And you thought that all user interface design was, uh, bollocks:
``I asked a user interface designer I knew at Nortel about this, who happened to be Dutch and who was familiar with this particular piece of toilet technology. And he told me that washrooms are much cleaner when these flies are there. Presumably because they encourage, in a very subtle way, good aim.''
Well, if so, don't try to make do with some crummy tinfoil hat you made out of kitchen supplies. Go for the real thing:
Very sheer, comfortable undergarments you can wear over your regular underwear to shield yourself from powerline and computer electric fields, and microwave, radar, and TV radiation. This silver-plated, stretchable, washable nylon mesh is electrically conductive. It reflects radiation. Plus you won't get those static shocks as you used to in dry weather and your clothes won't cling to you! Fabric provides up to 35dB of shielding at 100 MHz. Made in USA. Surround what you want to protect!
She had never known silence, and the coming of it nearly killed her -- it did kill many thousands of people outright.
E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops.
Why aren't all road safety films like this? (Warning: needs `Flash'.)
Well, here are two of mine: unbbc, filters out the BBC's stupid web design; and BIMBO, `'blog intelligent moderation by oligarchy', is a system which extracts interesting links from a bunch of web logs by sending them out to a shockingly well-informed cabal of people to rate. It's kind of like the converse of Suckdot.
Fascinating look at the depictions of nuclear power in comic books in the early days of the nuclear age.
As I was going up the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
Apparently some
People have not heard of this
Foolish Python script.
Some enterprising outfit is flogging -- for £400 -- a device which incorporates a GPS receiver and a database of speed camera locations, intended to tell drivers when they are about to be photographed by a safety camera. It is described as being much more effective than RADAR detectors, which is completely believable: I was once in a taxi which was equipped with such a device, and it unfailingly detected the RADAR on top of traffic lights which is used to determine queue lengths, with the result that the driver hit the brakes whenever passing a traffic light. I mentioned this, and was astounded to discover that he hadn't spotted the pattern before -- he seemed genuinely to believe that there were police officers with speed guns hiding behind every traffic light....
Here's Steve Outing wittering about spam filters. Apparently, SpamAssassin is evil because it will make the authors of on-line newsletters censor themselves, since they'll be afraid of inadvertently SAYING SOMETHING WHICH MAKES THEIR TEXT LOOK LIKE SPAM. ONLY $99.95. Or something like that.
Now, what the world really needs is a way to filter cluelessness out of everyday life....
Oh my god. It turns out that Eric Raymond has a web log, full of off-the-wall xenophobic wittering. And it's `powered by' Blogger. That's not even free software. Sorry, open source....
This is all done with wwwitter.
Copyright (c) Chris Lightfoot; available under a Creative Commons License. Comments, if any, copyright (c) contributors and available under the same license.