Catbeller@ 12, I believe you forgot to thank the hard-working members of the law-enforcement and business communities who are doing all they can to keep us safe.

I'm sure the powers that be appreciate his effort, but wouldn't CCTV be more efficient?

These people seem genuinely nice.

I wonder what they're up to?

Heh-heh...you know something, he did say "well" a lot!

Elysianartist, the silence is probably due to our universal fear of retribution from our ZOG overlords. Or is it our Illuminati overlords? Or our Trilateral Commission overlords? I keep getting our overlords mixed up.

Using "tard" as a generic insult is so gay!

“You don't check for the infinite possible things that are not specified,” says electrical engineering professor Ruby Lee, a cryptography expert at Princeton. “You could check the obvious possibilities, but can you test for every unspecified function?”

So basically, there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns?

Hey, at least he wasn't carrying something really scary, like a camera...

Pipenta, both this comment and your reply to Clay Shirky's essay are absolutely brilliant and get right to the heart of the issues. I'm not sure whether to fall madly in love with you or merely lobby to have you become a full-time Boinger.

Best ironically-appropriate misspelling I can recall: a student a few years back wrote something about all the "sit-calms on TV."

I wonder if maybe what we're seeing is something of a return to honorable amateurism, even if the overall quality of amateur production isn't all that high. I'm thinking of Twain's skewering of Emmeline Grangerford's artistic pretensions in Huckleberry Finn. Here's a 19th-century adolescent lowbrow who wrote absurdly sentimental poetry and drew inept, bathetic sketches ("Art thou gone yes thou art gone Alas!") On the other hand, Emmeline was at least taking part in some kind of art, like any number of hobbyist musicians and artists before the rise of Big Media.

For my money, middling creativity is still a notch above utter passivity (as long as I don't have to pretend to like your poetry).

Best additional line from the comments: "Didst thou a sign behold anent this house/Whereon was writ, 'Dead blackamoors stor'd here'?"

Worst. Chumby hack. Ever.

Hmmm...so the first lesson is, little white clouds should save themselves by running away from the scary Big Black Clouds. Was this thing produced by the KKK?

Just requested this and Pyongyang from the public library; James Fallows has also been doing terrific work on China in the Atlantic Monthly; I've just been re-reading his July 2007 article on Shenzhen.

On the upside, it would do wonders for overpopulation. Plus, if the old "nuclear winter" theory holds any water, the smoke from a global nuclear holocaust might offset global warming (I dunno, all those burning cities would also produce a lot of CO2).

All in all, giving some other species a chance to evolve might do the planet some good.

Harvey clearly wasn't part of the New Generation of Coffee Achievers (but hey, any ad campaign featuring Kurt Vonnegut couldn't be ALL bad...) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rea-yBgOSo

Bucketoclams, don't get Cory started again.

More like stealing candy with a...nahh, still not worth it.

Seems a tad disingenuous for him to claim that he wants to explore whether this rig would encourage "diminished sense of social responsibility (...) and demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment," considering that he's already entering the "experiment" with that expectation.

Now, suppose he were to outfit a random sampling of college freshmen with these outfits...

The only upside I can think of: this would make a good plot device for a Carl Hiaasen novel. Sadly, a satisfying resolution is similarly limited to the realm of fiction.

I'm so glad someone sent that photo in--over the last week or so, I've thought of my favorite blog every time I've driven past my favorite pizza place. Incidentally, Flying Pie is an enthusiastic promoter of Pi Day, Talk Like a Pirate Day, and was responsible for adding the exclamation point to the city's semi-almost-famous "Library!" sign. http://www.flyingpie.com/library.html

It is wonderfully refreshing to see a reviewer come right out and say "I loved this even though I'm really not sure I understand it." It reminds me a little bit of one of my favorite literature professors who, before getting into the allegorical overtones in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find," started the class by saying the story scared the hell out of him every time he read it because he could imagine something awful like that happening to his family.

Katidd @ 46, the only thing that should ever be inscribed on the moon is "CHA"

Fascinating...Tell me more!

I'm sure Boombotz is long-gone, but if he wants to contact the NPR ombudsman to challenge this story, she can be reached through this link: http://www.npr.org/templates/contact/index.php?columnId=2781901

I considered writing her myself, but his charges would be much more effective, if true, if they came directly from him. Interesting, however, that his website, joeypark.com, doesn't appear to include any contact info--rather an odd strategy for a site that's presumably meant to showcase the owner's skills as a designer. (Gahhh! I hate how the nature of talking on teh internetz pretty much *encourages* the sort of amateur-detective speculation I'm doing here!)

So what happens if they install one of these at CERN?

Darlene's gonna be so pissed when I tell her about this...

What happens to the vowels after they've been removed? Seems like a waste to just throw them away; maybe they could be sent to Eastern Europe, where there's a shortage.

and let's not forget Jaffee's contribution to tech jargon: "Glitch" (the onomatopoeia for stepping in dog doo)

TNH: Since you noted @ 216 that post #14 had received insufficient props, let me do likewise for a line from your own post @ 160:

If it's true that participating in the conversation when you're the moderator gives you undue influence, all I can say is that the effect definitely hasn't kicked in yet. I'm looking foward to it.

OK, maybe this makes me a suckup, but I am now thoroughly in love with you.

Hypnosis actually involves the hypnotist shooting little lightning bolts from their eyes into the subject's eyes, which become rotating spirals. The subject then starts talking in a monotone ("I...will...obey") and walking with their arms stretched out in front of them.

I thought everybody knew that.

Wow. A literal buzzkill.

Stormbunny? Bunny Trooper? Uhh...Peter Plastoid-armor-tail?

And a cannon, which Mr Weston-Webb once used to shoot his wife across the River Avon...

I really want to know more about THAT, too...

@ 6 Or naughtybitmaps

Pukebazooka @12: Holy cats--check the enlarged versions of the photos and you can see that the blimp's ground crew was out in the open during the tests...ah well, they were only enlisted men.

Oh yeah. I gotta buy toothpaste.

"Dextre" is a fairly ominous name. After all, Dextre is a serial killre.

Raisedbywolves @ 54: The real question is whether the pop-rock eating ant could fly if it were on a moving treadmill.

Twenty-odd years ago, as fundamentalist-based homeschooling/private schooling was starting to take off, I did a small writing-assessment project at a church-based school that used Accelerated Christian Education, a workbook-based, self-paced curriculum. One of the strangest workbooks had a variation on the old familiar "fact vs. opinion" checklist, in which facts were defined as either something that is demonstrably true ("Washington DC is the capitol of the USA") or a truth that is revealed by the Bible ("God created the universe in six 24-hour days"). Opinion was an unverifiable judgement based on personal preference ("chocolate is the best flavor of ice cream") or "materialist," non-Bible-based "science" that denies God's Truth ("the Earth is millions of years old"). Needless to say, the quizzes on that section were...interesting.

What do you want to bet that this will somehow be spun as a threat to public safety--like the stories of FPS levels designed around the floorplan of someone's high school?

Come see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm bein' repressed!

#69 wins teh internets!

Heard this on NPR. What was the DVD title, anyway?

Usually it's a Bible what stops bullets...

Noen, that's exactly the sort of groupthink I'd expect from you, and frankly from all of the collectivists in the hive-mind that is BoingBoing.

Arguing on the internet? Call it what it is: psychopathy

I just love the "canvas slappers" cartoon...piggies and stock handlers just havin' a fine old time, like snapping towels in the locker room. (Any odds on when that image will be repurposed for a BDSM personal ad? Err...not that I'd ever know where such a thing would be seen...)

Operation Happy Fun Ball

About halfway between his release from prison and his suicide, I saw Abbie Hoffman speak at Northern Arizona U in Flagstaff. When he signed my battered copy of Steal This Book, he grinned and said, "There, now it's worth at least a hundred bucks!" (During the talk, he insisted that he and the Yippies actually had managed to levitate the Pentagon, but that the gummint covered it up). Hell of a guy!

OK, but what about the guy in Wenatchee WA who crashed his car into a light pole last December?

When police asked the man what caused the accident, his one-word answer was "pterodactyl"

I mean, he never claimed that he was a pterodactyl, after all...

http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20071229/NEWS02/290431530

(Sadly, the website that reported the accident doesn't seem to have any follow-up...)

@Takuan, you just might have it in you to become an Objectivist yet... (ducks)

Come, Watson! The game is afoot!

[This comment is no longer available due to a copyright claim by the Wiccan Antidefamation League]

Rocky, boy, you've met your match...

Sigh. And to think that when I was 10 my mom wouldn't give me a quarter (or whatever it was then) to buy Howard the Duck #1...

Needless to say, there is already a "wiener poopie" t-shirt for sale out there (no, I'm not shilling for it; darned if I'll be bothered to cut-n-paste a URL). As memes go, this is better than "Don't taze me, bro."

And I may as well get it out of my system: "All your wiener poopie are belong to us." I feel better now.

Uhhh...Smurfs?

Worth quoting to every new arrival:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

--Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Not to get too depressing, but I wonder if some of the reason that less depression is noted past 45 is that a portion of the pool of depressed folks has, well, voluntarily removed themselves from the survey population.

"I'm not getting you down, am I?"--Marvin

This was genuinely and surprisingly touching even for this curmudgeonly nonbeliever--something about the music and the graceful fluidity of the robot's movement. The only thing missing was Linus reading from the Gospel of Matthew.

Puts me in mind of the time back in my college days when Harrison Ford had lunch in the restaurant where I worked (this would be the summer of 1981). Right after he left, a waitress ran to his just-vacated chair, sat down, and exclaimed "It's still warm! I can feel Harrison Ford's BUTT HEAT!"

This anecdote would have been way cooler had it involved a toilet seat, of course.

"Madge"?

I guess I just don't keep up. I still associate Madonna with that ridiculous conical bra (I know, that was at least 4 or 5 makeovers ago). But...is she now encouraging people to soak their hands in dishwashing liquid?

Actually, Cpt Tim @20, I remember reading about the "no under-nipple exposure" rule in (I think) David Gerrold's The World of Star Trek when I was in high school, and then, years later, giggling at Denise Crosby's underboob-cleavage costume in the early Next-Gen episode "The Naked Now." I always assumed that the costume was a deliberate inside joke...

@Pruferock 451, what I want to know is whether it's a carnivalesque celebration of the lower bodily stratum, bringing about a Rabelasian upending of social orthodoxy? Or is it just a lot of poo?

Nevermind, from the descriptions I've seen, no amount of Bakhtin could disinfect this video...

Forget Numa Numa and Troops--Where's teh Dramatic Prairie Dog?

Oh great. Now I have that "It's a Fatass World After All" song going through my head.

Fish heads, fish heads, trashy ashy fish heads!
Fish heads, fish heads, smoke 'em up, yum!

The owls are not what they seem.