Miscellany
Lots of assorted items have been accumulating lately, the flotsam and jetsam of the storm-tossed web:
- Yetisports part 3 is now available! I think I may like this one best of the three so far—smooth play, a little more complexity than the earlier ones, easier to believe the penguin is having fun, and there's a totally cool special effect when the penguin reaches its highest point.
- Vardibidian points out that Avenue Victor Hugo is closing.
- I was very amused by the video clip of Donald Rumsfeld on Face the Nation saying that he'd never said Saddam Hussein was an immediate threat, and demanding citations—and then having his own words repeated back to him. I have a certain small amount of sympathy for him—I've certainly been in situations where I believed I'd never said something, only to have my words quoted back to me, and it's embarrassing as hell even if you're not on national TV at the time. But I confess to a certain amount of schadenfreude in this particular case.
- The FCC is cracking down on indecency and obscenity on the American airwaves, in the wake of the Janet Jackson incident.
- Nice article on "What Makes Comic Book Movies Suck" by Tony Whitt. Though I almost couldn't read the rest of it after hearing that Keanu has been cast as John Constantine in the upcoming Hellblazer movie. Gack.
- Lovely lovely anecdote about using Sumerian at the bank.
- A rant about how female hackers are treated by the male hacker community at large. I suspect that some of the specific things she's complaining about were intended as jokes (I have a hard time believing the line in the chat transcript about their lawyers telling them to say what they said), but that doesn't take away from her overall point.
- Nominations are still open for the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards. (Among other awards. I have no idea when I'm going to have time to fill out my Hugo ballot.)
- Former Swarthmore physics professor Rush Holt is now a member of the US House of Representatives. Last year he introduced the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003 (H.R. 2239), which would require electronic voting systems to generate paper records. When I voted a couple weeks ago, I was struck by how ephemeral my electronic vote seemed—I voted, removed the plastic card from the machine, handed the card to the guy behind the table, and rather than dropping it in a box the way we used to do with paper ballots (which was only the illusion of security and privacy, but a powerful one), he stuck it in the back of the box that contained the unused cards. I wanted to say "Wait, don't put it there, you'll lose track of it!" but I convinced myself I was being silly.
- Latest versions of the Bagle computer virus can infect a Windows system if you just open the email, without even opening an attachment. Ugh. The good news is that if you've downloaded and installed recent patches to Internet Explorer, you're immune.
- Arthur E.'s photography has now appeared (with Arthur's permission) as the cover art for a Polish funeral doom metal album.
- The Supreme Court is about to address the "under God" part of the Pledge of Allegiance. Interesting New York Times article points out that much depends on exactly what you mean by "under God"—and that there are a wide variety of conflicting opinions about what it means. (There's also an AP article on the subject at the First Amendment Center.) I'll be very interested to see what the Supremes do with this. And to see whether, if they rule against "under God" in the Pledge, it starts a chain reaction of lawsuits over other examples of "ceremonial deism." Like "In God We Trust."
