Sunday, March 30, 2008

I didn't really find Wired's Top Ten April Fools Pranks for Nerds that interesting, but the video they posted for #3 is hilarious! I would love to see the return of creative computer viruses, and not just a bunch of code that eats data. Come on, people, that's been done to death.
Tim Harford writes in Reason Magazine about why poor countries are poor. The short answer? A corrupt government creates corruption all the way down the line.
The corruption is not only unfair; it is also hugely wasteful. Gendarmes spend their time harassing travelers in return for modest returns. The costs are enormous. An entire police force is too busy extracting bribes to catch criminals. A four-hour trip takes five hours. Travelers take costly steps to protect themselves: carrying less money, traveling less often or at busier times of the day, bringing extra paperwork to help fend off attempts to extract bribes.

The blockades and crooked police officers comprise a particularly visible form of corruption, but there are metaphorical roadblocks throughout the Cameroonian economy. To set up a small business, an entrepreneur must spend on official fees nearly as much as the average Cameroonian makes in two years. To buy or sell property costs nearly a fifth of the property's value. To get the courts to enforce an unpaid invoice takes nearly two years, costs more than a third of the invoice's value, and requires 58 separate procedures. These ridiculous regulations are good news for the bureaucrats who enforce them. Every procedure is an opportunity to extract a bribe. The slower the standard processes, the greater the temptation to pay "speed money."
It's a long article, but very informative. I really liked how he tied all the pieces together, and how surely the rot of bad government will reach into practically every aspect of its peoples' lives.
Jason Kottke has some interesting links to the New York Times and NPR on cooking with food from 99 cent stores -- including a cookbook!

To bypass the NYT registration, you may wish to use a service like BugMeNot.
CDNN ran a story on the sex life of the giant squid. And while it's interesting, it's interesting mostly for this comment here:
But having such a big penis does have one drawback: it seems that co-ordinating eight legs, two feeding tentacles and a huge penis, whilst fending off an irate female, is a bit too much to ask, and one of the two males stranded on the Spanish coast had accidentally injected himself with sperm packages in the legs and body. And this does not seem to have been an isolated incident since two of the eight males that had stranded in the north-east Atlantic before had also accidentally inseminated themselves.
(Via BoingBoing.)
The Morning News has a great post that takes famous song lyrics and puts the words in alphabetical order. I've only done half so far, because it's fun and I want to devote a good amount of time to it.
5. 9 a all american amusement an and are at baby back be beach beyond bold bones born boulevard boys break broken but cages can ’cause chrome-wheeled comb come could ’cross day death die don’t down dream dreams drive drones drop engines everlasting everybody’s feels four friend from fuel-injected get girl girls glory go gonna gotta guard hair hands hard hemi-powered heroes hide highway highway’s how huddled i i’ll i’m if in is it it’s jammed just kids kiss know last-chance left legs let like line live lonely look love machines madness mansions me mirrors mist my n never night no of oh on one ooh out over palace park place power rap real really rearview ride rider rims rips rises road ’round run runaway sadness scared scream so someday soul sprung stark steppin’ strap streets suicide sun sweat that the their then there’s these this three through till to together tonight town tramps trap try two us velvet visions walk wanna we we’ll we’re wendy were when where while whoa wild will wire with wrap you young your
Like all good on teh intarwebs, it's from the delightfully kooky mind of Matt Baldwin. (Thanks, Tamara!)

Monday, March 17, 2008

This is a really, really cool picture of Chicago at night.
I loves me some Star Wars parody. This magnificently awful (read: Sweded) version of A New Hope is a masterpiece! (via BoingBoing)

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Maximum PC employs a few audio "experts" to see if compressed MP3 files make a big difference to sound quality.
With the possible exception of the USB Key that survived a washing and drying cycle, no other Maximum PC Challenge has ever surprised us as much as this one. It’s downright humiliating, in fact, that in many cases, we were unable to tell the difference between an uncompressed track and one encoded at 160Kb/s, the bit rate most of us considered the absolute minimum acceptable for even portable players.
They also come out pretty solidly in favour of variable bitrate encoding, which I'm sure is no big surprise to anyone.
Israelis are suing their government for laser cannons. It sounds like something out of science fiction, but there is a working laser cannon in storage in New Mexico, and the Israelis want it. The hell?! When did we get laser cannons?

Monday, March 10, 2008

A new study suggests that Daylight Savings Time is actually worse for the environment. Up yours, Bob Hughes. Now can we finally put this debate to rest?
"There is a reason we continue to get daylight savings under the rubric of energy conservation because as a policy, it costs individual consumers nothing and asks them to conserve nothing. So it's wildly popular," he says.

"Unfortunately, it's entirely ineffective."

Previous studies on daylight savings have had similar findings. But most have been based on simulation models, not concrete data. An exception was a study on the extension of daylight savings in two Australian territories for the 2000 Summer Olympic Games, which showed more electricity used.

Monday, March 03, 2008

Discover lists 14 different distributed computing applications that use extra processor cycles for other purposes. I've been using the SETI@Home client for over 10 years, but there are other projects that are a bit more personal, like Folding@Home, FightAIDS@Home, and the Help Defeat Cancer Project.
BBC News has a brief eulogy for Netscape Navigator. I started using Mosaic early in 1994, and migrated to Netscape almost as soon as it was released. Those were heady times, where platform choice was less about using an efficient tool and more about being on the side of everything good and wholesome. It was a sad day when the mighty Netscape, who once stood toe-to-toe with Microsoft, was sold to AOL. We should have known that the good guys only win in the movies.

There's more on Netscape at Wikipedia.
Wired has 10 interesting science videos showing a number of weird chemical reactions.