| Joe Kissell has a few words to say about Bavarian beers, but the part I liked best was:
Anheuser-Busch is now selling a beer with caffeine, guarana, and ginseng (not to mention fruit flavors). That is a prime example of a beverage that, whatever its merits may be (and I can barely imagine), should not be permitted to call itself beer.
Which reminded me of one of my more mortifying moments on the road, when after deriding the very American tourists at the trendy Berlin bar for their ludicrous choice of beverage (depicted at right), I ordered a Berliner Weisse and got the same damn thing. In a crystal goblet. |
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Word geekery: toast
From Interesting Thing of the Day, a history of toasting. The drinking kind, not the gooey marshmallow kind. Reminds me of how the handshake has lived longer than the wearing of the swords that engendered it.
An historic day
April 17, 2005: I set a new personal record. Five visits to four Starbucks in two states, and an indie shop afterwards.
dNext’s found video of GWB
Next time you have 60 seconds to spare, check out Hi, I’m ah… hello? at dNext. Satfeed of GWB as he puts together… well, hell, it’s almost impossible to figure out what he’s trying to do here. But it’s nice to know that he’s having a good time.
Essential life skills test, question #497
You are replacing a bulb in a standing halogen floor lamp that you’ve had since forever. You purchase a replacement bulb and find that it is several millimeters too long for the fixture; the original bulb broke coming out and cannot be used for comparison. Not only is there no manual for the lamp, but there’s not even a manufacturer’s name. It’s after midnight, you just woke up a friend to borrow his Phillips screwdriver, and you want to get this done now.
Do you:
- Research the Internet for an hour to determine the standard lengths in common use for halogen fixtures;
- find that the two possible lengths are 118 mm and 78 mm;
- double-check the Imperial length of 40 mm, just to be sure;
- resolve that there’s no way this lamp needs a 78 mm, that’s too short;
- scour the lamp for identifying marks;
- find the Underwriters Laboratories sticker;
- search the Internet to see if there’s a public database of UL registrations;
- having found one, plug in every number off the sticker until you find the right one;
- trace the registration to a company in Kowloon, Hong Kong;
- search the Internet for that company;
- find their American offices in Miami;
- click every link on the site looking for a PDF manual;
- and not finding one, write down their 800 number to call in the morning.
- Press lightly down on the contact point for the bulb and find that there’s plenty of give, allowing you to install the bulb in five seconds.
- Do 1 first, then 2, then feel like biggest schmuck in history.
They’re atoms, they’re just made up of empty space
Great interview on Kojo today with Jon Ronson, author of The Men Who Stare at Goats. RealPlayer, jump ahead to minute 33 or so.
New area code for Ohio: 419
Oh, this is priceless:
I am Mr. Joseph Abudulkarim Adisa, associate to TOM NOE, who is a prominent figure in the governing party of OHIO and Chairman of the U.S. Mint’s Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee. Our rare coin company was entrusted with 50 (FIFTY) million dollars of public money since 1998, which we have used to buy various quantities of nickels, half-dollars, and gold dollars to sell to collectors or lose in the mail.
In case you’re missing the reference, this is a true story.
Addendum, 4/18/05 3:29 AM: Bizarre. I had no idea that 419 is an Ohio area code. I was referring to this.
Bright on Dworkin
Susie Bright, of all people, checks in with a brilliant eulogy of Andrea Dworkin:
I could feel the great loss in the messages I read this morning, from the old guard of feminist activists. Her death is going to be a horrible reminder to many that women’s place in society today is a cruel rebuttal to many of our dreams of women’s liberation. The media image of women today is pathetic; it’s Barbie on Steroids. “I Am Bimbo, Hear Me Roar! Tee-hee!”
My only encounter with Dworkin was a debate at Annenberg where I thought she was truly decimated by Larry Gross. I was actually a bit disappointed that the battle wasn’t more even; there’s certainly a rational anti-pornography argument to be made, but that didn’t seem to be her plan that night. It’s taken this long, and Susie Bright, for me to finally hear a positive and comprehensible explanation of what Dworkin was talking about.
StopBolton.org, 2001 version
Seeing so much well-deserved coverage of StopBolton.org made me a bit wistful for the original version which I helped put together in 2001. Turns out, it’s in the WayBack Machine. Looked better with the CSS in place, but still like seeing an old friend.
Biggest ÒWhoopsÓ of 2005 Nomination
Goes to the College of American Pathologists for shipping out 3,700 samples of this lovely item:
The samples are of Asian flu, which killed between one and four million people in 1957 but disappeared by 1968. Testing kits containing the virus were sent to more than 3,700 laboratories in 18 countries from Brazil to Lebanon.
Because the virus has not been in circulation since 1968, people born after that do not have antibodies against it – and current vaccines do not guard against it.
I’m not entirely sure why the story pays so much attention to the 61 sample shipped outside North America, seeing as how a) it’s the BBC reporting, and b) last time I heard, our most recent spate of bioterrorism was home-grown. We think.
Spring, and the Apple trees are blooming
Sure, the numbers look great for Apple this quarter, but what really jumped out at me — seeing as how I’m not an iPod consultant — was the part that said, “Apple shipped 1,070,000 Macintosh units during the quarter, representing a 43 percent increase in CPU units over the year-ago quarter.”
Bad things we’re used to
There are now two different classes of events, both of which can cause huge amounts of damage, but which occur so regularly that it’s barely even a news story.
The first one, of course, is “New Crippling Security Hole Found in Windows.”
The second one is “New Theft of Personal Information of Thousands from Clueless Data Aggreggator”, or its close cousin, “Whoops! That last one was worse than we thought.”
Which raises the question, when the friendlier, smaller numbers are bandied about at first, is that due to incompetence on the part of the companies? Or just outright CYA? One or two mistakes I can accept, but this is a regular part of the meme.
Next, reward offered for J. W. Booth for crimes against the nation
Via Atrios, the Cunning Realist points out that the FBI hasn’t bothered to update its most wanted posters to include a few events that took place in 2001.
Oh, and they also still want a dead guy. Whom we killed.
Boy, it’s a good thing that the Patriot Act has done so much to improve interdepartment comumnications!
No black box in ND black boxes
Via Engadget, this bit of very good news:
[T]he North Dakota legislature is the first to set a precedent by making the black box data sole property of the vehicle owner. The legislature overwhelmingly approved the bill, which also aims at requiring auto manufacturers to notify owners of the presence of black boxes in their vehicles. It would require a court order before any of the information recorded by the box can be used in court, and prohibits insurance companies from making access to the box a condition of obtaining coverage.
WEP you see is what you get
FBI agents demonstrate cracking a WEP wireless network in under three minutes.
My favorite integer…
…is now 17,651,472,774,995,090,209,190,652,337,069.
Sixteen brownie points to the first person who can tell me why.
Phishing for a story
The BBC checks in with a story about how computer security is threatened because computer users are threatened by the language the experts use.
Confusing “geek speak” used by experts and media included “phishing”, “rogue dialler”, “Trojan” and “spyware”. Eighty-four percent did not know that phishing describes faked e-mail scams.
Well, duh. If ever jargon was created that was clearly meant to be used only in email, that was it. Spam has that nice, pronounceable quality to it. Phishing, not so much.
What do you use to catch a phisher? B8?
But look, this isn’t entirely our fault. We don’t get to make the language, remember? In our community, “hacker” is still a term of respect — meanwhile in the rest of the country people still think that word is somewhere between “terrorist” and “child molester” on the list of things you don’t let your babies grow up to be. We used that word for years, and then Time came along and blew it away with one cover story.
Granted, “spam” is all our fault. To think that Monty Python has gotten words into everyday use….
But here’s the deal the geek community will make with the Muggles. We’ll stop speaking to you in Perl. And you’ll stop cherishing our lingo more than we do. We don’t care that you’ve got a 2.4 GHz processor that can channel 3.9 teraquads of dilithium into your flux capacitor. If computers are still needlessly complex — and they are — face facts and realize that this is true because most people want them to be. Because otherwise, they’ll have to rely on their knowledge of car engines to show off how technically erudite they are. Or they’ll stop having convenient excuses not to become minimally computer literate.
Kerckhoffs’ Principle
Bruce Schneier linked back today to an excellent essay he wrote in 2002 outlining the definition of security by obscurity, and why systems that depend upon it are fragile.
One group of people knows how the cockpit door reinforcement was designed. Another group has programmed screening criteria into the reservation system software. Other groups designed the various equipment used to screen passengers. And yet another group knows how to get onto the tarmac and take a wrench to the aircraft. The system can be attacked through any of these ways. But there’s no obvious way to apply Kerckhoffs’ Principle to airline security: there are just too many secrets and there’s no way to compress them into a single “key.” This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to secure an airline, only that it is more difficult. And that fragility is an inherent property of airline security.
What the Christian Right really stands for
Via Pandagon, this Rolling Stone article is required reading for anyone who doesn’t think it’s a swell idea for America to become a Christian theocracy.
“Most people hear them talk about a ‘Christian nation’ and think, ‘Well, that sounds like a good, moral thing,’ says the Rev. Mel White, who ghostwrote Jerry Falwell’s autobiography before breaking with the evangelical movement. “What they don’t know — what even most conservative Christians who voted for Bush don’t know — is that ‘Christian nation’ means something else entirely to these Dominionist leaders. This movement is no more about following the example of Christ than Bush’s Clean Water Act is about clean water.”
A few years ago I had dinner with an Italian of Jewish descent who had had a rough time of it under Mussolini. I commented at the time that I thought that America was immune to such treatment of Jews, and he said that I was commendable for being so young and naïve. Over time, I’ve come to believe he was right, and what scares me is how many people I think are buying into the myth of American exceptionalism, as I did.
My religion forbids dispensing insulin
Pandagon with an excellent essay on pharmicists who pick-and-choose which medications are ethical:
People who want to deprive women of contraceptives claim the moral high ground, but they are actually deeply immoral. It’s immoral to force pregnancy on someone who doesn’t want it. It’s immoral to add stress to marriage, especially in this day and age when marriages are already under strain for economic reasons. It’s immoral to view other people’s bodies as objects to play out your power fantasies on, as the Pharmacists for Life like to do.
What I’d like to know is whether there’s one case of a man being denied his Oxycontin by a pharmacist on moral grounds.
What I’d also like to know is whether anyone has noticed that these people are acting outside of their code of ethics, and whether their state licensing boards use any of the same wording.