Question

“Why did Australia get all the convicts and America get all the religious nuts?”

Answer

“Australia got first choice.”

There’s this crossword puzzle online. It’s from the Ludington Daily News, a newspaper in Michigan. There are a lot of crossword puzzles online — the New York Newsday is a pretty good one, with a Saturday Stumper from hell.

The “Lud” is different. It breaks every crossword puzzle rule in the book. It never has a theme. And it mixes hard and easy clues in a way like no other crossword I’ve ever seen. Some of the somewhat easier ones include gems like:

1. Set again
2. Woody plant
3. Leg joint
4. Foot... [More]

I know I’ve seen this one before, but I got this via email and was kind of struck by some of these numbers (highlighted below).

If we could shrink the earth’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following*:

In My Plea to John Kerry by Michael Moore, Moore’s take on Nader, for whom he worked in the 2000 campaign is this:

“And what I and others try to explain to Ralph before he decided to run is that you already did your job. The Democratic Party of 2004 is not the Democratic Party of 2000. the threat, the threat that you posed in 2000, they got the message. And it was carried on by Howard dean and Dennis Kucinich and others in this year. And they helped push the Democrats toward where the majority of Americans that... [More]”

Rules for Being Republican (Democracy Means You)

It’s a cheap shot, but what the hell.

Since the author’s unknown, I figure the site just copy/pasted from an email. So I reprinted it in its entirety.

1. You must believe that being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you are millionaire conservative radio jock, which makes it an “illness” and requires our prayers for your “recovery”.
2. You have to truly believe that people, who are privileged from birth, achieve success all on their own.
3. You have to... [More]

Here’s a collection of my favorite Daily Show clips from the last couple of weeks. Each one has a link to the clip (Real Player) and list of my favorite quotes from it underneath.

Conventional Wisdom

Conventional Wisdom, Talking Points, Acquired Opinions: it’s how you learn stuff in today’s magical media age. Why think? Regurgitating thoughts other people had is easier.

“Conventional wisdom is the agreed-upon interpretation by the media: it’s not important that it’s true, just that it’s... [More]”

PC Magazine Reviews Firefox, Opera (Slashdot) is a discussion about Firefox, for the most part. Several times during the discussion, people praise the Extension Manager in Firefox.

It’s not enough.

To really take off, this Extension Manager is an excellent base. However, if you visit the site and see the jungle of plugins that await you, you’re a fool if you think “most” people are willing to wade through it to configure their browser. Programmers and geeks love it. “Most” people will not.

Here’s the... [More]

Star Trek Flat affords you a look into a world few know: geek interior design.

What do you do if you’ve got a lot of time on your hands, considerable do-it-yourself skills, a bunch of cash and no friends in sight?

When you’re done, you try to sell it (EBay) for a million bucks and see if you can find a rich, lazy geek who wants to live in England.

I was going to name the article, “How not to get laid in... [More]

Benchmarks

The official benchmarks have been released by id. id Software’s Official DOOM3 Benchmarks (HardOCP) covers it in detail, showing you that if your card was purchased in the last year, you can probably play the game at high quality. Let’s get the recommendation out of the way:

“There is no way for a $500 [ATI] X800XT-PE to compete with a $400 [NVidia] 6800GT when the GT is simply going to outperform the more expensive card by a good margin. … for those of you that are in the high end video... [More]”

This Land is Your Land is good Flash; Flash put to a better purpose than burning out your retinas with advertising. It’s a parody of the Woody Guthrie song that rips Bush, Kerry, the US Media, US consumerism (the part with the Native American and the Walmarts popping up like mushrooms was funny). Check it out for a good laugh.

If you have trouble downloading it, try it here at The Land is Your Land (local copy). They, of course, have a little copyright infringement thing with the owners of... [More]

In Praise of Unruly Women by Arianna Huffington (AlterNet) talks about Theresa Heinz Kerry, who sounds far more interesting than her husband. In it, she hammers the patriarchal attitude of American media, most starkly pointed up in Newsweek’s cover: “Is John Kerry’s Heiress Wife a Loose Cannon or Crazy Like a Fox?”

The pre-approved talking points about her are either about her hair or about how she pretty much forgets a woman’s place.

Right now you’re probably relatively familiary with her response to a journalist of “Shove it!”.... [More]

Todd Hollenshead’s .plan (Shack News) has the full announcement. It shows up in the US anywhere between the 3rd and 5th of August, Europe on Friday, August the 13th and … everywhere in Russia and Asia probably around August 1st or so.

PC Gamer has a review of one of the last few release candidates of Doom 3, and there are illegal copies of the text floating around, like this one: PCGamer Review − September 2004 Issue − 94% (NV News). id has stuck to their promise to make a better gaming experience and “those... [More]”

Wouldn’t it be great to catch Bush on TV, finally, as a poster to Bush Delivers Speech On Iraq − Solutions Or Politics?

“You know, just once I’d like to hear the guy thank us for paying for all of this.”

One of the comments to the Plastic article, Pronunciation of Abu Ghraib starts off:

“Okay, it’s not exactly a national secret that George W. Bush doesn’t have the greatest diction. … Furthermore, there are rarely hard and fast rules about the proper pronunciation in English of words and names... [More]”

So I’d found that I’d stayed up late enough the other night to catch the Daily Show International Edition (CNN pushed it out to 1:30 here) and I saw about 5 minutes of headlines, before CNN broke in with breaking news.

The breaking news was watching the 747 carrying Reagan’s casket trundle up a runway. For ten minutes. Approximately every 2 minutes, the female announcer would let us know that “you are watching the plane carrying former President Ronald Reagan’s body taxi up the runway” as if it... [More]

There are two most amazing things about the Half-Life 2 case modification, Blackmesa HL² by piloux, documented here.

1. This is the first modification that I would consider a work of art. The attention to detail is really amazing. The person who made it must have really had a blast making it. They’re also bound to get a lot of attention at LAN parties.
2. This news was posted on Slashdot this morning. The page, including images, weighs in at 1.5MB. The server it’s on never faltered. Go to it now... [More]

The Anybody-but-Bush/Kerry campaign is getting more strident and acquiring more adherents with each passing day. The core question that they seem to think doesn’t even need answering (on account of how evil Bush is) is: ‘Is Kerry going to be a better President for the majority of Americans?’ That’s the difficult question tackled by With Friends Like These by Mickey Z (CounterPunch).

Kerry’s not Nader

If he is, then you should vote for him, right? I mean, there are people who are more than just mentally suffering under... [More]

The FCC Song by Eric Idle (MP3) is the first I’ve heard from him in a while … and he’s mad. He’s got an official announcement on his web site. The lyrics are available in full and here’s a little sample (just to show you it’s not work safe).

“Fuck you very much the FCC.
Fuck you very much for fining me.
$5,000 bucks a fuck, So I’m really out of luck.
Thats more than Heidi Fleiss was charging me!
So fuck you very much the FCC.
For proving that free speech just isn’t free!
Clear Channels a dear... [More]”

US Historians are so adorable when they talk about world history. So, How Do We Get Out Of Iraq, Guys? addresses a “novel idea” for withdrawing from Iraq, proposed by John Kiesling. It basically involves picking the guy we want to rule Iraq and pulling him into power by “ced[ing] him tactical, positional victories while denying them to his competitors”. Propping up dictators is something we’ve done dozens of times before — usually we aren’t directly in competition though. Usually, this is the... [More]

In a discussion on Plastic about Baptists potentially removing their children from public school in droves, One thing I don’t understand about Plastic was rated ‘Brilliant’ for saying said that:

“What most parents are trying to get through homeschooling is not a better education but one that more closely fits their own ideology, even to the point of downright denial of facts and the censorship of ideas. For the sake of their ideology they exclude knowledge, which is a harm to the child.”

... [More]

Version 3 of the Unreal Engine is in development. Tim Sweeney on UE3 (Beyond Unreal) has the latest info on it, direct from the lead developer/architect. He’s been involved since the first version which ran Unreal; the second version ran Unreal Tournament and UT2003. Since this engine is aimed at the kind of machine that will be “mainstream in 2006”, some of the numbers being tossed around are pretty formidable.

Sweeney offered no answer when asked how much space a game that uses “2k by 2k” everywhere might take... [More]

Koenigsegg is a Swedish supercar company that you’ve probably never heard of. They make the CCR1, the beautiful orange car to the left, which goes from 0-100km in 3.2 seconds and tops out at “395+ km/h (242+ mph)”. It reaches “806 HP at 5900 RPM” for maximum power output. Being European, it doesn’t even guzzle gas to the extreme amount you would expect — about normal for an American car (“13 l/100 km” (about 20MPG highway) — see A gallon of gas for info on Euro/US conversion). There are a lot... [More]

I was asked recently for my impressions of Of memory and our democracy by Colin Powell (USA Today). I presume the person asking wanted to know how I would react to such obviously cogent and convincing arguments put forth by such a preeminent thinking such as Mr. Powell. The thing is, once you read it objectively, you have to wonder whether he even wrote the damned thing at all. Or if it matters.

The article itself is a puff-piece mouthing oft-quoted myths that are readily absorbed by a cowed, brainwashed public. This is... [More]

I got an email recently with a rather interesting suggestion: change the emblem of the United States from an “eagle to a condom because it more accurately reflects the government’s political stance”. Why is it better?

“A condom stands up to inflation, halts production, destroys the next generation, protects a bunch of pricks, and gives you a sense of security while you’re actually being screwed.”

While you’re probably nodding your head in agreement, and, perhaps, wonderment that the government... [More]

Look on the bright side. Each staggering step the US takes towards certain Armageddon is at least always accompanied by an opportunity to engage in some serious “Schadenfreude” when Bush gets trapped on the White House lawn by a pack of reporters. Or maybe he’s flushed out from cover by a serious enough scandal that he’s forced to make some form of official statement.

That’s when the whole flustered, fumbling, repetitive, seriously talking-pointed, single-minded (or no-minded?), redundant... [More]

Leave it to the Japanese to come up with a super-efficient way of folding a T-Shirt and then putting the demonstration to video game music. This technique may revolutionize the way some of you do laundry.

UML is bandied about so much these days that it’s considered by many to be standard. It’s standardized, but to be standard it’s got to be in use almost everywhere. Everywhere important, at least. Domain-Specific Modeling and Model Driven Architecture by Steve Cook (PDF) assures us that we who feel uncomfortable with UML’s claims to universality are, in fact, in good company.

Where I work, we do pretty much pure object-oriented designs; every once in a while someone dares put an aspect of our design into UML... [More]

The undying myth of the forefathers

Do You Recognize Bush’s America? by Arriana Huffington (AlterNet) contains a lot of good, hard information about the Bush administration, covering the massive contradictions in policy versus pablum that should be evident to any 10-year-old, but evidently escapes most Americans (though, to be fair, they miss it because of the paucity of real information provided by criminally negligent media).

Then she ends the article with:

“The guiding principle behind George Bush’s rebooted Democracy is... [More]”

Long-time earthli News reader, Nico Michael, participated in the filming of a short political feature as told in Film lets N.Y.ers drop a dollar on President (NY Daily News). The “15-minute film” is sponsored by “a nonprofit group that distributes films promoting social causes and human rights” and simply shows people sending their opinions to the White House via public phone.

If you dare step away from the video card world for more than a few months, you find, on returning, whole new vistas of acronyms, bandwidths, core-speeds, registers, pipelines and “technologies” waiting to eat you alive. The latest cards from the two top vendors, ATI and NVidia, are lining up to play tomorrow’s games at 1600x1200 with 8x Anti-aliasing and all effects on high. Quake 3 doesn’t even make a dent — assume it runs at 300FPS with everything on.

Radeon X800 XT

ATI’s latest card,... [More]

So in Iraq the US has what many call a Vietnam. There are a lot of parallels you can draw between the two wars and a lot of people are doing so. They’re the ones using the word “quagmire” a lot. It’s a detrimental term meant to reflect poorly on the one caught in the “quagmire” (the US). It also serves to dehumanize the opponent as a sucking force from which the US should disentangle itself before more harm comes to it. The harm inflicted on the country being called the quagmire is implicitly... [More]