Links

Stuff I find around the web that interests or amuses me.

Happy Space Alien Day!

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Dad sent me a link to an amusing story today about how New Mexico Representative Dan Foley has proposed legislation to create Space Alien Day — to “enhance relationships among all the citizens of the cosmos, known and unknown.”

Amusing enough on its own, but the kicker for me was the final quote from Rep. Foley, which goes down in my book as one of my favorite political quotes ever…

If we can capitalize on something that did or did not happen in 1947 then it can help the entire state.

Oh, the number of times in my life — past, present, and future — when it’d be so nice to capitalize on something that did or did not happen!

tw@

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Following up (again) on the the text messaging as writing thread, the BBC has a page where they’re asking for user submissions of classic works in ‘abbreviated’ format.

Reading some of these produces an interesting dichotomy — I’m impressed by the creativity of some of these, while simultaneously cringing at what’s being done to such classic literature!

4scr + 7a ugo r 4fthrs brt 4th on this cn10nt a nu nAshn cnCvd in lbRT + ddc8d 2 th prop tht (evRE1) r crE8d =

aka: “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Amusingly, though, in the comments to the post at Green Fairy where I found this (no permalink available, unfortunately — her post was on March 3^rd^ if you want to search for it), someone suggested the abbreviation ‘tw@‘.

I like that one.

ILNY, it's a gr8 plc.

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Following up on an issue from last September, a teacher in London is reported as having received an essay that they couldn’t read, because of the student’s use of text messaging acronyms.

The teenager’s essay which caused the problem began:

“My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :-O kids FTF. ILNY, it’s a gr8 plc.”

In translation:

“My summer holidays were a complete waste of time. Before, we used to go to New York to see my brother, his girlfriend and their three screaming kids face to face. I love New York. It’s a great place.”

Stonehenge porn?

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Here’s a fun little story that dad pointed out, from the Discovery Channel — Female anatomy inspired Stonehenge?

The design of Stonehenge, the 4,800-year-old monument in southwestern England, was based on female sexual anatomy, according to a paper in the current Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

[Anthony Perks] noticed how the inner stone trilithons were arranged in a more elliptical, or egg-shaped, pattern than a true circle. Comparing the layout with the shape of female sexual organs showed surprising parallels.

Perks believes the labia majora could be represented by the outer stone circle and possibly the outer mound, with the inner circle serving as the labia minora, the altar stone as the clitoris and the empty geometric center outlined by bluestones representing the birth canal.

It came from Outer Faith

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Dad sent me this great little quiz from Beliefnet — It came from Outer Faith.

Though no one’s yet written a book on how to convert aliens, some religions do accept the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence. Find out how much you know about the intersection of faith and sci-fi.

I got seven out of ten when I took it, missing just questions five, seven, and eight. Not too bad, I think!

tail -f access_log

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A geek-fascinating look at traffic as a new weblog is discovered.

I’ve only ever run web sites on Apache or one of its ancestors, and this lineage of web servers has always written its statistics into a file named access_log. I think anyone who’s running a Web site, or who cares about the Web, ought to, on a regular basis, spend some time watching the access_log in real time.

Too often we get this image of the Web as a vast well-oiled machine, with glossy browser screens in front and masses of gleaming software in back. Watching the access_log is like a window into the side lobby of the legislature, or a tour of the fermentation vats at the brewery.

(Via Dave Winer)

Snowflake pictures

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A single snowflake

Gorgeous pictures of snowflakes at this site, along with more information than I ever thought there would be about the little buggers.

My parents have often teased me about how long it would take me to walk the three blocks to school when I was a kid, usually assuming that I had to examine every snowflake I saw to see if they were really all different. In normal Alaskan winters, of course, there are a lot of snowflakes. Even in only three blocks.

That said, though, I never got quite this into examining snow. Probably because the downside to examining snowflakes was being out in the cold, and at ten years old, I was a bit short of the capital it would take to build my own laboratory for experiments like this. Bummer!

(Via /.)

Dive! Dive! Dive!

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Interesting editorial over at Wired today: Go Deep! The US needs a NASA for exploring the oceans.

NASA has had its day. It’s given us technological marvels from cell phones to SETI screensavers. But we’re not mining the moon. We’re not terraforming Mars. And we’re certainly not finding any aliens. We’ve gotten completely off track: choosing to look for long-dead microbes 390 million miles away on Europa, while neglecting undiscovered life just miles off the coast of North America.

About 94 percent of life on Earth resides in the oceans. We’ve seen only about 2 percent of this vast ecosystem – the uppermost layer (home to fish, whales, scuba divers, and most known marine life). Beneath this warm lens lies a cold, dark, and life-rich realm of grand proportions. It’s home to creatures as far removed from the sun and human biology as any alien imagined by science fiction.

This is something that’s been bouncing around my brain for quite a few years now. While I certainly don’t want to see space exploration stop (and I am excited about some of the new ideas being proposed), it’s amazed me that we’re basically ignoring such a huge expanse of unexplored territory, right here on the very planet we live on. Surely some of the advances made in our exploration of space could be adapted to serve in an underwater environment, since some of the same concepts apply (such as keeping a standard pressure environment stable in an environment with a vastly different pressure — much more, rather than much less).

What new technologies could be created as we explore the new problems? Or what current technologies could be adapted and improved? We’re already seeing more and more work in hydrogen-powered automobiles — why not incorporate some miniaturized desalinization plant with a hydrogen-powered engine, and then any submersible could have a nearly infinite supply of fuel (think of a Bussard Ramscoop for a sub)? The linked Wired article mentions some of the odd chemical processes that are ocurring naturally by undewater thermal vents — who knows what kind of chemical tricks we could learn by studying these?

I just think there’s a lot to be explored in a frontier very close to home, and it’s a real shame that so little has been done in this direction as yet. Yes, I still think we need to go up — but there’s no reason we shouldn’t be going down, either.

New WTC plan chosen

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Final plan for new WTC building

Well, it looks like the winning plan for the replacement complex for the WTC has been revealed. While it’s not the one I favored, maybe it’ll translate better into the real world than the pictures of it I’ve seen so far.

It’s interesting to me that the new tower will include a spire that will bring the total height to 1,776 feet — four hundred feet taller than the original WTC towers, and three hundred feet taller than the current tallest buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia. Ego? Hubris? Penis envy?

Anyway, all carping aside, it’s good to see that they’re moving forward on this, and that they did manage to choose something that was neither specatularly ugly nor spectacularly insipid. From what I remember, it’ll take about ten years to get the building erected and finished. Maybe round about the time I’m turning 40 I’ll swing by New York to see the building, and find out what they came up with for a memorial. I’ve got a decade to plan my trip, I should be able to make it by the time they finish, right?

(Via WebWord)