This PSA is going to haunt my dreams tonight.

[Via jwz]

The Periodic Table of Awesoments is, well, pretty damn awesome:

In the 300 B.C., years before the birth of black Jesus, Aristole postulated that all good things were made of "win." That was a pretty good guess, but he was drunk and probably also having an orgy. Modern day awesominers know there are actually 118 fundamental "awesoments" that compose all good things.

[Via LinkMachineGo]

Ben 'Bad Science' Goldacre brings us the "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that…" t-shirt:

First up, much awaited, we have possibly the finest all-purpose political t-shirt slogan ever conceived. Better still, they only reveal their true powers when you are standing next to someone who is also wearing a slogan t-shirt. Recent favourites from my bus journey include "Drop beats not bombs" and "I need a hug".

Marvellous.

Matthew Baldwin's employers have clearly embraced diversity in a big way.

What with all the stories about the passing of Oliver Postgate last week, I completely overlooked the fact that TV comedy producer Bob Spiers died on 8 December. Off The Telly's tribute to Spiers explains why we should care:

Having Bob Spiers on board was almost a guarantee of a hit show, with his credits ranging from the massively popular likes of Fawlty Towers, French & Saunders and Absolutely Fabulous (which, it's easy to forget, all began as relatively small-scale shows on BBC2), to cult favourites like Joking Apart, A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Murder Most Horrid, to virtually forgotten but much-loved obscurities such as Lazarus & Dingwall and Up Line. [...]

Not a bad track record, that.

My favourite reaction to writer Roberto M Orci's interview attempting to set fans' minds at rest that next year's new Star Trek film doesn't break canon came 126 comments in, from a poster going by the name of 4 8 15 16 23 42:

I think we've discovered the name of the new movie:

Star Trek: The Solace of Quantum

The interview itself is quite long and delves into all sorts of Trek history, so here's an executive summary:

1. The events shown in the film don't completely match the stories that have been told to date in the various TV shows and films.
2. We've thought about this a lot.
3. The film isn't a reboot.
4. Did you know that quantum mechanics is the most successful, most tested scientific theory ever?
5. The "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics allows, nay insists, that timelines can exist in parallel.
6. If you don't like the changes the writers have made to the backstory from previous Trek stories, the story you know and love is just a couple of timelines over.
7. Your Trek DVDs will still exist next year.
8. Remember, folks: quantum mechanics is the most successful, most tested scientific theory ever.

My one-line reaction: just call it Ultimate Star Trek and be done with it, already!

[Via Feeling Listless]

I've been saving some of these up for weeks now:

• Cookies
• Fuego
• Pointing up
• Euclidian Geometry?
• Liloo. Cool exercise
• The Wizard of the North
• A fish that has nothing to do with this post
• Groyne 98
• The evening fire
• Solitude
• Pink anemone
• overshadowed
• On Frozen Pond
• Endeavour in the Moon
• Chilean Skyscape
• A Happy Sky Over Los Angeles
• Journey
• E Y E S P E A K \\ )))

The Guardian presents the finalists in its Six-word memoirs competition.

My favourite is Matthew Cooper's contribution:

Always Felt Old. Now I am.

There have been a few problems with comment posting over the last few days, with some comments being marked as spam incorrectly and at least two commenters reporting error messages when they try to post. I've rescued the comments in question from my spam bucket, but until I can identify the root cause of the problem I need to make some changes around here. Diagnosing the problem hasn't been made any easier by the fact that my web host has suffered intermittent down time this weekend, making it harder for me to spot what's going on between the welter of 503 errors I keep getting when trying to access the site.

As of earlier this afternoon, I've disabled Spam Karma 2, the WordPress plugin that I've been using to deal with comment spam since shortly after I switched to WordPress. Clearly I can't allow the F*ckw*t Spamming Bastards to have their way with my comments¹ so I've turned on comment moderation.

What all this means, unfortunately, is that until I can either fix the problems commenters have reported over the last few days or find another automated comment moderation system that I can live with the posting of legitimate comments may will be delayed, sometimes by several hours. I can only apologise, and promise that I'll do my best to keep up with the comment moderation queue.

In the meantime, if anyone posts a comment and sees any strange error messages could they please email me and let me know the wording of the error message, or simply post a comment reporting the error.

1. While I've been typing this post nine comments have been posted, every one of them spam. ↩

If wishes were horses…

Detective Superintendent Charlie McMurdie, architect of the UK's Police Central E-crime Unit (PCeU), said frontline police ideally need a digital forensic tool as easy to use as the breathalyser, to help them deal with growing numbers of computers being seized during raids on suspects' homes.

There's what they need and what's feasible.

McMurdie said such a tool could run on suspects' machines, identify illegal activity – such as credit card fraud or selling stolen goods online – and retrieve relevant evidence.

The question is, what does Detective Superintendent McMurdie mean here? If she's talking about a program that can be told which credit card numbers/email addresses the police suspect were involved in the commission of a crime and will search the PC's hard disk for evidence of those details – a sort of targeted version of the desktop search features that most modern PCs have – I can see that being a useful program to have.

If she thinks that someone can write her a program that will identify evidence of transactions, emails and online activity that might be suspicious without any prior indication of specific details to look for, I think she's going to need a much bigger budget.¹

The tool is part of a package of measures envisaged by McMurdie as one day coming out of the £7m PCeU, which from spring next year will co-ordinate law enforcement of all online offences and lead national investigations into the most serious e-crime cases.

One of the themes that kept popping up during the interview was that there are huge backlogs of requests for digital forensic work and this is what drives the desire for a magical black box to find evidence of crime. Wouldn't it be better to divert the resources they might spend on this sort of software development to, say, paying for more specialists in digital forensic work?

What worries me is that the officer leading the PCeU can come out and say something like this:

"[Look at...] breathalysers – I am not a scientist, I could not do a chemical test on somebody when they are arrested for drink driving but I have a tool that tells me when to bring somebody in."

A breathalyser measures the blood/alcohol level in a physical sample: if the ratio is above a certain level that indicates that a crime has been committed, barring evidence of inaccuracy in the measurement or procedural screwups by the arresting officer.

The magical device Detective Superintendent McMurdie would like to develop would have to search a multitude of types of data in a potentially huge range of formats (possibly encrypted) in a computer's memory and backing store. Unless the police know at the outset of the search that they are looking for a copy of an email to a particular person or of a visit to a particular web page, it's hard to see how the tool can know that it's found evidence of illegal activities. That problem is several orders of magnitude more complicated than a breathalyser. It'd be nice to think that she realises that.

[Via Open Rights Group mailing list]

1. But then, I'm sure that when her computer scientists develop a working AI the financial returns from licensing the technology will turn the PCeU a tidy profit. ↩

The gallery of this year's winners of the National Geographic Traveler's Photo Contest contains some gems.

As the gallery is done in Flash I can't link directly to my favourite: the second photograph, "Great Egret with Nesting Material" by Daniel Cedras.

[Via 3quarksdaily]

Courtesy of McSweeney's: World of Warcraft vs. My Girlfriend.

I'm sorry I was so late picking you up from the library. I didn't know they locked the doors at 8, and I'm sorry you had to stand outside alone for two hours. If it makes you feel better, despite its reputation to the contrary, that portion of the city does not have a violent-crime rate significantly above the national average.

You have to consider the position I was in. I was healing for a party with five players in it, all of whom were counting on me to help them defeat Mekgineer Thermaplugg and liberate the Gnomish city of Gnomeregan. Those are the needs of five people, in contrast to just yours, alone. (Note that I'm not even counting the needs of the Gnomish people here, Ashley.) As Spock once famously said, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one." You were that one.

This guy is clearly a close relative of Sheldon Cooper.

[Via Ta-Nehisi Coates]

The organiser of the Helios Project, an initiative that promotes the use of Linux by schoolchildren, received a fabulously clueless letter from a local teacher by the name of Karen who had:

"…observed one of my students with a group of other children gathered around his laptop. Upon looking at his computer, I saw he was giving a demonstration of some sort. The student was showing the ability of the laptop and handing out Linux disks. After confiscating the disks I called a confrence (sic) with the student and that is how I came to discover you and your organization. Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows. [Emphasis added]

Two thoughts:

1. I think the first line of the first comment nailed it: "Absolutely goes to show the mindset billions of dollars of PR money will buy."
2. The very best line came later in the email: "I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older verison (sic) of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them…" Wanna bet?

As it turned out, this wasn't the end of the story: Karen got in touch to discuss the matter and is having Linux installed on her PC this weekend. Even so, to my mind it's not an entirely positive outcome to the story: I'd like to know more about why, exactly, Karen was so "tearful [and] frightened" that she was on the verge of going to law to protect her privacy. Did some idiot post her contact details on line and tell Linux supporters to explain the error of her ways? Was it that she ended up having an uncomfortable discussion with her school's principal when he or she started receiving enquiries about the story?¹

[Via Memex 1.1]

1. In fairness, it may also simply be that Karen is not used to being talked about online by total strangers and reacted badly to being the centre of attention for a bunch of total strangers, some of whom – if a few of the comments on the linked article are anything to go by – clearly have a few issues of their own with public schools/teaching unions. ↩

Nice as the Springfield Punx version of the Watchmen is, I think the full-on collage of pop culture/geek media heroes and villains is much more fun.

However, I don't recognise 6 of the figures in the collage:

1. The guy in the red and black ice hockey uniform in the front row.
2. The redheaded woman just behind and to the right of Reed Richards.
3. The man in the light blue shirt and blue jeans to the left of Luke Cage and 60s Batman.
4. The creature in the purple and brown outfit with the green head.
5. The grey-haired man in the grey suit just behind Harley Quinn.
6. The purple and green alien/robot/whatever in the back row between Warren Worthington and Iron Fist.

Any ideas?

[Via LinkMachineGo!]

6 vertigo-inducing viewing platforms.

I've posted about the Grand Canyon Skywalk before: of the other sites posted, the Aurland lookout in Norway is my favourite. (Which is to say, the scariest. The walk up to that sheet of glass looks utterly terrifying.)

[Via GromBlog]

Robert E Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, knew cats:

The life of a cat is not numbered by nine. Usually it is short, violent and tragic. He suffers, and makes others suffer if he can. He is primitive, bestially selfish. He is, in short, a creature of awful and terrible potentialities, a crystalization of primordial self-love, a materialization of the blackness and squalor of the abyss. He is a green-eyed, steel-thewed, fur-clad block of darkness hewed from the Pits which know not light, nor sympathy, nor dreams, nor hope, nor beauty, nor anything except hunger and the satiating of hunger. But he has dwelt with man since the beginning, and when the last man lies down and dies, a cat will watch his throes, and likelier than not, will gorge its abysmal hunger on his cooling flesh.

Brrrr…

[Via Artw, posting to MetaFilter]

Carrie Fisher remembers making Star Wars:

Even now, many years later, people are still asking me if I knew Star Wars was going to be that big a hit. Yes, of course I knew. We all knew.

The only one who didn't was the director, George Lucas. We kept it from him because we wanted to see what his face looked like when it changed expression.

Not only was he virtually expressionless in those days, but he also hardly talked at all. His only two directions in the first film were 'faster' and 'more intense'.

Shortly after I arrived, he gave me this unbelievably idiotic hairstyle. He said in his little voice: 'Well, what do you think of it?'

I was terrified I was going to be fired for being too fat, so I said: 'I love it.' Yeah, right.

[...]

I weighed about 105lb at the time but carried about 50 of those in my face.

So you know what a good idea would be? Give me a hairstyle that further widens my already wide face.

Her anecdotes in the same extract about growing up as the offspring of celebrity parents are really funny; I might have to keep an eye out for her new autobiography when it comes out in paperback.

[Via #!/usr/bin/girl]

Would anyone care to take a guess what this software does? ¹

[Via Daring Fireball]

1. My guess is that it takes input from a file, a serial port or a TCP connection and redirects it to an application running on the local PC. (Note the direction of the arrows running into and out of that central dialog box.) I take it the idea is to allow a programmer to set up a file that echoes the keystrokes used to execute a sequence of commands so that a complicated set of functions can be executed. A macro execution tool of sorts. Ugly, horribly error-prone if the user hasn't left the local application in the expected state, but possibly quite useful in some circumstances. ↩

The Tao Of Backup.¹

[Via The Tao of Mac]

1. Yes, it's an advert. But it's funny, and true. ↩

If only we'd had A Young Mad Scientist's First Alphabet Blocks when I was growing up:

These lovely blocks contain many carefully engraved illustrations of the equipment, training, and activities that a budding mad scientist will require, combined with a clever alphabetic introduction to the concept depicted.

[...]

A complete list of the images represented by the letters is as follows:

A is for Appendages
B is for Bioengineering
C is for Caffeine
D is for Dirigible
E is for Experiment
F is for Freeze ray
[...]

[Via jwz]