The world’s least efficient machine:
More information about this modern day wonder here.
April 28, 2011
April 27, 2011
The xkcd Guide to Making People Feel Old
Original here.
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April 23, 2011
A neat way to address software piracy
I still find it hard to believe that Cracked, of all the media entities from the pre-internet era, is worth visiting (and linking to). However, this is good stuff:
The [Arkham Asylum] developers included a little bit of extra code to detect when the game has been pirated, a common tactic used to track a company’s losses or simply mess with cheap people. The game is mostly unchanged when hacked, with one seemingly minor exception: Batman’s glider cape is hilariously unusable and has the aerodynamics of a piece of cardboard riddled with bullet holes.
It’s not that the cape is faulty, apparently; it’s simply that your version of Batman doesn’t know how to use it. Instead of gliding from one surface to another, Batman simply opens his wings over and over like a total ass-clown, causing him to lose altitude and fall down. It’s like you’re being forced to play with the pudgy Batman copycat from the beginning of The Dark Knight.
All the other gadgets still work, so you can always fight your way across the level on foot, right? Well, yeah, except that without the glider cape you’ll be completely stranded in a certain room — you know, the one filled with poisonous gas. That’s right, in the pirated version of Arkham Asylum, the always-prepared Dark Knight is such an useless idiot that he gets himself killed due to his shitty cape.
This trick gets misconstrued a lot as a simple game glitch, so you have people like this guy asking what’s wrong with his game at the official Eidos message board … only for the forum administrator to explain the situation and tell him: “It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code [punk].“
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Is this where the “ponygirl” fetish got started?
One of a series of “WTF?” postings at How to be a Retronaut may show the origin of the “ponygirl” fetish. (I would advise you not to Google Image Search for that . . . unless that’s what you are interested in):
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April 17, 2011
Ilkka lets his anti-pedestrian flag fly
Ilkka is usually a pedestrian/public transit rider, so it’s quite a surprise when he looks at the world from the driver’s perspective:
It’s always good to see things from the other guy’s perspective, and today we went on errand to the city on a car, very different from my usual public transit and pedestrian viewpoint. I understand not just the complaints of drivers much better now, but also the notion of “high cost of free parking”. I thought it was absurd how the city of Toronto, by allowing curbside parking, effectively turns its perfectly good four-lane streets into narrow two-lane bottlenecks that massively throttle the traffic. And then all those freaking pedestrians crossing the streets wherever they feel like, something I basically never do. It actually wouldn’t be a bad idea to impose a law that not only is it never a crime to hit a pedestrian who is on the street anywhere else than the sidewalk or a crosswalk, but the city would actually pay a small reward for this service to society, bit like the “kill money” bounty that hunters traditionally get for putting down pests. The problem of pedestrians running around in the traffic would vanish within a week.
I think he’s kidding . . .
April 15, 2011
April 14, 2011
“We have engineered a massive, unstoppable Essex. We should all be in jail”
In this time of abject apologies of all sorts for historic wrongs, it’s time for England — East Anglia in particular — to acknowledge the sins of their past:
As David Cameron told Pakistan that its current balls-out craziness was actually the fault of the British empire, experts pointed to the giant, stupid, disgusting country founded by some people from East Anglia.
Julian Cook, author of America: What the Fuck Were We Thinking?, said: “When Harwich-born Christopher Jones captained the Mayflower in 1620 he began a process that would lead ultimately to genocide, the Ku Klux Klan and Grey’s Anatomy.
“Thanks to him and his insane passengers, the way was paved for a nation of heavily armed toddlers led around by an ever-changing roll-call of religious maniacs, grubby conmen and dead-eyed celebrities.
“It doesn’t understand anything more than 15 minutes old — except creationism — and is littered with strip malls and heavily branded cheese pumps.
“We have engineered a massive, unstoppable Essex. We should all be in jail.”
H/T to Johnathan Pearce for the link.
Scott Feschuk is one of those “ethnic voters” for the Harper photo-op
Scott Feschuk is delighted to have the opportunity to have his photo taken with the prime minister. He’s overjoyed:
What a moment.
I never thought that I — a regular, ordinary Canadian — would get the chance to have my photo taken with the Prime Minister of Canada.
But as luck and crass political calculation would have it, he’s eager to be seen with me! All I have to do is attire myself in such a manner as to flamboyantly display my heritage, thereby rendering me a subhuman prop that Stephen Harper can exploit to woo more of my kind.
Needless to say, I’m in.
As is true of much national folklore garb, it can take quite a while to get into my ethnic costume. Each item has been carefully selected to represent a historic and sacred element relating to my suitably exotic but non-threatening culture.
Join me, won’t you, as I get dressed.
I think I can speak for all of us about our deep gratitude that this blog post is not illustrated.
It’s also nice to see that the Conservatives have not yet figured out how to avoid handing their opponents such wonderful opportunities for mockery.
Original tempest-in-an-ethnic-teapot here. 680News reported yesterday that the staffer who wrote the letter is no longer working for the candidate.
April 8, 2011
QotD: the international double standard
A long time ago we had a president who was doing a chubby intern.
And some Americans got uptight about it.
And we were told by Europeans everywhere ‘Relax, it’s just sex. He’s the leader of the country, they have mistresses, it happens get over it you uptight prudes.’
So now with Silvio Berlusconi having sex with underage prostitutes and orgies and I don’t know what-all I guess that makes Europe — and Italy in particular — about eighteen times more sophisticated [1] than us hicks in the United States and so-on and so-forth.
Y’all must be so proud.
[1] Sarcasm.
Brian Dunbar, “Sophisticated Europe”, Space for Commerce, by Brian Dunbar, 2011-04-07
April 7, 2011
Friend of Randian cultists afraid to say what he really means
The victim of Objectivist intimidation is poor little P.J. O’Rourke, who has to be very careful how he reviews Atlas Shrugged:
Atlas shrugged. And so did I.
The movie version of Ayn Rand’s novel treats its source material with such formal, reverent ceremoniousness that the uninitiated will feel they’ve wandered without a guide into the midst of the elaborate and interminable rituals of some obscure exotic tribe.
Meanwhile, members of that tribe of “Atlas Shrugged” fans will be wondering why director Paul Johansson doesn’t knock it off with the incantations, sacraments and recitations of liturgy and cut to the human sacrifice.
But that’s about as far as he dares to go, risking retribution from Randian cultists. Oh, wait . . . he does go a tiny bit further towards martyrdom after all:
But I will not pan “Atlas Shrugged.” I don’t have the guts. If you associate with Randians — and I do — saying anything critical about Ayn Rand is almost as scary as saying anything critical to Ayn Rand. What’s more, given how protective Randians are of Rand, I’m not sure she’s dead.
The woman is a force. But, let us not forget, she’s a force for good. Millions of people have read “Atlas Shruggged” and been brought around to common sense, never mind that the author and her characters don’t exhibit much of it. Ayn Rand, perhaps better than anyone in the 20th century, understood that the individual self-seeking we call an evil actually stands in noble contrast to the real evil of self-seeking collectives. (A rather Randian sentence.) It’s easy to make fun of Rand for being a simplistic philosopher, bombastic writer and — I’m just saying — crazy old bat. But the 20th century was no joke. A hundred years, from Bolsheviks to Al Qaeda, were spent proving Ayn Rand right.
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April 6, 2011
A good example of what not to crowdsource
The Guardian tried to enlist the brainpower of the crowd to solve the problems at Fukushima. As innovative as some of these solutions might be, it does demonstrate that there are things that cannot be crowdsourced:
Todd: “Build the worlds biggest tank over the whole site with pre-fab tilt slab concrete. […] I have done similar projects on a smaller scale but not with nuclear waste.”
Weston, Nuclear Radiologist: “repair the reacters befor any thing else bad happiens”
Andrew, Inventor: “water problem is un-fixable. Stop trying. Let it run off into the Pacific.”
Hugh, Geology Student: “I would use explosive materials to detach the Fukushima plant from the main land, use air-bags to float it 50km out into the pacific and then sink the whole lot 7000m down to the bottom of the Japan Trench.”
Max: “I suggest removing radioactive contamination there by using a small controlled explosion of a specially engineered nuclear device at the site of the stricken Fukushima plant”
OmegaSector: “IN FUTURE, ALL NEW NUCLEAR REACTOR MUST BE BUILT OVER A 1.2 km hole. Any out of control reactor, one press of a buttom and boom, the reactor will fail down 1.2 km and then seal up with soil.”
Denny, Assistant to Dr Strangelove: “Small scale nuclear strike.”
Kevin: “Japan has over 30,000 suicides per year — that’s over 80 per day. Since these people are planning to kill themselves anyway, how about the government asking for volunteers to go in, fix piping, visually inspect the damage, etc..?”
Not Einstein: “friendly radiation… to probably cancel out its effects. Its more like injecting good cholesterols to fight off bad ones in your body. I am not versed in these nuclear technicalities but I do understand philosophy of things, and sometimes you just need to fight fire with fire.”
Oscar. Mike. Golf.
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April 4, 2011
Tweet of the day: Charlie Sheen
Faux John Madden: Charlie Sheen has bombed in Chicago and Detroit. All that’s left is for him to bomb in Green Bay and he’s duplicated the Vikings season.
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April 1, 2011
Tor Books announces John Scalzi’s next book series
For those of you not interested in fantasy, how can you possibly resist this:
Tor Books is proud to announce the launch of John Scalzi’s new fantasy trilogy The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, which kicks off with book one: The Dead City.
Night had come to the city of Skalandarharia, the sort of night with such a quality of black to it that it was as if black coal had been wrapped in blackest velvet, bathed in the purple-black ink of the demon squid Drindel and flung down a black well that descended toward the deepest, blackest crevasses of Drindelthengen, the netherworld ruled by Drindel, in which the sinful were punished, the black of which was so legendarily black that when the dreaded Drindelthengenflagen, the ravenous blind black badger trolls of Drindelthengen, would feast upon the uselessly dilated eyes of damned, the abandoned would cry out in joy as the Drindelthengenflagenmorden, the feared Black Spoons of the Drindelthengenflagen, pressed against their optic nerves, giving them one last sensation of light before the most absolute blackness fell upon them, made yet even blacker by the injury sustained from a falling lump of ink-bathed, velvet-wrapped coal.
With the night came a storm, the likes of which the eldest among the Skalandarharians would proclaim they had seen only once before, although none of them could agree which on which one time that was; some said it was like the fabled Scouring of Skalandarharia, in which the needle-sharp ice-rain flayed the skin from the unjust of the city, provided they were outside at the time, while sparing the just who had stayed indoors; others said it was very similar to the unforgettable Pounding of Skalandarharia, in which hailstones the size of melons destroyed the city’s melon harvest; still others compared it to the oft-commented-upon Moistening of Skalandarharia, in which the persistent humidity made everyone unbearably sticky for several weeks; at which point they were informed that this storm was really nothing like that at all, to which they replied perhaps not, but you had to admit that was a pretty damn miserable time.
Which is to say: It was a dark and stormy night.
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Chinese Tiger Mom meets Irish Setter Dad
P.J. O’Rourke on Amy Chua’s recent book:
What’s all this bother about Chinese Tiger Moms? Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has America’s female parents in a swivet. You’d have to take Sarah Palin to a NOW convention to see so many ladies mad at a fellow woman. Practically a third of the Atlantic’s April issue is taken up with Caitlin Flanagan and Sandra Tsing Loh giving Amy Chua the dickens in terms strong enough for Hillary Clinton’s private thoughts on Monica Lewinsky. My wife put it more succinctly: “This person is factory farming her kids.”
I gather Ms. Chua is a total bitch with her children, making them finish homework before it’s assigned, practice violin and piano 25 hours a day, maintain a grade point average higher than Obama budget numbers, and forbidding them from doing anything they might enjoy, such as exhale.
But being a male parent with a typical dad-like involvement in my children’s lives — I know all of their names — I thought Battle Hymn was great. That is, I thought it made me look great. Not that I read the dreadful book, but I did buy each of my children a copy and inscribed it, “So you think you’ve got it bad?”
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