Eclecticism

Sometime between June 8th and June 12th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• The grand strategy of Al-Qa’ida can be thought of as auto-immune warfare:: "Specifically, auto-immune war is a strategy, but its tactical implementation is the creation of false positive responses. Security obsession gums up the economy with inefficiencies. Terrorism terrorises the public; security theatre keeps them that way. As Kilcullen points out, every day, millions of travellers are systematically reminded of terrorism by government security precautions. Profiling measures subject entire communities to indignity and waste endless hours of police time. Vast sums of money are spent on counterproductive equipment programs and unlikely techno-fixes. National identity cards and monster databases are the specific symptoms of this pathology in the UK, just as idiotic militarism is in the US."
• Clove Cigarettes to be illegal: Well, now what are all the goths and gothlings going to smoke at the clubs? "This one's been pretty much under the radar, but HR 1265, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act will ban 'harm-reduced' cigarettes (those labeled 'mild' or 'light') and flavored cigarettes. It also puts tobacco regulation under the FDA. This bill just passed the Senate and President Obama has said that he will be signing it into law. Here's a few tasty excerpts: Prohibits a cigarette or any of its components from containing as a constituent or additive any artificial or natural flavor (other than tobacco or menthol) or any herb or spice (including strawberry, grape, orange, clove, cinnamon, and vanilla) that is a characterizing flavor of the tobacco product or tobacco smoke."
• 30 ROCK Is a Rip-Off of the MUPPET SHOW!: I've never seen 30 Rock, but now I want to… "Tina Fey's 30 ROCK is currently the most acclaimed comedy series on television. It's won numerous Emmys and Golden Globes and I think Pulitzers. Critics and audiences alike love the show and its lovable zany characters, and consider it one of the most original comedies in years. And I guess it is original…if you've never seen THE MUPPET SHOW. Because, my 'friends' (in quotes because I don't know or trust you, please don't be offended), Tina Fey's 30 ROCK is quite obviously ripping off Jim Henson's beloved TV show. 'You're crazy', you say? 'Wow, now with the insults. This is why I don't trust you', I respond. And the I hit you up with so many facts you HAVE to concede I'm absolutely right."
• Exclusive: The Future of Facebook Usernames: "June 13, 12:15am: A first wave of 'It's alive! Go get your name!' posts go up on various technology blogs, noting that the service is running a little bit slow. None of these posts mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook."
• Yub Jub Means "Devour the Weak": An Authoritative Study of Ewoks, From the Field Notes of Davo Atten-Boru and Pladdo Cardigun, Exo-Naturalists.: "After several cycles of exhaustive fieldwork, we can unequivocally report that Ewoks are not the naïve companionable canopy dwellers initially reported by Alliance military sources, but rather a singularly violent, cunning species, driven by perpetual internecine combat and territory acquisition."
• Sprinkle When You Tinkle: "See, commonly women will say, 'Can't you aim straight?' unaware that the aim is completely irrelevant to the path the wee decides to take once leaving the body. As I said, this is true for both ladies and gentlemen. Ladies don't realise this happens because they don't watch themselves wee. Yet, their wee sprinkles out into the gap between the seat and the rim of the porcelain of the loo."

Sometime between June 1st and June 5th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Goths in Hot Weather: "There's one thing that troubles me about our cheery friends: what to do they do in summer? All that makeup, long black leather and rubber must get very sticky. I think we should show our respect for these poor unfortunates, struggling to stand out from the vanilla crowd despite blazing temperatures and sunshine that puts the rest of us in shorts and vest tops. Join me in celebrating the majesty of the Goth, who, eschewing any practicality whatever, still has the commitment to don a full length leather trenchcoat, stupid New Rock boots, and half a Superdrug counter of makeup. All hail the Hot Goth!"
• Behind the Scenes: Tank Man of Tiananmen: "Twenty years ago, on June 5, 1989, following weeks of huge protests in Beijing and a crackdown that resulted in the deaths of hundreds, a lone man stepped in front of a column of tanks rumbling past Tiananmen Square. The moment instantly became a symbol of the protests as well as a symbol against oppression worldwide — an anonymous act of defiance seared into our collective consciousnesses."
• Creating New Documents: "There is a very basic problem with this arrangement: How do you create new files? On the one hand, since you use the Finder to manage your files, it would make sense to create new files in the Finder – right where you actually want them. On the other hand, since each individual application typically has at least one unique type of file, the Finder can't create new files – only individual applications can."
• Geotracking Your Photos With the AGL 3080: "Small and unobtrusive, all you need to know is that if the green light is blinking, it's recording GPS data. It's one of many similar devices, such as the GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr and Sony GPS-CS1KASP, that all function in virtually the same ways — they are either on or off, recording data or not, and they tend to do a pretty good job."
• What Plagiarism Looks Like: "Some enterprising readers (faculty? student-journalists?) have gone through the dissertations of Carl Boening and William Meehan, highlighting every passage in Meehan's that can be found, word for word, in Boening's. Neither the University of Alabama (which granted Boening and Meehan their doctorates) nor Jacksonville State University, where Meehan is president, has chosen to take up the obvious questions about plagiarism that Meehan's dissertation presents. As another recent story suggests, plagiarism seems to be governed by a sliding scale, with consequences lessening as the wrongdoer's status rises."

Sometime between May 26th and June 1st, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• On the (Rebooted) Final Frontier: "It's one thing if you want to pick on the movie itself — there are certainly visible seams in the plot, though really I think that if you're going to complain about the scientific validity or the military verisimilitude of Star Trek, you are simply in the wrong theater to start with — but the criticism that baffles me is the one I keep seeing about 'disrespect.' As though it's the act of rebooting itself that's the problem. To which I can only reply, are these people all nuts? Star Trek's entire history in all media over the last four decades has been nothing but revisions and reboots. Hell, the original Kirk-and-Spock version was actually a reboot after the first pilot failed to sell."
• 15 Sexist Vintage Ads: "We've come a long way since advertising was so offensively sexist. Right?"
• Seattle Police Dispatched to Zombie Walk: "This is a startling example of the blinders we wear as geeks. We saw this guy, mentally acknowledged that it was a really cool costume and then didn't think anything more about it. Neither of us had any clue at first what the police were doing there. In our minds there was absolutely nothing amiss and it took both of us several seconds of having the police shouting to realize what they were getting so worked up about. Oh right. There is a guy with a gas mask carrying a rifle with grenades strapped to his jacket standing in the store."
• Confessions of an Introverted Traveler: "We introverts have a different style of travel, and I'm tired of hiding it. Oh, I'm always happy enough when interesting people stumble into my path. It's a lagniappe, and I'm capable of connecting with people when the opportunity arises. And when the chemistry is right, I enjoy it. But I don't seek people out, I am terrible at striking up conversations with strangers and I am happy exploring a strange city alone. I don't seek out political discourse with opinionated cab drivers or boozy bonding with locals over beers into the wee hours. By the time the hours get wee, I'm usually in bed in my hotel room, appreciating local color TV."
• Meme Scenery: "So I had this silly idea to isolate the backgrounds from famous Internet memes, removing all the subjects from every photo or video. I'm pretty happy with the results. Like Jon Haddock's porn sans people, these photos are banal out of context. Only someone familiar with the original memes would sense something's amiss, like the set of a play waiting for the actors to stumble into history. Can you name all 22?" (I got ten of them…)

Sometime between May 25th and May 26th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• California High Court Upholds Same-Sex Marriage Ban: "The California Supreme Court upheld Tuesday a ban on same-sex marriages that state voters passed in November, but it allowed about 18,000 same-sex marriages performed before the ban to remain valid. The 6-1 ruling was met with chants of 'shame on you' from a crowd of about 1,000 people who gathered outside the court building in San Francisco."
• ‘Buffy’ in for Feature Relaunch: "A new incarnation of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' could be coming to the big screen. 'Buffy' creator Joss Whedon isn't involved and it's not set up at a studio, but Roy Lee and Doug Davison of Vertigo Entertainment are working with original movie director Fran Rubel Kuzui and her husband, Kaz Kuzui, on what is being labeled a remake or relaunch, but not a sequel or prequel. The new 'Buffy' film, however, would have no connection to the TV series, nor would it use popular supporting characters like Angel, Willow, Xander or Spike. Vertigo and Kuzui are looking to restart the story line without trampling on the beloved existing universe created by Whedon, putting the parties in a similar situation faced by Paramount, J.J. Abrams and his crew when relaunching 'Star Trek.' "
• 14 Cars Damaged During WA Couple’s Stripping Game: "Troopers have arrested a man and a woman suspected of damaging at least 14 vehicles by throwing rocks onto them from a railroad trestle over Interstate 5 near Lakewood, Wash., as a part of a bizarre stripping game. Investigators say the couple was playing a stripping game, the rules of which involved Madison shedding a layer of clothes for every left headlight the two managed to bust. The same rule applied to Sizemore and right headlights."
• May The Force of Others Be With You: "Let it be said, my friends, that the early drafts of Star Wars should be a rich source of encouragement to every aspiring screenwriter the world over – because they royally sucked. They are of the same low, amateurish quality that may be found in many first screenplays…. (Thus, many scripts and new writers have the potential to reach Star Wars heights.) Had Star Wars never happened, had Lucas…theoretically asked me to review his script for him, I'm not sure I could've even finished reading the darn thing."
• Is It OK to Run an Illegal Library From My Locker at School?: "I now operate a little mini-library that no one has access to but myself. Practically a real library, because I keep an inventory log and give people due dates and everything. I would be in so much trouble if I got caught, but I think it's the right thing to do because before I started, almost no kid at school but myself took an active interest in reading! Now not only are all the kids reading the banned books, but go out of their way to read anything they can get their hands on. So I'm doing a good thing, right?"

Sometime between May 19th and May 24th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Agatha Christie: Agatha Christie Breaks a Third World Record: "Agatha Christie has set a new world record — for the book with the thickest spine. Measuring over a foot long, with 4,032 pages, the volume contains the complete Miss Marple stories — all 12 novels and 20 short stories. "
• Rules for Time Travelers: "With the new Star Trek out, it's long past time (as it were) that we laid out the rules for would-be fictional time-travelers. Not that we expect these rules to be obeyed; the dramatic demands of a work of fiction will always trump the desire to get things scientifically accurate, and Star Trek all by itself has foisted half a dozen mutually-inconsistent theories of time travel on us. But time travel isn't magic; it may or may not be allowed by the laws of physics — we don't know them well enough to be sure — but we do know enough to say that if time travel were possible, certain rules would have to be obeyed. And sometimes it's more interesting to play by the rules. So if you wanted to create a fictional world involving travel through time, here are 10+1 rules by which you should try to play."
• Klingon Anti-Virus: "Use Sophos's Klingon Anti-Virus to quickly perform an on-demand scan and find viruses, spyware, adware, zero-day threats, Betazoid sub-ether porn diallers and Tribbles that your existing protection might have missed. The software can be run without deactivating your current anti-virus software. Phasers can be left set to stun. (This software has compatibility issues with the version of msxml4.dll used by cloaking devices on Romulan-modded D7-class battle cruisers. Installing this software on such vessels is punishable by ordeal of Ginst'a'Ed.)"
• Star Trek: What It Teaches Film Makers About Special Effects: "…of the many factors I found impressive, the one that particularly stuck out against the tide of blockbusters in recent years was that there was barely a special effect wasted. Granted, there were lots of special effects in the film, but each had a purpose in the greater scheme of things, and at no point did I get the impression that someone was playing a videogame before my eyes, or showing me what their computer could do. Coupled to the fact that there was no ridiculously over-the-top slow motion gimmickry, along with no unnecessarily confusing edits, and I left with the real impression that this was a film made by people who absolutely, top to bottom, knew what they were doing."
• Dollar ReDe$Ign Project: "We need to rebuild our country, revive our economy, redesign the Dollar bill. Email us your ideas. Win a prize. In God We Trust, In Change We Believe." Some neat designs already posted if you scroll down a bit. I'm particularly fond of this entry.