October 31st, 2007
A lovely zinger from Senator Joe Biden:
“A sentence from Rudy Giuliani has three parts: a noun, a verb, and 9/11″.
October 31st, 2007
A nicely presented chart of the number of inhabitants per doctor in the countries of the world.
[Via Bifurcated Rivets]
October 30th, 2007
As evocative product names go, MomSpit™ is surely one of the very best:
It’s not gel. It’s not sanitizer. It’s MomSpit – the universal no-rinse cleanser for hands and face. Works like magic, smells like heaven, cleans like soap and water without the sink.
[Via Away With Words]
October 29th, 2007
Rejection letters for famous papers in Computer Science:
R.L. RIVEST, A. SHAMIR, AND L. ADELMAN
“A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems.”
According to the (very short) introduction, this paper purports to present a practical implementation of Diffie and Hellman’s public-key cryptosystem for applications in the electronic mail realm. If this is indeed the premise, the paper should be rejected both for a failure to live up to it and for its irrelevance.
I doubt that a system such as this one will ever be practical. The paper does a poor job of convincing the reader that practicality is attainable. For one thing, there is the issue of the number n used to factor the message.
[...]
Electronic mail on the Arpanet is indeed a nice gizmo, but it is unlikely it will ever be diffused outside academic circles and public laboratories—environments in which the need to maintain confidentiality is scarcely pressing. Laboratories with military contracts will never communicate through the Arpanet! Either normal people or small companies will be able to afford a VAX each, or the market for electronic mail will remain tiny. Granted, we are seeing the appearance of so-called microcomputers, such as the recently announced Apple II, but their limitations are so great that neither they nor their descendants will have the power necessary to communicate through a network.
[Via Qwghlm]
October 29th, 2007
From Great Moments in the History of Technical Services:
427 A.D.
The Library at Alexandria decides to contract out its annual weeding project; Vandal hordes are the lowest bidder.
Heh.
[Via Making Light (Particles)]
October 28th, 2007
I’m not sure the wind shaped pavilion is the most practical design for a building, but I could stand seeing a few of them around town:
Made entirely out of lightweight fabric, each of its six main segments twist around its central support frame in response to fluctuations in the wind. This means that the shape of the pavilion continually alters.
I wonder how much noise the segments make as they turn. Enough to drown out a conversation between the occupants, or just a background hum?
[Via Monoscope]
October 28th, 2007
China Mieville on the attraction of floating utopias for those of a libertarian bent:
Freedom is late.
Since 2003, a colossal barge called the Freedom Ship, of debatable tax status, should have been chugging with majestic aimlessness from port to port, a leviathan rover with more than 40,000 wealthy full-time residents living, working and playing on deck. That was the aim eight years ago when the project first made headlines, confidently claiming that construction would start in 2000.
[...]
Freedom Ship’s website claims that the vessel has not been conceived as a locus for tax avoidance, pointing out that as it will sail under a flag of convenience, residents may still be liable for taxes in their home countries. Nonetheless, whatever the ultimate tax status of those whom we will charitably presume might one day set sail, much of the interest in Freedom Ship has revolved precisely around its perceived status as a tax haven.
[...]
[Via 3quarksdaily]
October 27th, 2007
Apple’s new release of OS X uses a rather cheeky icon to represent the typical Windows PC.
[Via Daring Fireball]
October 24th, 2007
Tonight’s episode of Heroes on BBC3 might just be the most purely entertaining forty-five minutes of television I’ve seen this year.
That is all.
October 24th, 2007
The anatomy of a balloon dog, revealed.
[Via kottke.org]