Bill Gates is a profoundly boring individual

Jesus...fucking...Christ. Just watch 5 minutes of the interview with Bill Gates and try to resist the urge to gauge your eyes out from boredom. The best part of the interview was the fact that they put up the screen saver before going to commercial.

The pinnacle of totally wrong, utterly nerdy humor

You have no idea how much I hate myself for finding funny this comment at Slashdot on the story of how Jim Gray, one of CS's great luminaries, is missing after going on a solo sailing expedition:

Hm...

(Score:5, Funny)

by Cyberax (705495) on Tuesday January 30, @01:41AM (#17810566)

> SELECT loc FROM Locations loc, People p WHERE p.name="Jim Gray" AND p.loc=loc.id

The query returned 0 results.

I heart Baratunde Thurston

I heart Baratunde Thurston, especially for his t-shirts. I take totally unjustified pride in saying that I knew and worked with Baratunde at Harvard.

Geostationary Banana Over Texas

I swear to god, I've been laughing continuously for at least the last 15 minutes. They seriously want to put a giant banana in geostationary (sub)orbit over Texas.

Every time I read, or even think about, the first sentence, I am doubled over laughing. It just captures the essence of the current moment in history so goddamn perfectly.

"GEOSTATIONARY BANANA OVER TEXAS is an art intervention that involves placing a gigantic banana over the Texas sky. This object will float between the high atmosphere and Earth's low orbit, being visible only from the state of Texas and its surroundings. From the ground the banana will be clearly recognizable and visible day and night; it will stay up for approximately one month.

Basically, the banana will be constructed like a blimp. Filled with helium, it will float between 30 and 50 km up in the sky. It will have a semi-rigid structure made of bamboo and a skin made with synthetic paper. Thanks to an extra load in gas and a valve system, it will keep its shape at all times. The final size of the piece will be 300 meters in length. The expected launching date is August 2008 from around Baja or Sonora, north-west of Mexico. The total costs for this project is roughly estimated at one million dollars.

The project has passed preliminary developments and at the moment is in the final phase of its engineering stage."

The history of Tetris

An absolutely fascinating BBC documentary on the history of Tetris. Did you know that the creator of Tetris worked for Microsoft until about two years ago? Or that he also created Hexic (which is pre-loaded on every Xbox 360)?

Stupid elephant

You have to admit...the guy's got a point. That block ain't going anywhere with that elephant in the way.

Digital Maoism

This is perhaps the most brilliant article I've read in a while. It elucidates both the danger and the power of the "wisdom" of the crowd.

The collective isn't always stupid. In some special cases the collective can be brilliant. For instance, there's a demonstrative ritual often presented to incoming students at business schools. In one version of the ritual, a large jar of jellybeans is placed in the front of a classroom. Each student guesses how many beans there are. While the guesses vary widely, the average is usually accurate to an uncanny degree.

This is an example of the special kind of intelligence offered by a collective. It is that peculiar trait that has been celebrated as the "Wisdom of Crowds," though I think the word "wisdom" is misleading. It is part of what makes Adam Smith's Invisible Hand clever, and is connected to the reasons Google's page rank algorithms work. It was long ago adapted to futurism, where it was known as the Delphi technique. The phenomenon is real, and immensely useful.

But it is not infinitely useful. The collective can be stupid, too. Witness tulip crazes and stock bubbles. Hysteria over fictitious satanic cult child abductions. Y2K mania.

The reason the collective can be valuable is precisely that its peaks of intelligence and stupidity are not the same as the ones usually displayed by individuals. Both kinds of intelligence are essential.

What makes a market work, for instance, is the marriage of collective and individual intelligence. A marketplace can't exist only on the basis of having prices determined by competition. It also needs entrepreneurs to come up with the products that are competing in the first place.

In other words, clever individuals, the heroes of the marketplace, ask the questions which are answered by collective behavior. They put the jellybeans in the jar.

- Jaron Lanier

Yay AirTran!

Hooraaaaaay AirTran! Down with screaming babies!

PC vs. Mac: endgame

WOO HOO!!! 1000th post!!! Kegger at my house!!!

I am a mere 854,656,728 seconds old!

Yay useless birthday facts!

Other interesting facts:
I share a birthday with Jude Law and Charles Goodyear (I did not know this).
My life path number of 4 (yay stupid meaningless numerology facts!).

"You do not use the mouth"

Oh, I am thinking you are very screwed...and don't blame her periodical.

(I'm pretty sure they're actors, but it's still funny)

11?!

11?! Fucking 11?!

Goddammit I need a new flux capacitor!!!

Seriously, how can you _not_ list the flux capacitor as a replacement part for a Delorean?

I almost feel bad for the little guy

But not too bad.

(with props to Q)

Iguana getting winky wacked

Some stories are so weird they leave you utterly speechless.

Roddick

Roddick...angry!!! Ball leave stadium now!

Signs you need to get out more include

I'll leave it to you to figure out whether I'm referring to the authors or the readership.

The life lessons of famous scientists

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5164417-111414,00.html

What's remarkable to me is the stunning similarity of many of them.

Federer

You know what? Watching Federer has gotten boring at this point. There is simply no one that can beat the man. Yes, Nadal can occasionally pull a game out of his ass, but otherwise Federer is just a fucking juggernaut. Has the man done _anything_ with his life other than play tennis?

On top of that, I'm watching him make Robredo run around the court like a 6-year-old with ADHD.

When hi-def is too hi-def

With Blu-ray you can see even the most minute imperfection on a porn actress's body! Umm...yay?

There is a fundamental question here

...and that, of course, is: Does this count as a successful suicide attempt?

Iron Hymen

Yes. You heard me right.

"I understand that abstaining from sex protects me from:

Forcing my wonderful parents to use "tough love" and kick me out of the house for embarrassing them by being such a little whore.

Having adoption-hungry homosexuals circle my pregnant belly like vultures, hell-bent on corrupting my unwanted bastard child with their sicko "love."

You...EEEEEEEEdiot!

These guys are in serious contention for dumbest criminals ever.

Stealing GPS receivers? Really? Really?? Tell me something: if you saw a box labeled "Acme Homing Beacons," would you consider those a good theft opportunity as well?

Another fox guarding the henhouse

Not that anyone should be surprised, but in case you haven't read anything that makes you livid at the Bush administration in the past, oh, 15 minutes...

DRM vs. watermarking

You know, I've read and talked with people about digital watermarking before, but I haven't really thought about it as a means to deter piracy. But as I do so now, it's actually not such a bad idea. I don't know that we've come up with a mechanism resilient to fairly simple attacks, but if we did hae an ideal watermarking scheme, it might be a nice compromise for digital rights. The problem, as Butler Lampson has now famously stated, is not so much security (preventing people from copying) as it is accountability (knowing who copied what). If you can track down exactly who gave a copy of a movie to everyone, that's a big reason for them not to do it in the first place.

So, with watermarking, you would still be able to hold people accountable for illegal copying, but at the same time, you wouldn't need all the draconian, infuriating constraints that prevent people from doing obvious, perfectly legal things like copying a piece of music from one device to another.

10 1-on-1 fight scenes

I don't know about ten best, but they are definitely ten badass fight scenes.

Point of trivia: the South Park "cripple fight" is taken nearly verbatim from the "Nada vs. Frank" fight scene.

Also, why is Luke v. Vader not in there?

Man, humor, legislature

It's probably the fact that it's 4 in the morning, but I really liked this quote:

Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.

-- Samual Butler

Today in Seattle

1. It snowed.
2. The expansion pack for World of Warcraft came out.

I'm pretty sure no one actually did any work today. Oh, they might have _been_ at work, but they certainly weren't doing any...

0.1% of the people on Earth play World of Warcraft

Holy mother of god. That is a terrifying statistic.

Boobs...in...spaaaaaace!

It seems somehow fitting that one of our first exports to space was porn. :)

(marginally NSFW)

*twitch*

Some days I am proud to be a Seattle resident. This is not one of them.

(Warning: this WILL raise your blood pressure)

"Flaccid with rage"

Only Stephen Colbert can come up with ingenious phrases like "flaccid with rage."

Your daily douchebag (1/12/07)

Today's Daily Douchebag is a bit of a surprise: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

"A Democrat?! Surely not." Turns out that just because you aren't a Republican doesn't mean you can't be a jackass politician. His crime? Fighting tooth and nail against an earmarking reform amendment. Not only that, the earmarking amendment just so happens to be exactly the same as the one proposed by Pelosi in the House since a clever Mr. Jim DeMint from South Carolina (a Republican! Maybe they do remember what "fiscal conservative" actually means...) took the House language and plopped it verbatim into the Senate amendment.

So, well done Mr. Reid. Thank god we have someone fighting against meaningful reform.

Chemistry is cool

Think an aluminum boat can't float on air? Think again.

Your daily douchebag (1/11/07)

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new Daily Douchebag!

Meet Representative Kingston. You'll remember he was the one complaining about having to actually work 5 days a week in Congress? Yes, well, apparently he came to the realization recently that people are poor because they don't work enough (and aren't married, apparently).

We admire the profound depth of your douchebaggery, sir. Truly, we do.

The fair mistress porn favors HD-DVD

It is a long-standing truth that where go-eth porn, there follow the tech industry. DVD succeeded where LaserDisc failed largely because porn producers made content for DVD.

So when I see a that porn companies are shunning Blu-ray, that's pretty much a death knell for Blu-ray. Whether HD-DVD succeeds remains to be seen, but Sony is fucking retarded if they are going out of their way to prevent porn from being put on Blu-ray.

Mr. Beckham goes to Los Angeles

Holy shit. This is like Michael Jordan announcing he's going to Croatia.

The beginning of a life of disappointment

Poor, misguided baby...I will let your picture speak for itself.

Tivo's horse shit!

I was excited about the announcement of TivoToGo for mac (fucking finally)...until I read that it's only available as part of Roxio Toast Premium. What the fuck?! You're going to make me pay for the same service that Windows users get for free?? Fuck. You. This after the whole "Here! Have reduced functionality for $800!" Tivo3 debacle is really making me question my Tivo affection...

How much of a gamer are you?

Me? 72%, apparently.

RIP Ramen King

A moment of silence, please, for the Ramen King?

From the "truth is stranger than fiction" files

Read his and then tell me you think an alien coming millions of light years to hover briefly over O'Hare International Airport is more likely than a weird weather phenomenon.

Cool stuff

I don't know how else to describe it. It's just random materials that are cool.

That crazy Bush

Whoever said Bush doesn't have a sense of humor?

Silly Bush...you wouldn't know a balanced budget if it were handed to you on a silver platter at the beginning of your presiden...oh, wait...

(douchebag.)

Hep C drug patent workaround

Jesus Christ...what a fantastic example of just how fucked our intellectual property system is.

Yet another "Google isn't a benevolent dictator?!" story

For fuck's sake. When are people going to stop being surprised that Google is behaving more and more like a normal, self-interested corporation???

Numbers stations

Huh. I had never heard of the so-called "Numbers Stations," stations that broadcast random strings of letters and numbers and are thought to be coded spy agency transmissions.

I have a suspicion that most of the transmissions are garbage so that it's not obvious _when_ a transmission actually occurs.

European view of America