I think I would title the story Swedish Surrealist Heli-Ninjas Commit Perfect Theft. But the writeup at The Punch is pretty good too. That’s caper movie material right there–“competence porn”. I love that it actually happened.
Month: September 2009
Aside
I love effective visualizations, and the Billion Dollar gram is a very simple and effective way to help normal people understand the relative sizes of some of the ridiculously large dollar values attached to various government, corporate, and public initiatives. As someone who enjoys data visualization I appreciate it. As a human being, I can’t get past that items across the top row without feeling a combination of almost blinding rage and terrible, terrible shame.
Was He The Last Ottoman?
I saw a story on Wikinews today about the death a couple of days ago, at age 97, of Ertuğrul Osman, who, according to the story was the last pretender to the throne of the Ottoman Empire. That lead to some fascinating reading about the Ottoman Dynasty (start here) who ran the Empire for more than 625 years until the… Read more →
Aside
Apparently I missed the 250th anniversary of Guinness yesterday. There was a time that couldn’t have happened, since I would likely have been accidentally celebrating it on any given day anyway, but that time is receding into the distant past now. Hell, I used to have the stuff on tap in my house. When I do have a pint at a bar, I still go to Guinness when it’s the only stout, or the best of the available ones, but it’s not religious anymore and there are many better stouts out there.
First Time At A Wedding
In lieu of actual content, allow me to present my favourite of a whole pile of photographs of Sarah taken a couple of weekends ago at the wedding of one of my friends. It was Sarah’s first wedding. I note that the photo was taken by a member of the police force, on a camera normally used for crime scene… Read more →
Aside
I don’t feel like I “missed out” in my childhood because modern console gaming, or the Internet, or whatever hadn’t been invented yet. However, I do think that if books like John Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice series, or Joseph Delaney’s Wardstone Chronicles had been around when I was just coming into my teens, I would have absolutely devoured them. I’m retroactively jealous.
Stick Figure Crypto
I generally love when people use the comic form to explain complicated concepts. I generally love cryptography. I have a special place in my heart for stick figures. So you can imagine how I feel about Jeff Moser’s multi-stage explanation of how AES came about, and how it works. Everyone should check it out, since there’s not really anyone (at… Read more →
A Reflection On Pleasant Punk Blasphemy
As part of the process of getting ready for our impending move, I’ve been engaged in a process of ripping all my audio CDs that hadn’t previously been ripped. This keeps leading to my having that “Oh, I haven’t though about you in a while” experience. I had that recently with Crass. Since I was single-digits old when the whole… Read more →
Aside
I should note that I still quite like Feingold, even if he is doing the cutesy acronym thing.
Aside
I’m not going to get my hopes up too high yet, but if it turns out that putting Sotomayor on the court was the start of the end of corporate personhood… well, let’s just say I don’t see myself having a problem with that.
Quaero mihi similes, et adiungor pravis.
I spent a lot of time last night looking at translations of Latin and Middle High German poetry. Oh, and listening to what I can only refer to as operatic renditions of the pieces. How did this happen? Well, actually, like many times when I start following a trail of weird connections, it all comes back to James Burke–usually just… Read more →
Aside
I love garlic like few men love garlic, and I have even bought garlic from Lenny, but that doesn’t stop me from recognizing utter stupidity when I see it. If I were one of those “majority of householders” who were being prevented from having high speed by this kind of utterly cornball FUD, I would certainly be giving old Lenny a piece of my mind.
Aside
Cuddles and Mr. Mushroom illustrate the dangers of unthinking conformance to societal norms of civility.
Not up to par
Like many other liberal people, I pinned a lot of hope on the dramatic change from a Bush administration to an Obama one as being the end of several policy directions that I saw as abhorrent. Unlike many people on “the left”, I was consciously being rational about my expectations. I knew that Obama intended to govern as a “centrist”For… Read more →
Aside
“The correlation between U.S. aid and human rights violations has long been noted by scholarship.” Just because Chomsky is a thinker who’s ideas are best considered at a length beyond that of a soundbite, doesn’t mean he doesn’t know how to throw in a finely polished and cutting bit of snark as an aside. And that article the snark is nested in–that also bears reading.
