September 27, 2012
Yahtzee Croshaw reviews Guild Wars 2
September 26, 2012
Reason.tv: Imagine (There’s No YouTube)
As protests against “The Innocence of Muslims” video span the globe — and U.S. officials pressure YouTube’s owner Google to restrict free expression — Remy imagines a world where politicians cave to angry mobs and dictate what we can see on YouTube.
Written and performed by Remy. Edited by Meredith Bragg.
September 25, 2012
QotD: Replacement NFL referees
The replacement officials are a mockery wrapped in a travesty, dunked in a vat of incompetence, glazed with WTF and set to the Benny Hill theme song.
Scott Feschuk, “In defence of the replacement officials (Kidding: they’re terrible)”, Maclean’s, 2012-09-25
September 21, 2012
Rick Mercer’s first rant
No, not his own … the first one he remembers:
One of my earliest life-defining memories as a kid was being dragged against my will to the bank because Mom had a meeting.
I can remember sitting in a chair next to my mother while she had an excruciatingly dull conversation with a banker. I remember wondering what I had done to be forced to sit through this and if it were actually possible to die from boredom. And then everything changed. I will never forget the moment. The banker leaned forward and said, “Now Mrs. Mercer, do you have your husband’s permission to do this? Perhaps we should give him a call.”
From my point of view the day just got a whole lot better; for the man behind the desk the opposite was true. He had no idea what he had done. He had unleashed a hell storm that he had absolutely no chance of surviving. The poor, hapless man.
To say the oxygen was immediately sucked out of the room would be an exaggeration. To say that the blistering rant my mother delivered to the dumb creature made his ears bleed would not be. Needless to say very soon we were no longer in a cubicle but in a much nicer office upstairs, with a different banker who was doing everything he could to stop my mother from closing every account and going across the street. The dude who suggested Mom get her husband’s permission to open a chequing account was sent to “get the lad a fudge stick.”
Go Mom!
Everyone should rant. Ranting not only makes you feel better but occasionally, as my mother proved to me many times, you might get results—justice, satisfaction or a fudge stick.
September 13, 2012
iPhone fans are going through this progression right now
From Pedro Dias on Google+:
September 8, 2012
Fifty shades of legal action
This is just too amusing not to share:
EL James wants 50 Shades parties shut down. "You can’t just hijack something someone else owns": http://t.co/5i3YApnE
— Cleolinda Jones (@cleolinda) September 8, 2012
I hope somewhere Stephenie Meyer's lawyer(s) just lit up with joy, all "OH SO WE'RE DOING THIS NOW? YAAAAAY"
— Cleolinda Jones (@cleolinda) September 8, 2012
Split decision from the two Scotts
Scott Reid and Scott Feschuk are doing their weekly NFL picks again this season. To my surprise/shock/horror, they have the Minnesota-Jacksonville game as the “Sure Thing”. Fortunately, they disagree on which “sure thing” is really the “sure thing”:
Jacksonville (plus 3.5) at Minnesota
Reid: You ever notice that Christian Ponder’s Christian name is Christian? Imagine if his surname was Sur. That would totally rock! But here’s my point: Christian Ponder always conjures to my mind the image of a pilgrim. You know, the kind with belt buckles on their hats who casually persecute Indians and run around drowning hysterical teenage girls. They’re better known these days as Republicans. You know what doesn’t come to mind when you’re thinking about Minnesota’s Cotton Mather? Touchdown completions.
Fact is that Ponder is just no damn good. In fact, I don’t think there’s ever been a truly successful Puritan quarterback in the NFL. (Kurt Warner doesn’t count because everyone knows he made a deal with Satan to destroy Trent Green’s career.) But I’ll guarantee you this much: That belt-buckling Christian Ponder is a damn sight better than the Blaine Gabbert Project that’s inexplicably still underway in Jacksonville. MJD may be back but the Jags are going to set the standard for awfulloosity this year in the NFL. Eat the points and don’t worry. Minnesota will win this game by a wide margin. Pick: Minnesota.
Feschuk: Wow, I had no idea Minnesota was going to lose this game until you picked them as your inaugural Sure Thing. Makes sense though: Adrian Peterson is rushing back too quickly from yet another major injury and should be good for maybe five or six carries before he blows out his Achilles or falls down a well. Pick: Jacksonville.
September 6, 2012
September 4, 2012
Want to ensure that your shipment is opened and fully inspected at least once?
If you’re not happy unless your package has been thoroughly inspected by trained professionals on its way to the destination, you’ll want to stock up on this new item available from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
August 29, 2012
Does your Paleontology department need a visit from the “Pizazz!!!” marketing consultants?
Lore Sjöberg likes dinosaurs, and thinks paleontologists have an awesome job … but that too many of them are phoning it in in the “naming newly identified dinosaurs” department:
In zoology, whoever discovers a new species gets to name it. Normally this isn’t a big deal; at this point, the only living animal species being discovered are either some isolated sea slug or some type of antelope that everyone thought was the same as another type of antelope, but it turns out they can’t interbreed so — two different antelopes. In the latter case, everyone’s just going to keep calling it “an antelope” and in the former case, who cares?
However, there is one situation where animals are being given names that people are actually going to use, and that’s dinosaurs. Paleontologists have an awesome responsibility, as well as an awesome job. Whatever they name their long-extinct terrible lizards, that’s the name, and there’s a decent chance it’s going to show up on film or as a stuffed animal in a museum gift shop.
Some dinosaur names are ideal. Tyrannosaurus rex, for instance, is objectively the best name that anything has ever had, with Wolf Blitzer coming in a distant second. And there’s the Triceratops, which sounds cool and means “three-horned face,” and also Pentaceratops, which is, OK, kind of derivative, but I’m still hoping they eventually discover a Hexaceratops.
Sadly, however, not all scientists are equally inspired. Here are a few dinosaurs that, international rules for nomenclature be damned, need new names.
Like most kids, I was fascinated by dinosaurs and one of the (few) highlight of the public school year was the (usually) annual trip to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto with their dinosaur displays. Yet every time I happen to see dinosaurs mentioned in the popular press these days, it’s almost always some killjoy paleontologist trying to strike one of those cool dinosaur names by “reclassifying” to either an unreadable/unpronounceable Latin tag or a name that’s so heart-stoppingly boring that it might as well be a serial number.
Unless it’s some deep-seated conspiracy to make paleontology as uncool as accountancy or technical writing, I can’t understand why so many scientists seem to want to kill the natural joy so many of us found when we first learned about their topic of study.
Update: Brian Switek responds to Sjöberg’s complaints in the Smithsonian’s Dinosaur Tracking blog.
Now, there are some dinosaur names that I’m not totally enamored with. While I understand the dinosaur’s symbolic status, Bicentenaria argentina doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and the same goes for the unevocative Panamericansaurus (yes, named after Pan American Energy). Then there are the names that appeal to the more puerile portion of my sense of humor. Read the name Texasetes too fast and you may get the dinosaur confused with a part of the male anatomy (not to mention the actual debate over whether the name of Megalosaurus should really be “Scrotum“), and you should always be careful with the pronunciation of Fukuiraptor unless you’re actually trying to insult the allosaur.
But what baffles me is that Sjöberg didn’t pick any of these names. Instead, his list includes the likes of Spinosaurus and Giraffatitan. I get his beef with dinosaurs named after places (Albertosaurus, Edmontosaurus, etc.), and I agree that Gasosaurus was comically unimaginative, but Iguanodon? The second dinosaur ever named, and one of the most iconic prehistoric creatures named for the clue in its teeth that led Gideon Mantell to rightly hypothesize that the dinosaur was an immense herbivore? I have to wonder whether Sjöberg would consider “Iguanasaurus – the original proposed name for the dinosaur – to be a step back or an improvement.
I just don’t get Sjöberg’s contention that Giraffatitan is “terrible” because – *gasp* – the sauropod wasn’t actually a big giraffe. Strict literalism only in naming dinosaurs, please. And, really, what would Sjöberg suggest as a replacement for Spinosaurus? When Ernst Stromer found the theropod, the most distinctive thing about the dinosaur was its enormous vertebral spines. What would you call it? Suchomimus – a cousin of Spinosaurus – is a little more poetic, but I like Stromer’s choice just fine.
August 28, 2012
August 21, 2012
Verity Stob learns to love IPv6
A love story, of sorts:
Somewhere in the near future…
There were more than 50 people in the room, so it was hot and airless, and it smelled of stale sweat. Government-sponsored crisis posters, tatty and torn, were sticky-taped to the yellowish walls. One urged its readers: ‘Don’t let your selfishness come between little Johnny and his Wikipedia’, another enquired: ‘Do you NATter with your Neighbours? Don’t squander the nation’s resource!’
(The latter effort was illustrated with a carefully posed photo of a beaming, bosomy Minister for IT Conservation encouraging a weedy-looking Everybloke to plug his laptop into her generously exposed router socket. The photo had recently acquired a pleasing piquancy. This same Minister had been caught selling a bunch of government-owned IP addresses, supposedly earmarked for use in schools for the next generation of Olympic heroes, to the International Bank of Fatcat and Taxhavenia.)
Under the flickering fluorescent lighting, a shuffling, miserable queue of the desperate and the hopeless zigzagged towards the bullet- sound- and Windolene-proof glass of the counter. At the front of the queue was me.
The official behind the glass pursed his lips, flicked my carefully filled-in paperwork to one side with disdain, and leaned forward to speak into his goose-neck microphone…
The critical message of this election cycle
A. Barton Hinkle distills all the campaign wisdom down into one easy-to-understand message: The Wrong Side Absolutely Must Not Win:
The past several weeks have made one thing crystal-clear: Our country faces unmitigated disaster if the Other Side wins.
No reasonably intelligent person can deny this. All you have to do is look at the way the Other Side has been running its campaign. Instead of focusing on the big issues that are important to the American People, it has fired a relentlessly negative barrage of distortions, misrepresentations, and flat-out lies.
Just look at the Other Side’s latest commercial, which take a perfectly reasonable statement by the candidate for My Side completely out of context to make it seem as if he is saying something nefarious. This just shows you how desperate the Other Side is and how willing it is to mislead the American People.
The Other Side also has been hammering away at My Side to release certain documents that have nothing to do with anything, and making all sorts of outrageous accusations about what might be in them. Meanwhile, the Other Side has stonewalled perfectly reasonable requests to release its own documents that would expose some very embarrassing details if anybody ever found out what was in them. This just shows you what a bunch of hypocrites they are.
Rinse, repeat.
