Links

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

Need some free shoes?

by

Need a new pair of shoes? Head down to the beach, if you’re in the Pacific Northwest…

Enough soggy Nike basketball shoes to outfit every high school team in the state are drifting through the Pacific Ocean toward Alaska after spilling from a container ship off Northern California.

There’s just one hitch to finding a free pair.

“Nike forgot to tie the laces, so you have to find mates,” said Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who tracks sneakers, toys and other flotsam across the sea. “The effort’s worth it ’cause these Nikes have only been adrift a few months. All 33,000 are wearable!”

A beachcomber told Ebbesmeyer about the shoe spill after finding two new blue-and-white EZW men’s shoes washed up near Queets on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula on Jan. 9 and 16.

Unfortunately, they were sizes 10 1/2 and 8 1/2. Both were lefts.

(From the Anchorage Daily News, via Dad)

Scoblemania

by

Yikes. After going through my ‘Technology’ grouping in NetNewsWire, which includes RSS feeds for 34 different weblogs and news sites, every link that I called up as ‘probably worth babbling about’ was from Robert Scoble.

I think I want his job. This has nothing to do with what his job actually is (he works at NEC, but I don’t know anything other than that), it’s just that he’s easily one of the most prolific bloggers I read, to a point that I assume his job must be incredibly low-stress and low-responsibility, since it obviously doesn’t interfere with his blogging time. ;)

Anyway, in no particular order…

  • Erik Barzeski calls Scoble a ‘Microsoft Slut’. Scoble returns the jab. Me, I feel like I’m whoring myself out every time I use a Windows PC instead of my Mac. No real point to any of this, except for the amusement factor.

  • Scoble: “Is there any way to stop Microsoft? I think the answer is getting clear: no.” Kind of a scary statement, but (as befits a ‘MS Slut’ [now there’s a product name we need to see…]) he keeps mentioning all the cool stuff he saw that he can’t talk about, so I suppose it’s a definite possibility. Of course, he also admits that he’s “…too drunk with the Microsoft wine to really be objective,” and he even occasionally says some good things about Apple’s future too, so I’ll cut him a break.

  • Scoble: “It wouldn’t be the first time that Microsoft does something innovative by acquiring another company. Oh, where do you think FrontPage, Hotmail, PowerPoint, Excel, Internet Explorer, DOS, etc came from?” Where’s the innovation in acquiring another company? All of these were innovations before Microsoft got their hands on them — all Microsoft did was recognize a good thing and assimilate it (though I’d personally never put FrontPage in a “good thing” category, there are a depressingly high number of people who use it, so it must be making MS some amount of money, and this is beside-the-point rambling anyway). I’m willing to accept the argument that Microsoft has actually innovated in the past, and may do so again in the future (though I’m hard pressed to come up with any examples), but I don’t think that ‘innovation’ and ‘acquisition’ are compatible.

  • Scoble recommends Watching Microsoft Like A Hawk as a good site for MS info, news, and scuttlebutt. Looks like it is. Unfortunately, I can’t find an RSS feed, so I’ll probably forget to check up on them. Bummer.

  • “Apple has some cool stuff coming this year to be sure — including some desktop machines that are outperforming current Intel stuff.” Damn, but I wish I could see some of the stuff that he’s seen. Now I just have to wait and see if Apple will introduce what he’s hinting at before or (more likely) just after I finally am able to plunk down money on a new machine.

Riot in Anchorage

by

[![APD on 6th Ave.]]

[APD on 6th Ave.]: https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/graphics/2003/02/graphics/apdon6thave-thumb.jpg {width=”150″ height=”67″}
Dad pointed out an article in the Anchorage Daily News about a teen dance that “erupted into what officials are calling a riot.”

Saturday’s event was the annual Fur Ball, a \$10-a-ticket dance for teens age 14 to 19 that’s part of Fur Rendezvous. In all, 1,352 teens got in, according to a ticket count, said Jay Savell, Egan operations manager. The event had a fire marshal-approved capacity of 1,500, he said.

Police said they were told that the dance was oversold. Not so, Savell said.

Some teens with tickets didn’t get in because the center knew it was approaching capacity. By the time Egan staffers finished counting tickets, the dance was shutting down.

Teens waiting outside grew impatient and tried to break the center’s glass windows, police said.

Inside, fights broke out when kids flashed gang signs and showed gang colors, police and teens said. Four or five on-duty police officers, 14 Egan security workers, a dozen other Egan staffers and 10 volunteers from Elmendorf Air Force Base were working security. But police thought the situation was getting out of hand.

Pretty disturbing, but I have to say that after working in teen dance clubs for as long as I did in Anchorage and having watched the shift in attitudes and behavior in the years, I’m not at all surprised that something like this finally happened.

I want to say more, but I’m tired and brain dead at the moment, and can’t coax much more out of me. Bleah. Maybe I’ll revisit this later on.

Recommend me?

by

Actually, I’m not out to be a boyfriend right now — pretty happy staying single for the foreseeable future — but I can think of plenty of times when I wouldn’t have minded getting a recommendation on greatboyfriends.com! It’s a really clever idea, too —

DOLLS! We all have charming male friends…smart, noble, successful, honest, good-looking guys who’re between girlfriends…or who’re just a tad shy…or who’ve had bad luck with women.

Here’s the open-hearted place where we women can write-up recommendations of these wonderful fellows, show their pictures and vouch for them. And here’s the delicious part. If you want to FIND a great boyfriend, Darling, you have all these lovely men to choose from!

(Via Jeremy Zawodny)

Awww – how sweet!

by

WUDI LOVE

Just a little “Wüdi love” from me to my readers, in honor of the coming Valentine’s Day.

Yeah, even I can get a little mushy from time to time. Who knew?

If you want some cheap and fairly risque amusment, take a look at this list of recently created hearts. Some of them are pretty predictable, but some of them amuse me to no end. Just don’t expect them all to be lovey-dovey. Consider yourself warned.

(Thanks to the ACME Heart Maker, via Jeremy Zawodny)

First floor: mens wear, ladies undergarments, and zero-g toilets

by

I mentioned this briefly last March, but with the Columbia disaster, the idea of space elevators is starting to float around the ‘net again.

Forget the roar of rocketry and those bone jarring liftoffs, the elevator would be a smooth 62,000-mile (100,000-kilometer) ride up a long cable. Payloads can shimmy up the Earth-to-space cable, experiencing no large launch forces, slowly climbing from one atmosphere to a vacuum.

For a space elevator to function, a cable with one end attached to the Earth’s surface stretches upwards, reaching beyond geosynchronous orbit, at 21,700 miles (35,000-kilometer altitude). After that, simple physics takes charge.

The competing forces of gravity at the lower end and outward centripetal acceleration at the farther end keep the cable under tension. The cable remains stationary over a single position on Earth. This cable, once in position, can be scaled from Earth by mechanical means, right into Earth orbit. An object released at the cable’s far end would have sufficient energy to escape from the gravity tug of our home planet and travel to neighboring the moon or to more distant interplanetary targets.

Fascinating stuff to envision, and according to that article, it could conceivably be a reality in ten to fifteen years.

Part of the fun for me, though, was just tracking the thread across the web. I picked up on this from Doc Searls pointing to Dana Blankenhorn’s series of five blog posts about the idea. Dana’s posts led me to John Stryker pointing out some possible problems. The ensuing conversation in the comments to John’s post included some encouraging words from Michael Laine, the president of HighLift Systems, a company actively working on attempting to collect the necessary technology and funding to put this project into reality.

While this will probably come as no great surprise to those who know me, I’m solidly in the camp of people who would love to see this vision become a reality. If I had the pocket change, I’d write the check myself — unfortunately that’s a wee bit out of my range at the moment. Still, though, I’ll keep hoping.

What Al said, in tiny bits.

by

I’ve seen this all over the ‘net, but had yet to make a link to it. As it’s far past time I did so, here it is: Why Al says that ‘E’ is the same as ‘MC^2^’, as told so that each word has four jots or less.

So, have a seat. Put your feet up. This may take some time. Can I get you some tea? Earl Grey? You got it.

Okay. How do I want to do this? He did so much. It’s hard to just dive in. You know? You pick a spot to go from, but soon you have to back up and and go over this or that item, and you get done with that only to see that you have to back up some more. So if you feel like I’m off to the side of the tale half the time, well, this is why. Just bear with me, and we’ll get to the end in good time. Okay?

Okay. Let’s see….

On a side note, do you have any idea how hard it is to type like this? Lots of hits to this site for help, I tell you! I stand even more in awe of the man who was able to set this down this way — and do it well — than ere I sat down to dash off this post!

(Via MeFi)

Oh, and if any of you fine folk who read my site want to talk back on this post, I urge you to do your best to use this vein also. It will sure put that grey mass in your head to the test!

Networking sex

by

When network engineers start discussing sex…

…the average amount of information per ejaculation is 1.56010^9^ 2 bits * 2.0010^8^, which comes out to be 6.2410^17^ bits. That’s about 78,000 terabytes of data! As a basis of comparison, were the entire text content of the Library of Congress to be scanned and stored, it would only take up about 20 terabytes. If you figure that a male orgasm lasts five seconds, you get a transmission rate of 15,600 tb/s. In comparison, an OC-96 line (like the ones that make up much of the backbone of the internet) can move .005 tb/s. Cable modems generally transmit somewhere around 1/5000^th^ of that.

(Via MeFi)

WTC finalists chosen

by

The two finalists for the WTC replacement

The two finalists for the project to rebuild on the site of the World Trade Center have been announced.

Of the two, I’m partial to the Think proposals, especially the World Cultural Center. I wasn’t entirely sold on it until I watched the flyover animation of the entire structure, but I have to admit, that’s a very impressive concept. I also liked the effect of the lit ‘towers’ at night (seen at the end of the animation) — in my mind, they tie in very nicely to the Towers of Light spotlights that took the place of the towers for a time.

Daniel Libeskind’s proposal, on the other hand, just doesn’t grab me as much. It doesn’t have quite the same striking visual aspect to it — aside from the spire reaching skyward, for the most part it just comes across to me as one more big building in the middle of New York. Maybe it would work better once realized, but from the pictures shown here, I’d go for the Think towers, myself.

So — which is your choice?

Photographic glitches? Lightning? Alien death rays?

by

Well, it shouldn’t take long for all the various conspiracy theory buffs to start jumping all over this one —

A San Francisco amateur astronomer who photographs the space shuttles whenever their orbits carry them over the Bay Area has captured five strange and provocative images of the shuttle Columbia just as it was re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere before dawn Saturday.

The pictures, taken with a Nikon-880 digital camera on a tripod, reveal what appear to be bright electrical phenomena flashing around the track of the shuttle’s passage, but the photographer, who asked not to be identified, will not make them public immediately.

I think the thing that bugs me the most about this is that even though NASA has set up a page for people to upload images and video that they may have taken during the shuttle disaster, rather than do that (or, to give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe in addition to that), this guy decided to run to the media and stir up a little controversy. \<grumble>I guess everyone needs their fifteen minutes of fame, deserved or not.\</grumble>