Inverted Hell Is Heaven.

[Via Monoscope]

Like James Nicoll and most of his commenters, I read this update on a problem with Voyager 2 and thought V'Ger:

The mission has zeroed in on a flipped or bad bit in the flight data system being the likely culprit for the spacecraft's current problem with formatting science data properly. Remember that computers store information as strings of ones and zeroes or "on" and "off" bits. Once in a while, a passing cosmic ray can evade the radiation protection on a spacecraft and slam into a memory bit; when that happens, the bit may change value, from zero to one or vice versa. It's a lot like a transcription error in DNA; it's a sort of mutation of the code. It's possible that the flipped bit will have no or insignificant effect on the spacecraft, but once in a while, a flipped bit happens in a very important location and causes serious problems, and that's what the Voyager team thinks happened within Voyager 2's flight data systems.

Patrick Farley has raised the funds to relaunch Electric Sheep Comix.

(If you're wondering why this is good news, take a look at Apocamon or Spiders or The Jain's Death.)

[Via Waxy.org]

Apple responds.

The Wolverine ABCs.

Neat.¹

[Via MetaFilter]

1. I can't figure out who that is he's with in B, D and R. Any ideas? ↩

That's not just a roundabout, it's some sort of gateway to (from?) a higher dimension.

I'll bet cars have entered that monstrosity, never to be seen again…

[Via AMS, posting at the Bad Science forum, via Progressive Gold]

In the MeFi thread on the prospects for our new Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government, Grimgrin relates a quip about one of David Cameron's predecessors:

I remember a line from Frankie Boyle when discussing the 20 million pound planned funeral for Thatcher.

"For twenty million pounds you could buy everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we'll dig her a hole so deep we can hand her back to Satan personally."

(For context, here's how the Conservative party's support in Scotland crashed and burned during the Thatcher years and has yet to recover. Which is why the new Secretary of State for Scotland is a Liberal Democrat.)

I made the mistake of reading this Daily WTF while eating:

The product was the most fragile rube-goldbergery device Eric had ever had the misery of working on but, as Eric would expect from a group of genius engineers, it was clever.

For example, in order for the program to tell the difference between the form for heat exchanger X and one for heat exchanger Y the program assigned a unique ID, but instead of storing the information in a variable, the values were stored in the background color of the form. After all, the color #444445 is really not visually distinguishable from #444446!

A combination of laughter, incredulity and horror almost made me choke on my ham sandwich…

Mark Thomas on the new cabinet:

Cable expected to get business/banking role in cabinet, how wonderfully Etonian that Osbourne should bring in a private tutor.

(It would have worked even better if Vince Cable had ended up as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, but it's still a hit, a very palpable hit.)

Even 55 years on, the Lockheed U-2 still looks like a strikingly modern aircraft.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Remember Paul Chambers, the Twitter terrorist? Back in January, when the harsh winter was threatening to close Doncaster's Robin Hood airport, he posted:

"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!!"

Guess what happened next:

I never expected to be charged, but a month later I was: not under the offence of making a bomb threat, for which I was originally arrested, but under the communications act for the offence of sending a menacing message. [...] Even after all the preceding absurdity and near-breakdown-inducing stress, I was confident common sense would prevail in my day in court.

Unfortunately, yesterday I was found guilty and ordered to pay £1,000 in fines and legal costs, which I have to find along with my own legal costs of another £1,000. I am considering an appeal, though I have no means, having left my job due to the circumstances.

I wonder if our new Justice Secretary has any thoughts about whether taking Chambers to court really served the interests of justice.

A message from a considerate time traveller.

[Via LinkMachineGo!]

Emily Lakdawalla on a possible explanation for Saturn's hexagon:

The hexagon was first observed in Voyager images of Saturn, and immediately excited curiosity among scientists. In the years following Voyager, an oft-cited explanation for the origin of the hexagon was that it was a standing wave in Saturn's atmosphere. In order for it to be persistent, something needs to be driving it; that something was postulated to be a large, solitary storm observed in Voyager images at a latitude just south of the hexagonal feature. There were problems with this explanation, though, the chief one being that Cassini sees no such solitary storm, yet the hexagon is still there.

In an article published in the April issue of Icarus, Ana Aguiar and her coauthors advance an alternative explanation, and test it in the laboratory. [...]

Fascinating stuff, especially the videos of some of their laboratory tests.

John Lanchester finds an apt metaphor for post-election Britain:

The voting system and the electorate have botched this election. Reality, as it sometimes helpfully does, offers a metaphor for what we've done. In Chingford, an Independent candidate decided to do something frightfully amusing and changed his name to 'None of the Above'. But because of the way names were presented, he appeared as 'Above, None of the' – at the top of the ballot.

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook charts the speed with which Facebook has loosened your grip on your personal information.

At one level, this isn't a problem. If you're happy for Facebook to allow your Extended Profile Data to be shared with the entire internet then clearly Facebook is the social networking site for you. The problem is that Facebook makes it ridiculously complicated to undo all the changes they make in users' default privacy settings. If I actively used Facebook¹ I'd be extremely nervous about the possibility of missing – or, more likely, misunderstanding the implications of – a policy change and discovering too late that the entire internet now not only knew about my [REDACTED] habit but had the pictures to prove it.

I'm not sure how best you could do it without making that chart too complicated, but it'd be interesting to see a version of that graph with another layer showing what percentage of users bothered to alter their various privacy-related settings from their new defaults after each change in policy. Not many, I'd guess.

[Evolution of Privacy on Facebook chart via rc3.org]

1. I do have an account, but as more of an 'antisocial networking' guy so I don't feel the need to do anything with it. ↩

James Fallows, writing almost two decades ago about the appeal of The Economist in the American market:

The other ugly English trait promoting The Economist's success in America is the Oxford Union argumentative style. At its epitome, it involves a stance so cocksure of its rightness and superiority that it would be a shame to freight it with mere fact.

American debate contests involve grinding, yearlong concentration on one doughy issue, like arms control. The forte of Oxford-style debate is to be able to sound certain and convincing about a topic pulled out of the air a few minutes before, such as "Resolved: That women are not the fairer sex." (The BBC radio shows "My Word" and "My Music," carried on National Public Radio, give a sample of the desired impromptu glibness.)

Economist leaders and the covers that trumpet their message offer Americans a blast of this style. Michael Kinsley, who once worked at The Economist, wrote that the standard Economist leader gives you the feeling that the writer started out knowing that three steps must be taken immediately — and then tried to think what the steps should be.

A certain modesty would seem appropriate in The Economist's leaders these days, considering that after 10 years in which the Thatcher government essentially did what the magazine said, Britain has the weakest economy in Europe. (Remind me, again, why we're looking to the British for economic advice.) But the implied message of the leaders often seems to be, "I took a First at Oxford. I'm right."

[Via PinkPundit, commenting at The Awl]

Ben Ward on how to Understand The Web:

Want to know if your 'HTML application' is part of the web? Link me into it. Not just link me to it; link me into it. Not just to the black-box frontpage. Link me to a piece of content. Show me that it can be crawled, show me that we can draw strands of silk between the resources presented in your app. That is the web: The beautiful interconnection of navigable content. If your website locks content away in a container, outside the reach of hyperlinks, you're not building any kind of 'web' app. You're doing something else.

Well worth reading in full.

[Via Daring Fireball]

The best computer error code I've seen in a while, courtesy of this list of Oyster Card Codes:

82 Illogical use of ticket

[Via Kevan Davis]

From Clash of the Titans: The Abridged Script:

MADS MIKKELSEN

Sam, is it true that you are a demi-god?

SAM WORTHINGTON

Wait, what? Did I miss a scene? When did that get revealed?

GEMMA ARTERTON

It's true, Sam. I am also a demi-god, and I've been watching over you all of your life. Except when your entire family was killed, my bad. Anyway, you're the child of Liam Neeson and a queen. When the king found out, he grew angry with rage and sent you both out to sea in a box, at which point your mother's hair changed color.

SAM WORTHINGTON

I am the bastard child of Liam Neeson? Sweet deal if I ever get kidnapped in Paris, but otherwise this sucks pretty bad.

There are lies, damned lies, and automated sensor readings:

A RECORDED downturn in [Adelaide's] Central Market shoppers that had been attributed to the global financial crisis has now been blamed on a faulty doorway sensor system.

The council and traders have been in a panic over the past year over a sharp downturn in visitor figures and fine-tuned advertising campaigns to attract shoppers.

A council report obtained by The Advertiser has found faulty sensors caused the dramatic drop in recorded visitors and ACC has now been forced to review at least a year of data.

[...]

The council's best estimate is that the drop in actual visitor numbers over the past year is less than 1 per cent, compared with about 10 per cent previously believed. [...]

[Via RISKS Digest]