Rumor has it that Placer County’s jailers refused to hold Steve Kubby. If so, let’s hope they escape prosecution.

In Bruce Sterling‘s wonderful novel Schismatrix (1985), the spaceship Red Consensus has an interesting feature:

The control room . . . had been designed by some forgotten industrial theorist who believed that instruments should use acoustic signals. . . . Bizarre at first, the sounds were designed to sink unobtrusively into the backbrain. Any change in the chorus, though, was immediately obvious. Lindsay found the music soothing, a combination of heartbeat and brain.

Now:

the Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning has created software that translates network and server activity into music. And, their IT department operators can interpret the music to detect problems in the system.

(Cited by Sore Eyes.)

An acquaintance writes:

Eudora remains my client of choice because

1. I’m used to it
2. My attitude is Augustinian: “Make me a LINUX user, but not quite yet.”
3. I love the splash screen, which looks like an insane mailman manically throwing people’s letters away over his shoulder.

It’s odd to learn that Don Knotts and Dennis Weaver, who died recently, were born in the same year. Knotts always seemed older than he was, and Weaver seemed younger.

I may have mentioned that I read a lot of webtoons. (I recently sorted them into three grades; the “first tier” has seventy titles.) I prefer to read their archives from the beginning, so I’m often years behind. So it can be a bit irritating when Sam Logan or Jeph Jacques says “Check out the cameo in today’s Superduper Funnies” giving only a link to that strip’s front (current) page – because somehow it’s usually a strip whose archive has no dates! Obviously you won’t find me doing that.

See how the mother bird feigns injury to see what the predator will do.

Godwin’s Law crops up in de cwaaziest pwaces.

There are some things we were not meant to understand.

In other news – seen in Oakland: a hot-pink Ford with the plate 430WIFE; a van, much adorned with Tibetan Buddhist symbols, and the bumper sticker My other vehicle is Mahâyâna

I had a bitch of a time uploading files for the new version of WordPress. It’s my first update since migrating from the Linux box to the Mac Mini, and the ftp client I have is crap compared to gftp which came with Gnome.

And I see I’ve (partly) broken my theme: it can’t display single posts. Until I get around to repairing/rewriting it, you get this generic theme.

You may have noticed that I have not demonstrated solidarity with the Danish press by helping to publicize the “Mohammed” cartoons. That could be because I fear for my safety, or because I hate Western freedoms, or because the cartoons do not meet my usual standards, i.e. they’re not funny. You choose.

I sneer at institutional sports, but — oh just go watch it. (Cited by Radley Balko.)