.sigfile of the day:

Any idiot, upon seeing the first automobile, could easily predict that it would revolutionize transportation. Only someone with exceptionally keen insight could have foreseen that it would also revolutionize the sex lives of teenagers.
— Isaac Asimov

Sydney Padua presents Lovelace and Babbage Vs. The Organist Pt 2, in which Babbage redefines the problem of crime, invents CCTV and wrecks his partnership with Ada Lovelace.

So geeky. So good.

Beware: you may have trouble sleeping after viewing this gallery of Celebrities with Upside Down faces.

Barbra Streisand and Evangeline Lilly actually look pretty good. The upside-down look clearly suits Michael Douglas. Skin from Skunk Anansie almost pulls it off.¹

Then there are the horrors, destined to haunt your dreams tonight: Billy Idol, Thora Birch and … scariest of all … Tom Cruise!

[Via kottke.org]

1. Though the picture of Skin isn't a very good Photoshop job IMHO, what with the face being obviously too large for the head. ↩

Unlink Your Feeds. Please?

Listen.

You need to unlink your feeds.

I understand why you did it. I’ve made the same mistake myself. But it’s hurting your friends, it’s hurting you, and it’s hurting the Internet. You need to stop.

You need to stop automatically dumping your feeds from one account into another. [...]

[Via Electrolite (Sidelights)]

My favourite response to this lovely close-up shot of Mimas came from comment #8:

8. Greg in Austin Says:
February 15th, 2010 at 11:37 am

I can imagine one of the Cassini engineers here on Earth programming in the flight pattern:

Engineer: "Keep your distance, but don't look like you're keeping your distance."

Cassini: "Beeep?"

Engineer: "I don't know. Fly casual!"

Charlie Brooker has found himself a reason to love eBooks:

[The biggest advantage...] to the ebook is this: no one can see what you're reading. You can mourn the loss of book covers all you want, but once again I say to you: no one can see what you're reading. This is a giant leap forward, one that frees you up to read whatever you want without being judged by the person sitting opposite you on the tube. [...]

The lack of a cover immediately alters your purchasing habits. As soon as I got the ebook, I went on a virtual shopping spree, starting with the stuff I thought I should read – Wolf Hall, that kind of thing – but quickly found myself downloading titles I'd be too embarrassed to buy in a shop or publicly read on a bus. Not pornography, but something far worse: celebrity autobiographies.

The Space Shuttle in silhouette.

[Via Bad Astronomy]

Essential reading for your next family road trip.¹

1. Assuming that you're in North America. ↩

A gallery of Moth Trails.

[Via MetaFilter]

Ross Anderson et al: Chip and PIN is Broken.

The UK Cards Association: "Our research suggests that criminal interest in chip-based attacks is minimal at this time as they are unable to find ways to make sufficient amounts of money from any of the plausible attack scenarios." (Emphasis added.)

[Via Memex 1.1]

A Valentine, xkcd-style.

Nick Hornby discovers that being nominated for an Oscar isn't all about hanging out with George Clooney:

There is, it turns out, a lot of paperwork associated with an Oscar nomination. Yesterday we had to sign a form promising that we wouldn't sell our statuettes; [...]

Was this tweet from unhappy traveller Paul Chambers in poor taste?

"Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"

Perhaps so. Perhaps not. Depends who he was talking to. I'd imagine that any family/friends/acquaintances were following him on Twitter probably knew his sense of humour and, quite possibly, his travel plans.¹

Was this a textbook case of an official overreaction?

A week after posting the message on the social networking site, he was arrested under the Terrorism Act and questioned for almost seven hours by detectives who interpreted his post as a security threat. After he was released on bail, he was suspended from work pending an internal investigation, and has, he says, been banned from the Doncaster airport for life.

Hell, yes! Unless, that is, the prosecution reveal that their trawl through Chambers' computer has revealed evidence that he actually is a spectacularly dim terrorist wannabe.

I'm not going to hold my breath.

As an added bonus, I'll bet Chambers will be on various watch lists for the rest of his days, or until officials everywhere develop a sense of proportion in dealing with 'terrorist threats.'²

[Via Groc's various musings]

1. He was due to fly out from the airport the following week. ↩
2. Again, I won't be holding my breath while I await the blessed day. ↩

What is the worst date movie of all time?

My vote goes to Hard Candy: a terrific little film, but one guaranteed to make every post-pubescent male in the audience profoundly uncomfortable.

Seeing these illustrations by Freff after all these years reminded me that I'm going to have to make the time to re-read John Varley's Gaean Trilogy some day. I loved everything John Varley wrote back in the early 1980s (though I slightly preferred his short stories to his novels). I wonder how well the latter have aged?

[Via MetaFilter]

The terms & conditions for using iTunes include a boilerplate clause¹ barring persons in embargoed countries, or who are on various US government lists, from downloading and installing iTunes, or using that software for "any purposes prohibited by United States law." Or, to put it another way:

[All] the Al-Qaeda operatives holed up in the Northwest Frontier Provinces of Pakistan, dodging drone attacks while listening to Britney Spears songs downloaded with iTunes are in violation of the terms and conditions, even if they paid for the music!

[Via Bruce Schneier]

1. Prompted, most likely, by the fact that iTunes uses encryption to protect some of the content it downloads. Since the 1970s, encryption software has been in the same class as munitions – i.e. something that shouldn't be exported to hostile powers. ↩

David Rose, editor of the personal ads column at the London Review of Books¹ spoke to GQ about his work:

FRENCH: This is a personal favorite of mine:

If you think I'm going to love you – you're right. Clingy, over-emotional and socially draining woman, 36. Once you've got me, you can never ever leave me. Not ever. Prone to maniacal bursts of crying, usually followed by excitable and uncontrollable laughter. Life is a roller coaster; you've just got to ride it, as Ronan Keating once said. Buxton. Box no. 0617.

ROSE: That's got all the elements of an ad that I really like, including an obscure musical reference. I was going to put a musical discography at the back of the book thinking it would present the perfect sound track to an emotional ride – if you put all of these songs together, this is what heart ache sounds like. But the songs were just completely ridiculous. There was far too much Dean Friedman. Far too much Bachman Turner Overdrive. If that's what loneliness sounds like, then I don't want to hear it.

[Via The Morning News]

1. Previously. ↩

Charles Vance Millar had quite a sense of humour:

Charles Vance Millar was a prominent lawyer who practiced in Toronto from 1881 until his death in 1926. He went to his grave a bachelor, and due to some interesting investments (Charlie liked the longshots), this irascible 73-year-old left a considerable estate.

Millar was both a student of human nature and possessed of a perverse sense of fun. His best jokes turned on others' greed and love of money, and his pet theory was that every man had his price – the trick was to figure out what it was. (One of his favorite pranks was to leave $1 bills on the sidewalk, then watch the expressions of passersby as they furtively pocketed them.) His last will and testament exemplified his unusual sense of humor and put to the test his notions about every man having his price. Given Millar's obvious familiarity with the law, he had to have known what the execution of his will would do to the judicial system he'd long been part of – indeed, that was probably the motivation behind his wacky stipulations. Millar's death afforded him one last chance to tweak the beard of the legal system, and he took it. [...]

[Via MetaFilter]

Wade Davis related an astonishing story of resourcefulness in a recent talk he gave at the Long Now Foundation. The gist of his story (which I gather he's related in quite a few talks over the years) is summed up in this Reddit post:

During the 1950s Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. A family from Arctic Bay told me this fantastic story of their grandfather who refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his tools and all of his implements, thinking that would force him into the settlement. But instead, he just slipped out of an igloo on a cold Arctic night, pulled down his caribou and sealskin trousers, and defecated into his hand. As the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of an implement. And when the blade started to take shape, he put a spray of saliva along the leading edge to sharpen it. That's when what they call the "shit knife" took form. He used it to butcher a dog. Skinned the dog with it. Improvised a sled with the dog's rib cage, and then, using the skin, he harnessed up an adjacent living dog. He put the shit knife in his belt and disappeared into the night.'

Some posters to the Reddit comment thread are sceptical, suggesting that an icy shit knife would melt when it encountered the warm innards of a freshly-killed dog. I'm sure it wouldn't last long, but:

1. Nobody said that the knife was unscathed at the end of the episode. There may well have been some deterioration, just not enough to render it useless;
2. In very cold weather, I can readily believe that that shit would freeze really hard;
3. If the shit knife was reasonably sharp it might not have to last very long. I don't imagine that an experienced Inuit hunter, well used to skinning animals, would take too long to skin a dog.

Besides, if the story isn't true it damn well should be.

Ty Mattson has created a range of simple yet stylish posters for Lost. I like the first poster best, but that may just be because John Locke is far and away my favourite character.

At any rate, as of late in season 3 he is.

As I predicted, having started watching the last third of season 3 again I've ended up buying the season 4 box set. I realise that I'm still lagging way behind everyone who has been watching the show on TV all this time, but I'm hoping that by the time I make it to the end of season 4, the season 5 box set might be available at a reasonable price.¹

[Via Qwghlm]

1. Or I'll have turned into a rabid Lost fan, desperate enough to buy season 5 – and possibly even season 6 – whatever the price. Time will tell. ↩