Seen via Planet Debian:
I am passing on a message from my daughter Shailaja. She would like you to go here and vote for computer engineer. (Or news anchor if you want to annoy her father.)
What will Barbie do next?
Via Peter Swimm: a fascinating interview with the creator of Kobe Bryant Deathmatch Fiction.
A quote from the Kobe Bryant fanfic in question:
We chose to have our fight to the death in an abandoned factory in China. I flew over in my private jet and made sure I preserved my vital combat energies by abstaining from totally consensual intercourse with my perfect-10 stewardesses.
Instead, I reminisced about other NBA superstars who I have killed in action: Mel Turpin, Joe Barry Carroll, Benoit Benjamin, Stanley Roberts, Arvydas Sabonis, Mike Giminski, Bill Wennington and Edward Martini, who is not technically in the NBA or a superstar but a male nurse I mowed down in an unsolved hit-and-run homicide.
It’s fairly short (five minutes of reading?) so you might want to go read the whole thing (then again, maybe not). Lots of fascinating thoughts in the interview on the nature of fanfic and "serious literature". Also be sure to check out the Dirk Nowitzki fanfic, linked from the article.
Via Suzanne, an article about Lukeywes1234, a meme that had completely passed me by. Some of these videos are quite fabulous.
People were posting mashups of his videos and tributes to the kid. It was all classic, random YouTube idiocy. And then YouTube did something inexplicable: They yanked down Lukeywes1234’s channel.
Now if there’s one thing you should know about nerds, it’s that they don’t take too kindly to anyone smothering their self-expression. Lukeywes instantly passed from mere blip of the week into Internet legend. The tributes became more hyperbolic and Wagnerian.
Each meme illuminates something about 4chan. This one, like the crusade against the Church of Scientology, seems more and more like revenge memeing.
Seen via JWZ, this list of supercuts.
My favorites are the Red Dwarf, every "smeg" reference and Every Famicon (NES) Game Title Screen. It’s completely fascinating how much you can glean from just this kind of cross-section: for example, Lister says "smeg" more than any other character; Holly says it only once, and Cat only a few times; the most common "smeg-" compounds are "smeg-head" and "smeg-for-brains"; "smeg" is said in despair/panic as well as ecstatic joy ("fan-smegging-tastic!").
Seen on JWZ: a short story described as "The Rapture of the Nerds from the perspective of a non-nerd", The Gentle Seduction.
With regard to the ever-continuing debate about Wikipedia and its validity as a source of information, this volley from JWZ notes the prevalence of the "in anime" section.
Our work here will not be complete until every Wikipedia page contains an "In Anime" sub-section.
Note that both of the cited links are to fairly old versions of the pages (both of which have the In Anime section removed in the current version). Nevertheless, it’s fascinating to watch how the idea of Wikipedia evolves, even as Wikipedia continues to be a popular resource for many.
Lately there’s been some fuss about Google’s new privacy policy, with this post by Joey Hess (on Planet Debian) and Slashdot’s article about Google’s new opt-out policy.
Joey Hess writes:
With the decade over, and Google rolling out all manner of tracking cookies and javascript, it’s time to move on. Just keeping on top of the torrent of privacy-affecting changes Google is making, and trying to parse the real meaning in the chirpy googlespeak announcements has become more work than the value their search engine adds. (This was the last straw.)
At least for now, I’ll be using Duck Duck Go for search. It’s small, quirky, has features the big competition lacks, and works well enough for my mostly moderate and occasionally intense needs. Sorta like Google in 1999.
While I am in favor of privacy, have not been thrilled with Google’s behavior, and have come to resent the attitude of Google employees and officers, I have to say Duck Duck Go does not meet my search needs. Neither does Bing. Neither does Google, when it comes right down to it. Search is hard, and there are a lot of tricky bits. (Try searching for the Haskell type signature "Int#". For a while it was nearly impossible to find the emacs package "magit", as all you could get were results for "magic".)
So for the time being I’m still using Google Search. With luck, in time everything will just magically get better..
I found this fascinating site for the GRIB API:
The ECMWF GRIB API is an application program interface accessible from C and FORTRAN programs developed for encoding and decoding WMO FM-92 GRIB edition 1 and edition 2 messages. A useful set of command line tools is also provided to give quick access to grib messages.
Being as ignorant as I am, I had never heard of GRIB (WP: from "GRIdded Binary", "a mathematically concise data format commonly used in meteorology to store historical and forecast weather data"). For the first ten minutes I was staring at this page trying to figure out if it was an elaborate hoax — that someone had invented a funny-sounding acronym for a technology and pretended to develop APIs for interacting with it. It sounds wrong in just the right way! Especially convincing is the mention of the older, now deprecated GRIBEX package.
Related work: HORG, the Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group; SCIgen and their video Near Science, and Dresden Codak’s Dungeons and Discourse.
Seen on the FTP-master New feed: Gnaughty, Fast and Easy Porn Downloader.
Gnaughty is a program to automatically download adult sex content, i.e. porn movies and pictures, from a known internet porn directory.
Providing a friendly interface, users who feel like having some porn can have it served fastly and directly to their desktop.
This is deeply fascinating for a lot of reasons. Central to all of them is the fact that pornography, being taboo, is nevertheless a fairly important part of the computing experience for many users. As a result, the market is underserved by companies who can’t address the topic without breaking the taboo — a constraint that "the open source community" can address because there is no company.
Other interesting, related topics include bug 283578, about the hot-babe package and how gnaughty contributes/discontributes to the ongoing discussion about sexism in open source; the role of Sourceforge in this whole process; how the name "gnaughty" relates to the taboo nature of its own function; and the charming perspective-altered screenshot that shows on the Sourceforge page.