Nightmare fuel:

[...] We get paper wasps everywhere, but the general population has learnt to live with them, along with the hundreds of other harmful beasties poised to strike at any time.

But a much rarer site over here is one of those spider hunting wasps. They'd probably be the most physically imposing insect I've seen, on top of the loud droning noise of their flight. You can feel the wind from their wings from easily 2 feet away.

They are not stop action, too, always looking for spiders. I believe our local one hunts for ground dwelling wolf spiders. Once I saw one fly by carrying an absolutely fuck-off big wolf spider, I had to do a triple take. A fuck-off big, droning insect carrying a fuck-off big spider with the wind of its wings beating against my face. Quite a memorable experience.

posted by uncanny hengeman at 8:07 AM on December 31

David Hepworth has posted my favourite comment on Elton John and David Furnish having adopted a baby.

Courtesy of MightyGodKing, a little thought experiment:

THE IMAGINED SITUATION IS: The BBC has decided to air a one-time four-hour miniseries event of Doctor Who. The miniseries will be entitled "The Eleven Doctors" and feature every single Doctor as the cast, with a number of companions rounding it out.

Paul McGann, Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant and Matt Smith will play the Eighth through Eleventh Doctors. [The...] remaining living former actors who have played the Doctor all agreed that they should let more age-appropriate actors play the younger incarnations of the earlier Doctors [...] and of course Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell are all long dead.

So:

1. Who plays each of the first seven Doctors?
2. Which companion does each Doctor get, if any? (Assume, for marketing purposes, that Amy Pond will be present and accounted for. Possibly Rory as well. And Sarah Jane Smith is a definite, played by Elizabeth Sladen.) Note that some Doctors will have to go without.
3. Who then should play those companions?

A few ideas come to mind right away: Simon Callow for Two. Bill Nighy for Three. Martin Freeman for Five. I'm going to need to think a bit about the rest.

Can we fit Benedict Cumberbatch in there somewhere, or should we just take it as read that he's a shoe-in to play Twelve once Matt Smith moves on, and thus ineligible to appear as one of the Eleven Doctors?¹ Come to that, do we really want Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch teaming up here too: perhaps we have to choose between Holmes and Watson?

<fanboy level="insane">
One more thing: no way in hell is four hours going to be enough. If you're going to go to the trouble of gathering eleven Time Lords, surely you've got to give each of them something substantial to do. See, for example, The Ten Doctors webcomic. I'm thinking a 13-parter, minimum.
</fanboy>

1. Thinks: could The Eleven Doctors turn out to be Matt Smith's final appearance, ending with the most Time Lord-tastic regeneration scene ever and Cumberbatch stepping into the role? ↩

Andrew Collins demonstrates why 6 Music had to be saved: juggling on the radio. When would you see that sort of visual spectacle on a commercial radio station, eh?

For what it's worth, it really is worth following the link Collins provides to a YouTube clip of juggler Mat Ricardo in action. He shows not just how to remove a tablecloth without disturbing the pots/plates/cutlery, but how to put it back on again. A very neat trick.

The Beauty of Pixar: a mashup of scenes from Pixar's films, complete with appropriate musical accompaniment. Nice work – though if it were me, I don't think I'd have inserted the clips from The Shining and Goodfellas.¹

On a personal note, can I just observe that when I read the list of sources used in making that mashup I realised that I've only seen four Pixar films. Four² out of eleven: that's a really pathetic score, isn't it?

Pardon me, I just need to go and surrender my geek credentials until I've done some homework…

[Via kottke.org]

1. I see why they made sense in context, but to my mind their presence mostly detracted from the spectacle of all those perfect pixels. ↩
2. Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. Though I do have Toy Story 2 on the DVR, waiting for me to get round to it. As it has been since … [checks timestamp on recording ] … July 2010. ↩

Touching Your Junk: An Ontological Complaint.

[Via Phil Gyford]

I wonder if the stock in a human library wear an arm-band that signals what genre they're in:

The idea of a Human Library first emerged in Copenhagen about a decade ago, as a way to break down prejudice by bringing people of different backgrounds together for one-on-one conversation. The Toronto Public Library held its first Human Library event at five branches on Nov. 6, attracting more than 200 users who checked out the likes of a police officer, a comedian, a sex-worker-turned-club-owner, a model and a survivor of cancer, homelessness and poverty. They're all volunteers whose lives would make good reading, but even better one-on-one chatting. The library is considering make the program long-term, so a supply of human books will be regularly available to readers.

Seriously, whilst I don't think the concept is for everyone, I can see how the right 'human book' could be fascinating.

Then again, there could easily be a dark side to this. Can't you just see David Cameron's 'Big Society' requiring recipients of out-of-work benefits to spend a few hours a week as 'stock' in a human library.¹

[Via The Millions]

1. You know, to improve their communication skills for when they manage to land a job interview. Of course, there would be a twist: if the borrower gave their human book a bad review upon checking him/her back in, the benefit claimant would lose a week's benefit. ↩

In the wake of their decision to 'sunset' Delicious, Jason Scott is not inclined to give Yahoo's management the benefit of the doubt as regards their future intentions towards their remaining acquisitions:

I am, frankly, a mixture of disappointed and sad that after Yahoo! shut down Geocities, Briefcase, Content Match, Mash, RSS Advertising, Yahoo! Live, Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Pets, Yahoo Publisher, Yahoo! Podcasts, Yahoo! Music Store, Yahoo Photos, Yahoo! Design, Yahoo Auctions, Farechase, Yahoo Kickstart, MyWeb, WebJay, Yahoo! Directory France, Yahoo! Directory Spain, Yahoo! Directory Germany, Yahoo! Directory Italy, the enterprise business division, Inktomi, SpotM, Maven Networks, Direct Media Exchange, The All Seeing Eye, Yahoo! Tech, Paid Inclusion, Brickhouse, PayDirect, SearchMonkey, and Yahoo! Go!… there are still people out there going "Well, Yahoo certainly will never shut down Flickr, because _______________" where ______ is the sound of donkeys.

What, because they take your money? Because they're so big? Because so many people use it and like it? Because it works well? Because it would make Yahoo! look bad? Go ahead, give me some more reasons. Flickr allows you great ability to export all your data. Get used to using it regularly.

Bruce Sterling on the Wikileaks saga:

Assange didn't liberate the dreadful secrets of North Korea, not because the North Koreans lack computers, but because that isn't a cheap and easy thing that half-a-dozen zealots can do. But the principle of it, the logic of doing it, is the same. Everybody wants everybody else's national government to leak. Every state wants to see the diplomatic cables of every other state. It will bend heaven and earth to get them. It's just, that sacred activity is not supposed to be privatized, or, worse yet, made into the no-profit, shareable, have-at-it fodder for a network society, as if global diplomacy were so many mp3s. Now the US State Department has walked down the thorny road to hell that was first paved by the music industry. Rock and roll, baby.

[Via The Null Device]

This photo-essay on exploring the Paris Metro is fascinating:

Back in October 2007 sometime after midnight and before the first trains rolled into regular service, qx and I took our first timid steps onto the tracks of the Paris metro. With more nervousness and care than I'd like to admit we gingerly stepped down between the metal rails just off the end of a platform wondering what madness had possessed us to do so. We'd never done Metro like this before and this scary new world was full of elements we didn't understand at all. Looking at every rail critically working out which carried the power, asking ourselves so many questions: how far could the electricity arc, would that even happen, could the cameras on the platform see us, did security wait in the tunnels after hours, were there any trains after service, if so how fast did they go, did anyone live in the tunnels, would we encounter writers? We'd heard lots of stories about RATP security forgoing the usual legal punishments and simply beating up those found in the tunnels and kicking them out onto the street. We weren't packing paint but would that matter?

[Via BLDGBLOG]

The first truly honest privacy policy:

At COMPANY _______ we value your privacy a great deal. Almost as much as we value the ability to take the data you give us and slice, dice, julienne, mash, puree and serve it to our business partners, which may include third-party advertising networks, data brokers, networks of affiliate sites, parent companies, subsidiaries, and other entities, none of which we'll bother to list here because they can change from week to week and, besides, we know you're not really paying attention.

We'll also share all of this information with the government. We're just suckers for guys with crew cuts carrying subpoenas.

Remember, when you visit our Web site, our Web site is also visiting you. And we've brought a dozen or more friends with us, depending on how many ad networks and third-party data services we use. We're not going to tell which ones, though you could probably figure this out by carefully watching the different URLs that flash across the bottom of your browser as each page loads or when you mouse over various bits. It's not like you've got better things to do.

[...]

This privacy policy may change at any time. In fact, it's changed three times since we first started typing this. Good luck figuring out how, because we're sure as hell not going to tell you. But then, you probably stopped reading after paragraph three.

[Via Bruce Schneier]

David McCandless has been looking at the translated editions of his book, Information is Beautiful:

The Finnish publishers called their version 'Tieto On Kaunista'. This, I believe, translates as 'Rainbow Information Icicles Pierce The Bubble Of Your Mind'. (maybe)

According to Google Translate it doesn't mean anything of the sort, but IMHO it ought to: 'Rainbow Information Icicles Pierce The Bubble Of Your Mind' is a fantastic title. Perhaps McCandless could use it for his next book instead.

Professor Ross Anderson's response to a request by the UK Cards Association¹ that the university take down an MPhil thesis published by a student that included information about the No-PIN attack and "give [the UK Cards Association] comfort about [the university's] policy towards future disclosures." may not be as pithy as the best reply ever committed to paper, but it's equally robust:

Your letter of December 1st to Stephen Jolly has only this week been passed to me to deal with. I'm afraid it contains a number of misconceptions and factual errors.

First, your letter was not correctly addressed. The University of Cambridge is a self-governing community of scholars rather than a corporate hierarchy. [...] Omar's work was not 'published by the university' as you claim but by him. If you wanted him to take his thesis offline, you should have asked him.

However, given that the material on the No-PIN attack appears on my page as well as Omar's and Steven's, and given that Mr Jolly passed the matter to me to deal with, I expect that I can save us all a lot of time by answering directly.

Second, you seem to think that we might censor a student's thesis, which is lawful and already in the public domain, simply because a powerful interest finds it inconvenient. This shows a deep misconception of what universities are and how we work. Cambridge is the University of Erasmus, of Newton, and of Darwin; censoring writings that offend the powerful is offensive to our deepest values. [...]

[Via James Nicoll]

1. That's 'cards' as in credit/debit cards, not playing cards or collectible card games. ↩

xkcd: Incident.

A stunning insight, courtesy of the Santa Brand Book:

*Santa* winds infinite Possibilities around finite Limitations to evoke the essence of invention and the Odour of Nostalgia. It has the complexity of Simpleness and the Simplicity of complexitiveness. It begins with the Hiss of Power and ends with the Ah of Surprise. *Santa* is.

There's much more where that came from, including a marvellous scatter graph of the Fatiness/Beardiness spectrum on page 6 which reveals that Hagrid is more likely to encroach upon the reputational space of the *Santa* brand than, say, Kylie.

[Via Fritinancy]

Notes on "how to clone delicious in 48 hours".

[Via kottke.org]

Dresden Codak » Fabulous Prizes.

[Via Nestor, posting this comment on Charlie Stross's post about The Spamularity]

Back in 1974 James N Bailey, General Counsel to the Cleveland Browns NFL franchise, responded to a letter from an unhappy season ticket holder with what might just be the best reply ever committed to paper.¹

[Via Deadspin, via The Awl]

1. Somehow it just wouldn't have the same impact had it been sent by email. It's something about the letterhead, the "Very truly yours" sign-off, and the fact it was cc:d to the then-owner of the Browns, Art Modell. ↩

A Huge Solar Filament Erupts.

Not a special effects sequence – moving pictures, based on images taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory of something that happened just a couple of weeks ago, not quite 93 million miles away from where you're sitting right now.

Doctor Who Meets Star Wars. Lots of fun bits, some not so much.

• The Doctor wielding a lightsabre? Surely not.¹
• If only they could have segued from Nine permitting Vader to strike him down to a post-regeneration Ten getting to put his "fightin' hand" to good use…
• Nice to see everyone showing up as a force ghost at the end. Except that the Doctor's previous regenerations aren't actually dead, are they?²

If there's got to be a Who-Star Wars crossover, I reckon Darth versus the Daleks would be a much better fit. The Empire and the Dalek Empire would either get on a like a house on fire and proceed to conquer the entire universe, or else they'd annihilate one another so thoroughly that you'd think there'd been another Time War.

[Via Word Magazine Blog]

1. On the other hand, River Song wielding two lightsabres: I say hell yes! ↩
2. Yes, I know. This is no place for logic. ↩