The Asteroid Belt

Another week, another asteroid belt.
Squirrels to be given contraceptives. This is certainly odd. I was surprised to read that apparently, the U.S. has done this in the past. I never knew that squirrel populations got out of hand in such a way. Then again, they are after all just another animal, so if there’s a bunch of them making baby squirrels, and then they all have lots of baby squirrels… well, it could be a problem, I suppose.

While reading the wonderful Languagehat blog, I came across this jewel: proofreading marks. I know very little about proofreading, and I certainly didn’t know that there was an official set of proofreading marks. Also from Languagehat, I found a link to this set of humorous additions to the marks. I particularly like the symbol for “remove permanently from your lexicon”.

Some Orthodox Jews attend a Holocaust denial conference because they want the Israeli state to be completely and peacefully dissolved. This is an interesting take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jews wanting to make Israel disappear? I’d never heard of this at all.

Border agents find an alligator in a suitcase. Snippet:

Then agents asked the man, whose name was not released, if he had anything else inside the car they should know about.

“The guy says, ‘There’s an alligator in there,’” Easterling said. “He says, ‘He’s in the suitcase there.’ And when (the agent) opened the suitcase, sure enough, there was a cayman in there.”

I must say: if some guy told me that there was an alligator in a suitcase, I most likely would not open it. I’d take it back to the department and perhaps have someone qualified (like a professional animal handler!) do the opening. Opening a suitcase with a live alligator in it sounds like a quite excellent way to get maimed. I mentioned this to my mom and she said that perhaps seeing people on TV handling alligators has made people forget a bit of reality: alligators and crocodiles are mean little bastards, and will snap at you just for the hell of it.

A Texas Representative wants to pass a bill to allow blind hunters to use laser sights. I was not aware that blind people regularly hunt, but I suppose it could be doable with a spotter. I don’t particularly understand how you’d get the same thrill out of it with some guy saying, “Drop your gun 2 inches and you’ll be on target.. now a little to the left.. up some…” but.. oh well. To each their own I suppose!

A teenage shoplifter was caught because they filled their pants with a bit too much: when she tried to run from the store, her pants fell to her ankles. See, that’s what you get when you’re greedy! Snippet:

Police also found a potato peeler, ice cream scoop, a set of measuring spoons, two cake decorating gel tubes and six Rollo candy bars on Dwiggins, according to court documents.

I’m surprised they didn’t find a kitchen sink in there. It sounds like this teenager was really wanting to bake. Hmm. Let’s see. A cake with candy bars, ice cream, and mashed potatoes in it? Yuck. I’ll pass, thanks.

Someone at Google copied a Yahoo! page, but in the end, I think Yahoo! had it coming to them. I didn’t search his site: does anyone know if Jeremy has a huge rant about Yahoo! copying Google’s work? I’m doubting…

Best Blog Or Not, Keep At It. Nils has a great post here on why, when it comes to blogging (and just about anything else, too!), perseverence pays off. I’ve tried blogging in the past and always quit after I didn’t have three million readers within a few months. This time I’m in it for the long haul because I’m doing it for the right reason: I enjoy it. If I don’t have any readers, oh well. As Nils noted, I like having readers, but I’d still be doing this even if I didn’t. It’s come to be a part of my (almost) daily routine.

Dear God. The entire cast of Battlestar Galactica - in Simpson form. I think most of them are pretty good, but the one for Starbuck doesn’t do much for me. I see the attitude, but Starbuck’s looks just aren’t there. I like how Ellen has put a bunch of daggers in Saul. Backstabber, indeed! I really hope she’s gone from the show. I didn’t care for her at all, but I suppose that was the idea.

I skipped doing an Asteroid Belt last week because I was simply too busy doing other things. I’d apologize, but.. well, life comes before the blog, after all. Having said that…

The Zune sucks. Snippet:

The setup process stands among the very worst experiences I’ve ever had with digital music players. The installer app failed, and an hour into the ordeal, I found myself asking my office goldfish, “Has it really come to this? Am I really about to manually create and install a .dll file?”
But there it was, right on the Zune’s tech support page. Is this really what parents want to be doing at 4 a.m. on Christmas morning? The new Zune portable media player represents Microsoft Corp.’s effort to compete against Apple’s iPod will include wireless technology to let people share their favorite songs, playlists or pictures with other Zune users.

And then, the Microsoft response to the Apple iPod fell on its face. With that, the battle was over. That didn’t take long.

Tabitha Vevers paints pictures of women having sex with squid and other ocean creatures. I don’t know what else to say besides, what - the - frak? These are just bizarre. I don’t really know what else to say about them. Here’s a snippet of the explanation:

“My recent Cape paintings feature human and sea life in a metaphorical embrace where land meets sea. In Rapture (II.06a) the man-sized lobster suggests a thick-shelled, but passionate lover, while the giant squid in Embrace (VI.06a) embodies a seductive many-limbed partner.”

A metamorphical embrace where land meets sea? Come on. It’s women and squid getting it on.
A couple brings in their lawyers to go over a sexual consent form before getting it on. This is hilarious. Not really safe for work, or for mixed company. No nudity or anything like that, but they are after all gabbing about sex.

An ancient tsunami ravaged the coastline of three continents; the tsunami was caused by 6.6 cubic miles of rock crashing into the water at a speed of 224 miles per hour. This makes some of the modern disaster movies look like kids’ play.

Kamigoroshi wrote a really cool post on growing up with your blog. Snippet:

The bottom line in all this is to grow up with your blog. Your blogs are a part of you, so whatever you pick up in life, you will put down online. If you picked nothing up, you have nothing to put down and that will show whether you give up on blogging or it all goes downhill from there. Live life, learn what you like, and otherwise appreciate it along with people who share their own appreciation for the matter. Blogging is no different from how you would conduct yourself in the real world. Whatever skills you pick up on either end would benefit the way you see yourself and the world for that matter.

Very nicely said, Kamigoroshi. In the past I tried to force my personal blog to be something it really wasn’t; I was trying to make it popular, to get people to read it, etc. Ironically, the harder I tried, the more seriously I took it all, the crappier my blog got; the less I enjoyed writing; and the less people read it! This time around I’ve been pretty casual about my blog, and I’m loving it. And, funny enough, now that I blog passionately but don’t take blogging seriously (if that makes sense), people actually read it.

Scientists forecast the next 50 years. It looks like quite a few scientists believe that we’ll be finding alien life in the next 50 years. What do you folks think? I personally think there’s life out there somewhere, but I don’t know when we’ll be finding it.

11 Web Claims. A few that really made me chuckle:

“We’re still in stealth mode, but you can sign up for an exclusive Alpha-tester invite” = “We’re figuring out what to do with this domain name, but it was too expensive to just let go.”

“We use semantic clustering to enhance results relevancy” = “Our results are taken from another search engine, but will anyone buy us? Please?”

A couple of short films that a friend of mine emailed me about: Animator vs. Animation, and then the sequel, aptly titled Animator vs. Animation II. These ooze with creativity and fun. I really liked when the My Computer icon blocked the fireball from the stick figure man with a brick wall that said “FIREWALL”. Cute.

WEBoggle. Word game, with lots and lots of other folks. It’s quite addicting. After playing four or five rounds, it’s clear that my vocabulary is rather weak. I was getting 30-40 points where the winners were getting 150!

Find that mystery linguist woman. A linguist, after teaching a class and using chalk during it, goes to the post office to mail some bulky packages. The post office workers notice white powder on the packages, as well as on the lady’s clothes. It is clearly weapons-grade anthrax. The post office is shut down, with people being ran out of the place, and police and specialist teams are called in. All of that for a bit of chalk dust. Oops?

At this point in time, Peter Jackson won’t be directing The Hobbit. What a bummer. Ever since the release of Lord of the Rings, all of the Tolkien fans have been clamoring for a movie adaptation of The Hobbit by Jackson and Co. Now it looks like New Line Cinema may get a different director and move on with the movie, due to Jackson suing them. (I can certainly understand them not wanting to work with him for that reason.) I’m guessing that if they get a new director, The Hobbit will fall on its face. Who knows, though. Maybe even if they get a different director, if they nab the previous cast (Ian Holmes, Ian McKellen, etc.), it might work. However, if they don’t get Jackson, they won’t be getting WETA, WETA Digital, etc.; would they have to totally recreate Gollum? What about Andy Serkis? Andy Serkis is Gollum. No one else will suffice.

A rather old MTV commercial about Günter the German. It’s kind of cheesy, but I love it. For those who are just dying to have the full song that’s in the background, it’s Die schwarze Barbara by Heino, master of German kitsch music.

Sniping: The perfect killing method, but clear targets are few. I thought this was an interesting article. It’s about Marine snipers in Iraq. As the war has progressed, the effectiveness of sniper teams has declined, for a variety of reasons. For one, the Iraqi insurgents, after four years of war, know where all of the best sniper spots are. Marines have also been given rules as to when they can engage:

Potential targets must be engaged in a hostile act, or show clear hostile intent.
The marines say insurgents know the rules, and now rarely carry weapons in the open. Instead, they pose as civilians and keep their weapons concealed in cars or buildings until just before they need them. Later, when they are done shooting, they put them swiftly out of sight and mingle with civilians.

A 92 year old woman was killed in a shootout with police. While it’s sad that it happened, it’s amazing that she actually shot three of them before she was killed:

One was hit in the arm, another in a thigh and the third in a shoulder. The officers were taken to a hospital for treatment, and all three were conscious and alert, police said.

Pretty good shot for a 92 year old, wouldn’t you say?

Bush screws America [video]. Not safe for work, or mixed company. A bit tasteless, sure, but still hilarious.

Don’t wait for the muse. Cool post about why you shouldn’t sit around waiting for the muse. Instead, jump in and start doing something. The muse will show up eventually. The article makes me think of NaNoWriMo a lot. Now I just need to follow the article’s advice and get back to writing…

Well, here’s the first installment of The Asteroid Belt, my weekly “link dump” post. Kudos to Jay and Cas for the idea (but Cas will let you know that she has been blogging longer! ). Thanks to Jay again for the title idea. This week’s Asteroid Belt is a bit thin, mostly because I’ve been doing non-blog stuff (it’s finals week, if that helps you figure out what I’ve been doing). Anyways, here are the links along with my accompanying babbling.

A researcher uses his understanding of the human brain to get $500,000 on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?. This is a pretty interesting article. It introduced me to a few memory techniques that I wasn’t aware of, in particular “priming”. Snippet:

The priming of a memory occurs because of the peculiar “connectionist” neural dynamics of our cortex, where memories are distributed across many regions and neurons. If we can recall any fragment of a pattern, our brains tend to automatically fill in the rest. For example, hearing an old Madonna song may launch a cascade of linked memories: your high school prom where it was the theme song, your poorly tailored prom outfit, your forgotten prom date, the stinging embarrassment when you threw up in the limo.

Since the producers allow contestants unlimited time to work out answers (as long as they’re not just stalling), I knew that I could employ the most basic of priming tactics: talking about the question, posing scenarios, throwing out wild speculations, even just babbling—trying to cajole my prefrontal neurons onto any cue that could trigger the buried neocortical circuits holding the key to the answer.

The article also discusses intuition and how to deal with it. At the end of the game, on his million dollar question, the guy actually went against his intuition (and his priming technique) and chose to walk with $500,000, because he thought the answer he’d come up with was wrong, due to it being the one that intuition made him think of first. After walking, he discovered that he had had the right answer. D’oh.

Viking ship to ply North Sea; no invasion planned. Okay, let me get this straight. They have a 100-foot long replica of a Viking warship. They will have 65 crew-members. And they won’t be invading anywhere? And they won’t be going dressed up in Viking gear? To quote Gollum, “You ruinnssss it!!”

An amazingly cool animated short about the rise and fall of human civilization from the viewpoint of two sentient rock beings. I loved this little video. Like Tom, though, I’d really like to know more. A sequel is in order!

From Google Docs and Spreadsheets Unsupported Browser page:

If you are working to fix problems with a specific browser and would like to bypass this check, just add &browserok=true to the end of the Google Docs & Spreadsheets url.

Please note that it is a violation of intergalactic law to use this parameter under false pretenses, so don’t let us catch you at it.

And, it won’t work very well — really.

It’s things like this that make me like Google. Maybe it’s just part of their plan to conquer the galaxies, but I can’t help but like a gigantic company that has retained its sense of humor.

Sunken Roman ship from the 1st century thrills archaeologists. In other news, a Viking ship was found in a similar state. Apparently, archaeologists weren’t very happy with the find, because all it contained was a few barrels of rotting shark meat.