I cannot possibly understand

This is weird. It defies any further adjectives. It has to do with federal agents and demented pigeons.

Google once again forces me to praise them

It's pretty ridiculous when there's such a huge ratio of "things I like about a huge corporation" to "things I dislike about same corporation". I'm speaking, of course, of Google. In the dislike column, there's that censorship bit most notable in China, and...I'm sure there are some other things. In the other column, there's pretty much everything else: their searches, e-mail, what they've done with Blogger, Google Books, Maps, and their breath-of-fresh-air approach to web design, amongst other things.

And now this, which is fairly impractical but really frickin awesome. It's only applicable to a few US cities so far, but basically, you can now get a street-level picture of many streets in those cities. I can now sit at my computer in New Mexico and 'walk' down the streets of Manhattan. It's somewhere between simply clicking through a series of static images and an actual animation. But it's fairly revolutionary, pretty useless, and - again - really awesome.

New Yorkers...

His latest campaign tactic apparently inspired by some manner of wild, predatory animal, Giuliani is simply going to chew his competitors' heads off. Literally:

Dear jeebus.

Worst ways to wake up:

Anyone who's ever had a dog or cat knows the annoyances of a sudden quadrupedal visitor in the night. "Fido, go away, I'm sleeping," you mutter grumpily as he tries to burrow into your bed.

Then you wake up a teeny bit more and realize it's not Fido or Fluffy but rather a wild leopard.

Huh. Well, that's certainly a way to jump-start your day with a kick of adrenaline.

Aaargh

I have very sensitive eyes. I also have fairly bad allergies. This means that finding contact lens solution that doesn't in some way irritate my eyes has taken some work. A few months after getting contacts I found one brand that not only didn't make my eyes burn every morning, but actually made my lenses more comfortable.

Then they stopped making it because it caused people to go blind.

So, back to buying overpriced small bottles* and seeing what worked. I finally found a suitable replacement.

Which is now being recalled because it makes people go blind.

Pardon me while I bang my head against this wall here...

McControversy ahoy

The Oxford English Dictionary has added 'McJob' to its text, defining it as "an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects". It is, of course, a word derived from the ubiquitous fast-food chain and the fact that working there is, well, unstimulating, low-paid, and doesn't have many prospects for advancement.

McDonalds is now circulating a petition trying to get the OED to change the definition, saying it's outdated and insulting to wage-slaves service-industry professionals. A few points come to mind here:

1. That's not the way the OED works, you grease-addled doofs! From the OED's website:

As the OED is a historical dictionary, its entry structure is very different from that of a dictionary of current English, in which only present-day senses are covered, and in which the most common meanings or senses are described first. For each word in the OED, the various groupings of senses are dealt with in chronological order according to the quotation evidence, i.e. the senses with the earliest quotations appear first, and the senses which have developed more recently appear further down the entry. In a complex entry with many strands, the development over time can be seen in a structure with several 'branches'.

Yeah. So even if that definition of "McJob" is outdated...that's the bloody point! It's not a normal dictionary, it's the dictionary, and the intent is not just to define words but to illustrate what they meant x years ago!

2. It's insulting to current 'McJobbers'? Because they're...what, unaware that their job is shit? Look, unless they've grown up completely cut off from society and now are on their first day on the job, anyone working in a number of industries understands that their job, 99% of the time, is shit. Food service, retail, customer service, call centers...these aren't jobs that most people truly want. The pay is low, the work is often demeaning, and you need to deal with the sweaty masses. So, sure, a select few chose it as a career (eg, I'm certain that the waitstaff at Le Bec Fin in Philly are not high-school students looking to earn enough to buy a Wii), but come on. Must we lie in order to be obscenely polite?

3. In 67 years, McDonalds has become one of the largest corporations in the world, has probably the highest name-recognition of any brand ever, and essentially owns the fast-food market in absolutely any country where the idea of fast food exists. An entry in a dictionary is not going to harm that.

Here we go again

Breaking news: some people are crazy idiots.

OK, so according to Wikipedia, there's somewhere between 900 million to 1.4 billion followers if Islam in the world. The CIA says that about 1% of Americans are Muslim, which comes out to about 3,011,399 Muslims in America. For the record, that's about .33% or less of the Muslim population in the world.

Out of those three million, let's interview just over a thousand of them. We'll ask them broadly-phrased questions about, essentially, whether violent acts 'often' are justified to defend someone's deeply-held faith.

Predictably, there will be a few crazies. Please note that a quarter of the population surveyed winds up being slightly over 250 people.

Oh god, run for the hills! In a hypothetical survey, 250 people out of a population of three million said that they feel violence is often justified! We're all DOOMED!

Or alternately it's a somewhat flawed survey being published under a hysterical, sensationalist headline.

Out of idle curiosity, I wonder what the results of a similar survey of Christians would reveal. Hmm.

Karma in a New York minute...

Step one: rob jewelry store.

Step two: flee on bicycle.

Step three: get hit by a bus.

Oh, for the love of whatever non-benevolant deity!

Fred Phelps and his clan of lunatics are planning on protesting at Jerry Falwell's funeral.

This makes me feel odd and indecisive.

On the one hand: I don't like either of them and think that they both are (to slightly different degrees) idiotic, bigoted assholes who use a position of authority to teach hatred and encourage injustice. While I'm not rejoicing at Falwell's death - the man had a family, and rejoicing at a death of someone you didn't know personally if rather crude - I'm certainly not shedding any tears. Similarly, if Phelps were to get, say, stabbed in the heart with one of his picket signs, I wouldn't be particularly upset. The fewer screaming, bible-waving, religious zealots, the better.

On the other hand: Oh come on, you're making me feel something like sympathy for Jerry Falwell? How is this happening?

Falwell, in case you've forgotten, is the guy who went on TV shortly after September 11, 2001, and said that the death of several thousand people was God's punishment. Why is God punishing us? Because of feminism and abortions and homosexuals, mostly.

Personally I think that the best way to resolve this issue would be for Phelps (and his followers, please) to also die. Then they're no longer our problem, and they can duke it out for eternity in whatever fairlyland the Booming Voice in the Sky sends them to. Good riddance.

Heh

It's not funny as in comedic, but there's a certain amusement to reading about firetrucks being destroyed in, you know, a fire.

Hello, government!

Happy Dubiously-Legal and Morally-Reprehensible Wiretapping Day! Hope all the friendly little ISPs out there have just bent over and taken it from the government without argument.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to contemplate whether America's wiretapping or Britain's omnipresent CCTV systems are more frightening.

New Jersey considers another stupid move

The government of my fine home state is considering requiring all pregnant women and newborn babies to be tested for HIV.

On the one hand the idea has a certain merit. HIV is bad. They have incredible drugs these days that can drastically improve lives, especially if started early. If a woman is pregnant and doesn't know she has HIV, testing may possibly change her mind about keeping the child (meaning either putting it up for adoption or abortion).

On the other hand...I really dislike the government meddling in people's medical records. Your health and medical treatment should be an issue between you and your doctor. I think that there's a gross discrepancy in our government's attitude towards healthcare as it currently is: they require certain vaccinations and preventative care for children, but there's no absolute guarantee that the children will get that. Yes, most states have clinics and offer certain options for low-income families. But whenever I read about things like this I can't shake the impression of the government basically saying 'Do this, and good luck paying for it'.

Flying

"I'm sorry miss, you can't bring that lotion on the plane with you. It may be a bomb."

"Fine, whatever. Take it."

"We'll be donating it to a homeless shelter."

"..."

(via BoingBoing)

Two things I have learned today:

1. Wikipedia has a category page for forks.

2. It takes a relatively short amount of time of looking at it before "fork" begins to look wrong as a word.

Ahahahaha

A fight broke out at the first Boston Pops concert.

Hee. I think I appreciate this even more having watched a short documentary about Stravinsky's Rite of Spring this morning.

Oh god

I really don't know what in the world this is all about, but it's...hypnotic.

Heh.

This week's The Onion has me giggling like a complete fool.

Here I shall make known the true depths of my geekitude

Around an hour and a half into the movie V for Vendetta, the two main police inspectors charged with hunting the terrorist meet with someone. There is a monologue nicely recapping a few decades of strife that England has endured; it's overlaid with a montage of various media clips reporting on these various disasters.

I once took a film class in which it was pointed out - as a complete aside and something I'm sure most people immediately forgot - that often, movies and TV shows will print up dummy newspapers as props. They don't want to bother, or simply can't get, the right to show an actual newspaper or what have you, so they'll make their own. If parts of text will be shown it more often than not will be random phrases interspersed with seemingly-relevant words. After all, very few movie watchers are depraved enough to get a copy on DVD and then pause when there's a clear close-up of a paper and read the articles.

The punchline, of course, is that I am one of the few who does this, and I admit somewhat compulsively. So, at 1:30:44 in V for Vendetta, there is a shot of a newspaper. The text of the visible article is taken, verbatim, from this special report on multiculturalism from The Guardian. It's entirely irrelevant to the current monologue (though, granted, not really the theme of the film), and I think the world must know this.

Now I'm going to finish the movie. I'm sure that the fact that I'm watching a movie, see a shot of a newspaper, and thus pause the movie, read what I can of the article, and Google it says about me, but I'm fairly certain it's not an affirmative statement.

Updated: The next shot (also of a newspaper) bears the same article under a different head and photo. That same shot has the same text, different head repeated in the left column. The far right column is text plucked from here: also a Guardian story, this one about Hull University closing it's math department. Curiously, the film plucks out the lede from both stories. Apparently someone in the props department for this movie was a Guardian reader, which just makes me like the movie even more. (OK, I'm going to watch a movie like a normal person now.)

Nice thought, anyway

There's absolutely no chance of it actually working, but on paper, Mogadishu now has a better, more sensible gun-control policy than almost anywhere in America.

Mogadishu, as in 'violent conflict for several decades now'. As in 'Black Hawk Down' took place there. As in 'vile, disaster-torn hellhole'.

Yeah. They now have more gun control than we do. And I think something's a little bit off about that.

The inflammatory comments write themselves

The Times has a piece about the increasing religiosity of American university students.

My initial reaction is: "Ugh." Not because of the subject matter, but because it seems every few weeks someone trots out a new survey about what kids these days are up to and, generally, it's from a ridiculously small sample set. It's absurd to draw conclusions about an entire generation from a survey of a couple thousand people. For this they surveyed over 112,000 college freshmen, which is another problem: freshmen, by and large, have a very different view of the world than someone three or four years their senior.

Then there's this, which...uh, I'll just let you imagine my response:

Peter J. Gomes has been at Harvard University for 37 years, and says he remembers when religious people on campus felt under siege. To be seen as religious often meant being dismissed as not very bright, he said.

Heh.

Anyway, this is one of my favorite paragraphs:

University officials explained the surge of interest in religion as partly a result of the rise of the religious right in politics, which they said has made questions of faith more talked about generally. In addition, they said, the attacks of Sept. 11 underscored for many the influence of religion on world affairs. And an influx of evangelical students at secular universities, along with an increasing number of international students, means students arrive with a broader array of religious experiences.

...yes, I certainly want a piece of the religiosity that drove a dozen whack-jobs to murder a few thousand people in the name of God. Wait, what? Yes, for a lot of Americans, those attacks did reveal that there are some non-Christian religious crazies out there (I draw the distinction solely because America is no stranger to Christian fanatics), and that...makes people go to church more? Okay, if you say so.

Anyway, it's an interesting read. I'm particularly fond of the viewpoint that several quoted people express, that students are fairly universally yearning for the "certainty" that comes from organized religion. I also like the way it focuses almost exclusively on Christianity, because everyone knows that that's what real people are...