Satanosphere

QOTD: I don’t own a cell phone or a pager. I just hang around everyone I know, all the time. If someone wants to get a hold of me, they just say ‘Mitch,’ and I say ‘what?’ and turn my head slightly.  — Mitch Hedberg 1968 - 2005

With the greater and greater advances of miniaturization in computing comes greater and greater opportunities for us all. Wearable computing is on the forefront, just across the very near horizon. Devices smaller and smaller are becoming more and more intelligent. It used to be a joke, “Can you imagine?! a Beowulf cluster of _______?” (Say, Furbies?)

Now, just in time for the cruisewear season, it’s revealed there is now a cube form-factor computer that runs a full-fledged distribution of linux …

… that is SMALLER THAN MY BALLS!

Can you imagine?! A Beowulf cluster of these …

IN MY PANTS?!

I had this ooky feeling when Guitar Hero became popular. Oh, sure, it’s a cuddle and a half. It does for manual dexterity what stress balls do for palms. And I myself have even felt the constitutional rush of pride over proving to my co-workers that I can, indeed, synchronize my fingers to press specific colored buttons in time to Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.” It took a load off. Then I retired.

But gently the terror infested in the back of my subgenius brain: Guitar Hero would, one day, legitimize the act of performing air guitar. I didn’t know when, I didn’t know how, but I knew it would. And today it did, thanks to Blake Peebles, a 16-year-old from North Raleigh, NC, who is dropping out of high school to play Guitar Hero professionally:

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wardriver.jpg JPEG Image, 453×400 pixels

I like physics. Even though I got a C in it when I tried to go to smart college, I still think it’s fun to learn about how the universe is held together. Also, I think physicists are probably very funny assholes, though I’ve never met any real physicists, only physics teaching assistants who were very boring and smelly assholes.

So when I found this article about some early tests at the Large Hadron Collider I had to read it.

From what I understand, the Large Ha[rd]on Collider tests consisted of firing a “test beam of protons” from the “injection point” or “injecting” protons into the collider’s “main ring” before “crashing into a deliberate beam dump” and this was all captured on “beam television”. But it gets more interesting! See there was this “blob” that showed up in the beam-TV but it was off-center as it “spattered through an alumina ceramic screen, which lights up due to the radiation.” WOW!

This can only be summed up with a full quote:

After the “television” camera was removed, the protons made it all the way to their destination, passing through Alice, one of the giant detectors built to observed proton collisions. The New York Times reported that a Web site summary of the evening’s activities ended with the word “beer.” [emphasis mine]

[redacted] - The World of Web Trolling - NYTimes.com

The only thing wrong with this article about internet “trolls” is the stupid malapropism created for the title which I will not repeat. That’s the **ONLY** thing wrong with this article.

“I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven” — some tard named Weev

[ UPDATE : 8/5/08 : Jason Fortuny, featured in the article, now faces lawsuit.

‘… but it’s a precise wimp,’ — asteroid deflectionist Rusty Schweickart, of the B612 Foundation

quoted in ‘Gravity tractor’ could deflect asteroids

because we don’t want this to happen:

At first I thought, “oh cool. i found my new band name.” and then I looked it up on InterNet -> Gravity Tractor (band). Not so good.

I admit it. This fucking article about the good old days of The Internet, before everthing got so goddamn flashy and Stylesheet shitty, made a bitter, acrid hint of a tear start to form in the very corner of my bleary old bloodshot eye:

R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008 : On the text-only Usenet of my memory, nobody knew whether you were a dog, or a kid, or Finnish—only what you wrote. There wasn’t the obsession with photos and video that overruns today’s social networking sites. Yeah, I know that sounds like “get off my lawn you darn kids” crotchetiness, but there’s something really nice about just talking to people and not caring what they look like.   – Sascha Segan

This Warren Ellis post — JOE 90 explains to me why the UK would produce a much vaster range of SF talent (e.g. Ellis himself) than we ever could here in This Here Good Ol U.S. of ‘Muhrca. It’s the opener for some crappy kids’ scifi / fantasy show called Joe 90 — from the same gang that brought us Thunderbirds Are GO. When you’re watching it, try to think about how much more awesome your Saturday mornings would have been with a little more of this and a little less Help! … It’s the Hair Bear Bunch!”

Ellis writes:

I think [the clip] underscores the basically creepy nature of children’s fantasy tv in the UK. Not as out-and-out fucking strange as, say, THE CHANGES or SKY. But, really, without any context — or, hell, even with it — the intro to JOE 90 is still kind of nervous-making.

Watch the YouTube for the creepy! Then wish for the DVD box set and some really great acid.

This link was given to me by a woman friend, who found it on Jezebel … who in turn found it on Nerd Approved.

It’s the pocket Slut-O-Meter (okay really it’s ‘Slutometer‘ in a pretty script font, but I like it my way best).

So since this thing pretty much doesn’t actually merit commentary of my own, I’m interested in contrasting the dry little paragraphs given to it by Jezebel and by Nerd Approved. After the jump…

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