Month: February 2004

Allrecipes presents a recipe for Salmon in the Dishwasher. No, really. I’m curious, but since it’s not breaded and fried, not overly so… 😉

McSweeney’s presents “Quotes From Either [W] or Senator/Chancellor/Emperor Palpatine from the Star Wars Movies.” A little heavy-handed and somewhat obvious, but still funny…

The Economist has an excellent article addressing one of the central questions of modern cosmology: “What if the dark energy and dark matter essential to modern explanations of the universe don’t really exist?” The article makes a point that I have often thought about: are we so blinded by our assumed superior technologies that we may overlook possible misconceptions about “reality?” Looking back at some widely-held scientific theories of the past that have been proven wrong, it’s easy to see in retrospect which assumptions proved to be their downfall. However, what we now see as ill-conceived ideas were for the most part based upon the best possible technologies and experimental procedures at the time. What’s to say that we aren’t making the same types of mistakes now based on errant assumptions, or just a lack of technology to prove otherwise? There is a great passage to this effect in the article:

It was beautiful, complex and wrong. In 150 A.D., Ptolemy of Alexandria published his theory of epicycles—the idea that the moon, the sun and the planets moved in circles which were moving in circles which were moving in circles around the Earth. This theory explained the motion of celestial objects to an astonishing degree of precision. It was, however, what computer programmers call a kludge: a dirty, inelegant solution. Some 1,500 years later, Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer, replaced the whole complex edifice with three simple laws.

Some people think modern astronomy is based on a kludge similar to Ptolemy’s. At the moment, the received wisdom is that the obvious stuff in the universe—stars, planets, gas clouds and so on—is actually only 4% of its total content. About another quarter is so-called cold, dark matter, which is made of different particles from the familiar sort of matter, and can interact with the latter only via gravity. The remaining 70% is even stranger. It is known as dark energy, and acts to push the universe apart. However, the existence of cold, dark matter and dark energy has to be inferred from their effects on the visible, familiar stuff. If something else is actually causing those effects, the whole theoretical edifice would come crashing down.

The article goes on to explain some scientists’ doubts about this “status quo” theory of dark matter, surmising that the observations and measurements that the theory is based on could be misleading. I don’t know nearly enough about this topic to be sure either way, but I’ve been fascinated with cosmology ever since (and probably before) I took courses in Archaeoastronomy and The History of Science in college, and I’m glad to see that someone is questioning a somewhat kludged theory rather than blindly accepting it. Albert Einstein said, “Physics should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” On the other hand, one of the Slashdot contributors recalled a humorous, but quite appropriate quote from The Hitchhikers’s Guide To The Galaxy that could just as easily be true: “There is a theory which states that if anyone discovers just exactly what the universe is for and why we are here, that it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.”

One of my favorite arcade games of the ‘80s was Sinistar. I can still remember playing the game at the theaters across from Columbia Mall (long gone now), trying in vain to shoot those little ships and asteroids to get the precious crystals needed to kill Sinistar. It was one of the first games to sport real voice samples; too cool. But I digress.

Sinistar, the main opponent in the game, was an entity of few words, uttering only seven phrases in the game. Videotopia analyzes these phrases and reveals a hitherto undiscovered level of meaning belied by the terseness of his lexicon. Revel in The Philosophical Revelations of Sinistar and see for yourself… 😉

Mozilla Firebird version 0.8 has being released and has been renamed to Mozilla Firefox. Some of the new features include an improved download manager, a real Windows installer (no big deal for geeks versed in the lore of .ZIP, but still nice :-p), and improved handling of some file types. Check out the complete list of release notes and the FAQ page. The one thing that I’m not sure I like is the availability of extensions. I have a bunch of extensions that I use to add even more functionality to Firefox, and the installation notes state that you should disable any Firebird extensions before installing Firefox. I’m still playing with Firefox, and so far I haven’t had any problems re-enabling extensions, but it’s definitely something to keep in mind when installing over an old version. This is only the first day of the release, so I’m sure that their servers are swamped and the extension situation will be addressed.

Additionally, Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5 was released today. The main new addition is the ability to synchronize address books with Palm PDAs (long overdue), but there is a multiple identity feature that looks intriguing as well. Take a look at all of the new features and fixes of this release. I don’t have a PDA yet to test Thunderbird’s capabilities with this, but it certainly spurs me on to buy one now that I know I’ll be able to synch properly.

As many of you know from my frequent raves about Mozilla products, I use the Mozilla Firebird web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail application pretty much exclusively (unless an application forces M$ upon me). I can’t say enough about how much I prefer them over M$ products, although from the frequency of my posts about them, I guess I say a good amount. 😉 I won’t belabor the point too much, but I find these products indispensable and infinitely more reliable and secure than the equivalent M$ products. Try them out and you’ll see, or feel free to post a comment with any questions or opinions…

BBSpot presents the Top 11 Yo Momma Insults for Coders:

11. Yo momma’s so crazy, she makes pi look rational.

10. Yo momma’s so annoying, she made Clippy try to turn itself off.

9. Yo momma’s so fat, she has to share resources with herself.

8. Yo momma’s so insecure, she makes an unpatched copy of Microsoft IIS look like Fort Knox.

7. Yo momma’s so stupid, she leaves possible buffer overruns in a “Hello World” application.

6. Yo momma’s so boring, she makes debugging Prolog seem fun.

5. Yo momma’s so fat, she uses FAT256.

4. Yo momma’s code is so bloated, she makes assembly look like C.

3. Yo momma’s so fat, she uses C++++.

2. Yo momma’s so flea-ridden, she has more bugs than Tribes 2.

1. Yo momma’s so ugly, she makes custom regex engines in perl look beautiful.

I feel grateful that a couple of these are over my head… 😉

Although the sites Powers of 10 and Atlas of the Universe are more graphically appealing, the site A Sense of Scale contains a lot more information in its hyperlinks, and still spans distances ranging from the Planck length (1.616×10^-35 m) to the distance to the farthest known object, quasar SDSS_1044_0125 (2.4×10²⁶ m).

The Onion reports on a technology that will revolutionize the auto industry: anger-powered automobiles. I think the most significant development is the resurrection of the Plymouth Fury, although I am very intrigued by the Acrimony line of vehicles… 😉

UGO presents the Top 11 Movie Gadgets. I need to find those moose glasses from Christmas Vacation now…

After seeing the hilarious commercial for Shards O’ Glass Freeze Pops during the Super Bowl (check out the IFilm archive if you missed it), I meant to check the web site to see if it was real. Sure enough, the Shards O’ Glass web site is up and running, telling you everything you need to know about this dangerously fun food product. Remember, “More stick for your lick!” 😉