I'm all for doing innovative things with timepieces, but this one is just way too much like hard work.

[Via FFFFOUND!]

To think the subjects actually paid to be made to look like this.

Amazingly misguided as some of the photos are, it's the commentary that makes the list such a treat. (See, for example, "Talk about a third wheel…")

[Via MetaFilter]

I forgot to include my favourite of the photos I've seen in the last few days in that last post:

• Stars within reach

I haven't done one of these posts for a while.

• After the storm
• No Title
• Cold and Snow
• BÃ¥stad by night
• Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska, Glacier
• Stars within reach
• Water slide
• Science of Boomerangs
• Galaxy
• Foggy Night, Durham Church
• Parcel Force
• Another way

I do hope this truck doesn't encounter any bumps in the road. (Not that it seems likely given the terrain, but still…)

Tariq Ali's article about Benazir Bhutto's return to Pakistan was published a couple of weeks before her assassination:

Arranged marriages can be a messy business. Designed principally as a means of accumulating wealth, circumventing undesirable flirtations or transcending clandestine love affairs, they often don’t work. Where both parties are known to loathe each other, only a rash parent, desensitised by the thought of short-term gain, will continue with the process knowing full well that it will end in misery and possibly violence. That this is equally true in political life became clear in the recent attempt by Washington to tie Benazir Bhutto to Pervez Musharraf. [...]

Ali's article is interesting not so much because of the prediction that her story might come to a violent end – that seemed all too likely from the moment she allowed herself to be persuaded to return to Pakistan – but because it comprises a useful account of the various family rivalries and clashing agendas that have shaped the last 30 years or so of Pakistan's history and will shape what happens next.

[Via Arkansawyer, posting to a comment thread at Making Light]

The Purple Nurple Optical Illusion made me feel woozy. It's probably best not to follow that link if you've had anything to drink lately.

[Via 3quarksdaily]

A spectacular collection of eyescapes by Rankin.

[Via NOTCOT, via Monoscope]

The Economist turns its attention to a rather unlikely management guru: Mao Zedong.

Mao knew not just how to make a point but also how to get it out. Through posters, the “Little Red Book” and re-education circles, his message was constantly reinforced. “Where the broom does not reach”, he said, “the dust will not vanish of itself.” This process of self-aggrandisement is often dismissed as a “personality cult”, but is hard to distinguish from the modern business practice of building brand value.

Yet within China economic growth was pathetic and living conditions were wretched. So why did a vast list of Western political, military and academic leaders accept the value of Mao's brand at his own estimation? Even Stalin, no guileless observer, believed in and, to his later regret, protected Mao. The brand-building lesson is that a clear, utopian message, hammered home relentlessly, can obscure inconvenient facts. Great salesmen are born knowing this. Executives whose strategies are not delivering need to learn it.

Chief executives are not in a position to crush the media as Mao did. Nevertheless, his handling of them offers some lessons. He talked only to sycophantic journalists and his appeal in the West came mainly from hagiographies written by reporters whose careers were built on the access they had to him.

The law constrains the modern chief executive's ability to imitate Mao's PR strategy. Publicly listed companies have to publish information, rather than hand it out selectively. But many, within bounds, emulate Mao's media management; others, determined to control information about them, are delisting. Burrow beneath laudatory headlines on business and political leaders, and it becomes clear that the strategy works.

[Via plasticbag.org]

I was a little surprised that the HMRC data disk loss only made it to number 2 in this list of the Top 10 Data Breaches of 2007.

I didn't recognise the number 1 entry at first, as I'd forgotten the name of the parent company of TK Maxx:

1. TJX — 'Sorry About That. Here's a Gift Card. Come Back Soon for our Sale!'
Victims: Millions of bargain shoppers worldwide
Class Action Outrage Scale: 8 out of 10 lawyers
D’oh! Factor: 3 out of 5 Homers

No breach got more ink this year than TJX’s, which involved some, OK, tens of millions, OK, 50 million, all right all right around 100 million credit and debit card records. Priceless moments included TJX’s defense in press accounts that "our security was comparable to many other major retailers" and the portion of TJX’s proposed settlement with consumers in which the company would hold a three-day “Customer Appreciation Sale” and give some customers $30 store vouchers. (Sorry about the e. coli in the meat in our store; here’s a gift card to buy more meat in our store). After consumer advocates raised a stink, the vouchers were changed to $15 checks. Sad as the whole episode was for consumers, TJX’s stock has remained healthy. Don’t you just love a bargain?

For my money the HMRC breach was worse, because it involved not far short of half the population of a single major industrialised nation. TJX may have lost more people's data, but the damage was spread around the world.

One other interesting point. In the wake of the HMRC fiasco there have been various reports of other data losses because public servants everywhere are being asked to review their record and report to their superiors. Oddly enough, I haven't noticed a succession of major retailers and credit card processing companies making public declarations of their past failings. Does anyone really believe that it's because no other retail operation has screwed up bigtime? It's like the perception that government IT projects always go over budget; if that's how it appears, isn't it at least in part because the likes of the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee can force departments to account for their failings? It's not the whole story by any means, but it's certainly part of the reason for the perceived failings of public sector IT procurement.

[Via Bruce Schneier]

Axis of Evil: Annual Letter to Our Members by Shap Sweeney:

Dear Members States,

[...]

The Centennial Goals, a flagship initiative of the A. of E., is truly shaping up to be a dream within our grasp. As we seek to raise $100 trillion, which would enable us to permanently destroy freedom and to kill every free person and dog alive by 2100, we will need to count on your steadfast support. It will take all of us working together to make our dream of ravaging the world come true. But when the Axis of Evil was founded in 2002, there was one simple goal in mind: to provide an axis where evil countries could pursue evil deeds. So as we look ahead to the coming year, we must remember we are in this together. We cannot do it alone.

[...]

James Fallows has found the workshop of the world (fine arts division) in southern China:

[In Dafen...] are many hundreds of individual art factories, in which teams of artists crank out hand-painted replicas of any sort of picture you can imagine. European old masters. Andy Warhol. Gustav Klimt. Classic Chinese landscapes. Manet. Audubon. Botero. The super-hot and faddish contemporary Chinese artist Yue Minjun, whose paintings and sculptures all feature people wearing enormous grins. Thomas Kinkade, the "Painter of Light." Walter Keane, the "Painter of Mawkish Big-Eyed Kids."

This and more is on sale, priced more or less by the square meter. We saw suppliers delivering huge rolls of canvas, to be converted into "commodity art" — which is what the English sign on one store said. [...]

Fallows posted more pictures from Dafen and a little more background information about China's history of reproducing art on a large scale in this follow-up post.

Hello Kitty contact lenses. Too cute for words, or deeply scary?

[Via Japundit]

Fathers do the funniest things at Xmas.

Seeing this clip from Vampire Circus brought back fond memories of the BBC's late night horror double-bills back in the mid-1970s. Let's just say that Vampire Circus made a big impression on me as a 13 year-old: a fine example of public service broadcasting in action.

[Note to self: set up a reminder in MyDigiguide to make sure I don't miss Vampire Circus next time it shows up on TV.]

[Via MetaFilter]

As promised, John Scalzi visited the Creation Museum last month and produced a report on the experience, accompanied by a rather wonderful (and quite snarky) slideshow.

For what it's worth, these are my favourite pictures from the slideshow:

• Nothing Stimulates Consumer Activity Like a Pterosaur!
• An Unintentionally Funny Sign.
• Your Head Looks Like a Coconut.
• A Real Committment to Wickedness.

[I appreciate this report is old news; I bookmarked it when it came out but only got round to reading it yesterday. I think it's worth posting about even six weeks on.]

In the right hands, xkill could be a useful tool. A very useful tool.

NAME
xkill - extended kill - kill processes or users, including Usenet posters.

[...]

DESCRIPTION
xkill sends a signal to a process or a terminal. The first two forms send a signal to a process. The functionality in this case is the same as kill (1).

When the command xkill is invoked with an username as argument, it attempts to locate the specified user on the local host. If the user is logged on, the signal ECUTE (electrocute, 666) is sent to the user's terminal. This will cause the keyboard to electrocute the user. If the user is not logged on, the appropriate line of the file /etc/passwd is marked. The first time the user logs on the ECUTE signal is sent to the terminal he is using.

When the command xkill is invoked with a remote username, in the form user@host, a connection with the remote host is attempted (see xkilld (8)), to send the ECUTE signal to the user's terminal.

[Via Claudio Calvelli, commenting at Charlie's Diary]

Mark Steel wonders whether the Roman Catholic church is ready for Tony Blair:

For the first time ever I felt like going to a Catholic Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. Because it would have been worth it to yell during the sermon: "It's one thing tolerating the Inquisition and the Mafia and an assortment of paedophiles, but surely even YOU draw the line at Blair."

The Vatican will have to be careful. He's probably planning to stand for Pope, then announce that if they're to succeed in the modern age, they'll have to discard outdated ideas of us and them, and learn to embrace the devil. "This is the way forward for New Catholicism," he'll insist, upsetting Old Catholics when he spends two free weeks in Satan's holiday home. [...]

Will Smith's PR people are going to earn their money this week:

The Men In Black star, 39, is determined to see the best in people, and is convinced the former German leader did not fully understand the extent of the pain and suffering his actions would cause during his time in power in the 1930s and '40s.

He says, "Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'Let me do the most evil thing I can do today'."

"I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good'. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming."

Remember folks, this is a man who keeps saying in interviews that he wants to run for president someday.

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

From The Economist, a history of census-taking:

People started finding the sorts of patterns in the resulting data—life expectancies, crime rates, causes of death, and the mix of religions and races—that are now part of our familiar mental furniture. In the 1800s, for instance, two French statisticians, André Michel Guerry and Adolphe Quetelet, analysed the tables of crimes against individuals and property that had recently started to be published. They were astonished by the hitherto-unsuspected regularities they found. Guerry was particularly struck by the fact that the method by which someone committed suicide could be predicted from his age. The author of an English commentary on his work described his findings thus: “The young hang themselves; arrived at a maturer age they usually blow out their brains; as they get old they recur again to the juvenile practice of suspension.”

[Via Qwghlm]