Albums 7, Apoptygma Berzerk 18, Moby 154, Wire 90125, Yes Songs of the Year 1921, The Who ‘39, Queen 1959, The Sisters of Mercy 1963, New Order 1981, Public Image Ltd. 1984, New Model Army 2000, Tuxedomoon Others 13, They Might Be Giants 18, Moby 39, The Cure 40, U2 9-9, R.E.M. 107, Orgy 225, New Model Army 5 8 6, New Order 1010, Ministry 6794700, Birmingham 6 6060-842, B-52s 8675309, Tommy Tutone Update, Sep. 10, 2007: Not […]
Remember back in 2005, when Sony decided it would be a smashingly brill idea to include a rootkit on one of their CDs? Well, now they’re selling USB keychain drives with built-in fingerprint scanners, and they figured it’d be totally rad to include a rootkit with that as well. As the old saying goes, subvert my […]
Remember Ted Haggard, the right-wing preacher who got busted for having sex with a male prostitute, and buying meth from him? If Bonnie Goldstein at Slate is right, he might be entering the lucrative field of financial shenanigans (a career for which his experience as a preacher prepared him well) (maybe he can share a cell […]
One of the departments at work is moving offices around, so there are piles of junk in the hallways, some of it cool, most of it not. One thing I picked up was a Gerber Variable Scale, invented by H. Joseph Gerber as a more elegant solution to an engineering problem that had originally required the […]
From an Ubuntu security advisory: After a standard system upgrade you need to restart emacs to effect the necessary changes. Details follow: Hendrik Tews discovered that emacs21 did not correctly handle certain GIF images. By tricking a user into opening a specially crafted GIF, a remote attacker could cause emacs21 to crash, resulting in a denial of service. Gosh, they make it sound […]
From Newsweek: China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.” This may seem […]
I either really really want to see this movie, or I really really don’t. I can’t tell which.
(Update, Aug. 20: John Wilkins, an honest to God philosopher, tells me in the comments that I’m wrong. So take this with a grain of salt.) For those not aware of it, John Searle’s Chinese room is an argument against the possibility of artificial intelligence. As recounted by Roger Penrose in The Empereor’s New Brain, it goes […]
I just watched PZ Meiarz’s talk about mind and brain, and listened to Ron McLeroy’s talk at his church, about the evils of materialism and evolution. I’ve also listened to Kent Hovind’s schpiel, and seen his show live. One thing that struck me—and it’s a small thing, but I think significant—is that PZ took questions during […]
Does anyone need more proof that Ron McLeroy, the newly-appointed Texas State Board of Education Chairman, is a superstitious asshat who’s out to cripple the state’s education system? Here’s what he told his church in 2005: “Whether you’re a progressive creationist, recent creationist, young-Earth, old-Earth, it’s all in the tent of intelligent design,” McLeroy said. “And […]
