I was awakened this morning by geese. What do they talk about as they fly?
Flickr gallery capturing people’s reactions on seeing goatse for the first time. (Cited in a comment on Malfunction Junction.)
A novel method for the removal of ear cerumen in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. I especially enjoyed the footnotes. (Cited by devnull.)
Today I watched Inside Man, my first Spike Lee joint since She’s Gotta Have It (1986) and, even more surprisingly, my first Denzel Washington ever. It’s swell. My housemate said after the opening shot, “Clive Owen is so great I’ll even watch him doing an American accent.”
I also watched an hour of Vermilion Pleasure Night, a Japanese cult tv show. Um. Imagine the most annoying of SNL’s recurring bits all strung together . . . .
Fake identifying documents save lives in Iraq:
At any time, the relevant authorities in Iraq could have decreed that all people get (as near as possible) forgery-proof biometric ID cards and carry them at all times – a great way to batten down a country, right?
Doing so would have fed directly into the strategy being used by the enemies of peace and security in Iraq today: setting up fake checkpoints and killing people who arrive there members of the wrong sect. Identity cards had a role in the Rwandan genocide just over 10 years ago, as well.
(Cited by Bruce Schneier.)
Number Systems of the World: lists of number-words from 0 to 100, ranked, somewhat arbitrarily, by “complexity”. (Cited by LanguageHat.) To me the most remarkable is Alamblak (#7) whose number-words are all compounded from the words for 1, 2, 5 and 20, thus 56 is yima hosfi tir hosfirpati rpat = twenties two, fives two-one, one.
New toy! Fritz Obermeyer’s Jenn makes stereographic projections of most of the convex uniform tilings of the hypersphere; of the 64 Conway-Guy polychora only four (whose construction is somewhat anomalous) are missing.
I downloaded the generic Unix version and easily built it on my Mac.
The author has responded cheerfully to my comments.
I mis-heard some trivial question as “What is Hamming music?”
For some of us, the name Hamming is strongly associated with information theory, and so I imagined that “Hamming music” must be algorithmic composition using error-correcting principles.
And that got me thinking vaguely about redundancy in art.