The Betacantrips Travelogue

“We Who Are About to Die of the Awesome” is a great name. On Tor.com, a story about a Roman mock-naval battle in Queens.

The museum was serious about the dress code: there were boxes of fabric out for those who didn’t arrive properly attired, and the biggest threat of all was, no toga, no free beer.

Oh, yes. The article didn’t mention that part. Free as in beer, beer as in rhymes with “oh, dear.”

File under: the sky is falling, science-fiction-without-the-future, get off of my lawn. On Slashdot:

Mike Sauter sends in a piece from Wired profiling research by Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford, from which she concludes that we don’t need to worry about computers and the Internet causing a decline in general literacy. “[Lunsford] has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples — everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring. ‘I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,’ she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it — and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.”

This seems pretty obvious to me, although I must admit the case of the woman who always had the television on, and once she got Internet access, immediately went to watch the Harry Potter movie trailers.

More fascinating databases! Seen on Planet Debian. Source:

Prophet is a lightweight schemaless database designed for peer to peer replication and disconnected operation. Prophet keeps a full copy of your data and (history) on your laptop, desktop or server. Prophet syncs when you want it to, so you can use Prophet-backed applications whether or not you have network.

Seen on Language Log: some humorous Japanese signage. Do you ultraviolet rays countermeasure? 666 know your rights!

Not only are the stereotypical Japanese fastidiously clean,  they are also extraordinarily polite.  They will not just tell you to be careful not to endanger yourself.  They will be sure to preface the warning with a “please” (actually the word for “please” in Japanese, KUDASAI, comes at the end of the sentence).

In today’s Japan mail (from Kathryn Hemmann) come two signs, one warning, “Please Be Careful to Strong Sunlight” and the other, “Please be careful to traffic.”

The first example utilizes the intriguing device of a sign within a sign, and it is all in English.

The oven is just saying HI! What’s the big deal? Seen on Engadget Mobile: a highly unusual situation.

It seems that the phone somehow triggers the burners on his Magic Chef range to ignite when it’s called — in fact, they don’t just light up, they go straight to the hellish “HI” setting, as the appliance’s display is eager to point out — and other phones tested have incited similar effects.

This cracked me up once I figured it out. Seen on Planet Debian: a cute exploration of Python arcana.

You’ll actually need Python ≤ 2.5 to reproduce that behaviour, but what’s actually neat about all this is that the exception will be caught—without warnings—as you originally expected under Python 2.6, dispite string literals being “truly and utterly dead”. See if you can work out why.

Once a day is over, it’s gone forever. (From Puppetry.)

Cool isometric art from eBoy!! Seen on Engadget Mobile: some crap nobody cares about.

While Apple was busy batting away the FCC with its litany of reasons why its app approval process is totally hunky-dory, Google was apparently having it’s own VoIP-related firefight. It seems that an article in the USA Today which hit newsstands this morning alleges that the internet giant sought to block (dare we say reject) a full Skype application from making its way into the Android Market. The story claims that the application was neutered to become “a watered-down version of the original that routes calls over traditional phone networks” — which would obviously cast a decidedly malevolent slant to the benevolent company’s policies.

Such a cool picture. But you needn’t watch the videos. From 8bit today, coverage of some releases.

August is only half way, but has already brought us some fine 8bit releases. A game, some demos for obscure platforms, glitch art and some pixel graphics are covered in this small list of 7 productions.

Seen on Planet Debian: a discussion of a recent Ubuntu bug.

This is one of my favorite bugs of all time: Ubuntu bug #248619, where OpenOffice.org won’t print to Brother printers on Tuesdays (but works on other days of the week).

Read some of the duplicate reports to follow the analysis and developer/user cooperation which isolated the bug.