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19.08.01 |
| A sterling, elegant and thoroughly addictive 3D Pong game. Shockwave games are the new thief of time. [via Nik] |
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18.08.01 |
| Berry Berry Nice muesli - twisted pranksterism, or had nobody in the entire company heard of beriberi? (A deficiency of a vitamin which can be found in, yes, muesli oats.) |
| Hugely speculative documentary about Sodom and Gomorrah on BBC2
the other night; such over-dramatic telly-science always makes entertaining
deductive brain exercise. "We found three skeletons with shattered
bones, so there could have been an earthquake which everyone escaped
except these three." Or a single building could have fallen down
by itself. Cough. Of course, you have to go a very long way to trump Erich von Däniken:- "Let us imagine for a moment that Sodom and Gomorrha were destroyed according to plan, i.e. deliberately, by a nuclear explosion. Perhaps - let us speculate a little further - the 'angels' simply wanted to destroy some dangerous fissionable material and at the same time to make sure of wiping out a human brood they found unpleasant." |
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17.08.01 |
| Upsideclone, an earthing rod for those stubborn Clownlike discharges, finally begins to regurgitate submissions to the world. First up is one of my own; Collector's Item. |
The label "non-lethal" doesn't mean quite what it seems. NATO policy says that "non-lethal weapons shall not be required to have a zero probability of causing fatalities".So says a NewScientist article on the things. Which is fair enough from a strict probabilistic angle - a determined security officer could get a decent fatality with a a bit of string and a smiley helium balloon - but I doubt it's how the arms manufacturers are interpreting it, with the British authorities mumbling evasively about plastic-bullet ricochets in Northern Ireland, and nobody really knowing the effects of getting a Taser in the eye. The solution from a victim viewpoint seems to be pregnancy, since any of the favoured non-lethal weapons have a fair chance of affecting your child and creating bad, bad publicity (killing adults; feh - killing children; evil). So I guess it's just a matter of time before activists start stuffing pillows up their shirts. Alright, they say we're only two or three years away from robot sentry turrets, firing rubber bullets at human-shaped heat sources with cheerful indifference to pregnancy or surrender, but we've all seen the director's cut of Aliens. We know what to do. |
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13.08.01 |
| I was tinkering boldly with the security settings on my mobile phone
earlier - we technical interface gurus can intuit these things, and
are happy to leave manuals in bottoms of drawers in other houses -
and managed to completely lock myself out of it. It began quizzing me for acronyms I'd never even heard of before, convinced I'd stolen it, and I only managed to placate the thing after a few calls to Vodafone and plentiful faffing around ("What's your mobile's number?" "Er, I don't know, it's in my mobile's address book."). God help us when technology brings laser-toting household security robots. |
| Nik gripes at Friends
Reunited for blanking email addresses from profiles, since they
demand a fiver to use their secret messaging service for a year.
Pricey for what might just be a single email, yes, but it's far more than
that - how much time and effort would it take you to track these people
down otherwise? I guess there's an element of game-theory to it - that most people won't sneak a cryptic email address in, that the company will get enough payments to keep going without the fivers of a cunning few, but it still seems a bit disrespectful. Besides, you only need to find one schoolfriend who owes you more than a fiver. |
As Above is part of the Uncertain Organisation.