I thought that the Pied Piper was just a story, until I read this. Ptomaine-poisoned rye bread or child slavery, according to the comments… either way, it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing I’d want to tell my kids at bedtime. As a cautionary tale in daylight hours, definitely.
I never realized, until I started reading the Bad Science blog, just how much “spin” there is in science papers. Spin is great when shooting pool, but it’s simply dishonest when someone uses it in a scientific paper. And when that paper is about the efficacy of a medicine or the safety of a product, …
This is the sort of thing I expect will become commonplace, as replacement body parts become a lot less expensive. (I’d love to claim credit for the prediction, but I’ve seen it before, in science fiction novels from at least two authors. One was William Gibson, the other I can’t recall the name of.)
Most of the licenses listed here are perfectly normal, but there are a few really odd ones…
It seems that I write like Mark Twain, at least when I put in the text of one of my longer recent blog posts. Oddly enough, no one else in the fifty comments on the Boing Boing post on this (at the time of this writing) was told that one, and lots of them tried …
This bug was filed back in 2005, but I just discovered it. It’s a nasty one, but between Apple and various Linux distributions, I think they’re making headway on it. The description starts out: Microsoft has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace. This is a bug, which Ubuntu is designed to …
I wrote about this idea a couple months ago. At the time, I expressed some reservations about the idea. Now it appears that I’m not the only one, a New Zealand “ball lightning expert” is saying the same thing. It’s nice when the experts agree with you, isn’t it? š
In my family, I’m likely to actually need this. And maybe a score-card too. š DARK HELMET: Before you die, there is something you should know about us, Lone Starr. LONE STARR: What? DARK HELMET: I am your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former room-mate. LONE STARR: What’s that make us? DARK HELMET: Absolutely nothing. Which …
Continue reading ‘“Use Wolfram Alpha to Figure Out Confusing Family Relationships”’ »
Right on target. Both the comic and the Boing Boing commentary on it.
Need yet another reason to panic? Try this one on for size. It might be a good idea to back up your vital data to optical media (writable DVDs, for example) before that point. Electronic and magnetic media just might not all survive unscathed.