It really chafes my scrote when someone says something like this:

A comment to bloggers. I do my best to credit blog posts by the author's real name. However, if you blog under a psuedonym [sic] and don't make it easy to find your actual name, I may not. Unless you want me to attribute your writings to your silly Internet handle, you should include your name somewhere prominent (if not on every page, on the "About" or "Contact" page).

With all due respect, Mr Baker, it's not up to you where I should or shouldn't put my "real" name; plenty of people have damn good reasons for remaining anonymous online. Nor is it up to you to sneer at someone's "silly internet handle". Put the nick in quotes if you must, and move on. It's a name, it attaches to a person, and it matters -- at least it should matter -- a good deal less than the substance of whatever you're quoting.

I realise that netonyms have been passé among the hipsterati for some time now, and my impression is that it's a good thing, due mainly to being more comfortable online than crusty old luddites like me. Nonetheless, that you haven't been online long enough to have a nick that half your friends use instead of your "real" name is no reason the rest of us should subscribe to your particular view of how the internets should work. You can quote me on that -- you can even use my "real" name if you want.

Damn kids, get off my lawn, mutter grumble mutter mutter...

This reminded me of the famous psych experiments conducted by Milgram and Zimbardo, about which every thinking person spends some time wondering and which are more on the public mind than ever since Abu Ghraib. For some reason, this time it occurred to me, as it has not previously, that I'd like to hear from the subjects themselves. I found this account of the Milgram experiment by a participant, but nothing else like it. Does anyone know where I could find more such accounts?

Strange Brew, by John Deering.

I'm going to start keeping notes on wine and beer over at the spousal unit's food blog, Get In My Belly. The first review is Barnard Griffin's 2004 Syrah. Short version: yum.

Ray wrote this little song for his daughter, who is having a hard time at work. I hope it gave the young lady in question as much of a lift as it did me.

Ze Frank has a couple of dozen remixes in this gallery; I like Brother Klez's Feel-The-Spirit Revival Mix, Psycho Dragon Joe's HateMyJob Club Mix and the Portishead-Style Mix, but the original file is still my favourite.

Thanks, Ray.

Breasts.

Breasts, breasts, breasts, breasts, breasts.

Breasts.

Breasts, breasts, breasts.

Breasts!

Breasts, breasts, breasts, breasts, breasts, breasts, breasts!

Breasts, breasts, breasts.

Breasts, breasts!

Breasts.

There. Now, if Ann Outhouse wants to accuse someone of using breasts to drive traffic to a blog, let her accuse me!

It's a shame about BoobGate, because Terrance has a more interesting point to make, but except for one noteworthy outbreak of vileness it seems to have been (uh-huh, uh-huh) overshadowed by Jessica's breasts.

(Title shamelessly stolen from Ann.)

From Julie via Janet, the random quotations game: Go here and look through random quotes until you find 5 that you think reflect who you are or what you believe; grab the first five you come to or you'll be there forever looking for a perfect set.

Mine:

I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them.

Jane Austen (1775 - 1817)

When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.

Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 - 1968)

The public interest is best served by the free exchange of ideas.

Judge John Kane, US District Court

What are the facts? Again and again and again - what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars fortell", avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history" - what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!

Lazarus Long, from Robert Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love"

There you have: the eternal tension between my desire to help others and my distaste for them in the flesh; an important facet of my view of both politics and academia; a succinct expression of the function of law and the reason we form societies in the first place; an endorsement of Open Access; and the reason I'm a scientist by trade (I know, Heinlein's kind of a jerk, but that doesn't stop him from being right every now and then).

Peter Suber recently linked to a post on the LibraryLaw blog which asked why the Wayback Machine does not seem to archive National Science Foundation pages:

I was just looking on the National Science Foundation's web site to try to find the Index of FOIA Frequently Requested Documents. The Index is mentioned in the NSF's Public Information Handbook. When I couldn't find the Index, I realized the Handbook was written in 1999, and perhaps an older version of the NSF website had a copy of the Index. So I went to the Internet Archive's trusty Wayback Machine, and put in the NSF's web address. Yesterday when I looked at the results page, there were no results, and the statement that the site had been blocked by robots.txt was the only information returned. Today, the Wayback Machine's results page shows each instance when the site was archive, from 1997 to 2005, but when you click on a link, the resulting page is empty and has this message:"We're sorry, access to http://www.nsf.gov/ has been blocked by the site owner via robots.txt."

I thought this was weird, and wrote the NSF webmaster, who wrote back to say this:

NSF blocks all indexing of the site between 7AM and 7PM ET, our peak traffic hours, for the convenience of our users. However, there is no block on the site from 7PM to 7AM ET. This is standard policy for most high traffic sites. The owner of [the Wayback Machine] need only comply with our policy in order to index our pages.

So that made me wonder whether archive.org is aware that NSF has this policy, or whether there might be some other error somewhere. Searching the Wayback Machine for "www.nsf.gov" or "nsf.gov" produces a list of archived pages. Clicking on any of those links earlier today produced a file location error, but right now (some hours later) it's working fine. The earliest available version of the relevant public information page says that the document Susan was looking for is "coming soon", but I couldn't find it even though I went through about six versions of the public information page from 1997 to 2005. The Public Info Handbook actually says

An index of FOIA Frequently Requested Records will be published, if applicable, on the Home Page under "Public Information - FOIA and Privacy Act Requests." Where possible, this will include an electronic version of the actual records released.

(emphasis mine), so perhaps it was never added. Searching the current NSF site for "frequently requested" does not turn up the index in question, and neither does searching their publications for "FOIA", but I did find a recent management plan (pdf) which includes "Review Agency posting of statements of policy, administrative staff manuals and copies of frequently requested records" in a list of areas "identified for review". So perhaps it's still "coming soon", 9 years on. We are, after all, talking about a government agency.

Incidentally, the NSF's robots.txt file is right where it should be:

# robots.txt for http://www.nsf.gov/
# Change history:

User-agent: vspider
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /home/nsforg/
Disallow: /awards/
Disallow: /pubsys/data/
Disallow: /search97cgi/
Disallow: /seind98/topdemo.htm
Disallow: /nsf99338/topdemo.htm
Disallow: /home/ebulletin/archive/
Disallow: /sbe/srs/start.htm
Disallow: /web/
Disallow: /geo/
Disallow: /eng/
Disallow: /home/crssprgm/igert/survey/
Disallow: /staff/
Disallow: /ads-cgi/
Disallow: /awardsearch/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /nsf99338/topdemo.htm
Disallow: /home/ebulletin/archive/
Disallow: /home/crssprgm/igert/survey/
Disallow: /staff/
Disallow: /ads-cgi/
Disallow: /awardsearch/

The Wayback Machine uses Alexa crawlers, so as far as I can tell the file as shown allows vspider (a commercial spiderbot) more limited access, but every other robot can go to most of the site. It doesn't change (I checked before and after 7pm ET; same file), so NSF must be implementing their block some other way. F'rinstance, .htaccess can serve/block pages depending on the time of day.

So, to sum up: NSF only restricts access during peak hours, and the Wayback Machine knows about this and archives the site just fine. The index of FOIA requests that Susan was looking for, however, does not appear to be available. The person to ask would appear to be the FOIA Officer.

Philip of BioCurious (certainly one of the best blog names ever) wants to know: Does your office or any of your labs have windows? I hate love to gloat, so I just had to post this by way of an answer. Portland, yo.

      

(I cheated a bit -- the first one was taken from a lab window at my last job, and the others are from my current job. The sunset one is actually an underexposed sunrise from the front entrance, but is not substantially different from the shot I would have taken had I been in the shared postdoc office at the time.)

Dr Shellie went to a workshop on Impostor Syndrome, which is "a behavior pattern in which high-achieving individuals (particularly women and academics!) have a hard time believing in their own success and intelligence". As you'd expect, female academics are particularly prone to IS, and Dr Shellie tacitly admits to having some impostor issues herself.

I thought it might be interesting to have a kind of impostor -- a male scientist -- take the impostor syndrome diagnostic quiz, so here goes:

Do you secretly worry that others will find out that you're not as bright and capable as they think you are?

Nope -- I'm pretty secure about being bright and capable. (Modest, too, no?) I bet that's a man thing -- I've always been praised for anything I've done that indicated intellectual firepower, whereas women largely don't get that kind of encouragement. Or, to the extent that they do get such encouragement within academic circles, it's offset by pressure from the wider culture which tends in the opposite direction, focusing on female appearance and disparaging women's intellectual achievements -- see also this post from Dr Free-Ride on women and nerdliness.

Do you sometimes shy away from challenges because of nagging self-doubt?

No. I do wonder if I'm up to some parts of the larger job -- getting funding, planning a long term research endeavour, managing a team -- but those are long term challenges and so sorta hard to "shy away" from. Shorter-term things like giving a presentation or picking up a new technique I'm pretty confident with.

Do you tend to chalk your accomplishments up to being a "fluke," "no big deal" or the fact that people just "like" you?

I think I do sometimes overdo the self-deprecation thing. That might be cultural though, as I grew up in Australia where it's much more common (to the point of pathology, see also Tall Poppy Syndrome). On the other hand, I think it's important to realise that luck does play a healthy part in many scientific accomplishments.

Do you hate making a mistake, being less than fully prepared or not doing things perfectly?

Sure. Doesn't everyone though?

Do you tend to feel crushed by even constructive criticism, seeing it as evidence of your "ineptness?"

Not crushed -- it annoys me, I can't seem to help that reaction, but I realise it's asinine and I always manage to step back and do my best to learn from whatever criticism I'm offered. If someone does catch me in an error I could have been expected to avoid, I do feel "inept", foolish -- but I think that's normal, not Impostor Syndrome.

When you do succeed, do you think, "Phew, I fooled 'em this time but I may not be so lucky next time."

Um, not really. Maybe a little. It depends on whether I felt secure going in -- sometimes I'm not well prepared (for a seminar, say), and if it goes well I do feel I got lucky.

Do you believe that other people (students, colleagues, competitors) are smarter and more capable than you are?

I flat-out know that some of them are -- but I think the question is aimed at a general feeling of not being up to standard, from which I do not suffer.

Do you live in fear of being found out, discovered, unmasked?

No.

In fact, I think a resounding "yes" to any of the last three questions might indicate serious anxiety and/or self esteem issues, possibly related to depression, and I think I would suggest professional mental health support in addition to Dr Young's ten steps to overcome Impostor Syndrome. (If that sounds like a put-down, note that I have major depressive disorder and see a psychiatrist regularly. I know whereof I speak, when it comes to living with mental health issues.) I don't mean to suggest that Impostor Syndrome should be subsumed into other "real" diagnoses -- I think IS is a real problem, and like many (if not most) such problems it overlaps with several other parts of the mental health spectrum.

Aaaaaahhhhh!! My eyes! My ears!

Curse you, CUJoe!

Find out why here. To paraphrase Bill Cosby: those of you with or without theses, you'll understand.

Bloody hell. I waited a few weeks to upgrade to Firefox 1.5 (MacOSX), because I know from bitter experience that every single time the bloody thing is upgraded, something breaks. I figure the early adopters run interference for me. Well, it appears I have to wait even longer -- it took about five minutes after upgrading for me to run in to Bug 298502, which is where you get the Beachball of Death and have to force-quit the second (but not the first) time you try to use a drop-down from the bookmarks toolbar. It seems to have been around since June, so that must have been on 1.0.x builds, but I'm back on 1.0.7 now and it's not happening. Gaaaah.

Alistair Cooke is sorely missed since his death last year, and never more so than now, as the story breaks that his corpse was defiled:

The bones of Alistair Cooke, one of the great broadcasters of the twentieth century, were stolen days after he died last year at the age of 95, according to reports in New York.

Cooke's bones were removed by a surgeon and then sold for around $7,000 (GBP4,000) to two companies that provide tissue for transplant operations, said The Daily News.

I don't know what Cooke's beliefs were, but I do know that he had his family break the law by scattering his ashes in Central Park -- so I rather think he'd have been amused by all this, and I wish he could somehow be here to send in one of his wry Letters From America about it. (I don't mean to say it's funny -- it's ghoulish and astonishing and vile, of course -- but I can almost hear him making droll humour from the horror, and all in that lovely voice.)

The caption reads, "Each prayer tassel hung on the pickets at the Department of Official Morality represents a visitor's hope for honest government or a corrupt official's atonement," and my first thought is, "so few?"

The Tao of Bush, Morgon Mae Schultz, Utne.com, via Eliot.

Prof B has the goods, and because I'm busy I'm just going to swipe her whole post. Watch out for that first link if you're squeamish, it's a post-op picture of a mastectomy.

This is what breast cancer is about.

Here's a place to start doing research on the latest news related to breast cancer: disease, diagnosis, treatment.

Here is an animated explanation of how to do self-exams. Do them. If, like me, you forget, order yourself a free shower card to help remind you.

October 21 is National Mammography Day. Call and schedule a mammography for yourself. And/or encourage your wife, sister, girlfriend, daughter, to do so.

Wanna donate to breast cancer research or activism? Think Before you Pink.

That's my girl.

Matthew Baldwin is a genius:

Speaking of this, you know what I think they should do? I think they should make it so if you press an elevator button that's already lit, it goes off. This would serve two purposes.

First, it would allow a rider to cancel a button pressed in error.

Second, it would thwart those A-personality types who enter the elevator and press the button for their floor even when it's already lit. This would obviously be the greatest boon of the technology, because, as we all know, those people are totally fucking annoying.

The "this" link goes to a post on Matt's other blog, Tricks of the Trade (which I just added to the blogroll because it, too, is sheer genius). Apparently there's a way to get most elevators to go straight to your floor without stopping for anyone else; evil, but useful.

There's a whale wandering around the Pacific on his/her own, calling in a voice unlike any other whale's. Not much info to be had; here's the whole article by Rhiannon Edward in the Scotsman (the story is from the Dec 11 issue of New Scientist but it's not in the online version):

A LONE whale with a mysterious voice that matches no other species has been discovered roaming the Pacific, it was revealed yesterday.

The whale has been wandering across the ocean for the past 12 years. Researchers identified it after listening to recordings made by the United States Navy’s submarine-tracking hydrophones.

Mary Ann Daher, a marine biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, used the partly declassified records to trace the movements of whales in the north Pacific. They show that one whale singing at a frequency of about 52 hertz has cruised the ocean every autumn and winter since 1992.

Its calls do not match those of any known species, though they are clearly those of a baleen, the family that includes blue, fin and humpback whales.

Blue whales typically call at frequencies between 15 and 20 hertz. They do use some higher frequencies, but not 52 hertz, New Scientist magazine reported.

The tracks of the lone whale also do not match the migration patterns of any other species.

New Scientist reported: "Over the years, the calls have deepened slightly, perhaps because the whale has aged, but its voice is still recognisable. Ms Daher doubts that the whale belongs to a new species, although no similar call has been found anywhere else, despite careful monitoring."

Whales of most species spend considerable time alone, so a solitary whale is not unusual, and even if though this one has never been recorded together with any other calls that doesn't mean he/she is always alone. Nonetheless, it's difficult to resist anthropomorphising and feeling sad for the poor lonely whale with the odd high-pitched voice. (Updated 041210. Abstract in Deep Sea Research is here.)

Top: yours truly scrapes 65-million-year-old matrix away from a Triceratops prorsus bone (femur, I think). That made my day. Bottom: the spousal unit in touch with her inner 12-year-old. That contraption (around and through which, on intricate wire trackways and scaffolds, large metal ball bearings continually drop, roll and loop) is apparently a childhood favourite.

I'd link to del.icio.us, which is an online bookmarks manager that I've been playing with and quite liking, only there'd be no point. It fails to load at least as often as it works. My guess is that their server/s is/are badly overloaded. What good is a bookmark service that works half the time?

Next I'm going to try spurl, which even allows you to interface with del.icio.us (when it's working, that is). It doesn't seem to be much more reliable at first glance though. Right now it's churning away trying to load in the next browser tab, but not getting anywhere. Oh wait -- it's finally loaded. Well, better that than timing out like del.icio.us, but it's still not much use if I just want to grab a bookmark and move on without having to wait for something else to load.

Dammit, until I played with these things I didn't even know I wanted an online bookmarks manager. Bah.

I keep wondering, where is all the alternative energy research and development? I'm far from an expert on the subject, but I can't help feeling that the West is not pursuing the subject with appropriate vigour. When I visited Kuwait in 2002, it struck me that here was a country with buckets of oil money and not much else -- except, you know, wind, tides, sunlight and vast empty spaces. If I were Kuwait, I thought at the time, I'd be working and investing my ass off in order to own energy production once the oil starts to run out.

What brought this to mind was the concurrence of a story about an exhibition of ecofriendly cars in Shanghai (google "Habo Shanghai" after that yahoo link dies) and this entry on WorldChanging about a meeting between Kofi Annan and Lu Yongxiang, the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences:

...this would be of only passing interest except for the comment from an unnamed Chinese official:

"China will send experts to train local technicians in African countries, and will also host training classes and sponsor African experts to learn in China about agriculture, water power and renewable energies". (Emphasis mine.)

China is clearly making renewable energy technologies a big part of its thrust to be a global power. Africa and other poor areas are terrific test-beds for Chinese renewable R&D, as system which would not be competitive in western markets can still find eager users. As Chinese renewable technologies get better, expect to see their target audience move from African aid to global consumers.

It seems a bit unscrupulous to be using poor nations as testing grounds, but then if the new tech is provided as aid any benefit it brings is a net plus. The strategy makes sense, and also makes me wonder how the world's power balance will start to shift once dwindling supplies finally force us all off the fossil fuel teat.

Murphy's Law is a wonderful thing, and so is this article about it by Nick T. Spark. Learn why everything you think you know about Murphy's Law is wrong, and what rocket sleds have to do with it, and how the fearless and deeply human medic who made it popular may, with Ralph Nader's help, have saved your life.

The article is from the Annals of Improbable Research (which has its own blog) by way of this AIR column in the Guardian. (via Sisyphus Shrugged; scroll down) The photos, which I swiped from the AIR article, belong to Edwards Air Force Base and show Capt John Paul Stapp, who turns out to be rather more interesting than Ed Murphy.

What the spousal unit said. Flexcar is aware of the problem, admits it's a problem, and yet doesn't fix it (they've been around since 1999, and I don't suppose that this summer is the first one in which the card readers have crapped out). That doesn't sound like a company that wants my business, which is just as well since they won't be getting any more of it until they can guarantee me I won't be left stranded if I park the damn car in the sun.

Flying Phil Rabinowitz streaks into the record books as the fastest centenarian so far: 100 meters in 30.86 seconds! He has actually run under 30 seconds but there was a clock malfunction so that time is not official.

I'm going to break this record. I'm serious. You wait and see if I don't.

(Photo: Esa Alexander/Reuters)

I've had it with Ureach. Their free email sucks -- it's a spam magnet with no filtering capacity to speak of, and anyway mine has simply stopped working this morning -- and their intrusive attempts to get me to pay for the "full" version ensure that I will never do so. (My favourite -- "we've upgraded you for free, all the features will go away in two weeks so pay up!". The "features" were shouse anyway.)

So I'm looking for an email service. I'm willing to pay a reasonable amount, although I'm not really sure what constitutes "reasonable" in this context -- a hundred dollars a year? A couple of hundred? Anway, features:

• web based, of course


• some kind of SpamGard that keeps the more obvious bulk mail at bay and learns by allowing me to define something as spam -- and get rid of it -- with a single click; unlike Ureach's version, this should actually work and keep my inbox relatively free of crap


• several Mb of space, the more the merrier


• the ability to archive when space fills up (I keep, for instance, every email between the spousal unit and myself)


• said archive to be in a database format so that I don't have a series of humongous textfiles to deal with; something compatible with, say, Eudora, or Communicator (does that even still exist?), or -- well, anything really, but ideally with a downloadable version of the webmail app


• decent address book -- meaning easy to add addresses to the file, easy to add recipients from the file when composing mail


• ability to organise stored mail into folders (bite me, Google)


• No advertisements. None, ever.


• POPmail, and ability to retrieve mail from other POP accounts


• catch-all addressing, so that I can sign things as "senn-Fredsblog@wherever.whatever" to see whether Fred is selling addresses


• decent search function (once more, Ureach, you suck)


• decent range of customisation in re: layout, format of messages, attachments, and so on -- or, you know, one unalterable layout that happens to match all my preferences


• "send copy to self" that actually does, that is, works like a bcc:; none of this bizarro "it's in the Sent folder and you can't ever move it" bollocks (Novell Groupwise, you virus masquerading as software, I'm looking at you); likewise, no symbolic linking, if I move something I want it moved already

That's about all I can think of for now. The easiest way to do all this would be to buy a minimal hosting package from a company with a decent webmail app, but all the webmail-with-hosting I've ever seen was utter crap. All info and advice much appreciated.

Yesterday and today, I spent about half an hour deleting (by hand; MT is nice, but it lacks some sorely needed functionality) some of the most vile comment spam I've seen. Rape, incest and bestiality are this scumbag's specialties, according to the comment titles and links. A WHOIS lookup on the domains entered in the url field gives this:

OrgName: Atrivo
OrgID: ATRIV
Address: 180 Golf Club Road #118
City: Pleasant Hill
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94523
Country: US

NetRange: 69.50.160.0 - 69.50.191.255
CIDR: 69.50.160.0/19
NetName: ATRIVOTECHNOLOGIES
NetHandle: NET-69-50-160-0-1
Parent: NET-69-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: MAIL.ATRIVO.COM
NameServer: PAVEL.ATRIVO.COM
Comment:
Comment: ## Comments listed here will appear in ARIN's WHOIS database.
RegDate: 2003-06-04
Updated: 2003-08-21

NOCHandle: EKA4-ARIN
NOCName: Kacperski, Emil
NOCPhone: +1-925-550-3947
NOCEmail: emil@atrivo.com

OrgTechHandle: EKA4-ARIN
OrgTechName: Kacperski, Emil
OrgTechPhone: +1-925-550-3947
OrgTechEmail: emil@atrivo.com

The OrgTechHandle entry is another WHOIS link, which gives:

Name: Kacperski, Emil
Handle: EKA4-ARIN
Company: Atrivo
Address: 180 Golf Club Road #118
City: Pleasant Hill
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94523
Country: US
Comment:
RegDate: 2002-12-09
Updated: 2002-12-09
Phone: +1-925-550-3947 (Office)
Email: emil@atrivo.com

A google search turns up around a hundred hits, including this, this and this.

Does your mother know what you do for a living, you pustule on the asshole of humanity?

Got some comments spam last night; the weird part is, the spousal unit renamed all the cgi scripts after obscure comedians, so how did I get hit? Was it some dork sitting up all night spamming by hand? Anyway, add 80.132.74.114 to your blacklist.

I've been seeing this all over the place, most recently at Pharyngula, and meaning to play along:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the sentence on your blog along with these instructions.

"This produces lymphocytes, each bearing a distinct receptor, so that the total repertoire of receptors can recognize virtually any antigen."

The antecedent of "this" is recombination of variable receptor gene segments and clonal selection of lymphocytes; the sentence is from Janeway, Travers, Walport and Shlomchik, Immunobiology 5th edition 2001 (Garland ISBN 0-8153-3642-X). If you want a good introduction to immunology, you can't go past this book; it really is first class. Both text and figures present a clear, concise but comprehensive and superbly well organised overview of the field. Highly recommended. You can see for yourself here at the NCBI Bookshelf, although you'll need to come up with searches (base 'em on the chapter headings is the easiest way) because there's no way to browse.

You know I love me some Margaret Cho, right? Well, now she and "explorer, genius, conquerer, artist, muse, refugee, eternal beauty, sexual scientist" Ava Stander are selling clothes:

We are not a plus-sized clothing line. Nor do we make clothes for the super skinny. Right now, our styles fit sizes 10 - 18, which encompasses the majority of women. In success, we will add sizes. In the mean time, we would like to point the spotlight back in to the faces of the mainstream media that is creating impossible standards of thinness for women. These unrealistic yardsticks seemed to appear at the same time women were gaining unprecedented power in the work place; as if it was known that women consumed with dieting and glamour would be less likely to take jobs away from men. Very quickly women previously not considered overweight were considered fat and the ideal woman went from Marilyn Monroe to Twiggy and Kate Moss. We would like to move the weight standards for women up a bit and bring back the styles of the 1940's that loved women and their curves instead of hiding and distorting them; back to the time when sexy was Lana Turner, Anita Eckberg, and Mae West, and Miss America weighed 150 pounds.

(via Kip)

Further to the snippet below, Ms Lauren of feministe has received a reply from Virgin to her complaint about the mouth-shaped urinals. Virgin, it seems, are shocked -- shocked! -- that women would be upset by the design, particularly since the offending objects were designed by women. Of course, since women all think alike and no woman could possibly do anything stupid or boorish. Gah.

On the other hand, Virgin is at least listening to customers, and will not be installing the urinals, which is why I thought it only fair to post this update. (picture swiped from Yahoo news)

So I see Martha Stewart was convicted of being rich while female and being in the wrong place at the wrong time when a slack-pizzled pack of political opportunists decided they needed to grab some headlines. Oh, and also of being kind of a bitch. Well, here's some news for you gleeful assholes filling up on Schadenfreude right now: the appeals court is likely to notice that the real charge was thrown out and the remaining ones were a desperate grab at a conviction, any conviction, in a case over fifty thousand dollars and some arrogance. Here's more for that worthless shitsack juror who just couldn't wait for his fifteen minutes: this is not a victory for the little guy, you maggot, it's a scripted take-down for the cameras and you bent right over for the system.

Go ahead, tell me how Martha deserves to do time while this prick hasn't even been charged. Bah. I thought I'd left the Tall Poppy Syndrome behind. (publicity shot swiped from wikipedia article)

Great Old Citrus: that thing is a citron, Citrus medica var. sarcodactylus. Spouse and I couldn't resist it when we saw it at Whole Foods. It's indigenous to the lower Himalayas and has been known for centuries throughout Asia. According to Julia F Morton's Fruits of Warm Climates, it's called fu shou in China, bushukon in Japan, limau jari, jeruk tangan and limau kerat lingtang in Malaya, djerook tangan in Indonesia, som-mu in Thailand and phât thu in Vietnam. The most common English name is Buddha's Hand. It has abundant pith and little or no flesh inside, and is mostly valued for the thick, soft rind, which can be candied or grated and used like lemon zest, and for its decorative value and strong lemony perfume. There's even a Buddha's Hand citron flavoured vodka available. Yum.

Update: there's the innards of the thing, with a medium sized apple for scale. I think this was about an average sized Cthulhu Fruit, although there was one in the shop at least twice as big.
Update the second: I don't know where I got the idea the rind was thick; as you can see in the picture, it's thinner than a lemon's.

.. if I did, I could drive here in my new home without retraining if not for the French, especially Napoleon. Also that Überscheißkopf Hitler. Quelle bastards!

(via Graham)

I only just thought to check whether the Poe Toaster (oh how I wish I'd thought of that) made his visit this year. Sure enough, he did. That link goes to the full version of AP writer Brian Witte's coverage, which (apart from a couple of dismal local attempts) seems to be the only version making the media rounds this year.

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In comments on portable music, Ralf writes I guess this won't whet your appetite for the iPod or its little sibling:

During his regular evening walk, software executive Steve Crandall often nods a polite greeting to other iPod users he passes: He easily spots the distinctive white earbuds threaded from pocket to ears.

But while quietly enjoying some chamber music one evening in August, Crandall's polite nodding protocol was rudely shattered.

Crandall was boldly approached by another iPod user, a 30ish woman bopping enthusiastically to some high-energy tune.

"She walked right up to me and got within my comfort field," Crandall stammered. "I was taken aback. She pulled out the earbuds on her iPod and indicated the jack with her eyes."

Warily unplugging his own earbuds, Crandall gingerly plugged them into the woman's iPod [...]

Oh dear Ghod. Don't we have a social contract, and laws, and rules, and mores, specifically to keep us safe from things like this? Get away from me, you freaks!

So I finally saw LotR:RotK, and it sucked. Hard. I'm probably too late to do anyone any good with this, but if you haven't seen it, don't. Jackson treats the characters and the story without respect, pretty much exactly as I'd expected him to do in the first two movies. I was suprised when he exceeded my expectations with FotR and TTT, but the signs were there in some of the egregious abuses of character and plot, and the third movie makes it abundantly clear that Jackson simply does not understand the nature of Tolkien's work. He reduces it to Hollywood pabulum -- Graydon (in this thread) is exactly right when he says, "The generosity has been leeched out of [the story], along with the restraint." Even viewed as schlock RotK is a lousy piece of work. Editing, pacing and visual continuity are all sloppy. The spousal unit postulated time/money problems and/or studio interference, but in the end Jackson must take the blame for turning a grand and epic tale into a stupid action flick.

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When you find that the backlog of those little apple juice boxes that your wife puts in your lunch has almost filled the comestibles fridge at work, do not take them all out and drink them all at once. If you do, you will rumble, bloat and fart for hours; you will shit green slurry until your fundamental orifice puckers in reflexive terror at each fresh gurgle; you will come to believe that angry weasels are eating their way out of your intestines. Got it? Do not gorge on apple juice: it does not love you back.