The Evil Eyebrow

Month: November 2007

  • Podcasting on the Run!

    I took my Iriver 799 along on my run tonight, in order to see how well recording can work in a hectically loud environment. Surprisingly, it worked very well, Now I have to keep the cord from knocking against the microphone and leaving a “thump thump thump thump…” sound on the audio track.

    Experiment and learn!

  • Good Math, Bad Math does a Takedown

    I really like Mark Chu-Carrol’s blog, Good Math, Bad Math. In it, he dissects various mathematical concepts, most of which are tantalizingly past my ken, which makes me think. I like that. But he also does frequent mathematical smack-downs on the Intelligent Design boneheads out there who like to play fast and loose with statistics and information theory.

    My hat goes off to him.

  • "Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics"

    I was perusing my blog stats today and did something I’ve never done before: I checked the most popular search phrases that would land you here. This goes all the way back to the inception of the Evil Eyebrow.

    1 lost is crap
    2 kai ryssdal
    3 lost crap
    4 Jasper Forde
    5 eyebrow
    6 Harriet Klausner
    7 evil eyebrow
    8 computers internet blog
    9 freaky optical illusions
    10 evil eyebrows

    So there you have it. In a nutshell, my blog is about Lost and Kai Ryssdal. Who would have thunk it. I suppose it’s not coincidence that half of these search phrases land me in the top 10 google hits.

    Oh, and did you know that there is an Evil Eyebrows website? Me neither, but now I do. Unfortunately, there’s nothing there. Go Eyebrows!

  • Xkcd today is the Bomb!

    I know that everyone who reads my blog already is a devoted follower of xkcd (or at least they should be), but today’s is particularly awe inspiring.

    Run, don’t walk, to today’s comic.

  • TinyURL and Social Media

    TinyURL, the service that takes a long string URL such as http://www.amazon.com/Storm-Front-Dresden-Files-Book/dp/0451457811 and turns it into http://tinyurl.com/2kfq6x is useful for plugging into emails or twitters or other programs that dislike exceptionally long strings. It’s a great service, yes?

    Maybe. From the TinyURL website comes a quote that illustrates my issues with it.

    Hide your affiliate URLs:
    Are you posting something that you don’t want people to know what the URL is because it might give away that it’s an affiliate link? Then you can enter a URL into TinyURL, and your affiliate link will be hidden from the visitor, only the tinyurl.com address and the ending address will be visible to your visitors.

    This is a great service in social media expansion, but I am often hesitant to click on a TinyURL because you can’t see its underlying link! The final destination is, as it’s stated above, hidden. How do I know I’m going to something legitimate? Of course, I acknowledge that any URL can be redirected to something unsavory or evil, even www.cutekittens.com (which is an evil marketing website if there ever was one) could be redirected without your consent to www.cuteAND_EVILkittens.com (which hasn’t been registered yet, darn it). There’s no more actual safety in clicking on a URL you can see, any more than one that is hidden behind the TinyURL masking. Still, it is comforting, therefore of utility, to be able to see that you’re being linked to a cnn.com portal or that the url says www.bigbigbigbigbigbigOHMYGODITSBIG.com. I’ll probably click on the first one from an untrusted source, but definitely not the second.

    I would suggest that TinyURL have an option to leave in the base domain and then cipher out the miscellaneous garbage at the end, which nobody reads anyway.

  • Best Public Law Quotation of Today

    I doubt there will be any other selected quotes from public law today, therefore this one is the best.

    From US Code Title 42:

    Sec. 12208. Transvestites
    For the purposes of this chapter, the term “disabled” or “disability” shall not apply to an individual solely because that individual is a transvestite.

  • Arrghhh! Too Many Projects!

    I know I’ve mentioned previously my tendency to have too much stuff going on. I need to focus!

    That being said, here is the list of things that are on the burner for the near future:

    TalkingTraffic Podcast. I really need to do that tonight. I usually post it by midnight this morning, but obviously not today.
    Work! Gosh, think about who pays for this website!
    Christmas. Not as big a deal this year, but there’s christmas cards, and I need to prepare my annual present of photo album pages to the family.
    Train. The Resolution 10k is in a month +6 days and there’s no time like the present. Plus I need to get back onto the bicycle and into the pool.
    Create! There’s this camera thing I have that has been neglected recently. Plus I’ve got two blogs, one podcast, and two web projects to work on.
    Read. My pile keeps getting bigger… [sigh]
    Clean! The house is a bit of a mess. Our goal is to have it spic and span by Saturday when we put up Christmas decorations.

    Tonight is Train, Cook, Clean, Podcast, Sleep. I know at least three of those will get done.

  • Favorite Photo of Last Week

    I'm Thinking

    I spent some time at Thanksgiving just wandering around with the camera.

  • The Golden Compass = Antichristian?

    Phillip Pullman’s books and the movie based upon the first one, The Golden Compass, have been receiving a lot of hate-press recently due to their perceived anti-christian outlook. The gist is, “Pullman is an atheist [true], who is trying to turn our kids to the devil [only true from a certain perspective].”

    I could discuss the pros and cons of these viewpoints, but I’d rather do an end-run. Question: Why didn’t these people come out of the woodwork for Battlestar Galactica? There’s a show where the good guys are polytheistic and the bad guys, bent on the destruction of the human race, are doing it because their sole God (obviously based on the Bible) is telling them to. BSG is much more blatant about it then Pullman ever is. Or what about The Lord of the Rings? Despite Peter Jackson’s pandering to the religious writers on his team, there is NO GOD in the Lord of the Rings. Nobody complained about that. And what about every horror/demon/antichrist film out there? Why do none of them get this sort of treatment?

    I think the truth is that the religious don’t think they’ll be able to sell their religions in the face of competing viewpoints. Also, given the control that christians have over this nation, they only fear what is perceived as anti-christian messages. No worries about the push to make “Jihad” a bad word (even though its actual definition doesn’t mean “kill everyone in God’s name”). Notice no complaints about all of the anti-muslim press that bandies about.

    The hypocrisy of some people just boggles my feet sometimes. I wish I could blame the media, but their motiviations are strictly monetary; they go where the stories are.

    In the interest of full disclosure, I think I should mention that I did not like The Golden Compass, but I’ll still see the film adaptation.

  • Random Weblog

    I wish I could say that I have something meaningful to post. Unfortunately, I have something vapid and useless.

    For all Firefly, Serenity, or Stargate Atlantis (not me) fans! Jewel Staite has a blog. And the two images of here on the front page looks like she’s been clubbed over the head or just got finished licking a toad, or something.