Awww. I miss my ratties now. )=

Derren Brown is fantastic. I'm a bit jealous of you being able to see him, being stuck here in .au. Oh well, another reason to travel.

I'd just started watching the "Tricks of the Mind" series when you posted your review of his book of the same name, so I ordered it (from the UK).
I finished it within a couple of days of getting it, and it was just as good as you said. I particularly liked the human element of it.

I've also seen a couple of clips of him performing card tricks, proving that he's just as good at "traditional" magic as he is at the mental stuff. He's re-inspired my interest in prestidigitation, and I've been practising...

By the way:
Telephone, sausage, monkey, button, book, cabbage, glass, mouse, stomach, cardboard, ferry, Christmas, athlete, key, wigwam, baby, kiwi, bed, paintbrush, walnut.

I have had pretty much exactly this wound, from a circular saw.
If you're not of a queasy disposition, you can see the pictures.
For those of you not wanting to look at the gore, the top of my finger was sliced diagonally off, nicking the bone and taking about a third of the nail with it.

Within a few months, it had mostly grown back, and three years on, my finger is completely healed. The nail grows a little oddly, but you'd have to look pretty closely to see the difference.

I was skeptical when I first heard this story, and I'm not any more impressed this time 'round.

Hey Joel, after all the discussion, what sort of backpack did you end up going with?

What's really disturbing is seeing this video directly after looking at the whole earth covered in bees^W satellites.

Is that John Howard?

I wondered what he was doing now...

Good for you.

I tend to agree with your sentiments. I started to avoid /. on the 1st of April a while back, as it was just one blatantly obvious April Fool's story after another. Ruined any impact it might have had.

Although, this year they seem to be showing remarkable restraint. So far.

These guys are one of the few reasons I'd bother to watch TV, before I stopped completely.

Their dry satire and willingness to puncture political targets of all stripes have stayed good for years, and don't look to be slowing up any time soon.

The first description of subvocalisation I read in SF was in David Brin's Earth.

I remember the discussion of the technology needing a clear and focused mind, which is why the airforce trialled and abandoned it, because all their testosterone laden pilots would have random thoughts that made their planes fall out of the sky...

"Never argue with idiots: They'll drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience."

Or you could just google for "Arguing on the internet".

And, finally:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24437939@N06/2314988887/

For Cory and Joel.

For those that think this is all a lot concern over nothing, here's a bit of the transcript of the radio ad for this campaign (from The Register):

Female Voice over:
How d’you tell the difference between someone just video-ing a crowded place and someone who’s checking it out for a terrorist attack?

How can you tell if someone’s buying unusual quantities of stuff for a good reason or if they’re planning to make a bomb?

What’s the difference between someone just hanging around and someone behaving suspiciously?

How can you tell if they’re a normal everyday person, or a terrorist?

Male voice over:
The answer is, you don’t have to.

That's right, the reliable London police will decide whether or not you're a terrorist.
Because they're good at that...

And another, just for the heck of it:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24437939@N06/2312900753/

I already posted this in the previous discussion, but here it is again:

http://www.filenanny.com/files/44f7b9c9f14e0/brain.png

Based on an idea of Romwell's.

PDF version of same here.

Oh, and incidentally, this reminds me of one of the best ways ever to take photographs of subjects without being seen to.
In the introduction to Manwatching, Desmond Morris talks about how he took photos of people without them suspecting: He stuck a right angle prism on the end of the camera lens, so that what he was actually photographing was at 90 degrees to what the camera was pointing at.
Apparently no-one ever twigged to what he was doing.

Terrorists could easily use similar measures...
Better ban prisms. No-one needs to make rainbows anymore, do they?

@61: Romwell, was this the sort of thing you had in mind?

Image link here.

Mirror it if you wish, I declaim all authority and responsibility.

Well, Tor's strategy has worked.
I downloaded this the other day, read the first few chapters, and now I've got a copy of the dead-tree version being held at my friendly local SF specialist bookstore. I like real books. Ebooks just don't cut it yet.

Yes, it feels a lot like Starship Troopers and Forever War, but I enjoyed them too.

(Not like anyone's going to read this so late after the fact, but I've been on honeymoon and am only now catching up on my internetting).

@40: Mate. Legend. And well done for revealing the conspiracy only to BoingBoing readers, who'd probably know better anyway.

Mate of mine once went to an Outback Steakhouse while on one of those "come to the US and spend your holiday looking after a bunch of kids at some fsm-forsaken campsite" deals.
He took photos of the food, because he was so weirded out by what they termed "genuine Australian cuisine".

Oh, and for the few that might not know yet: Fosters is not Australian beer. Anywhere claiming to be an Aussie pub and serving Fosters should be viewed with deep suspicion. Over here, the masses drink stuff like VB, West End, Hahn and Tooheys.
However, if you come to South Australia, we might let you try some Coopers Ale. If you're good.

Huh. Looks like American Gods has a predictably strong lead, followed by Neverwhere. My own picks languish towards the end, with only Anansi Boys doing worse...

Actually, while I personally would like to see Neverwhere win, American Gods is probably more accessible to the average reader. Neverwhere is very British in its setting, and a lot of the resonance is probably lost to someone who's not familiar with London.

I'm torn between Stardust and Coraline. Both are easy reads for those new to Gaiman.

On the one hand, I want more people to read Stardust, because the book is so much better than the film (IMO).

On the other hand, there's a film of Coraline coming out soon, and if people can read a free copy of the book first, they might go out and buy it before the film hits.

Mm. Coraline it is.

@5 - I've recently bought an Aeropress, and while it does make good coffee, you're right about the amount of beans/grounds it goes through. I'd probably use it more often if it weren't for that.

My usual way of making coffee is pretty basic - I put a couple of heaped teaspoons of grounds into a mug along with a couple of spoons of sugar, and add hot water. Stir, leave for a bit, stir again and let settle, then drink.
This doesn't make the best coffee - it's probably an acquired taste - but it's convenient.
It's also not the cleanest looking brew - my other half has dubbed it the "grunge-acino".

Congratulations, and yay for fresh geeklings!

Dammit - I still can't tell if Adam and Eve have navels...

I use Delineate on a Mac. It hasn't been updated in something like a millenium, but it's pretty good. The colour tracing with AutoTrace is reasonable, and the B&W tracing with potrace is brilliant. Both need some tweaking of knobs and cleaning up in a vector editor to get desired results, but they do what I need. Oh, and the re-draw time is crap.

The other one I remember was the old trace function on Corel Draw, which did pretty well from memory. Shame it's not really around these days...

I think this is also the ideal thread to note that, just now, my brand new AeroPress arrived.

I'm off to make a coffee...

@10: Mr Tom, I am in your debt - you have solved a minor mystery for me.
For the last decade I have owned a mysterious piece of lab-equipment looking glassware that I picked up at a garage sale. The only identification on it was the word CONA and some esoteric codes.

Now I know what it is. It's still more or less useless without the rest of the apparatus, but it does make a nice vase.

... of course, I could have just searched the internet at any time in the past 10 years. But hey, now I don't have to!

Legal almost everywhere. Here in Australia, it's as illegal as all those other nasty dangerous substances*. Several other countries have made it illegal too, I believe.

* Except tobacco and alcohol, of course.

I, too, have the photic sneeze reaction.
I'm guessing that the comments here are a non-representative sample of the general population, mostly consisting of people who read the story and went "Hey, that's me!".

Because it's not the sort of thing that comes up in everyday conversation, I doubt most people with it realise how many people don't have it.
I had conversation with a girl once who didn't believe me about it, because she didn't have it.

One of the early etymologies for w00t I saw was from MMORPGs, being a webism for "wondrous loot".

This, of course, is about as verifiable as the other explanations.

How on earth have I been on the internet for this long without knowing that Spider Robinson has a podcast?!