Fireflies

Fireflies. I really like fireflies.

stuff this

Wow. In the latest example of educational toys run amok, giantmicrobes.com is offering plush toys shaped like, well, giant microbes. There's orthomyoxvirus (the Flu), rhinovirus (common cold), and other stuffed friends who make you stuffy. There's even a planned Martian life from rock ALH 84001 stuffed toy.

Dang, and I thought bunnies and bears were cool when I was a kid.

update

Update: to make the whole thing more amusing, sometimes it gets stuff wrong you wouldn't expect. For example, it can't tell the difference between Fleetwood Mac's Fleetwood Mac and Rumors. Go figure.

how the

Ok, how the h-e-double hockey stick did it do that?

So, I've been furiously feeding music from my CD collection into iTunes lately, the better to have a whole buncha stuff to listen to at work. Now, when you stick a CD into the computer, iTunes goes and queries an online CD database to get track names, artist, times, etc. This works great with most commercial CDs, but not well with small releases and not at all, or so I thought, with stuff you burn yourself from your vinyl or tape collections. Guess I thought wrong, though.

I have two copies of Midnight Oil's brilliant Diesel and Dust album on CD. The first is a commercial disc bought in the usual manner, to replace the vinyl that everyone told me was obsolete. The other was made after Bad Things (tm) happened to said commercial disc at a party. The CD started skipping like mad, and reasoning that I wasn't going to buy the album three times I just recorded my LP copy of the album into the computer and burned a disc. Now keep in mind the times on the tracks are likely a little off from the CD, as my turntable is by no means calibrated to any standard, and I set the track boundaries kind of arbitrarily in some cases. Plus, there's no way the waves look like the CD version; the glorious crackles and pops of vinyl, plus the format's different EQ curve, guarantee that.

So imagine my surprise when I put this disc in my PowerBook, ready and willing to type in all the damn song titles myself, only to have the CDDB return the information on its own.

Wow! I suppose it's all some fairly straightforward bit of AI, where it looks for a best fit based on number and length of tracks, but I'm impressed nonetheless.

Dictionaraoke

I laughed until I cried:
Dictionaraoke, wherein sound clips from online dictionaries sing popular hits. Check out the "Another Brick in the Wall" rendition.

...and then there's Beatallica, which shows us what might have happened if the songs all were credited "Lennon, McCartney, and Hetfield."

madbadgers

...and, in related news (courtesy of the DSGPaL): even the small animals are going on angry rampages!

LONDON (Reuters) - An angry domesticated badger savaged five people, leaving one man so seriously injured he needed skin grafts, and chased away pursuing police officers during a 48-hour rampage through a quiet English town.

One-year-old Boris launched what experts described as unprecedented attacks after finding himself hungry, alone and frightened after being stolen or released from a wildlife visitor center where he had been hand-reared and hand-fed.

"I have been involved with badgers for 24 years and I have never heard of anything like this, nor has anyone I have spoken to," Mike Weaver, chairman of the Worcestershire Badger Society told Reuters on Tuesday.

Weaver was brought in by police to catch Boris, who had bitten the five victims' arms and legs after getting loose near Evesham, Worcestershire, in central England.

The officers themselves had been chased onto the bonnet of their car as they tried to round up Boris, who was later put down.

Weaver said badgers were notoriously powerful animals and the incident showed the folly of trying to turn wild animals into pets.

Thanks for the heads-up, Damon!

Oonsky-doo

My faith in the human race is refreshed. I have just learned that one can, through one of Google's alternate language sites, search the web in Bork, bork, bork!

Tax Cut Man

Look over there, it's Tax Cut Man!

Big Questions

You knew eventually someone would try it. So far, of course, they've only let it go for a month--much less than infinity, and the number of participants was finite too, so the results (as the news article says) are more performance art than anything. Still, it's nice to see a tiny step being taken towards answering one of the the Big Questions.

News article.

Some notes and output of the study.

lame

Talk about feling lame.

So, I just pulled some apparently malfunctioning parts out of my computer and replaced them with apparently functioning ones. I use those apparentlies since, of course, the putatively dodgy parts, when examined under the friendly glow of a 50/50 incandescent light/CRT glow mixture, don't look any less healthy then the currently functioning ones. Ooooh, bigass run-on.

I get to thinking, "...gee, some parts must burn out in a more visually stimulating way on occasion. Otherwise it's a dull world indeed."

Naturally, ten seconds later I'm googling, looking for the inevitable online archive of images showing horribly burned and mangled PC parts, cleansed in the mighty fires of their own systems.

Fifteen minutes later, I'm still at it (yeah, how's *that* for attention span, Padre!), having found nothing.

Finally I give up. Now, maybe I was having a Bad Search Day (you know the ones...no matter what you type in, the first twenty-seven results are all things like "Lil' Jonny, the six-man polka band that does naught but Bon Jovi covers"), but it seems strange. I barely even came up with more than a handful of sites featuring sculptors who mangle and trash computer parts post crashem in the name of art. What gives? Does nobody else find dead PC parts interesting, or has the Net come alive and developed taboos about its own shed dead skin cells?

shocker

Well, there's a surprise. Meanwhile, stories like this provide an interesting contrast.

*********************************
In lighter news, correspondent JP. Lo discusses electric bunnies:

Apropos of your 5/1 blog entry, people at work have talked about bunnies chewing through the neutral wires...the wire *coating* is made from soy...which the bunnies like to eat. Only they get a shock from wires other than neutral.

There you have it: apparently it's not just dark demon bunnies with red glowing eyes that like to eat wires. Take note, then: get a bunny, get WiFi.

bunnies

So, apparently all bunnies are not as well-mannered as Oolong. There's this one, for example.