Current
Earlier
Later
Archive
Home
Search
Mail
Stuff
Bigger! |
2003.06.08 : 2003.06.14
Saturday, June 14, 2003
Blab. Perhaps inspired by the soon-to-be-released Hulk
movie, a spammer sends us an inspiring image.
break walls apart with your
huge [organ]
 Well,
OK, they didn't say "[organ]", but you get the idea. It's quite an image,
isn't it? Brings new meaning to the term home improvement.
Ian notes that it would have been
even more Hulk-evocative if they had added green after
huge.
Blab. On yesterday's presidential spillage, an anonymous reader
writes:
I think Dean Kaman should
be praised for his excellent attempt at a surgical strike regime change.
Maybe he can also send one to Bill Gates.
Dorian
We're making a list.
Blab. A reader confidently predicts the end of the world. As
we know it.
Sure is a shame that SCO
will put IBM out of business on monday. I did so love my trivial
pile of IBM stock.
Dorian
Isn't SCO great? Having failed at PC
operating systems, they (apparently
mistakenly) thought that they bought the licenses to Unix. Having failed
at making money on that, they figured they could make money by suing companies
who allegedly violated the Unix licenses that they (apparently) didn't
have.
Who do they want to take for a ride first? That's easy. Who
has the most money?
And what
a ride it is! They IPOd at around $120 back in the heyday of 2000,
only to see their stock fall to sixty cents about a year ago. Sixty cents.
That's gotta hurt.
But no problem! Issue press releases! Threaten lawsuits! Result? This
one goes to $11.
Time will tell. Personally, we're not putting our vast wealth into SCO
stock. But that's just us. For all you folks out there with $11 SCO stock,
we have just one question: Were you the same ones who bought at $120? Cool.
Blab. A reader tries to keep up with current events by reading
the Kansas City Star. We would be amazed if that worked.
Bush is determined to widen
the scope of the search for Iraq's WMDs. The latest site
appears to be a pond in western Maryland. Damn clever of Iraq to hide them
right under our noses.
Dorian
And indeed it doesn't, as our reader's link is badly broken.
But what are your noses doing above a pond in western Maryland, anyway?
That's what
we'd like to know.
Blab. A reader actually checked out that Sim
Mob link from yesterday.
I'm surprised you didn't
notice (or at least didn't mention), in the Sim Mob article -
"Maybe Mia's gone. But she's not
forgotten."
You don't think we read the things we link to, do you? But, now
that we've gone back and read it, it is pretty funny. Mia
as Überfrau? We love it.
Blab. A reader knows better, but nonetheless sends us a ...
Blind
link. Because I can't think of a witty remark to do this justice.
We understand your frustration with Octodog, Dear Reader. It's hard
to know what to say about a device whose sole purpose is to turn
a hot dog into something that resembles an octopus. If you're on serious
meds, that is.
Blab. A reader pushes our buttons.
New scientific basis for
homeopathy.
As opposed to the old scientific basis for homeopathy? In any event,
a Swiss chemist prepared samples of water (well, heavy water), some of
them pure water and some of them with lithium chloride or sodium chloride.
The salty ones were diluted to the point where they couldn't possibly have
any salt left in them. Samples were then frozen and their structure studied
with photoluminescence. The claim is that the pure water ice and the used-to-be-salty-but-isn't-any-more
ice had really different bonding structures. So, the claim is, the ice
"remembered" that its water once had salt in it.
Yeah, that's pretty unlikely, as hydrogen bonds in ice tend to have
no correlation with any hydrogen bonds that might have been in the water
from which the ice was made. Water is a fluid, after all, so stuff
jiggles around a lot.
Now let's figure out what this has to do with homeopathy, other than
making an attractive popular story. Let's assume that the effect is real,
that ice bonds are different depending upon the history of the water from
which the ice was made. To be homeopathic, we still need to leap the gigantic
conceptual gap that says swallowing such water can affect human physiology
at all, and then another that says the effect will be the opposite that
huge concentrations of the material that used to be in the water has on
the body.
We're not in good enough shape for such a double jump, so let's return
to the experiment or, rather, the experimenter.
Our Swiss hero (a) did not do double blind experiments, and then (b)
said his results were connected with homeopathy. We suggest that said chemist
might have anticipated, maybe even invited, the media attention to an otherwise
interesting but doubtful chemistry experiment.
As for us, we dissolved small amounts of the Physica A article
in water, then diluted it until no journal molecules were left. Upon digesting
it, we became profoundly skeptical.
Yo. At 10:30 on Friday night, as we finished dinner, we recalled
to Helen that, in our misspent youth, our folks got off work at 5 PM sharp.
Mom was home at 5:10, Dad at 5:30. Dinner was served at 6:30 and over shortly
after 7:00. There followed several hours of conversation, homework, TV,
reading, or whatever.
These days, dinner seems closely followed by crashing, only to be followed
a tiny number of hours later by getting up again and going to work.
Wha' happened?
Plop. From our fortune cookie last night:
He who expects no gratitude
shall never be disappointed.
Figures.
Yow. Varekai.
Amazing to the point of impossibility. Circus from Mars.
Plurp. Here's a Saturday Puzzler for you. We were raised,
since tiny tot-hood, to wash the dishes in hot water. The hotter the better.
Kills the germs, so the theory goes.
But now we suspect it doesn't. Not
hot enough, after all, or if it is, only marginally.
So here's the puzzle: Is it really useful to wash the dishes in hot
water? If not, why not? If so, why?
Go ahead. Be a genius. Deny
our entire childhood.
 Plurp.
The blue dog
dissolved small amounts of
Plurp ...
Friday, June 13, 2003
Blab. A reader investigates a certain accident which
left the
victim unable to think straight. Or maybe that was the other way around.
I wonder if Dean Kamen makes
pretzels too?
Or, as another reader puts it:
Gyroscope insufficient
to keep Bush upright.
More action shots, courtesy of yet another reader, are Coalition
of the Wheeling. But, you know, they also think Jerry Lewis is funny.
So has rain-addled Seattle.
Not Cornell, though,
sorry. Or San Francisco.
But what do they know, right?
Blab. A reader apologizes unnecessarily.
Oh - I'm back too.
Sorry, I forgot to tell you. But I was in Spain (an ally?) -- not
Moldavia. Fortunately we did not see any slime molds in Spain.
Only men with semi-automatics slung over their shoulders from time to time...
Our many surveillance devices picked up your return immediately.
Semi-automatic what?
Blab. The Plurping cap seems to have warmed up at long
last.
...but teddy doesn't like
supositories either mummy! -AJL
Maybe you should unplug that thing.
Blab. Our one polite reader suggests various alternative solutions
to our Great Dilemma of Where Should We Live.
Sir: You could split the
difference between Santa Barbara and MAnhattan. You could find a
community that has the features you like most about either place and live
there, or you could find a place exactly between the two, or you could
split your time between the two, or you could keep thhinking about it and
do nothing (the slothful alternative).
Hmm. Manhattan, California, eh? Actually, the California folks thought
of that a while ago. In their inimitable style, however, they insisted
on calling in Manhattan
Beach and leaving out all of the urban stuff.
Blab. Similarly avoiding the question is this flag-changing reader.
If you get bored of Santa
Barbara and don't want to move to Manhatten, there's always London.
It's really very nice over here you know.
We are very, very fond of London, it being a real city and all (despite
the appalling lack of skyscrapers, tsk). After Manhattan, it might
be our very favorite city.
Rant. All of the blogs that we have followed, all of the blogs
that caused us to blog, or are related to causal phenomena that caused
us to blog, seem to be dying. Or moribund, at least.
Perhaps blogging is an activity, like so many others, that has a finite
- in fact, very short - lifetime, during which most of those involved get
interested, get serious, get famous, and then die off, their virtual carcasses
splayed out along the Information Superhighway like so many trend-imprinted
badgers.
Perhaps we are, as is so typical for us, Behind The Curve, lately adopting
this blogging thing only when the Cool Kids give it up.
We envision ourself, in our decrepitude, blogging uselessly in this
very same style, decades from now, wondering what happened to our dwindling
audience, as only a handful of brain-pulverized readers (or their bots)
respond randomly to our cackling.
Actually, that seems pretty much like what's happening now.
Plop. Why is it that, every day after we post Plurp, we
find really dumb spelling and grammar errors? Why can't we see them before
we post? It's so embarrassing!
Yo. Sim
Mob. Bits imitate atoms.
Plurp. In response to someone who suggested political
structures in GNE.
My real life is consumed
by politics. I have eschewed it in civil life, but it nonetheless digests
me in my work life.
The very last thing I am looking
for in a game is politics. Graaahh!!
If there must be a Benevolent Dictator
to take care of the random miscreants whose utmost desire is to spoil it
for the rest of us, let that be the Developers. I am willing to cede all
power, and forever, to them, for it is Their Game.
But Jaka save us from players who
lobby to become Powerful, from political campaigns, from religious structures,
from all of the claptrap from which I hope only to have a modest and humble
retreat in The Game.
I beg you. Let me live my simple life,
unhindered by The Collective, content with my closet, my teleporter, and
my chickens. Let me live in glorious anarchy, with no more complex social
task than to name my house something incomprehensible.
Really.
Plurp.
The collective breathing
of cows accounts for nearly 20 percent of the methane gas released into
the atmosphere.
This is why we pay university
folks the big bucks.
Plurp.
The blue dog
watched as they
unplugged that thing
Thursday, June 12, 2003
Blab. Our readers check in on the Great Debate: should
we live in Manhattan or Santa Barbara? First, we hear from Helen.
Santa Barbara, obviously.
Obviously. Next, a contrary reader, who might be us, writes:
These vagabond shoes are
longing to stray
Right through the very heart of it
-- New York, New York!
 Funny
that that reader was wearing our shoes. Subsequently, a reader reminds
us that:
U 
NY
That's for sure! But SB is also nice. Finally, a Treasured Reader states:
You should live in Lansing.
Yes, Lansing is a lovely living locale.
The frigid wastelands seem to have affected our Treasured Reader's sanity,
though not its alliteration. (They say alliteration is the last thing to
go.)
So there you have it!
Blab. A reader explains the curious situation with the Plurping
cap.
The plurping cap takes 28
hours for the tubes to warm up.
Ah! A good thing you plugged in early, then.
 Blab.
A reader exclaims:
!
And such excitement is well deserved! It's a massive
exhibition of Chihuly glass at
the Grounds for Sculpture
in almost-nearby Hamilton
NJ. We seem pretty much doomed to go there this weekend.
To New Jersey.
The sacrifices we make for art.
Blab. A reader concerned with the rights of the downtrodden notes
the following event.
Marijuana
Ed freed.
Now, we haven't been following this, but ...
Ed Rosenthal could have faced
as much as 60 Years for providing medicine to sick and dying patients.
Instead, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, sending a powerful message
against political prosecutions by the Bush administration, departed from
sentencing guidelines, causing the courtroom to erupt in cheers and applause.
The end result for Rosenthal: one day in prison, which has already been
served and $1,300 in fines.
Long polemic follows in cited essay, but we are pleased that states which
make certain activities legal aren't automatically overridden by Herr Ashcroft
and his Brown Shirts. There is hope.
Blab. A reader writes:
Former
CIA analyst makes the claim that those forged yellowcake purchase orders
were known by Cheney to be fake when Bush used them as evidence of Iraq's
nuclear program during his State of the Union address.
Could be! Unfortunately, Former CIA Analyst doesn't seem to know (or, at
least, to say) anything that wasn't already known on this topic. As has
become tradition recently, he offers no smoking gun. And he bruises his
credibility by wielding the Diatribe Cudgel with a bit too much enthusiasm.
Note: The above should not be taken as support for Dubya &
Co. Duh.
Plop. Here's a
presidential plan.
-
Get together with representatives of two nations that have been at war
pretty much continuously for decades, despite numerous peace initiatives
and Nobel Peace Prizes.
-
Issue a press release saying everyone is going to play nice from now on,
without resolving any of the underlying issues that caused the war or getting
agreement from any of the crucial groups involved.
-
Feign shock when one of the nations attacks the other, as it has been doing
for decades.
-
Feign shock when the second nation retaliates against the first, as it
has been doing for decades.
-
Rinse, repeat.
OK, who's not surprised? Let's
not see the same hands all the time.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was still waiting for the
Plurping cap to warm
up
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
Blab. A reader spots a potential flaw in our otherwise
brilliant proposal to pave over all of the out-of-the-way places that hide
emergent viruses.
There's only one problem
with converting out of the way places into parking lots. I HATE to park
in out of the way places especially since I drive to Manhattan every day.
Come to think of it, we should switch jobs as I'm close to your place of
work and you're close to mine. By gumbo, if EVERYBODY did that we could
minimize the total commute miles and nobody would ever need a car again.
Imagine all the people, said John Lennon, ...
Dorian
Yes, but if we lived in Westchester, when we came home at night, we'd be
in ... Westchester.
Blab. A reader writes:
Hey! What gives with Helen
thinking?
Funny you should ask. As if in response, another reader, who might very
well be Helen, writes:
Subj: Helen Thinks
The West Coast is different from the
East Coast. Something about sunlight?
Great regional wines there but sunlight
here.
Grill out here and grill IN there.
Ok, so, Murat DID perform a brilliant
grilled planked salmon for us on Sunday afternoon.
Great wines and delightful Santa Maria
wines........ok, Steve, what do you choose? Can't knock that Syrah,
can you?
Helen
Well, OK, so this is a bit narrowcast, but stay with us. Helen relates
events that happened to us last week / weekend that you couldn't possibly
know about, especially given that we were the only ones at all of the events
listed above. But, if your Psychic
Brainsucker is tuned just right, you can get an image of us lolling
around in Santa Barbara, being wined and dined by Provost and professors,
and stuff like that.
Which leads us to Helen's implicit question: Where Should We Live? There's
Manhattan, of course, where we currently live. Then there's Santa Barbara,
where we used to live, but do not currently.
Helen demands your answer.
 Blab.
An alien reader writes:
be nice. some of us LIVE
for organic tooth-whitening toothspaste
Check the label to make
sure that your particular species can ingest the specially-prepared chemical
combinations therein.
Blab. On our current Enigmatic Image Requiring Reader Explication,
a reader writes:
Ooooooooooh, another caption!
::Puts on Plurping cap::
But that's all. Looks like the Plurping cap needs new batteries.
Blab. A reader who remembered the batteries writes:
"Please Billy, give me the
bear..."
"NO! Leave Teddy alone!"
"Now Billy, you know perfectly well
that the Lilliputian farmers need the staw stuffing from the bear to feed
their tiny cows. If you don't let me have the bear, the cows will starve
and die and all the Lilliputian children will go without ice cream. Do
you want to see tiny dead cows and tiny crying children, Billy?"
"No..."
"Then hand me the bear so I can shove
it into this barn by my foot."
Yes, it's a tableau depicting The Socialization of Billy to the Lilliputians.
Dear, isn't it?
Blab. Another reader enters this same fray.
re: Dr. Security
"...and, if I hold the bear up to
my ear, I can hear the ocean."
"The mountains." "I can hear the mountains." See? It's funny
if you do it that way.
What about our other readers? Are there any? Has the bear
got your tongue?
Blab. A reader (but, thankfully, only one reader) cares.
Actually, I care deeply,
(for once) and far from being unknown, RAV actually make some very good
products, with the advantage that they work on many different platforms.
I suspect another Anti-trust trial coming on. -AJL
Because Microsoft bought a minor anti-virus company whose market share
is but a spot of dust on the vast edifices that are Network Associates
and Symantec? That seems unlikely to us.
OTOH, we imagine that our friends at those two edifices are worried
about the commoditization (read: Microsoftization) of their industry. It
happened before with PC utilities. Of course, Microsoft failed miserably
in their previous attempt to assimilate anti-virus function into Windows.
It's not clear how this one will turn out. Always in motion, the future
is.
Blab. A reader sends us a confusing, blind ...
[link]
... to hopelessly outdated tech. Why?
Blab. A reader proffers an interesting theory about SpongeBob
SquarePants Cheese Nips (too many syllables!):
The Sponge Bob Squarepants
cheese crackers are a sly marketing ploy to make you eat more. One might
normally eat in moderation, but with these you could justify eating more,
because you would think there aren't many calories in a sponge.
So the theory is that you eat more of them because they remind you of a
sponge? Like we said: interesting.
Blab. We are greatly relieved by the following news.
I'm back! Did you miss me?
Desperately, Dear Anonymous Reader. We had become frightened that you were
being held hostage by slime molds somewhere in Moldavia. We are pleased
that our worst fears were not realized. We will call Dubya immediate and
ask him to call off the planned invasion liberation.
Plurp. Oh ye searchers for knowledge, oh ye thirsty hoarde, what
have ye come to suck up here in the past week?
-
helen naked pitures
-
albert the squirrel naked pitures
-
chihuly
-
imani
-
blue ice
-
nathan giddings
-
aaliyah
-
naked pictures of helen
-
nathan maddox
-
those who don't learn from the past
Beyond all possible prediction, we are indeed the one and only Google selection
for albert
the squirrel naked pitures. This terrifies us.
Plurp. A lovely quote from Alice
in Wonderland, which we will surely use in an upcoming presentation
on research strategy.
"Would you tell me, please,
which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where
you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where--" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way
you go," said the Cat.
Yow. An analogy that we must use in some upcoming Autonomic Computing
presentation is this:
 "Weebles
wobble, but they don't fall down!"
We learned just today that this is the slogan for a 1970s British toy called
the Weeble.
Weeble
/wee'b*l/ An egg-shaped plastic toy
person with a weight in the bottom so that, if tipped over, they would
right themselves and stand up again. They were popular in the UK during
the 1970s and were famous for the slogan "Weebles wobble but they don't
fall down", unlike some computers (pretty tenuous link with computing).
Hey - we'll take anything we can get!
Plop. Speaking of the British, we don't
get it.
A campaign is being launched
to modernise the red, white and blue flag by adding a touch of black to
reflect multicultural Britain in the 21st Century.
So the idea here is (something like?): add the color black to the country's
flag in order to "reflect multicultural Britain" ... because before it
only represented white, red and blue people?
How are they going to represent Jews, or longshoremen?
Plurp.
The blue dog
wobbles but won't
admit to having
albert the squirrel naked pitures
Tuesday, June 10, 2003
Blab. A reader stirs just enough to say this.
I'm not sure that Sloth has
any boundaries, but I'm pretty sure I can't be bothered to find out. -AJL
That's why we're here.
Blab. A reader, both contradictory and enigmatic, writes:
In direct contradiction to
your other reader, the man from Delmonte,
he says 'Yes!'
That does seem
to be the case but, for the life of us, we cannot figure out why.
Yo. Not that anybody besides us cares, but Microsoft is buying
some
unknown Romanian anti-virus company in order to "improve the security
in its Windows platform."
Nobody seems to know what this actually means.
Plurp. Next in our current series of Enigmatic Images Requiring
Reader Explication is this.
Readers should, of course, do
the obvious, and provide either a caption or an explanation. Or something.
Plurp.
The blue dog
didn't care
and
couldn't be bothered
Monday, June 9, 2003
Blab. A rather negative reader writes:
No.
We're sure you are correct.
Blab. Andy writes:
I love your site... Do you
happen to have an RSS feed, to inform people about updates?
-- Andy.
Yes,
we
do.
Yo. Commencement went well yesterday. People gave speeches, parents
applauded, collegial supporters blasted air horns, and nearly a hundred
really bright, really motivated kids were let loose on an unsuspecting
world. As one of the student speakers said, "One thing is true about Creative
Studies students: we don't like being told what to do."
The rest of you folks are in big, big trouble.
Plurp. Today we meditated once again on the reasons that we should
be working on teleportation technology, as we spent the entire day getting
back home from Santa Barbara, which isn't even on another planet, as far
as we can tell. We observe that our karmic field is disturbed by these
stupid atoms being so slow!
Plurp. This current monkeypox
scare highlights a problem: diseases that are endemic in out-of-the-way
places find their way into the human population, sometimes with hideous
consequences.
We propose a comprehensive solution: eliminate all of the out-of-the-way
places. Identify them globally, then upgrade them to Civilization by making
parking lots out of them. No pesky carriers, no hideous diseases. As a
pleasant side-effect, we drastically decrease the probability of nasty,
ongoing mutations (e.g. influenza).
Those of you who object that your Favorite Spot is now a parking lot
should have shown a bit more tidiness and social responsibility in the
first place, doncha think?
Plurp.
The blue dog
fed entirely on
RSS
Sunday, June 8, 2003
Blab. A reader impresses us with ...
NIST brand peanut butter!
Yow! - Morton
Yow, indeed. It's NIST Standard Reference Material No. 2387 - peanut
butter.
[It is] designed not to be
eaten but, like many other materials NIST produces — concrete, ceramic
powders, steels of all kinds — to be fed into gas chromatographs, mass
spectrometers and other analytical equipment.
And at $375 per pound, it's quite a bargain.
Blab. A reader attempts to clarify the mystery that is SpongeBob
SquarePants Cheese Nips.
re: spongebob crackers
Does this
help clarify?
SpongeBob Barbie? Actually, no. But thanks for thinking of us.
Blab. A reader is full of ... helpful suggestions.
I can't believe someone was
searching for albert the squirrel! For those who don't know, he can
be found at www.threebrain.com.
We appreciate our readers sending all of our other readers elsewhere. It'll
make our life so much simpler when we no longer have readers.
Blab. We had the prickly filling that the otherwise lovely room
at the restaurant last night contained surveillance equipment. Unsurprisingly,
we were right, as made apparent by this missive from the Omnipresent Monitoring
Group.
Grilled Hudson Valley Fois
Gras with pear hash and potato gaufrettes
.............. all night long .........
OMG!!!!
Indeed, the food was great. If you had audio surveillance as well, you'll
know that the conversation was even better. What a great bunch of people!
Blab. A reader expresses a certain cynical surprise at the blue
dog.
pretty much totally freaked.
So, you're not from around here are you?
We don't actually know where the blue dog is from. Or if that question
is meaningful.
Blab. A reader informs us about its delicate, technical sense
of humor.
www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/06/04/teeth.birds/
I like that address! "Teeth Birds"
makes me laugh
Good to know.
We're trying to generalize this important lesson. Do you also find yourself
laughing at liver.spots
or fingernail.chipmunk?
Blab. A reader who may also have been using that
terrifying slogan generator nevertheless comes up with God's Own Truth.
You're Never Alone with a
Beet
That's for sure! Death and destruction would surely follow such folly.
Blab. Another reader, taunting fate, might have been doing that
same thing.
"If You've Got the Time,
We've Got the Bertie."
Fate can be cruel.
Yo. We went shopping for toothpaste at the quaint local grocery
store, only to find nine different varieties of organic, tooth-whitening
toothpastes, and nothing else.
It was not the unanimity of organic toothpastes that struck us as odd.
We expected that. It was the unanimity of tooth-whitening toothpastes that
frightened us. And the combination.
It's very Santa Barbara, these days anyway.
Plurp.
The blue dog
was pretty much totally freaked
by the nine different varieties
of organic, tooth-whitening
toothpastes
 |
