Several of you have heard my recurring rant on stock photography on news sites. Take a look at the photo in this article. Be sure to read the caption. Those are the best sheep costumes I have ever seen!
Argentina criminals ‘evade capture by dressing up as sheep’
(Via Boing Boing.)
This is one of the more perplexing things that has happened to me while booking a hotel room. And developers wonder why people just click through bizarre-looking security warnings…
Fail!
Kraft Foods is now the official sponsor of the implosion of Texas Stadium.
Have we run out of new stadiums to promote, so we have to promote the demolition of old ones?
Update: Wow.
From this story:
“The officer sustained facial cuts requiring stitches and a concussion…”
I can just imagine the emergency room: “Okay, sir, we have the cuts all stitched up now. For this last step, we’ll need Bruno to beat you about the head with a brick.”
Texas passed an amendment in 2005 with the intent of banning gay-marriage. But they may have banned more than they intended.
The amendment contains the text:
This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.
Logically, it seems like “marriage” is a member of the set of legal statuses “identical or similar to marriage”. Of course, there’s no telling how a judge would interpret the idea of something being “identical or similar” to itself.
All I can say is that shopping Amazon isn’t a completely safe experience. You need to pay close attention to the shipping costs (written in very-light-grey-on-light-blue next to the price on the far right):
There’s been a lot of press coverage recently of the incandescent lighting provisions of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, and it’s largely been of the form “The US Government is banning incandescent light bulbs.”
While this makes for good prime-time newsvertainment, it’s not really true.
The tungsten light bulb was invented in 1905 as a fairly radical improvement on the earlier carbon filament bulbs, which would generally last less than a week before burning out. The humble incandescent light bulb was pretty constantly improved — both in terms of lifetime and efficiency — until about 1964. At that point in time, a bulb that used 100 watts could put out between 1,300 and 1,700 lumens. And that’s where we are now. The most commonly used incandescent bulbs have seen no real improvements in the past 45 years.
Now, let’s look at what EISA actually says about incandescent bulbs. A careful reading shows that it doesn’t eliminate incandescent bulbs. Far from it. All it does is set minimum efficiency standards for them. The relevant information comes from Pub.L. 110-140, Subtitle B, Section 321 (a)(3)(A)(ii)(I)(cc); the important columns from the table are:
| Lumens | Maximum Wattage |
Effective |
|---|---|---|
| 1490 – 2600 | 2012 | |
| 1050 – 1489 | 2013 | |
| 750 – 1049 | 2014 | |
| 310 – 749 | 2014 |
The four lines in the table correspond roughly to modern 100, 75, 60, and 40 watt bulbs respectively. So, those are certainly aggressive compared to the ’60′s technology that we’re using today. But it’s not a “ban on incandescent bulbs” any more than recent automobile efficiency regulations are a “ban on internal combustion engines.”
In fact, you can already buy, right now in 2009, a number of bulbs that meet these standards. Sure, they’re a bit pricey right now, but so were 13 SEER air conditioners five years ago. When regulations force minimum efficiency standards, economies of scale almost always kick in and drop the prices to be very close to those of the older, less efficient technologies.
On top of this, we’ve seen some extremely promising advances in incandescent technologies, including laser treatment of filaments and coatings that turn waste heat into visible light. Either of these alone would completely blow the EISA standards out of the water, beating them by a margin of more than 30%. And there’s no reason to believe that they can’t be combined with each other for additional efficiencies.
So, before you start writing your eulogies for the humble incandescent bulb, I’d give the industry some time to show us what they can do when given a challenge.
Edit: there are additional EISA provisions that kick in January 1st, 2020; these require an efficiency of 45 lumens per watt or better. This will be more difficult, but the kinds of advances I talk about above are already close to this standard — the laser technique gets you to 35 lumens per watt — so even that isn’t likely to be incandescent’s death knell.
While there have been various slapdash measures put in place to mitigate the spiraling US Influenza A(H1N1) death count — one person and counting — it’s good to see that Fort Worth ISD has been able to keep their wits about them. Their measured response to the situation? “Fort Worth ISD To Close All Schools Immediately Because of Swine Flu Threat.”
Yes, they do use the phrase “until further notice,” and then go on to say that it will probably be at least a week and a half before they re-open any schools.
No, really, I’m not kidding.
(Via Reason Magazine.)
I gather this has been around a while, but it’s new to me. Larry the Cylon explains the problems with DRM:
(Via BoingBoing.)
Texas A&M, not content with merely messing up Jalapeños, has now created the TAM Mild Habenero.
Star Trek: The Experience Closing in Vegas
Several of us visited this during the SIP interim meetings in Vegas several years ago. I was fairly impressed, particularly with the “ride” that simulated a transporter in a way that almost made me suspend disbelief. As the article mentioned, it was a nice “geek-friendy” break in a town that is not particularly friendly to non-gamblers.
J.J. Abrams, we’re counting on you to make things right again.
Digging around to see if maybe the pain in my head is more than just my second cold this year. Wandering through various pollen count sites lead to wandering through allergists and other specialists. On more than one site I’ve found a link to this:
I’m a capsaicin junkie, but this is nuts. If you really want more info, its at http://www.sinusblaster.com/clasicformula.html
I just updated my iPhone to 1.1.3. On restart, it popped a window telling me how to use the new feature allowing me to rearrange icons on the home screen. You simply touch and hold an icon until it, get this, starts to “wiggle”. Yes, it actually used the word “wiggle.”
Sounds disturbing? You have no idea. (Unless of course you have one.) All the icons start wiggling. But it’s a subtle wiggle. Just enough to wonder if you’ve had a bit too much rum or something.
Not that I ever have that problem.
Anyhow, finally getting the “find yourself” function in Google Maps is way cool. Even though all the Nokia E6x users have had it for months. Heck, the freakin’ MDA users have had it for a while. But I bet my user interface for it is better.
(btw, FIRST post for 2008!)
The current big deal in Japan appears to be a musical animation of Oshiri Kajiri Mushi, or “Butt-Biting Bug”. It’s on youtube; I’ll let you find it yourself. Because that’s not the point of this post.
I googled “butt biting bug” to see if I could find some background info. One site I found had no real info at all. But the Google ads on the page, in combination, were a work of accidental art that will probably not occur again:
Official Bug Doctor Site (bug doctor for the PC.)
Large, Round Booties (figure it out yourself.)
Bug Beetles (huge selection of Beetles items.)
…and finally…
Kill mosquitos with the leaf blower you already have…
I think that pretty much sums up the Internet–or at least the WWW.
There are an increasing number of jailbroken applications that can be loaded onto the iPhone — so many, in fact, that someone has thrown together a nifty package manager for installing and managing all of them.
One of the more interesting things to do, of course, is run an SSH client so you can perform remote administration of other machines. Apparently, the installation of SSH from the package manager is a full-fledged OpenSSL install — including the server side of things.
And yes, it does start up the SSH service.
Combine this with the well-known passwords for both “root” and “mobile” accounts and what do you get?
orthrus:~/ adam$ ssh root@172.17.1.44 The authenticity of host '172.17.1.44 (172.17.1.44)' can't be established. RSA key fingerprint is 7f:c4:18:1d:08:63:6c:04:0c:14:30:b2:09:f4:ee:17. Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes Warning: Permanently added '172.17.1.44' (RSA) to the list of known hosts. root@172.17.1.44's password: Warning: No xauth data; using fake authentication data for X11 forwarding. Last login: Mon Aug 27 17:34:23 2007 from 127.0.0.1 # ls Library Media # uname -a Darwin Q40 9.0.0d1 Darwin Kernel Version 9.0.0d1: Fri Jun 22 00:38:56 PDT 2007; root:xnu-933.0.1.178.obj~1/RELEASE_ARM_S5L8900XRB iPhone1,1 Darwin # df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/disk0s1 307200 193116 111012 64% / devfs 18 18 0 100% /dev /dev/disk0s2 7622368 6624600 997768 87% /private/var #
Hmm… methinks the potential for havoc may be high here.
I wonder if Disney will consider Hamas’ use of Mickey Mouse as an act of war? They should know better than to mess with the mouse! Now we’re going to have to save the world for democracycontent-owners.
This really isn’t funny [snicker]. No, really.
[giggle]
[okay, the strike-through font humor doesn't translate to RSS...]
The US Copyright Royalty board has approved a per-performance royalty regime for internet streaming. Per-performance means they pay royalties for every _listener_ for each song they play, retroactive to 2006. This puts a far greater burden on internet streaming radio than on conventional radio. In many (most?) cases, the new royalty requirements are greater than the revenue of the stations.
I am a big fan of Radio Paradise. I’ve listened to them for years, and contributed several times. They have posted an essay on the subject.
Of course, there is an easy fix for this. Move offshore. And laugh while our copyright regime completely collapses under its own greed and idiocy.
It’s hard to imagine that _no_ one at SoundExchange and the RIAA gets this.
Every year the great State of Texas holds a huge State Fair.
There’s a lot to make this fair unique, but one of the more extreme traditions is finding the wildest fried thing they can convince people to pay money for, and sometimes even eat.
At this point, you’re probably thinking fried twinkie, fried oreo, fried pork rinds, but no – those are left for the mundane, unimaginative fairs of other states and countries.
Here, folks compete for wierd. Last year you could get a fried peanut butter, jelly, and banana sandwich. One of the winners was fried macaroni and cheese. It was getting so strange that I was able to convince several of my friends from Canuckistan that they were serving fried butter-flavored Crisco on a stick. I’ve felt a little guilty about that, figuring they’d learn otherwise and never trust my stories again, but this year’s state fair bailed me out. I’m going to tell them about this, and they’re not going to believe me. It will be mighty sweet when the press backs me up…
There are two major winners in this years contest. One is (IMHO) a little lame: fried pralines. I don’t know why they let that one in – it has a chance of actually being good. The other though….
Fried Coca Cola
No, you read that right. Really. Fried Coke. Don’t believe me? Read the news. I’m completely floored, and no I am NOT going to go try some.
I figure next year they’ll try frying these. Fried stick. um…, on a stick!