tech groupies, and DIY minded individuals” in Calgary, Alberta.

What an honor. If I’m ever in that part of the world, I hope I can visit — it looks like an amazing place.

THIS CHICKEN HAS BEEN WRONGLY COOPED (yes, it...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:53:00 -0500

THIS CHICKEN HAS BEEN WRONGLY COOPED

(yes, it was rrrrred’s idea)

Rush, “YYZ” (1981, Moving Pictures, 04:26) By way of...

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:58:32 -0500

Rush, “YYZ” (1981, Moving Pictures, 04:26)

By way of illustration.

-.-- -.-- --..

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:40:16 -0500

lonelysandwich:

An actual tritone is a musical interval that spans three whole tones, and because it normally sounds horrible and dissonant and creates tension to be resolved into a perfect 5th, it’s historically known as Diabolus in Musica, or “the Devil’s interval” and was even suppressed by the Church in the Middle Ages.

Oh, how I love me a good tritone. It’s exactly half an octave, and thus the only interval that is its own inversion. It’s equivalent to either an augmented fourth or a diminished fifth.

You can use tritones to construct an auditory illusion in which the same sequence of tones is heard as ascending by some people and descending by others, and which way you’ll hear it is culturally determined. The consistency with which people resolve the paradox one way or the other for different pitches is evidence that absolute pitch is a not a rare gift but a common latent ability that can be learned.

In one particular Rush instrumental, a two-note theme consisting of the Morse code for Toronto Pearson International Airport appears in the introduction, the lower note representing the dits and the upper note standing in for the dahs. The interval between those two notes? A tritone.

How can the iPhone SDK be NDA'd?

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 22:21:54 -0500

rentzsch:

I was talking to a friend, who made an interesting point.

For $99, anyone can sign up to be an iPhone Developer. Then, Apple provides you with supposedly confidential information.

I’m no lawyer, but it doesn’t seem right to claim information is confidential while advertising it for sale to the public at large.

Protected by copyright, sure. But confidential?

Well, it’s not that anyone can just sign up. You have to apply, be accepted, sign the NDA and other agreements, and pay your $99. People have been rejected (though not so much these days) and have had their memberships terminated for violating the agreement. And if you lose your membership, you can’t download SDK updates, provision devices for development and testing, or sell your apps through the App Store. So it’s not strictly a sale of information; it’s a contract with very specific language that must be purposely agreed to, and a well-defined penalty for violation. That Apple charges for membership and isn’t particularly selective about whom it lets into the program doesn’t stop them from enforcing its terms, among which is that frustrating NDA.

It’s worth noting, however, that the confidentiality now covers only prerelease and beta materials, as has been the case for the parallel Mac Developer Program for as long as I can remember.