And on a more positive note
I’m glad they’re working hard on this, I have a lot of pity for the people out there with undiagnosed bipolar/schizophrenia disorders. There are quite a few good web resources for it I’m noticing, also Schizophrenia.com. One of my neighbors growing up had schizophrenia, it’s a very disturbing disease.
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Hundreds of free 1930s Sherlock Holmes radio drama MP3s
The Sherlock Holmes Society of London has hundreds of free MP3s of Sherlock Holmes radio plays from the 1930s. I’m so about the great detective. I grew up reading all the books and all, this rocks so hard for me.
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Let’s play 20 questions!
20 questions, AI style. Pretty amazing… and addictive. It guessed "Superman" in 15 questions, "harmonica" in 18…"tampon" in 20.
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Cock-a-doodle-doo. What, what?
20,000 genes and splices: the Colonel’s Secret Recipe revealed! Even the fanciest chickens won’t be able to ignore their genetic cousins now.
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Massachusetts gays divorcing
Well, if the track record of straight marriages is any indication, this was bound to happen sooner or later. "Less than seven months after same-sex couples began tying the knot in Massachusetts, the state is seeing ts first gay divorces."
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Hmm..
Supreme Court of Canada approves gay marriage. Although agreeing that religious groups can’t be forced to perform any ceremonies, the Court stated in their ruling that defining marriage for civil purposes in Canada as a lawful union of two people would be constitutional. The ruling validates future legislation legalizing gay marriage, which is apparently almost guaranteed to pass early next year.
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Road rage cards
Short, to-the-point messages for use in traffic as needed. Road Rage Cards. Perfect for Jenn when she’s driving, she seems to somehow find all the idiots in town, and drive near them. Heh.
See also these STFU cards you can hand to strangers who are talking too loudly in their cellphones about stuff you don’t want to hear.
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Don’t hang up on Texas!
Have a good day Ms. Beyer! "Before you are rude to another telemarketer, you should keep in mind that he or she has your phone number and your address." Texas Telemarketer sends a threatening letter to a hanger-upper.
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What’s with the dynamite?
Sex education from the BBC, flash-style. Willy Wonky and Funny Flaps.
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IBM sells PC business
The end of an era confirmed. IBM sells its PC business to China’s Lenovo. Is a future Apple partnership in the works?
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Luna
This, is my kitten, her name is Luna. Well, technically it will be my kitten in 2 more weeks, Luna is still nursing from her mom and is too little to leave yet, but give it another 2 weeks and she’ll be in her new home.
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This post is not very PC
End of an era IBM may sell its PC division to Lenovo, a Chinese company, due to its decade-long dwindling importance in comparison to powerhouses HP and Dell – in a market they helped invent in the first place. Seems like a good enough reason to reminisce about the old bastard.
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The History of Maps
The History of Maps from the the oldest map of the world to prehistoric globalization to early modern worlds to nautical charts. Myths and facts.
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Doctor Who Returns in 2005
Doctor Who returns in a few months, here’s a teaser for us ubergeeks who can’t wait. (Realplayer warning on the link!). The "new" Doctor Who returns to BBC sometime in the first half of next year.
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Bzzt.
These are the toy tanks and they shock the people. I’m buying one for Austin and Simcha.
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Pornospammers = eternal innovators
Because GMail (and other popular email clients these days) blocks images by default, porn spammers have now begun to use 1980s style ASCII art in order to get their message across.
This textfile contains one simple example, with the words HOT GIRLS in big letters – it cunningly gets past spam filters by not containing any actual words in the body text. As its content is only apparent to humans, it will be tricky to catch by any filters – as long as the whitespace remains intact, the actual text can just be any random garbage. In theory, every spam email could be totally unique.
I confidently expect to see a renaissance in erotic ASCII art in the coming months, until someone figures out how to filter out this type of spam…
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All I Want For Xmas Is An Anthropomorphic Humanoid Guitar God Robot
GuitarBot "In designing GuitarBot, our goal was to create an electrified slide guitar that was versatile, responsive, capable of fast and slow playing, easy to control, with high-quality sound, modular and portable. We also wanted to extend, not simply duplicate, the capabilities of a human guitarist."
Don’t miss the video [16 meg Quicktime]. Brought to you by the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots.
Being a huge electronic music fan, the Quicktime movie blew me away.
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Workin’ Out
So been going to the YMCA a lot lately, not as much as I’d like, but still almost enough. It’s neat because I’m already starting get back some of the musscle I lost over the past few years.
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Eavsdropping on CRTs
This scientific paper was published two years ago. It may be an oldie, but it’s a goodie. Computer scientist Markus Kuhn demonstrated a way to read CRT computer monitors at a distance using a photosensor, even if you’re not facing the screen.
An image is created on the CRT surface by varying the electron beam intensity for each pixel. The room in which the CRT is located is partially illuminated by the pixels. As a result, the light in the room becomes a measure for the electron beam current. In particular, there is a little invisible ultrafast flash each time the electron beam refreshes a bright pixel that is surrounded by dark pixels on its left and right.
So if you measure the brightness of a wall in this room with a very fast photosensor, and feed the result in another monitor that receives the exact same synchronization signals for steering its electron beam, you get to see an image like this (after using a mathematical signal processing technique)
RobDurdle.com 