Godspeed you Black Emperor mp3s

This Week's Prostitution Arrest Photos
I'd love to run face characterization software on these...

Bunch of stuff about alcohol:
Why people stagger more to the left than to the right

Problem drinkers often have a taste for sugar :

A SWEET tooth combined with certain personality traits is a strong marker for alcoholism, say scientists in North Carolina who have devised a simple test they claim can identify 85 per cent of alcoholics.

...In tests, 62 per cent of alcoholics preferred the highest sucrose concentration-three times the proportion in people with no drink problem.

Subcellular Life Forms
A Mathematician writing about subcellular life... Parasites of parasites of parasites...

I like biology, but as a mathematician, I am drawn to the elegance of the very simplest forms of life: the subcellular life forms. They are so simple, in fact, that even calling them "alive" can be controversial. They lack many of the usual features of life. They don't have cell walls, most of them don't metabolize, and they are all parasitic, depending on other organisms for their ability to reproduce! Some of them even have no genetic code! Many of them cause diseases, but others are crucial to the well-being of their host, and many are so well integrated with their host that it becomes difficult to decide whether they are part of the host or a separate entity.

How many of these dimensionless fundamental constants are there? Somewhere between 18 and 22, depending on your opinion on some new developments. All other dimensionless constants (aside from those built into the initial conditions) can in principle be derived from these, if our best theories of physics are correct - by which I mean general relativity, which covers gravity, and the Standard Model, which covers all the other forces. Of course, "in principle" means "not necessarily by any simpler method than by simulating the whole universe"!

Pulp - This is Hardcore

There are two types of brit-pop fans.

1) Wears tight black suits, oily slicked- back hair, and leather loafers. Sometimes uses a cigarette holder.

2) The second dresses like a waterboy for Manchester United Football Club, keeps a mop of shaggy hair, and accessorizes with an earring, a parka, Adidas trainers, a Gshock, and a pint of bitter.

Fact: The first type of brit-pop fan is more likely to dance to Pulp's This is Hardcore.

Noam Chomsky Interview

"Government" is a kind of interesting term in American political mythology. The government is presented as some enemy that's outside, something coming from outer space. So when the IRS comes to collect your taxes, it's this enemy coming to steal your money. That's driven into your head from infancy, almost.

There's another way of looking at it, which is that the IRS is the instrument by which you and I decide how to spend our resources for schools and roads and so on. Whatever faults the government has, and there are plenty, it's the one institution in which people can, at least in principle and sometimes in fact, make a difference.

So government's shrinking, meaning the public role is shrinking. And business -- that is, unaccountable private power -- has to take its place. That's the dominant ideology. Why should we accept that?

NSA moles in linux?
I wouldn't be at all surprised if at least one vital component of linux has been written by NSA agents posing as CS students. Furthermore, it probably intends to introduce backdoors at a time it is deemed necessary.

I mean, whoever looks up the identity of code contributors? New versions of code constantly come out and are installed as root. Most people probably don't look too closely at them. And once the backdoor was introduced, the next version of the software would remove the functions in the code that created it. So it would be sitting there with no way for the user to know about it, even if he examined the code.

A type of metagame
I have an idea of how to make any game into a metagame. You play as normal, but at any point, you can take back your moves. The farther back the move you want to take back, the more it costs you (in terms of points). So you'd play, and if you thought you were losing, you could take back a move you thought was where you went wrong.

this could go on forever, until someone concluded that it was impossible for them to win. If the game is binary (as chess), whoever lost should have given up immediately anyway (assuming perfect play), but if it's a game where you both have score (as is go), the loser would have found the perfect value for komi.

Anyone know chess opening libraries online?
Since I've been on the internet the most obvious thing I wanted and always look for is a huge database of chess games & openings. It would start with the original position, and you would make moves. The opening you were doing would be displayed constantly. Also, there would be a list of pro games that coincided with your current moves, and a list of moves you could make that also had been made in pro games.

but i've never found such a thing, even though it wouldn't be that hard to program. the hard part would be getting the game database and dealing with huge server load and tons of database searches.

ECHELON ONLINE SURVEILLENCE

"The EU hearings are a bit of a joke," says Wayne Madsen, a former NSA employee and senior fellow at the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC). "It's going to be a bit like that scene in the movie Casablanca, where Inspector Renault declares: 'I'm shocked to find gambling in this establishment.' "

The Last Case of Encyclopedia Brown
This is an amusing onion-style perversion of a childhood classic. Funny!

About English as used by me, and by Finns in general

People sometimes ask why I, or Finns in general, use English so well. I wrote this document to answer to such questions, largely pointing out that we often just appear to know English.

...To some extent, it is an optical illusion caused by Finns' high threshold of saying or writing anything...

Kevin Mitnick's Senate Testimony

In my successful efforts to social engineer my way into Motorola, I used a three-level social engineering attack to bypass the information security measures then in use. First I was able to convince Motorola Operations employees to provide me, on repeated occasions, the pass code on their security access device, as well as the static PIN. The reason this was so extraordinary is that the pass code on their access device changed every 60 seconds: every time I wanted to gain unauthorized access, I had to call the Operations Center and ask for the password in effect for that minute.

My obsession with chess

I realized, then and there, that my life had achieved a state of eerie desolation... and that I didn't mind.
I began to dream chess.
There was just the board, the pieces and the possibilities. I would play whole games move by move. I never saw my opponent, only the hand that reached from the other side.
Who was I playing?
My brain was being rewired. I began to see diagonal lines of force emanating out of the corners of any orthogonal pattern such as the tiles of a floor or the legs of a chair.

A Gay Trucker

About being gay and driving truck. Endless miles, lots of chicken fried everything and don't fuck with me hon' waitresses. We have run team and we have run solo. For the most part, at this point in time, our truck rolls 23 hours out of the day stopping only for showers and fuel. I run the day shift negotiating traffic, shippers and receivers and dealing with dispatch. Dallas makes up lost time at night running 77-78 miles an hour being kept alert by the early morning ravings of the clear channel AM Art Bell Radio Program and the latest UFO conspiracy guest or El Nino update.

Kenyan women protest at drinking dens, demand sex

NAIROBI, Kenya (Reuters) -- A group of women stormed a Kenyan police station to demand officers either make love to them or close illegal drinking dens they said made their husbands impotent, a local newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Tetrinet
A tetris server. Play tetris online against some ridiculously good people. It's fairly fast as well. Includes 12-column pure (normal) tetris, and also a modified version which is not bad at all. For some reason (probably having to do with the weird history of tetris) there are 12 columns, not 10, but it doesn't make too much difference. Also A Summary of the Rules of the modified version, list of servers which includes ping times from wherever you are, and an image of what it looks like

Tetris Research
Apparently you can't play an infinite game of tetris. if you only get alternating S and Z pieces, you can't gain any ground. (and the probability of getting any sequence of pieces goes to 1 as n goes to infinity (and for any sequence of pieces s and any probability p<1, there exists n < infinity such that the (probability of having gotten s) > p after n pieces)) So after something like 70,000(??) of them, you are guaranteed to lose. Also comes with an unwinnable applet

The pattern recognition and strategies most Tetris players rely on are difficult to program into a computer. However, it might be theoretically possible to create a perfect computer Tetris player which could successfully play Tetris until its plug was pulled. The arguments presented on this page prove that that is impossible.

Don't you know that it's different for girls?
Puritanism strikes again! I don't understand it, I'd think people would much rather get laid than get shot. People should be scared to death of violence, not sex.

It's the old story that it's OK to cut off the nipple, but not kiss it. The day I was given an NC-17 rating, I was reading about "Eight Millimeter" in Premiere. It's a movie about snuff films. Joel Shumacher was saying that he had a surprisingly easy time getting an R rating. It's a movie about killing young girls.

United States Military Operations
All current (public) US Military Operations.

Marine Land Warrior

He launches into a description of the increasing miniaturization of the scope technology, with hopeful engineers predicting the incorporation of night-vision, video feed, and target pinpointing and identification technologies into contact lense systems by 2005.

...I bite down on the blood capsule, warm alcohol taste of thick fluid filling my mouth as Land Warrior opens his - I stand and scream, red froth spraying and dripping down my face and arms, twitching spastically i flop across the table crying 'your laser-guided bullets are murdering the planet's poor!' collapsing in a smear of dark crimson cutting through the cheap (expensive!) theatrics of the Marine presentation...

Teddy Bears filled with concrete

By 10:30, around a dozen Cacophonists had slipped in managing to place several bears on the shelves without arousing suspicion. Not content to just leave them there we appointed Cacophonist Todd to help direct the management's attention to our prank. At 10:35 Todd entered, located a Cuddler, and brought it to the register, informing the cashier he couldn't find the price.

George W Bush is a hypocrite

The most important cocaine question for George W. Bush is this: would you seek long prison terms for today's 18-year-olds for doing what you say you may or may not have done as a young man — and when you now suggest that whatever you did was a mere youthful indiscretion, and thus irrelevant to your candidacy? Countless thousands of people are rotting in prisons all across America — many in Texas — for being caught with small amounts of cocaine or crack, its smokable variant. Many were only peripherally involved in drug sales. Some were mere users. As governor of Texas, Bush — like most other politicians in both parties — has joined in this orgy of punishment with enthusiasm, signing laws that toughen penalties for drug users as well as pushers, and that send juveniles as young as 14 to prison for especially serious crimes, including some drug crimes. How can he square this with his position that whether he used drugs is irrelevant to his candidacy? If Bush won't tell us whether he used cocaine or other illegal drugs in his first 28 years — and there's no evidence that he did — he should at least tell us whether his admitted but unspecified "young and irresponsible" escapades would have landed him in prison had the drug laws he supports been enforced against him." Stuart Taylor, Jr. in Newsweek

Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery

You, as an individual, can decide right now to start listening to that tiny voice inside, the one you've pushed aside for so long, the voice that asks "how come I have to spend all this time doing all this stuff I don't really want to do?" Somewhere deep inside you, you know that you were meant for greater things; you know that you came to this planet to play; you know that there's a part of you that simply wants to be happy. As soon as you begin to allow this voice in you to speak, you will be guided, you will know what to do. The "right" course of action will become clear.

An interview with Sol
From the homepage of Robert J. Nemiroff, an astrophysicist who collects millions of digits of irrational numbers.

AM: When did you decide to have planets?
Sol: Very early in life, although I'm not exactly sure when - that part of my life was very nebulous. I didn't really plan to have planets because I never had a steady companion. They just sort of spun off of my care-free early life style.

Alan Keyes Jumps in Michael Moore's Mosh Pit

In Iowa, Moore hauled the mosh pit around in a large flatbed truck, crisscrossing the state, and inviting the Presidential candidates to "join the teeming and tattooed masses." The response from the candidates varied from a stunned and frightened Steve Forbes (who quickly walked by the pit giving it two thumbs up), to front-runner George W. Bush shouting at Moore and his moshers to "behave yourself and go get a real job."

Gary Bauer, on the other hand, called the Des Moines police -- who sent five cruisers and a paddy wagon to arrest the pit...

...Minutes later, Alan Keyes emerged and, against the loud protestations of his Secret Service agent, Keyes climbed to the top of the makeshift stage on the back of the truck and dove backwards into the screaming mosh pit. He then body surfed the entire pit -- his body carried like a wave on the outstretched hands of the tightly compact crowd. He then did a couple of body slams with a spiked-hair youth from Ames high school -- and left the pit with the official endorsement of the show.

Did Al Gore say it? Or was it the Unabomber?
I've read some of the unabomber's manifesto, but none of Gore's stuff (I can't even remember hearing his voice), and I only managed to get 50%.

Bob Jones University: A Bastion of Bible Christianity?
Thank god we have good wacky christians to criticize Bob Jones University for being world-polluted and heathen.

(5) Worldliness Promoted: The cover of the Winter 1994 issue of the BJU Review pictures cheerleaders painted up royally--mascara, bright red lipstick, rouge, eye shadow, holding their pom poms, and as the caption reads, "hamming it up for the camera." Another issue had a cover picturing BJU students dressed-up as Disney characters, while another featured a BJU dorm room photo with a nearly life-sized poster of former NBA star Magic Johnson--hardly a portrayal of a Biblical life-style. (Johnson retired from professional basketball because of testing HIV-positive.) Again, one could substitute the name of any secular college in the country over these cover photographs, and it would fit precisely.

Dust My Broom
I love rageboy

Is this perhaps the right place to say that the greatest invention of the 20th Century is not the microchip, not extra-orbital flight, not bio-engineering? Sure, why not? The the greatest invention of the 20th Century is rock and roll. Specifically rock and roll performed at extremely high decibel levels in humongous sports stadia that thereby finally inherit some legitimate human use.

Or late at night in a car alone going as fast as possible on hot summer residential streets with the windows rolled down all the way and the speakers shredding under the gain. Oh... start me up!

And nothing personal, you know, but fuck you Microsoft and fuck you Nike and Wendy's and VW and all the rest who've ripped the music that didn't mean anything but that we were alive and knew it, and strapped it into the blind dark service of your fucking cars and fucking shoes and fucking hamburgers.

$90,093.35 Adventure
A guy deposited one of those fake checks that junk mail always has, with great results.

I didn't want to say $95,093.35 out loud; it felt scary. So I asked the teller for a piece of paper. I wrote $95,093.35 on it, passed it to her, and said, "I'd like to get this amount in a cashier's check."

Without saying a word, she began moving quickly to grab papers and forms. Then she rushed out these words: "You need to write me a check for the same amount." She seemed bothered.

I understood and began to write out the check. Suddenly I was daunted by having to write out $95,093.35. I had never written it out in words before and I wasn't sure I'd be able to get it to fit on the line: ninety-five thousand ninety-three dollars and thirty-five cents. That was the biggest number I'd ever written into the suddenly small space on a check.

It's by Bruce Sterling, so it's also about technology influencing culture, alternative energy, etc.

Sounds of the World's animals

Afrikaans: woef
Albanian: ham ham / hum hum
Arabic (Algeria): haw haw
Bengali: ghaue-ghaue
Catalan: bup, bup
Chinese (Mandarin): wang wang
Croatian: vau-vau
Danish: vov
Dutch: woef
English: bow wow, arf, woof, ruff ruff
English (Old English): Hund byrcð.
Estonian: auh
Finnish: hau hau
French: ouah ouah
German: wau wau
Greek: gav
Hebrew: haw haw (/hav hav)
Hindi: bho:-bho:
Hungarian: vau-vau
Icelandic: voff
Indonesian: gonggong
Italian: bau bau
Japanese: wanwan, kyankyan

Accent Collection

I was thinking that it would be really cool for a web site to collect all different types of accents in mp3 or wav. So there'd be all kinds of native speaker accents (southern, british, brooklyn), and also a section of foreign accents (people who learned english as a second language, and have all different levels of fluency), and also a section of english accents in foreign languages, such as a southerner speaking spanish, or a british accent in japanese (if you've ever heard southern accented spanish you know how funny it would be).

once I get my portable mp3 player that has a mic, i'll bring it to cs & math classes and get all sort of accents.

Freenet

Freenet is designed to make censorship impossible. While most people agree that excessive censorship is bad, some stop short of saying that censorship should be abolished altogether. My personal belief is that censorship of any form is fundamentally flawed.

The Freenet project aims to create an information publication system similar to the World Wide Web , where information can be inserted into the system and associated with a "key" (the key is normally some form of description of the data such as "freenet source code V1.0"). Later anyone else can retrieve the data using the appropriate key. In this respect it is a little like the World Wide Web which requires a "URL" to retrieve a particular document. To participate in this system users will simply need to run a piece of Java software on their computer, and optionally use a client to insert and remove information from the system. Anyone can write a client (or indeed a server) however the reference implementations will be written in Java.

In 1842-3 he arranged for a major publicity campaign, initially through Italian contacts such as the Piedmontese military engineer and future premier L.F.Menabrea and then through his close ally the aristocratic philomath Ada Lovelace.10 This new machine was an unprecedented technical system. It was designed to carry in its memory one thousand numbers each of fifty digits. The store consisted of sets of parallel figure wheels, structured like those in the store of the Difference Engine; the input-output device was based on sets of number cards and variable cards, the latter of which would control which gear-axis would be used; and the control was transmitted though what Babbage baptized operation cards. Sequences of cards carried instructions to the engine, which were decoded in the store using the machine's library of logarithmic and other functions, and then distributed to the operating sections of the mill. Such distribution could itself be modified by variables set by the existing state of operations in the machine. These crucial aspects of the Engine, its capacity for memory and for anticipation, were to be profound resources for Babbage's metaphysics and his political economy. "Nothing but teaching the Engine to foresee and then to act upon that foresight could ever lead me to the object I desired

... Babbage's most penetrating contemporary reader, Karl Marx, famously reckoned that it would be easier to write "a critical history of technology,....a history of the productive organs of man in society" than Darwin's "history of natural technology".

A trip to a city that celebrates Ramadan

All this utter chaos reaches its peak at about 4pm. Just as hunger grips the stomachs and patience of drivers, rush hour kicks in. Imagine a city the size of Montreal at rush hour, except there are no street lights, no signs, no traffic police - and nobody has eaten in 12-20 hours.

Odd English

"Neater! Quicker! Cheaper! than string." -Oband rubber bands

"Our life has become rich, and we can afford to have conversations with each other that much." -Chotto Oishiyo Cookies

"On opening, I was surprised that the box is full of love." -gift bag

Red Rock Eater
A really excellent newsletter:
'Topics usually concern the social and political aspects of computing and networking.'

Grammar

In the same way as the laws of physics describe, but do not determine, the behavior of the universe, grammar rules and books describe language, but do not determine it. The only way to know of something is correct grammar is to ask someone who speaks the language if it 'sounds right'. Even then, their answer only applies to the particular dialect they speak.

An example of this is the use of their as a 3rd person singular pronoun.

Which sounds right:
1. Everyone should clean their own room or
2. Everyone should clean his or her own room or
3. One should clean one's own room.

To me, 1 is what you'd say, 3 is what you'd write, and 2 sounds like you're an asshole.

Weekly CPU prices
Tracks weekly changes in CPU prices. Useful.

echelonwatch
The ACLU's site about Echelon, the international data interception network which the us is a member of. although legally the us isn't allowed to spy on it's own citizens due to privacy violations, apparently they engage in data trading with other echelon members to circumvent this.

NTK
*the* weekly high-tech sarcastic update for the uk. amusing section header: "goto's considered non-harmful".

bookmarklets
You know that annoying "personal toolbar" in netscape that 90% of people leave there and never use, taking up space? Well, it does have a wonderful use: you can create link buttons on it. And if the buttons aren't links to url's, but links to javascript source code, netscape will just run the code. So you can replace the back button with javascript:back() etc, while also adding in very useful buttons which tell you the last mod date of a page, or "target new" which redirects all subsequent links from that page to new windows.

dofoot
A perl script that simulates ssl by processing html files and including the contents of other files. basically it inserts information from files (or the date) between html comments. I plan to use it to automatically add author information and last modified dates. (It checks the last mod date of any html file and inserts it into the file).

Justice for Daniel Faulkner

On July 3, 1982, having heard weeks of testimony, a jury of 12 citizens sentenced Mumia Abu-Jamal to death for the premeditated murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Over the next 16 years, Jamal¹s case has become one of the most publicized Death Penalty cases in the world. It has also become the most misunderstood. The twisted tales about this case are many. They have been told and retold by countless individuals who know little or nothing of the actual facts of the case.

Napster
Napster is like a chat client with file transfer and search capabilities. When you log in it sends a list of all your mp3s to a central server. Through a search function you can download mp3s directly from another person. The win98 client is really buggy but it works well enough to get ~200mb/hour in the computer lab.