I'm reading
Come watch me read tomorrow night. I'm reading a really gross story called "Sacred Cow Skull." You'll be pleasantly disgusted.
- posted by frank crist @ 5:06 PM 0 comments

 
Virtual Apple 2 - Online disk archive
1,100 Apple II games you can play online! Right on. Here are the Es:

Eagles
Earth Orbit Station
Earthly Delights
Easter Island
Echelon
Eggs It
Eidolon
ElectroArena
Eliminator
Elite
Empire I - World Builders
Empire of the Overmind
Enchanter
Epoch
Escape
Escape From Arcturus
Escape From Rungistan
Escape From Traam
Escape!
ET Comes Back
Eternal Dagger
Europe Ablaze
Evolution
Exodus Construction Set
Expedition Amazon

The funniest thing about this: the emulator only works on IE on Windows. I.e. the APPLE emulator doesn't work on MAC. *Irony*.
- posted by frank crist @ 7:22 PM 0 comments

 
FreeEnigma: not the deal it sounds
BoingBoing is reporting about a new encryption service for email, FreeEnigma, which incorporates a relatively strong GPG encryption scheme into your popular email services (GMail, Hotmail, etc) via a FireFox extension.

One thing that you must know aboug GPG--indeed, any key-based encryption--is that, just as with any key for any lock, the key must be hidden for the encryption to work. If I have a key to the front door of your house, I can enter your house. It is the same for encryption: if I have the encryption key to your encrypted message, I can read your message.

Having established that, I found an interesting item in the FreeEnigma FAQ:

You manage all contacts and trusted persons with whom you want to exchange encrypted e-mails on the freenigma server. For the experts: the entire key management takes place on the server. Your keys are managed on the server while the encryption itself takes place within the client. For the non-experts: don't worry - you won't find any complicated terms in freenigma. Everything is simple and intuitive to use.

One of the "great" things about encryption is that the keys are long and complex and it would take a significant effort to find your key--unless you use FreeEnigma. Now, any governmental (or commercial) agent who wishes to read all of your encrypted email can just supoena FreeEnigma to get your key. And what's to stop FreeEnigma from exploiting your key themselves? Or from blundering it into the public domain like a much larger company recently did with their sensitive user information?

Encryption technology is not there yet because key management is not there yet. Just because an organization promises to take really, really good care of your sensitive key, we promise, doesn't mean you should trust them. In fact, you probably should not.
- posted by frank crist @ 3:33 PM 0 comments

 
BACON WALLET
Where do you keep your cheddar? In your bacon wallet! SO HUNGRY!
- posted by frank crist @ 10:38 AM 0 comments

 
Snakes on the wane
This article by Simon Houpt, art critic for the Globe and Mail, wonders aloud why "Snakes on a Plane" has done so badly, even though it generated so much internet buzz?

I have a few answers for him:
1) Have you seen the movie?
2) Do not believe the hype produced by a bunch of internet dorks. Peanut Butter Jelly Time may be the most amusing thing ever created, but an award-winning piece of culture it ain't.

Besides, even though New Line will recoup its 30 million in production costs with an opening weekend of 15 million, they really dropped the ball on how to make money from this movie:

MERCHANDISE! They should've crammed "Snakes on a Plane" logos and screenshots on everything from Burger King Cups to disposable diapers. That's the real genius behind the whole phenom that Houpt doesn't perceive: "Snakes on a Plane" really is just that bad of a concept that it appeals to the perverse to promote it. The movie will become a cult classic, surely, but it will never be a box-office smash.
- posted by frank crist @ 3:58 PM 0 comments

 
California Academy of Sciences - General Information
The trap-jaw ant is getting a lot of attention right now for having the fastest self-powered strike of any known animal. The ant, which lives in Costa Rica, can shut its mandibles at 145 MPH, beating out the vicious kick of the mantis shrimp.

How does one go about determining that a creature as tiny as an ant can move a body part 50% faster than Nolan Ryan can throw a fastball? They used a camera that recorded at 50,000 frames per second.

In addition to attacking its prey with lightning mandibles, trap-jaw ants can also hurl themselves into the air with the force of the snap to evade predators and the like.

The videos, at the bottom of the linked page, are not to be missed.
- posted by frank crist @ 3:52 PM 0 comments

 
The Inner Life of a Cell
A great article, and better animation, about a visualization of all things in the cell world. Pretty incredible and well-conceived.
- posted by frank crist @ 8:06 PM 0 comments

 
Mountain Dew == Headache
Every time I drink Mountain Dew, without fail, 20 minutes later I get a raging headache.

I thought it was because it had so much caffeine, so I looked it up on this chart to discover that Mountain Dew has 55mg of caffeine per 12 oz can. Well, considering that I usually have a quad iced venti latte every morning as well, which contains 4-6 oz of espresso, yielding a delicious jolt of 200-300 mg of caffeine, I decided that our friend C₈H₁₀N₄O₂ isn't the cuprit.

Instead I thought I'd look up the other major ingredient in Mountain Dew: sugar. However, Mountain Dew only has 46g of sugar, a mere 5g over Cherry Coke, which never gives me a headache.

Praise Jupiter for the Tubes of the Internets. Caffeine is not the culprit, nor is sugar, so on a whim I decided to go to Mountain Dew's Wikipedia entry, where I found a most interesting paragraph at the top:

Mountain Dew contains tartrazine (“FD&C Yellow No. 5” in the US), which could lead to allergic reactions in some people. This has also led to an urban legend that the Yellow No. 5 in Mountain Dew reduces the sperm count of male drinkers. This is, however, false. Mountain Dew, along with many other citrus flavoured sodas, contains citric acid and sodium benzoate. Recent reports to the FDA indicate that Mountain Dew and other soft drinks may contain high levels of benzene that are above the FDA's limit for public drinking water. The source of the benzene appears to be from a reaction of citric acid and sodium benzoate. There has been a call, recently, for soft drink companies to address the toxic chemical reaction that takes place in many similar beverages. Diet Mountain Dew contains aspartame. Mountain Dew's brominated vegetable oil (BVO) is another source of contention.

Well now the list of potentially bad items grows: tartrazine, according to the article, is the most egregious offender, which, according to its own Wikipedia entry is "banned in Norway and was banned in Austria and Germany, before EU regulations lifted the ban again." And in 2001, Heather Brodie Perry, a Reference Librarian at Stonehill College in Eastern Massachusetts, wrote a petition to the FDA to delist tartrazine (A.K.A. FD&C Yellow 5). I called Heather by phone and she told me that over 2000 people had signed her petition, which has yet to be closed by the FDA.

So is tartrazine causing an allergic reaction in me? Or are my headaches caused by the carcinogen benzine, or the allegedly brain-tumor-causing aspartame, or the toxic and indigestable traces of bromine contained in the brominated vegetable oil?

Heather suggested that I do a comparison with other products with similar amounts of tartrazine. She cited Tang as a good comparator. Looks like it's a Tang weekend for me!

(Special thanks to Heather Brodie Perry for being so nice when a random internet wacko--me--called her out of the blue!)
- posted by frank crist @ 5:25 PM 0 comments

 
Word of the day: blotto
blotto (adv.) - Blind drunk, intoxicated to the extreme

You were so blotto last night
- posted by frank crist @ 1:36 PM 2 comments

 
Poker Math Geeks Unite!
Cactus Kev, poker aficionado, has written a seriously hard-core poker hand evaluator. The real secret of it is in two parts.

First, the algorithm makes a difference between unique hands--any of the 2,598,960 (C(52,5) in combinatoric parlance) possible hands in poker--and distinct hands--those hands that will tie in a game of cards even though they're different (e.g. a ten-high straight of TH-9D-8D-7D-6D ties a ten-high straight of TS-9C-8C-7C-6C), and of which turn that 2,598,960 unique hands into 7462 distinct hands.

Cactus Kev then needed to be able to evaluate a hand with the cards in an arbitrary order (sorting it would waste CPU cycles), which brings us to the second strength of the algorithm: a prime number was assigned to each value of card (e.g. Two is 2, Three is 3, Four is 5, Five is 7, and so on until Ace is 41). Now he could simply multiply the five cards together and get a unique number, which he could then compare against any of the 7462 distinct hands to deterimine which hand he had.

Paul Senzee of Florida then further optimized the algorithm to include a pre-computed perfect hash, which knew all of the distinct hand ids in advance so as to remove any unnecessary CPU cycles.

This algorithm, on an unspecified computer (probably a Pentium 4 class machine), calculates a poker hand in arbitrary order in 63 milliseconds. That's almost 16 hands per second to identify the rank of any of the 2,598,960 poker hands. Kudos, gentlemen!
- posted by frank crist @ 1:23 PM 0 comments

 
Spider web construction gallery (Samuel Zschoke)
We already knew that the construction of a spider web is an intricate and beautiful process, but Dr. Samuel Zschokke, Senior Lecturer at Universität Basel, takes it one farther by diagramming the actual construction phases and materials of spider webs. And he does this in a most ingenious way:

the general idea was to have the spider build a web in front of a video camera connected a image scanning device (to detect the spider in the picture) which in turn was connected to a computer (to record the spider's positions).

The effects are quite stunning, and the trivia is awesome (for instance, did you know that most spiders only take an hour to build a web that may last for one or two days, while Cyrtophora citricola takes several nights to build a web which may then last for a couple of weeks? And what a web it is!)
- posted by frank crist @ 2:43 PM 0 comments

 
BetaNews | Microsoft: Build Your Own Xbox Game
Why not? I'm a bit surprised that MS would open a development platform for next to nothing, but, come on, like they don't have an ulterior motive. My guess: an attempt to strengthen their position among application developers, which is one of MS's main businesses. And it might just help the flagging 360 sales in the face of the imminent Nintendo Wii and Sony PS3 releases. Furthermore, I think MS is a bit tired of being smacked around by various hacker communities (who are going to reverse-engineer everything anyway), making their code release a first attempt at harnessing them as allies.
- posted by frank crist @ 8:05 PM 0 comments

 
Coronal suture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
That crack along the top of your skull that divides it between front and back? It's called the coronal suture.
- posted by frank crist @ 3:51 PM 0 comments

 
'Baby, Give Me a Kiss' - Los Angeles Times
Wow. A great article by Claire Hoffman, a journalist on the Hollywood and adult entertainment beat for the LA Times, about Joe Francis, the apparantly psychotic founder and cult-leader of the Girls Gone Wild franchise. It should come as no surprise that the guy is ruthless, eneretic, charismatic, and covered in dirt. The article is written from a "ride-along" POV in which Hoffman gets access to the entire GGW empire--from the distribution facilities, to court documents, to hanging with Francis himself--and shows an incredible amount of restraint. I mean, tons of restraint. Francis has so much dirt on him that the entire article could've been about his pending legal fights, but Hoffman takes her time with it, painting a very versitile picture of the man responsible for those late-night infomercials promising drunk co-eds for all the world to see.
- posted by frank crist @ 2:26 PM 0 comments

 
Zoey Budgerigar
It says:

Hi, my name is Zoey Budgerigar. I am the Snow Princess from lands far away. I was rescued from the streets of St. George Staten Island, NY by Carly Haffner and Don Porcella in July of 2005. I am here to bring joy and beauty to your life.

Yes, but look at the picture of the blog creator, Don Porcella. Is it just me or is there a serious mismatch in effect?
- posted by frank crist @ 8:14 PM 0 comments

 
Proverb of the day...
The idiot who has his eye on your wife is like a blood sucking fly.
Egyptian Proverb
- posted by frank crist @ 7:40 PM 0 comments

 
All Hallows Eve, All Souls and All Saints Day - Halloween's Christian Roots, The Tale of the Jack O' Lantern and More
This would be the Catholic Church's take on the holiday as reported by AmericanCatholic.org. A whole bevy of links to articles on the proper, political stance for Catholics to take regarding Halloween, including "How Halloween can be Redeemed":

How can Catholics keep All Hallows Eve from becoming “hollow”? Celebrate Halloween and All Saints Day while remembering both the Christian connection to Halloween and the positive messages that stem from the holiday.

- posted by frank crist @ 6:57 PM 0 comments

 
Snakes On A Plane :: Send a Message From Samuel L. Jackson!
This has got to be the funnest fucking thing ever. It's madlibs with Sam Jackson's voice that will call a friend (or enemy) and leave them a message. ZOMFG!
- posted by frank crist @ 5:19 PM 0 comments

 
Studies of the mental processes of chess grand
From Scientific American:

But how do the experts in these various subjects acquire their extraordinary skills? How much can be credited to innate talent and how much to intensive training? Psychologists have sought answers in studies of chess masters. The collected results of a century of such research have led to new theories explaining how the mind organizes and retrieves information. What is more, this research may have important implications for educators. Perhaps the same techniques used by chess players to hone their skills could be applied in the classroom to teach reading, writing and arithmetic.

- posted by frank crist @ 3:21 PM 0 comments

 
What are the stupidest things your customers have ever done?
Everybody likes to bitch about the young-twenty-something clerk behind the counter at their neighborhood cellular corner store, but what are those same clerks saying about you? This forum thread (quite long!) is a list of grievances the employees of the cell retail industry have against you. For example:

I had a customer come to my store at 9:10 at night with his defective V300 yelling at us to open the door for him (we close at 9 o'clock sharp). He came in earlier in the day because the phone was freezing or something, but he got all pissed off because he didn't want to go through warranty exchange, he wanted us to give him a new phone right there. I guess he had changed his mind, but when he demanded that we open the door and we refused, he started screaming "F$%* T-Mobile" and throws his phone about 150 feet across the 4 lane highway into another parking lot. I would've had more respect for him and his outburst if he'd stood behind his 'T-Mobile sucks' principles and left the phone there. Instead, I laughed as he drove across the street and spent 5 minutes wandering around looking for his phone in the dark. Then I memoed his account with the details in case he tried to go through with the exchange.

- posted by frank crist @ 11:55 AM 0 comments