SnapShirts.com will take your blog and make it into a wordcloud such as this one.
The words come from your website and size represents frequency. Just go to the link and check it out…
Very nice, and they’ll make you a T-Shirt! I supsect that it will be interesting to see how things evolve over time.
Link found from SFSignal
If you are not a reader of The Bad Astronomy Blog, I’ll point you to a recent post which has received a lot of comments. Quite interesting reading, from low to high brow.
January 26th, 2006 is the 20th anniversary of the Challenger Disaster. Seven astronauts lost their lives. Today, we remember them.
My family and I had lived in Satellite Beach, Florida for nine years until the summer of 1985. We saw the first Space Shuttle launch, Voyager I and II, and everything in between. We moved to New Hampshire 6 months before Challenger blew up. I’m very lucky because I did not have to personally watch it explode overhead, and I would have been watching the launch.
In a few days, we will remember Columbia from just three years ago. Once again, I lucked out because I had planned to waken in time to watch the shuttle go overhead during its reentry. Thankfully, I slept through it as NASA believes the main breakup occurred almost directly over the city I was living in at the time, Lubbock, TX.
Hopefully, I will no longer need to be thankful for any close brushes with aerospace disaster. NASA needs to develop a more dependable crew module for ascent and descent; one which is intelligently conceived and prosecuted, unlike the space shuttle program. A program with a lot more bang for our buck.
This link takes you to a site with a good film about a boy learning to talk. Once you’ve entered, click on Le Film and enjoy!
For everyone’s reading enjoyment we have The Top Ten Sci-Fi Films That Never Existed.
Very Nice.
Using the lottery as a retirement vehicle? I’d check out this website first.
Thanks to friend Fraudirector, I was made aware of this very scary article concerning the state of America’s College students.
I’m not sure if I’m depressed or overjoyed. Depressed for America’s failing education system. Overjoyed that I have some serious job security. After all, you need to divide and multiply in my job. Even use percentages!
I have a wild idea (totally out in left field here) that it may partially be to blame on New Math. It was a failure and may have made that generation dislike math to the extent that their children do not get the sort of support during grade school and high school that is needed to instill a thorough understanding of basic concepts.
Just a theory.
Apparently a garbage truck struck and knocked down a large overhead guidesign on Interstate 805 in San Diego. Here’s a forbes article, but it’s not very detailed. I’m trying to find a picture, but no luck so far. At least one person was injured when the sign struck a car.
Two-minute-later update!
[Spoilers]
My wife and I have been watching Angel from the beginning over the last couple months. We’re about two thirds of the way through season two at the moment and we just watched an episode that replaced a previous one as my favorite.
Previously (and you can stop reading this now if you’re not an Angel fan; it will get realllllllly boring), the episode in season one where Angel is at a party in Cordelia’s apartment and there is a quick montage of him imagining himself dancing. That was freaking hilarious! It still is.
[Spoilers]
But now, the episode in season two where Lindsey gets a new hand has taken first prize. His departure from W&H and the end of the episode (“You know you gave an evil hand, don’t you?”) was absolutely classic.
Joss Whedon is my master.
In a bit of conversation a few weeks ago, a person related their plan to deploy tripwires in all of their outgoing email to cause the NSA headaches if they happen to be monitoring for certain phrases or words. She would include words such as bomb, missile, nuclear, radioactive, radioisotope, dirty bomb, terrorist, etc., in order to swamp their filters with junk.
I immediately thought, “Good! Teach those rotten do-badders a lesson if they try to break the law and spy on Americans.” However, then I got to thinking: Is this against the law? Is it the right way to protest the President’s obvious flouting of our democratic ideals? Would it actually do any good?
Here is some commentary (in the comments, mostly), which might shed some light on the topic, although some of it is a bit lowbrow. Personally, I think whether or not you believe it is right (or legal), it will be 99.9% ineffective.
Assume for a moment that there is some email wiretapping going on. How much email flows back and forth every second? It’s got to be in the hundreds of megabytes. No one has the ability to visually scan that much email. Therefore we get to the filter/datamining approach. How much email every second contains words or phrases that are innocuous in context–”I’m gonna kill my father for showing up drunk,” “She is the bomb,” “Y’all want to go to the quarry this weekend and blast things with guns?”–but would probably trip a dumb filter’s protocols? I’m sure it’s plenty. Too much to be looked at, again, by the budget-strapped agency that is the NSA (every gov’t agency is strapped).
Therefore, we get to the point of smart filters. The only way I can think that this sort of datamining approach to work would be for the filters to know when something isn’t critical because of the context it is in. This scenario would invalidate the email tripwire described above and merely make your signature line look weird.
So, in the first two cases, I think they would not be able to scan that much email with or without any deliberate insertions, and in the third, they wouldn’t see it anyway.
Personally, I think Bush is off his rocker and should face some serious inquiries regarding these wiretapping revelations. But also, I don’t think a personalized NSA-Bomb of this nature would have much effect, either positive or negative, on our country’s intelligence organs.
Again, for thorough commentary, see this link
There is no knowing the Evil Eyebrow
Twenty Twenty-Five
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