Last Man Standing

From Wonkette:

Guess who somehow found room in his liver for some backbone? Teddy Kennedy!
The sole survivor of the CIA’s bold 1960s campaign to rid Washington of Kennedys, Senator Ted says Congress will be blocking whatever crazy “surge” Bush will announce tomorrow.

LOLerskates!

New Link

I'm going to offically add Hankspot to my blogroll to the right. Not a lot of posts/week ( a plus in my book), many of them interesting. I agree with some, disagree with others. If you enjoy some of these posts, you may enjoy some of his.

Hank's another CoH person who (I think) spends more time in game than out. Well known on the server, he's a decent guy (even if his style is very different than mine). He's had some interesting and amusing battles with some individuals in the Goon Squad.

As some of you know, my son Geoff has been underwriting my Something Awful membership for years now, making me a crypto-goon. I have not yet had the time, energy or inclination to purposely team with the Goons, but in the whole they've been decent players individually.

And yes, I know the Terrible Secret of Space!

Blue Origin

The future made a special guest appearence this week!

Neat!

Spiders! On Drugs!

Remember, this was done for Science!

Science!

A Rare Tale of Integrity and Engineering

I ran across this the other day while looking for something else. It's a true story of an architect, his building and a surprising lack of ass-covering.

Engineers really do think different. Almost makes me wish I had had the kind of mind it takes to study it.

It also makes me wonder if the novelity is due to the rarity.

In May 1978, while working on another project, LeMessurier discovered that bolts had been used to join the diagonal braces to the columns of the Citicorp tower (by then completed and occupied). This surprised him because he had originally specified that the joints should be welded (a proper weld between two metal pieces is usually stronger than the individual metal pieces). However, when he checked into the matter, he found that the contractor had proposed the change to bolts to make construction easier and less expensive, and that, after carrying out some calculations to ensure that the bolts were strong enough, LeMessurier's chief engineer had approved the change. This was all proper practice, and so LeMessurier did not think any more of the issue at the time.
Approximately a month later, LeMessurier received a phone call from a student working on a senior-year project. To this day he does not know who the student was, but the student said, in effect: "Sir, can I bother you for a minute? I know you are a very busy man but my professor thinks you should have put the columns on the corners to better resist the loads which occur due to wind blowing on the tower."

The rest of the story

I Really and Truely Did This

Here

Although I didn't know the term "Turning Machine". I had worked out a secret code for sending messages on candy-button paper when I was 6, with the "clever" notion that you could eat the message afterward or, better yet, eat some of the reamining buttons and send a reply.

My scheme crashed directly into reality when the first person I gave my siliva-covered, half-eaten strip of candy to (my uncle as I recall), looked disgusted and threw it away.

Slight Atheism Debate

Here with Dr. Nick

Nick and I politely take the field, politely click lances, politely return to our camps and each declare to our followers that we were the victors!

With no mention of Santa Claus or the FSM.

Not quite the gusto of a debate with TJIC, but I am also spared the usual tjicistan personal attacks and verbal diarrhea, so I think it's more interesting.

My respect for Nick over TJIC continues to accelerate.

Vanguard League Website

I did manage to build a website for my SG last month, and to my utter and complete surprise I find it not only being used, but it has an active Forum.

Check it out when you have a chance. The Trading cards are also my work. There should be more of them as more members send me their pics.

BTW, the Vanguard League is now in second place as a hero group on our server (Victory) and in 5th place over all. :)

Zune!

Hee hee

Longish Hiatus Over

I should be back to bloggin more regularly now. I picked up a nasty, nasty bout of the flu in London and have been down with that and the usual Holiday stuff since.
Actually, I have a back log of stuff to post, so there might be a surge before we resume normal operations.

Insta-Wine

Be Jesus through this efficeint Japanesse machine:

Heim Theory

If you read the first page of this and you mind isn't blown completely away you either didn't understand it or ... you're not from this planet.

It completely re-invents 20th century physics and makes very accurate predictions which have withstood emperical testing. The gaviton as a soliton of a probabilty-based dimensional extention to 4-space...

Damn!

Interstellar travel just might be within my lifetime afterall.

Instant Freezing Beer

Because beer comes in a sealed container, it's possible to chill it well below the normal freezing point and still have it in liquid form. This is interesting becasue when you top the top, the pressure drops and the beer freezes solid very quickly.



Here's the whole story.

Note that you can do the reverse process with hot liquids and a microwave oven, i.e. heat water past the boiling point but not have it boil. The trick is to have relavtively pure water with very few nucleation sites. If you add something with a little surface area, e.g. sugar, tea, instant coffee etc. the water will instantly boil up. This is a significant source of injury with tea btw.

Mars: 2020

This made me chuckle. I tried to identify all the missions and I think I got most of them. I'm guessing the little lost one is the lamented Phobos probe.

A Bad Day for PHP

Stefan Esser retires. He's an excellent security guy, but the Open Source community is often more like a religion than a software development house, and the one thing they can't abide is a heritic.

Saturday, December 9. 2006
Last night I finally retired from the PHP Security Response Team, that was initially my idea a few years ago.
The reasons for this are many, but the most important one is that I have realised that any attempt to improve the security of PHP from the inside is futile. The PHP Group will jump into your boat as soon you try to blame PHP's security problems on the user but the moment you criticize the security of PHP itself you become persona non grata. I stopped counting the times I was called immoral traitor for disclosing security holes in PHP or for developing Suhosin.
For the ordinary PHP user this means that I will no longer hide the slow response time to security holes in my advisories. It will also mean that some of my advisories will come without patches available, because the PHP Security Response Team refused to fix them for months. It will also mean that there will be a lot more advisories about security holes in PHP.
Posted by Stefan Esser in Security, PHP at 10:58

(

Father October

could take my confession.

Is that not just a little bit, well, I don’t know…suggestive? It kind of gives me the heeby-jeebies. I mean, it’s a priest. And if I’m not mistaken, they’ve taken a photo of him, trying to make him look almost seductive. Do I need a new pair of contact lenses or is this a fairly accurate assessment?Another point to make note of: there’s not one ugly priest in the bunch. It’s not like they got a shot of some 90-year old priest giving confession, or tried to represent the entire spectrum. These priests are in their prime and they are all fairly or very good-looking.

It's interesting to watch market forces collide with the Catholic Church. What's next Nun's at the Beach? A prime time soap opera? It should be a very interesting decade ahead for the faithful...

(via)

While you're over ther, Andrew seems to be talking himself in to accepting Romney's 1994 pro-gay outreach as a position, while distancing Romney's 2004 miscegenation-based anti-gay works. Seems similar to the benefit-of-the-doubting that lead to his Iraq endorsement. He does have enough intellectual integrity to call mea culpa on that though, so this could correct itself. If only the dems would get over Hillary already and show they are not actual GOP co-dependent enablers, otherwise sane middle-ground folks would stop rationalizing the best of extremely poor choices.

Saving Baby Miriam

This was sent over by a friend. When I read it, I thought of an arguement I had with my son a few years ago about the primary purpose of a soldier.

Playboy, May, 1963

Wow, a scanned in issue of Playboy from the bygone era.. Let's just chalk this up to "changing standards" and "different time, different place". There is actually more nudity on FOX these days.



(via)

And then there are times when I tihnk...

... maybe legalizing drugs isn't such a hot idea afterall. The matter-of-fact tone of this article is pretty amazing. At no point is it mentioned if the police hold the victim on drug charges. Or maybe I missed the point and that's assumed.

He was naked, on crack and in alligator's mouth

...
Mayid's call shortly after 4 a.m. sent four Polk County, Fla., deputies racing to the 2,150-acre lake just outside Lakeland, Fla., where they jumped into the water and wrenched Apgar's arm from the gator's mouth. The 45-year-old victim, who told authorities he'd passed out nude on the shore after smoking crack cocaine, was rushed to a hospital in critical condition.
Later Wednesday, state wildlife authorities trapped and killed a nearly 12-foot-long alligator thought to be the one that attacked Apgar.
...

Full article here

Foot Shoot for Programmers

From a former intern at CertCo (now a successful real-estate tycoon).

--------------------------------------------
> Shoot Yourself in the
> Foot in Any Programming Language
>
> The proliferation of modern programming languages
> (all of which seem to have
> stolen countless features from one another)
> sometimes makes it difficult to
> remember what language you're currently using. This
> guide is offered as a
> public service to help programmers who find
> themselves in such dilemmas.
>
> C
> You shoot yourself in the foot.
>
> C++
> You accidentally create a dozen clones of yourself
> and shoot them all in the
> foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is
> impossible since you can't
> tell which are bitwise copies and which are just
> pointing at others and
> saying, "That's me, over there."
>
> JAVA
> After importing java.awt.right.foot.* and
> java.awt.gun.right.hand.*, and
> writing the classes and methods of those classes
> needed, you've forgotten
> what the hell you're doing.
>
> Ruby
> Your foot is ready to be shot in roughly five
> minutes, but you just can't
> find anywhere to shoot it.
>
> PHP
> You shoot yourself in the foot with a gun made with
> pieces from 300 other
> guns.
>
> ASP.NET
> Find a gun, it falls apart. Put it back together, it
> falls apart again. You
> try using the .GUN Framework, it falls apart. You
> stab yourself in the foot
> instead.
>
> SQL
> SELECT @ammo:=bullet FROM gun WHERE trigger =
> 'PULLED';
> INSERT INTO leg (foot) VALUES (@ammo);
>
> Perl
> You start shooting yourself in the foot, but you
> lose the gun.
>
> Javascript
> YOu've perfected a robust, rich user experience for
> shooting yourself in the
> foot. You then find that bullets are disabled on
> your gun.
>
> CSS
> You shoot your right foot with one hand, then switch
> hands to shoot your
> left foot but you realize that the gun has turned
> into a banana.
>
> FORTRAN
> You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until
> you run out of toes, then
> you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out
> of bullets, you
> continue anyway because you have no
> exception-handling ability.
>
> Modula2
> After realizing that you can't actually accomplish
> anything in this
> language, you shoot yourself in the head.
>
> COBOL
> Using a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN
> place ARM.HAND.FINGER. on
> HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to
> HOLSTER. CHECK whether
> shoelace needs to be retied.
>
> LISP
> You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the
> gun with which
> you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the
> gun with which
> you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the
> gun with which
> you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the
> gun with which
> you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds ..
>
> BASIC
> Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On
> big systems, continue
> until entire lower body is waterlogged.
>
> FORTH
> Foot in yourself shoot.
>
> APL
> You shoot yourself in the foot, then spend all day
> figuring out how to do it
> in fewer characters.
>
> Pascal
> The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the
> foot.
>
> SNOBOL
> If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot.
> If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.
>
> Concurrent Euclid
> You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.
>
> HyperTalk
> Put the first bullet of the gun into the foot of the
> left leg of you.
> Answer the result.
>
> Motif
> You spend days writing a UIL description of your
> foot, the trajectory, the
> bullet, and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory
> handles of the gun. When
> you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the
> gun jams.
>
> Unix
> % ls
> foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
> % rm * .o
> rm: .o: No such file or directory
> % ls
> %
>
> Paradox
> Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your
> users can too.
>
> Revelation
> You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as
> soon as you figure out
> what all these bullets are for.
>
> Visual Basic
> You'll shoot yourself in the foot, but you'll have
> so much fun doing it that
> you won't care.
>
> Prolog
> You tell your program you want to be shot in the
> foot. The program figures
> out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't allow it to
> explain.
>
> Ada
> After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to
> concurrently load the
> gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in
> the foot. When you try,
> however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong
> type.
>
> Assembly
> You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to
> discover you must first
> reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot. After
> that's done, you pull the
> trigger, the gun beeps several times, then crashes.
>
> 370 JCL
> You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page
> document explaining how you
> want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot
> comes back deep-fried.
>