Can't you keep my hand to yourself?!
Thursday, April 27
  In-between or outside?
 
  Wii wha?
This post is mine! I call it! Right, I'll put up a fancy graphic later, but for those whose only source of news and culture is Wustlog, Nintendo has just (about an hour ago) announced the name of its new console: the Wii.

I'll let that sink in.

Wii.

Thank you nintendo.



I added this picture of Nintendo's CEO so you know what he looks like when you meet him on the street and beat some sense into him with your Wii controller.
 
Wednesday, April 26
  A long-expected party

 
Tuesday, April 25
  Who wants a car that gets 150 MPG?


1300 km per tank

Only $13,000, it doesn't look too bad.

Comment if you love the Earth and think this car is the best thing ever.
Comment if you own a large oil company and want more SUV's on the road.
 
Thursday, April 20
  Dogs are stupid
Add this to the list of things that I feel terrible for laughing about but do anyway.

stupid dog video
 
Tuesday, April 18
  Ironic Deaths

Just for fun, if each of our friends died an ironic death, how would that individual die? Dictionary.com defines irony to be: A literary style employing such contrasts for humorous or rhetorical effect.

So, have fun, and leave a comment.
 
Sunday, April 16
  Pirate ninjas!! (More correctly: pirate kung-fu masters)
More about China and the West and intellectual property and Google and censorship and kungfu and pirates-versus-ninjas and really, realllly cheap DVDs.
The one phrase you hear very little of whenever China's economic potential is discussed is 'intellectual property'. This is because China is world champion in every branch of piracy known to man. I don't think there's a CD, DVD, computer game or software package that is not illicitly available for a dollar or two in virtually every town in China.

The reasoning is simple: even if the Chinese wished to respect intellectual property (a big 'if'), they simply could not do it. This is because IP requires a culture of laws and adherence to them, plus an infrastructure of courts, legal services and all the other paraphernalia of litigation and enforcement. Neither the culture nor the legal infrastructure exists in China, and it will take decades to build. Even if China's rulers wanted to transform their territory into a society which respected intellectual property, they simply could not do it on any realistic timescale.
 
Friday, April 14
  Yet another evolution-related post
From a list of myths about evolution...
We owe a great deal — indeed, literally everything — to evolution, and yet never have so many said and written so much about something they understood so poorly. Not that evolution is all that difficult to understand. Rather, so many people have such strong feelings about it, often connected to so many regrettable stock phrases, that clear thought has often been obscured. This is especially unfortunate in today's intellectual — or, more to the point, anti-intellectual — climate, with the Bush administration persistently seeking to trump science with ideology.
...
Unlike theology, with which creationists are more familiar, science is founded on ideas, discovery, testing, and refinement rather than on presumably inerrant doctrines of faith. Disputes about the details of evolutionary fine-tuning, far from undermining the validity of evolution, are testimony to the vitality of the whole enterprise, since any worthwhile science raises more questions than it answers. Accordingly there is uncertainty as to whether evolution always proceeds gradually or is punctuated by occasional bursts of change, but no question that it proceeds, and that it does so by the accumulation of genetic modifications.
Are there really so many bigoted ideologues in America that we want, as our president, a bigoted ideologue?!?! (Apparently yes.) Argh.
 
  Apple's Boot Camp is so last week
Why? Because it's been obsoleted by Parallels Workstation. Unlike Boot Camp, you have to pay for this software. But it allows you to run any OS that will work on Intel processors.

Yes, that's XP you see.

If you choose Windows, then by golly, you're in Windows. You can install and run your favorite Windows programs — speech recognition, business software, even games — and, incredibly, they run as fast and well as they ever did.

Correction: they run faster than they ever did. Most people comment that an Intel Mac runs Windows faster than any PC they've ever owned. And if the Windows side ever gets bogged down with viruses and spyware, you can flip into Mac OS X and keep right on being productive.

Parallels, like Boot Camp, requires that you supply your own copy of Windows. But here's the cool part: with Parallels, unlike Boot Camp, it doesn't have to be XP. It can be any version, all the way back to Windows 3.1 — or even Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS/2 or MS-DOS. All of this is made possible by a feature of Intel's Core Duo chips (called virtualization) that's expressly designed for running multiple operating systems simultaneously.

In the finished version, the company says, you'll be able to work in several operating systems at once. What the heck — install Windows XP three times. If one becomes virus-ridden, you can just delete it and smile.
 
Thursday, April 13
  Goooooogle Calendar
Here

But I'm still waiting for Google Spreadsheet, then I can avoid buying Office for the rest of my life! Or, at least put it off for another month..

I'm also waiting for something from Google to leave the Beta Stage......
 
  Interesting Study...
I don't know about the rest of you, but when I want to read the results of a scientific study, I first check out the Wustlog. Here's one that could be relevant to our, and our children's generation.

Link
 
Wednesday, April 12
  A MIG in every garage
From the Economist:
Strange things can turn up at Hong Kong's container port, one of the busiest in the world. On April 3rd local customs officials announced they had confiscated a military aircraft on its way through the port. Following an investigation, customs officials reported that the aircraft—the guns and engine of which had been dismantled prior to shipment—had arrived from Ukraine and was bound for America. There was no evidence of smuggling or other criminal activity, but the plane lacked a proper import licence. RTHK, a government-owned broadcaster, reported that the plane was a Russian-built MIG-29, a formidable cold war-era fighter jet flown by many countries.

The discovery has raised questions about Hong Kong’s port security, even though the port is fully compliant with stringent procedures enforced by America after September 11th 2001. This was not the first time officials have come upon military hardware at the city's Kwai Chung port. In the early hours of March 30th 2000, customs officers literally stumbled across five Soviet-built armoured personnel carriers unloaded on the docks, which may have been en route to North Korea via mainland China. These vehicles then became playground equipment at some of the city's drug rehabilitation and training centres. But what the city will do with the fighter jet is anyone's guess.
 
Monday, April 10
  It's sugar fizz-water to you, bub
I'm sure everyone has had coke-vs-soda-vs-pop argument before - it seems to be the de-facto discussion any group of people from far-flung (enough hyphens yet? I think so too) portions of the country have when they get together and start talking. Well, someone has gone and catalogued it state-by-state, county-by-county (more hyphens!). "Soda" seems to be prevalent on the coasts and, oddly, in St. Louis and Chicago. Must be a Democrat thing.
 
Saturday, April 8
  For San Francisco, free citywide Wi-Fi from Google & EarthLink
This would be so sweet.
 
  Pandora and the Music Genome Project
Lately I've really been enjoying Pandora. (By "lately" I mean since this morning when I first tried it.)

Pandora player screenshot by Foosh
Here's an excerpt from the FAQ:
Q: How do you decide what to play?

We take your input (artists, songs) and feedback ("I like this", "I don't like this") and use the Music Genome Project to create stations that play songs that are musically similar to what you've told us. That's it; only the music counts. We don't care how popular the artist is, who's backing them, and we don't care which genre bin they usually belong in. Only the music matters.

Q: How many stations can I maintain?

You can have up to 100 stations at any one time. Once you reach the maximum number of stations, you have to delete a station before you can add another one.

Q: When I give song feedback ("I really like this", "I don't like this") what happens?

The playlist that drives your station is immediately changed to take into account your preferences. The songs that play from that point on will change to reflect what you've told us about your musical tastes. This feedback will only affect your current station.

Special thanks to Shannon for telling me about this site.
 
  Obese sex machines
You're fat, lazy, and only the prospect of mating can propel you into action. But that's just fine - as long as you're an African mole rat. Your fellow colony members will even toil to support you.

They found that the industrious mole rats performed more than 95 per cent of the total work of the colony. The lazy mole rats built up their fat stores, placing a double burden on the colony - doing virtually no work, but requiring more food (Nature, vol 440, p 795).

Just one thing gets the lazy mole rats going. In the wet season, when the soil is moist and soft, they go into overdrive, digging burrows to help them strike out and reproduce, possibly mating with other colonies or even founding colonies of their own.
 
Thursday, April 6
  On life support....

South Park wins Peabody Award
Primitive animation is part of the charm of TV's boldest, most politically incorrect satirical series. Its simple style also makes possible the show's unmatched topicality.
 
Tuesday, April 4
  POLL!!!!!
Why don't you leave comments?
Because I HATE YOU!
I don't have time
I'm apathetic
Big Brother is watching me
I don't have anything interesting to say (LIES!)
Anti-establishment feelings cause me to reject the man/woman/the machine/carbon based life form/silicon based dead forms
Other? Please LEAVE A COMMENT IF YOU SELECT THIS!
  
Free polls from Pollhost.com
 
Saturday, April 1
  April fool's jokes
An overwhelmingly long list of April fool's jokes/hoaxes on internet.
 
  For the Mad Scientist in All of Us...


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