…you may also enjoy The Times of India: Literate Goondas Making Ass Of Law.

I read this headline on Google News, and couldn’t make sense of it. I read the article, and I still can’t figure out exactly what it’s about, or exactly what the headline has to do with it. I did find out that “goonda” means “thug” or “hooligan,” and apparently it’s not slang — it’s used in official documents, e.g. the Control of Goondas Act. Further googling shed some light on why Indian english doesn’t make much sense.

Surely, such a group as this is already aware that October 19th is the International Day of the Nacho?

Thank goodness for Ignacio Anaya.

If I were more clever, I would save this for six months, but I am not.

Earlier, I solicited nominations for it. This week, my office has published it. Now you can read it!

The Best of Technology Writing 2006

And we’re now accepting nominations for 2007.

Not my own. From Modern Haiku’s website:

barn dance
the fist fight spills over
into the moonlight

-Ken Hurm

[Made me think of Tony, and wonder why we didn’t wrassle.]

Is anybody else planning on participating in NaNoWriMo this year? I think I’m going to do it.

For those who aren’t familiar with that funny abbreviation, it’s National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write 50,000 words during the month of November. I think a couple of Nachovians have done it in the past.

I have no idea what I’m going to write about yet, but I’m looking forward to carrying around my little black notebook the rest of the month and writing down things like “Old impeccably dressed Italian man with thin mustache,” “Wedding ring found laying on the bar next to an empty can of Bud Light,” or “returning to the scene of the crime” that seem like the nuggets on which a good story could be based.

So go read, comment, interact, thumbs up, thumbs down, virtual community, yeah!

http://ccinsider.comedycentral.com/

Then go do something good today.

Love you,

Mandy

In case you haven’t been keeping up with your Bloggy McBlogalot, our friend Mandy recently had an adventure backstage at the Comedy Central roast of William Shatner:

Andy: How old are you?

Mandy: I’m 30.

Dude #1: On Page Six—

Andy: No, no, no. Don’t fucking—

Dude #1: They put so much bad shit on you, buddy.

Andy: Don’t put—

Narrator: Peeing noise.

Introducing the worldwide Racial Slur Database. Includes perennial favorites such “Snipcock - Jews - Henry Ford used it; reference to circumcision.”

Today’s top story:

This eventually led him into those murky industries that supply military-style services to whoever can afford to pay for them. One of the outfits he worked with — a company with the sinisterly euphemistic name Executive Outcomes — was used by the government of Angola in the 1990s to defend its oil installations from the rebel group UNITA.

I’m tickled by the name of the company. With so many some of its employees now in African prisons, surely they’ll be doing some hiring. And why isn’t Vince the CEO or COO?

Kurzweil most recently popularized the idea, but Vernor Vinge is the originator of the modern concept of a “coming technological singularity”. I just discovered his original 1993 paper about it, and it’s a much better (and shorter) description than anything else, including Kurzweil’s.

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html

This has provided the basic fodder for several excellent sci-fi novels I’ve read lately (including some award-winners by Vinge). It is something I think everyone should read, and get both really excited and really worried about.

The always-erudite Design Observer blog reminds us that there is still evil in the world of typography.

My walk will be different, my talk and my name. Nothing about me’s going to be the same!

Seriously, though. I’m planning to migrate nacho.org from Wordpress to Joomla!, mostly so I can keep it in step with three other web sites I manage. It would be nice if they were all based off the same platform. I know nobody’s posted to nacho.org in the last month, but I thought I’d mention it. If you experience weirdness, that’s why.

From Inside Higher Ed:

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) wanted further discussion and perhaps a report on a particular aspect of future supercomputing research. Sherman said that, based on the opinions of experts, there is reason to believe that in about 25 years a supercomputer will be built that “exceeds human intelligence.” Sherman said he hopes that some of the future researchers that the bills would cultivate will be steered toward the potentially emerging field of making sure that the super-intelligent computers “avoid self-awareness … and ambition,” he said.

To which [NY Repub chairman Sherwood] Boehlert responded: “My grandson has a Gameboy that exceeds my intelligence.”

Of course he does. You’re a Republican. Asshole.

And so does this ID student.

Stratfor, a really excellent international affairs site that I’m just slightly too cheap to subscribe to, just published this terrifying analysis of the Pentagon’s latest China planning.

What the DoD document has said is that the fundamental long-term threat to American interests and security is not the intermittent threat of terrorist strikes by Islamist militants, but the emerging threat to the global naval and nuclear balance that is posed by China. Put differently, if the Pentagon really believes this report, it is fighting the wrong war in the wrong place. The jihadists are a threat to American lives, but China threatens fundamental, global American interests.

Whether the Pentagon’s view of the Chinese threat is accurate or not is not the key point right now. That this is the view of the Chinese threat means everything. If this is the view, then it follows that U.S. military expenditures should not go toward Iraq and Afghanistan, but toward securing U.S. control of the western Pacific sea lanes through increased technologies focused on naval and space power.

If we’re lucky, the war in Attaqistan will “end” before we go to war with China. More likely we’re all going to be 40-year-old conscripts on battleships patrolling the South China Sea.

It seems like a petty thing to be worried about, but I’m disappointed with
my current flask. It’s small, and its opening is too
small to pour from, which makes it nearly impossible to clean. So I
went looking for a new flask. Where do you go to buy such a thing?
I checked the interweb. What I found was a product field ready ripe
for innovation.

Stainless steel flasks are durable and good looking. The better ones
are curved to fit your pocket (really, to fit your butt, but pocket seems
more tactful. Oops! I said butt anyway.) The better ones also have
a wide enough opening and/or a second “air entry” opening so they pour
better. The cap must be attached by a swing-arm so the cap doesn’t get
lost. A glass lining is also desirable, because otherwise anything left
in the flask for more than a couple of days will start to taste like
stainless steel.

However, this glass lining has a major problem: it breaks. I thought of
my lexan water bottle, which is virtually unbreakable, yet has all of the
non-taste-absorbing, smooth-and-therefore-antimicrobial properties of glass.
I wonder if anybody makes a stainless steel flask that’s lined with lexan
instead of glass?

Apparently not. At least not that I can find.

Camping suppliers make huge (16oz+) lexan flasks, but these are a) too big,
and b) even if they were the right size, lexan by itself lacks the romance
required by a product designed to carry spirits. So what I’m suggesting is
something that looks like a traditional flask on the outside — polished
stainless steel on the outside, maybe some leather — but has an unbreakable
lexan interior.

I am assuming that alcohol doesn’t break down lexan, because the 16oz plain-lexan
flasks are advertised as “something to keep your whiskey safe while backpacking.”

If anybody knows where one could obtain such a thing, I would like to know.

The beta for Google Calendar began yesterday. I hadn’t heard of it before I saw the announcement on Slashdot this morning.

From my point of view, this may be the best Google feature since the basic search engine’s debut.

(more…)

plastic action figures demonstrating Ashtanga yoga!

Yoga Beans

So many figurines on my hallway shelf…who will do the sun salute first? Big Boss Man? Shaggy? Breakdancing Guy?

This is oh so very real.

Way back in 1996, Rob Freitas at the Institute for Molecular Manfacturing designed a nanorobotic red blood cell. If you were to replace ten percent of your red blood cells with these robotic versions you could do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath, or sit at the bottom of your pool for four hours. It will be interesting to see what we do with these in our Olympic contests.