Christopher Walken performs Lady Gaga's Poker Face.

Comfortably the strangest thing I've seen this Halloween.

[Via MetaFilter]

Best. DDoS. Ever?

As you may already be aware, recently the Atheist Founation of Australia and the Global Atheist Convention websites were the target of a significant DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, which began on Monday 19 October.

This is a call to all non-believers and advocates for freedom of speech to join us in a global co-ordinated minute of prayer with the aim of inundating God (in this context, the Christian god, God, as distinct from the Greek god, Zeus, the Egyptian god, Ra etc etc) with so many useless prayers that it causes his divineness to go offline as as result of our own DDOS ('Divine' Denial of Service).

The prayer minute will be at exactly 8pm (Eastern Standard Time) and 9am (Greenwich Mean Time) on Sunday 8 November 2009.

The prayer can be about anything you want (but say it as frequently as possible in the minute we have assigned to ensure DDOS is achieved) or to whomever god you want. Its mostly directed at the Christian god so as to ensure we don't get too many return to senders from other gods.

[Via Net Effect]

President Obama has inspired Japanese youth to adopt his name as slang:

[It was found ...] as an entry dated 22 September in a collection of slang and modern usage put together by the Japanese Teachers' Network in Kitakyushu. Here's what they write:

obamu: (v.) To ignore inexpedient and inconvenient facts or realities, think "Yes we can, Yes we can," and proceed with optimism using those facts as an inspiration (literally, as fuel). It is used to elicit success in a personal endeavor. One explanation holds that it is the opposite of kobamu. (æ‹’ã‚€, which means to refuse, reject, or oppose).

[Via James Fallows]

Just a quick note to say that posting is likely to become even more sporadic than usual over the next few days/weeks as I'm having severe connectivity issues with my internet connection at home and it's unclear at this time when (or how) they'll be resolved.

Watch this space…

The level of detail in this false-colour image of the Crab Nebula from the Hubble Space Telescope is astonishing.

From a John Cleese interview at The Onion's A.V. Club, intriguing news about a musical adaptation of A Fish Called Wanda:

AVC: Can you say any more about the musical?

JC: Yes, well, they suggested a musical of Wanda to me some time ago, and I was completely unenthusiastic, and then ever so slowly, the idea grew on me. Because it's a chance to work with Camilla, and we enjoy each other a great deal. She's very funny. She's also very, very rude, but very, very funny with it. God, she's rude. [Laughs.] Mainly about my age. So we have a lot of fun working together, and she's very original and creative, so that's fun. And I brought in this guy, Bill Bailey – I don't think he's very well-known in America, is he yet?

Is it just me, or is the idea of getting Bill Bailey in to work on the musical a masterstroke?

Two of the Guardian's techies have produced the best short, non-technical overview of Google Wave I've read.

[Via currybetdotnet]

As linked to all over the UK's corner of the web over the last 24 hours: Cassetteboy vs Nick Griffin vs Question Time.

I think it's fair to say that Will Self is not enamoured with the mobile phone:

Yet I don't think inconsiderate use of mobile phones is simply the rudeness born of a slackening of social bonds: I believe it to be a form of collective madness. When I'm in a public but confined space, such as a train carriage, and some deranged person begins to Samsung-soliloquise, I try to bring them to their senses by reading aloud from Schopenhauer (I carry a copy of The World as Will and Idea with me for just this purpose). Soon enough they stop and, sadly often irately, ask me what I'm doing. Then I explain that while public declamation and conversation is as old as humanity, there is no precedent for a person holding a one-sided private conversation aloud in public.

xkcd now has an (unofficial) theme song.

[Via MetaFilter]

42 Essential 3rd Act Twists.

Includes The Vengeful Immigrant, Ancient Druids Lose Interest and several variations on the Double Shyamalan.

[Via The Sideshow]

Greg Knauss is pleased to report that he's successfully passed on his values to the next generation.

The New Yorker profiles James Cameron as he works on Avatar. Not a lot of new information, unless you were unaware of Cameron's perfectionist streak. Consider his instructions to his sound engineers as they prepare an excerpt of Avatar to whet fanboy appetites at ComiCon:

"If we had to ship this thing in, like, two hours I'd send the fucking temp," Cameron hissed. "It was built with a real opinion. And that opinion is not gonna change, 'cause I personally cut it myself. My advice to you: Listen to it, study it, match what's there. Your principle, like a surgeon with the Hippocratic Oath, should be, Do no harm."

I'm hugely sceptical about the current push towards 3D films, but if there's one director who could persuade me to don the goggles it's James Cameron.

Part of me wishes Cameron had spent the last twelve years turning out three or four pretty decent feature films instead of messing around producing Dark Angel and Solaris and pottering around in submersibles but there's no denying that the man has earned the right to do whatever the hell he wants to.

The World's Largest Gun Suppressor hardly seems worth camouflaging.

[Via MetaFilter]

Help Wanted:

Researchers from the National Centre for Social Research, commissioned by the Department for Work and Pension (DWP), sent three different applications for 987 actual vacancies between November 2008 and May 2009. Nine occupations were chosen, ranging from highly qualified positions such as accountants and IT technicians to less well-paid positions such as care workers and sales assistants.

[...] The report, to be released tomorrow, concludes that there was no plausible explanation for the difference in treatment found between white British and ethnic minority applicants other than racial discrimination.

It also finds that public sector employers were less likely to have discriminated on the grounds of race than those in the private sector.

The employment minister is concerned. The Conservative who chairs the relevant select committee thinks "this was a good exercise by the government". British Chambers of Commerce advisor Abigail Morris questioned whether a study of such relatively limited scope could produce useful results, then went a step further:

[She questioned...] whether the government should be involved in using a "sting operation" to uncover racism in the middle of a recession and whether it was worth the money. "Business is struggling with the worst recession for a generation. Is this really the time to be wasting government resources and the time of hard-pressed companies with fake CVs?" she asked.

Three points:

1. If the government shouldn't be doing this, who should?
2. Presumably the alternative to a 'sting operation' is to send employers a simple form containing the question "Do you discriminate against job applicants who you think may not be of Anglo-Saxon origin?" with a single Yes/No box to tick.
3. In the depth of the worst recession for a generation, it's a fair bet that every one of those 987 posts received a good number of applications. I seriously doubt that the burden of receiving three more applications made a significant difference to the amount of time the firms spent winnowing the pile of CVs down to an interview shortlist.

A nice anecdote from The Observer about working with photographer Jane Bown:

[A...] former Observer colleague, Judith Judd, was sent, with Jane, to travel by train from London to Southend. The service, the last with non-corridor trains in Britain, had just been voted the nation's worst. They got in a compartment and Judith began interviewing travellers until Jane announced, loudly: "This is no good, Judith. Everyone here has got a very boring face. We need to move to another compartment." Of course, this could not be done until the next station, so Judith had to sit, in ghastly silence, for 20 minutes, surrounded by slighted commuters. Jane, unconcerned, stared out of the window.

Chinese photographer Lu Guang depicts the grimy side of the workshop of the world quite beautifully.

[Via MetaFilter]

For Howard Jacobson, life imitates a bad sitcom:

A number of years ago I stumbled into the Brooks Brothers store in Regent Street, fancying a pair of canary yellow Ivy League cord trousers I'd seen in the window and was surprised to find the entire sales staff lined up, as though to greet the Queen, but evidently, on this occasion, lined up to greet me. Were they familiar with this column? My novels? Had I found readers on a scale only Leona Lewis dare dream of?

"Highly appreciated but not necessary, guys," I said, expecting applause. Not a one of them moved a muscle. "Stand easy," I told them. Not a flicker. "Do I just measure my own inside leg, then, or what?" I asked. Still no acknowledgment, unless you call the icy contempt of 15 stuffy Brooks Brothers salespersons an acknowledgement.

It was only as I was leaving the shop without canary cords that the chimes of bells sounded and I learnt that the staff had been marking the anniversary of 9/11 with two minutes' silence. The rest of Regent Street had been doing the same. The only unquiet thing anywhere was me. The entertainer.

The University of Nottingham's Sixty Symbols hosts short videos of scientists talking about, well, scientific symbols:

Ever been confused by all the letters and squiggles used by scientists?

Hopefully this site will unravel some of those mysteries.

[...]

The films are just fun chats with men and women who love their subject and know a lot about it!

[...]

Click on "gamma" and you'll find a professor of physics talking about cricket balls… Click on "rho" and we're stuffing paperclips into coffee cups.

And sometimes when there's no symbol to tell a story (like Schrödinger's cat), well we just make one up!

[...]

[Via The Scout Report]

Every time you torrent…

[Via LinkMachineGo]