1. Mexican border fence being built “for national security” mysteriously stops at edges of property owned by golf courses and billionaire Bush donors.
2. RIP, Gary Gygax. I spent most of 1985 in your Tomb of Horrors, and I thank you for it.
3. David Pogue with a brilliant medley about the music and video industry. Same video embedded below from YouTube; the link is to the TED video feed.

4. Google map of presidential primaries. Gotta love a popular vote difference of 0.013%.
5. Statistical data from the United Nations now available online.
6. Confidential military data repeatedly sent to British tourism site. Solution: British tourism site voluntarily shuts itself down because USAF won’t stop.
7. Bruce Schneier brilliantly discusses the flaws in the “transparent society” model with a review of inherent power dynamics:
   

   You’re stopped by a police officer, who demands to see identification. Divulging your identity will give the officer enormous power over you: He or she can search police databases using the information on your ID; he or she can create a police record attached to your name; he or she can put you on this or that secret terrorist watch list. Asking to see the officer’s ID in return gives you no comparable power over him or her.

1. Can Cheeseburger-in-a-Can possibly be any good? “No. Oh dear sweet shrieking Lord, no.”
2. Sigma Phi Epsilon clearly does not give their brothers enough to do. But the big question: what happens when the iPhone hits 10,000 hours? They didn’t check? Wusses.
3. Who do you want answering the phone at 3 AM? Brilliant spoof of Clinton ad.
4. $31 million stolen from airport baggage while under TSA watch. Can we just give up on the whole “TSA keeps us safe” thing now? If criminals can take things out of the bags, then criminals can put things into the bags.
5. Note to thieves: if you must rob a community organization, try to avoid bikers.
6. The Billboard Liberation Front today announced a major new advertising improvement campaign executed on behalf of clients AT&T and the National Security Agency. Focusing on billboards in the San Francisco area, this improvement action is designed to promote and celebrate the innovative collaboration of these two global communications giants.

   

   Billboard Liberation Front web site highly recommended for its uncanny spoof of marketing firms.

7. I think I’ve neglected to mention the excellent webcomic Basic Instructions. This is excerpted from December 12th, “How to Destroy Society”; collect them all!

   

Dada, thy name is Jim Davis: Garfield strips without the cat. Humorous if you enjoy laughing at the pathetic.

While I’m thinking about comic strips, A Friend Who Shall Not Be Named pointed me in the direction of the highly disturbing Sexy Losers comic strip. No, really, I mean it. Highly disturbing. But this relatively tame joke about incest is the most amusing thing I’ve read all year.

It’s all over, folks; a Diebold computer error has released the 2008 election results (according to The Onion). “This country is based on the fantasy that the government is the voice of the people.”

919,000 “suspected terrorists” on government watch lists. And growing.

Iraq war causes sub-prime crisis? Can’t say as I understand it, but then again, Joseph Stiglitz has a Nobel in economics, and he said so. But $3 trillion, or about 60 times more that Bush said it would cost when he was (literally) selling the war? That I understand. How many more times will we be forced to ask, “incompetence or malfeasance?”

Experimental 16.4 terabit per second fiber network created over a distance of 1,500 miles. Jesus. That’s my entire 120 gig hard drive in 0.06 seconds. Human eyeblink: 0.3 seconds.

Most of my readers won’t understand this, but those that do will find this hysterical, as I do: “GLTerminal emulates a 1970’s terminal monitor, complete with flaws in brightness, warped display curvature, and flicker. It even simulates baud rate lag. And! for extra verisimilitude, the character colors can be green or amber.”

The Onion: Dangerous idiom shortage strikes. “Citizens in the South and West have been hit by the dearth of idioms like babies bite the bedpost. Unless something is done before long to dry out the cinnamon jars, residents of Texas may soon cease speaking altogether.”

Introducing the bacon cheese baconburger: the “burger” being made of over a pound of ground bacon. I’d cast aspersions at such a meal, but it’s not that long since I had a boarburger with a side of poutine.

If you’re looking for reasons to commit hari-kari by baconburger, try listening to more country music. “[Stack and Gundlach’s] model explains 51% of the variance in urban white suicide rates.”

If you feel like having your mind nicely blown, check out these astronomical photos taken this year. I like the astral comet with the 13 light-year tail, myself. But the pictures of the dark matter really do take the cake.

Take your pick of goofy headline: “YouTube Inspires Schmuck to Risk Own Life”, or “Schmuck Has Entirely the Wrong Name to Work at Dunkin’ Donuts”.

If you ever meet someone claiming to be a “multi-touch engineer”, no, that’s not a euphemism. Although it damn well should be.

Drexel: the ugliest campus in America. But a great source for orange bricks, if you have a sledgehammer handy.