Watch Without a Watchman

Found a site that lists plurals for a variety of animals. A tower of giraffe! An intrigue of kittens! A business of ferrets!

Joel M. (via www.boingboing.net)

Warning: funny to nerds.

The future of guns is coming fast, and it was created by an illiterate eight ear old.

No, not really. It was a self-taught Aussie physicist, but he's probably just a teensy bit illiterate.

Anyway, the thing sounds like some sort of Judge Dread beast. It fires different types of bullets, speaks, and knows when it's been drawn and fired. It's all electronic and there are various sizes, from pistol to mortar, and one of the best parts is that it can be easily wired up and computer controlled.

That's right. Computer controlled. Pretty soon we'll be finding these things stuck to cameras, roving patrol-bots, robot aircraft, and what have you. Better practice saying "It wasn't me, Friend Computer! It was commie-mutant-traitors, er, I mean muslim-mutant-terrorists who placed Bouncy Bubble Beverage in the High programmer's shower head!"

Joel M. (via www.diepunyhumans.com)

Better get your rich on, hoss. Pretty soon the rich are just going to keep getting richer forever, while the poor die, cold and alone.

In principle, I am in favour of death. I think that you should be able to die whenever you like, for whatever reason you like. Just so long as you aren't me, or I don't care about you, or you aren't around me when you're doing it. I also think that death is an important feature of life in that it helps to clear out the dead wood and keep things rolling over. Once again, however, the above caveats apply.

Still, though, I don't think that longevity treatments are necessarily a bad thing. A human lifetime is nothing compared to geological, stellar, or, God help us, galactic timeframes. Just so long as we learn to throttle down our consumption of resources and reproduction rate, longevity isn't a problem at all, really. Things will be the same, but everyone will have more time to enjoy life, more time to accomplish, more time to appreciate the long-term results of one's actions. I think that everyone should get at least five hundred years, barring accidents. Long enough to notice definite changes in the environment and society based on one's actions.

Of course, I've got a more selfish argument for longevity. I don't think that anyone will ever 'throttle back' anything in any serious way. We're just not wired that way. Despite that, I am fine with it. I want the planet to turn into a quagmire. I want it to be bursting at the seems with scores of desperate people. I want the earth to groan with our numbers and split at the seams. I want things to get so terrible, that there is no choice but for humanity to bend over, grab its collective bootstraps, and pull itself into the sky forever. I want it to eject its huddled masses, yearning to breath free into interplanetary space and, finally, interstellar space so that we can be sure that intelligence cannot be lost to the cosmos because of some tiny mutant disease or slip of the wrong finger.

Joel M. (via www.boingboing.net)

An interesting website belonging to a British stencil artist called Banksy. He's got some extremely good ideas.

I hate when people do fun, cool things. So speaketh the bitter, wizened old fetus that beats where my heart should be.

Joel M. (via www.boingboing.net)

Whoa. Take that, you braised rib eating muthafuckas.

Like I may or may not have said here, but what I have certainly already said before in some forum or other: one of these days people are going to remember what Purple Pussy and Zombie Atkins always knew: "Eat what you want - just don't stuff your fat face."

Joel M. (via www.boingboing.net)

Busy playing Knights of the Old Republic. Not much is sinking in at the moment. Check this out, though. Rummy gets rumbled.

Joel M. (via www.boingboing.net, the writers of which are being surprisingly political today)

Brace yourselves. It's the Book of All Knowledge: A Compendium of Useful & Astonishing Information Magickly Updated at Timely Intervals by Invisible Homunculi.

Purportedly, it contains a sizeable, though unknown, fraction of all knowledge in the universe. It's pretty neat.

Joel M. (via www.fatmessiahgames.com)

Some guy is busy working on a robot that basically prints out a house. Didn't I mention something about this once? Something about the death of the trades? Well here it is, ladies and germs: step one.

It's just like all of those call-centre jobs heading to India or what I've been saying about the recording industry. Things are changing really, really fast and lots of people are going to be crying rivers when their supposedly secure careers and investments get crammed up sideways. Is your ass greased and ready?

I can't wait for the lawyers to get theirs. Some bright young guy is going to build that funky robo-courtroom from the Jetsons and then die under the sheer weight of the pile of subpoenas they send him. But then it's going to get used anyway and a lot of those smart young kids shelling out for law school right now because they don't have any imagination are going to be feeling pretty stupid.

Pretty soon, it's just not going to be enough to pull down a salary and then go watch the game. You can do it, sure, but you'll be working at a coffee shop or as a trucker, at least until they get some sort of auto-highway pilot thingie going. You just aren't going to be able to be fat and happy without passion and a whole lot of work and, frankly, I don't see a problem with that.

Well, except that I appear to have a chronic passion and work deficiency, but that's just me.

Joel M. (via www.boingboing.net)

Here's a little piece about fainting goats. Feel free to ignore the family photos below and, instead, let your mind wander to a world where everyone has one friend who 'faints' when frightened in case of monster attack. Or maybe to a love story between a person with myotonia congenita and someone with Tourette's Syndrome.

Joel M. (via www.forteantimes.com)

Spacedaily does their homework on the sudden climate change phenomenon, with a tip of the hat to the Pentagon report that has sparked so much wild-eyed gnashing of the teeth.

Joel M. (via www.spacedaily.com)

The real cost of war, a Mother Jones heartbreaker. Pictures of really young guys who were maimed in Iraq who, weirdly, almost all are cool with it. They would do it again, they love the military, they think it was the right thing to do.

Makes you wonder what sort of brainwashing the army uses nowadays.

Again, I've only got so much sympathy for soldiers who get hurt or reservists who (gasp) actually get called up, but it still sucks to look at a guy six years younger than me who has lost his legs.

Joel M. (via www.disinfo.com)

Sorry it's been so long. To make up for it, here are Rumsfeld's 1,000 Fighting Styles.

I especially liked Mirror Swan Fist.

In other news, I bought all of my new computer stuff today, so I should have a machine of my own up and running.

Y'know, even though I can use Susan's machine pretty much with impunity, what with my evening work schedule, I am somehow less comfortable using it than I am using my own machine. Go figure.

Joel M.