Via Bruce Schneier, an interesting analysis of the proposed DHS RFID/Bluetooth biometric ID card.
Proposition 27
Some scary talented friends have come up with another 48-hour movie. Should you be in Philadelphia, this will be a worthwhile outing. For those of us who are not, looking forward to the wide release on 2,400 screens, or at least the streaming Quicktime version.
Postscript, 1:12 PM: I should note that watching Terrence Ryan running for his life will always be a treasured memory for me. And I’d gladly sit through some Shockwave advercrap to see Craig’s Variety Hour. So, Wumpus, when’s the deal with Atom Films? Perhaps you know someone who could walk you through it?
Out with the Oldenburg
Penn is finally going to do something about their broken sculpture, although it would probably be better to find the 220-feet tall man who dropped it in the first place.
Up next, Philadelphia replaces the Clothespin with a WiFi antenna.
(Cliffs Notes for those not from Philly.)
Making up new facts to replace the old, inconvenient ones
Arms Control Wonk catches John Bolton in the act of rewriting ancient history… from March, 2003.
Hey, it’s been a busy two years. It’s hard to keep track of everything Dick Cheney made up in that time.
Crucial programming tool
This programming utility should really make a difference in my workflow.
The Commentator uses revolutionary real-time language processing to actually grok your code and add the necessary comments on the fly. No more doco to slow you down. Just install The Commentator and watch as your coding elegance is eloquently decorated with insightful, nuanced commentary …as you type.
Before you get too excited, note that it was published on the first day of April. Still worth a look.
Modern amenities
A friend of mine is coming to Washington and staying at the Red Roof Inn, so I was checking out the neighborhood for her. This amenity brought me up short:
This location offers interior corridors
So now I’m going to spend the rest of the day visualizing back before they installed those corridors and their customers had to use the catwalks suspended nine stories over downtown DC.
Spotted on Connecticut Avenue
Tourist T-shirts are a dime a dozen here outside the Zoo, but I just saw a good one:
π Maintenance
It would be really nice if she were a math major.
The value of Whatever
So — what is a mention by John Scalzi worth, measured in people who came by to visit?
Answer — so far since the jeffporten.com reboot, more than Google and Yahoo combined.
Thank God he didn’t use a $1,000 bill
See if you can count all of the instances of monumental stupidity in this story:
[O]n the morning of Feb. 20, [Mike Bolesta] buys a new radio-CD player for his 17-year-old son Christopher’s car. He pays the $114 installation charge with 57 crisp new $2 bills, which, when last observed, were still considered legitimate currency in the United States proper. The $2 bills are Bolesta’s idea of payment, and his little comic protest, too.
For this, Bolesta, Baltimore County resident, innocent citizen, owner of Capital City Student Tours, finds himself under arrest.
Finds himself, in front of a store full of customers at the Best Buy on York Road in Lutherville, locked into handcuffs and leg irons.
Finds himself transported to the Baltimore County lockup in Cockeysville, where he’s handcuffed to a pole for three hours while the U.S. Secret Service is called into the case.
I don’t care what it is, I want one
Never let it be said I didn’t spread a baseless Apple rumor.
Apple just licensed a chipset that is capable of not only music and video, but 3D graphics and image capturing with resolutions up to 8-megapixel. And not only is the chipset powerful, it can be integrated with chips from Broadcom to provide wireless communication, from cell phones to Bluetooth to Wi-Fi.
Get Perpendicular
Ever wondered what would happen if a Japanese company set up a branch in the United States, hired a marketing company that had been raised on Schoolhouse Rock, and then dropped acid at their Tuesday greenlight meeting?
Craziest
There is something captivating — and maybe a bit jaw-dropping — about this “vidlit” short story. Shockwave audio/video, otherwise SFW. Via Boing Boing.
Don’t even think about ÒLa MarseillaiseÓ
Ranking up there with imaginary swords being private property in China, a French filmmaker got busted for playing “The Internationale” in his film. It’s copyrighted.
For those needing a refresher, that song has been the anthem of these guys for well over a century.
Stop Bolton, 2005 edition
Wade Boese with some reasons why John Bolton shouldn’t be trusted with anything more important than a model train set.
[A]lthough Bolton can point to a few successes on his watch, his uncompromising mindset prevented some potential nonproliferation breakthroughs. His legacy as he seeks confirmation as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations is largely one of jilted and discarded treaties, offended diplomatic counterparts, and lingering proliferation dangers that the Bush administration refused to confront directly.
French Horns
Proving, once again:
- The French are insane.
- My threshold for humor is extremely low.
(See comment page for the attachment I’m talking about.)
Everyone needs a healthy obsession
According to my logs, I’m just a few hours shy of hitting a lifetime total of 2,000 hours playing poker.
No, wait. Strike that. I haven’t entered that weekend at the Tropicana yet. I’m over the top.
Looks like that number is about to go way up.
Mickey, Donald shot — film at 11
Florida’s legislature has approved a bill that would give residents the right to open fire against anyone they perceive as a threat in public, instead of having to try to avoid a conflict as under prevailing law.
Republican Governor Jeb Bush, who has said he plans to sign the bill, says it is “a good, commonsense, anti-crime issue.” The bill, supported by the influential National Rifle Association, was approved by both houses of the Republican-run legislature on Tuesday.
Note the phrase “perceive as a threat”. So basically, blow away anyone you like if you can later claim you thought they were dangerous?
In case you didn’t get your fill last week
Courtesy of the Museum of Hoaxes, the Top 100 April Fool’s Hoaxes of all time. My favorite:
On March 31, 1940 the Franklin Institute issued a press release stating that the world would end the next day. The release was picked up by radio station KYW which broadcast the following message: “Your worst fears that the world will end are confirmed by astronomers of Franklin Institute, Philadelphia. Scientists predict that the world will end at 3 P.M. Eastern Standard Time tomorrow. This is no April Fool joke. Confirmation can be obtained from Wagner Schlesinger, director of the Fels Planetarium of this city.”
Although maybe it would have been nice to live in an era when scientists had this much credibility.
The numbers don’t lie, but we can lie about numbers
John Aravosis nails it regarding those numbers I posted earlier:
Now let me get this straight. 82% of the country thinks Congress and the President were wrong to intervene in the Schiavo affair, and that makes the country “divided.” But Bush has the lowest approval rating of any president at this time since WWII, 45%, and he’s widely popular. Nope, no media bias there.
The joy of living in a democracy
Five months after the election, this in from the Daily Kos:
Truman, 1949: 57%
Eisenhower, 1957: 65%
Johnson, 1965: 69%
Nixon, 1973: 57%
Reagan, 1985: 56%
Clinton, 1997: 59%
Bush, 2005: 45%
Eisenhower, 1957: 65%
Johnson, 1965: 69%
Nixon, 1973: 57%
Reagan, 1985: 56%
Clinton, 1997: 59%
Bush, 2005: 45%
Actually, the bright spot in the picture for me is that Nixon was at 57% in 1973.