Minor weirdness

One guy convicted of stealing $300K, gets 1-3 years. Another guy convicted of stealing $250K, gets 8-24. Both were convicted of several felonies.

Here is a little more backstory on the guy who got the longer sentence. One suspicion: he got the book thrown at him for rejecting a plea deal and insisting on a trial. (The plea deal was, comparatively speaking, nothing -- five years of probation and community service.)

At any rate, thanks to our state controller and associates for nailing a couple more fraudsters.

I don't even have a bluff answer

Wish I'd had the presence of mind to take a screenshot of this tweet before I clicked the link, which said "Translate this tweet." In any case, this is the result of clicking that link:

I have no idea which machine-learning system (?) thinks any of that tweet needed translating (not counting from English to something else, of course), much less from Portuguese.

And granted I'm running Windows, but why is Microsoft handling trying to perform translation services on Twitter, being viewed through Firefox?

See, this is how conspiracy theories get started.

Also, cattle mutilations are up.

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(?)

Blast to the past

The latest spam comment on this blog just got blocked. From this post.

Does rickrolling seems really long ago to you?

A larger mystery: why spam comments appear on posts from five years ago, and not on the latest ones. (This is usual, and regular if not particularly frequent.) Do the spammers think they'll have a better chance with the old posts of sneaking in unnoticed? But if so, why would they think anyone would ever see them?

Stool seeks pigeon

$29.95 for that piece of crap?

(Seen on Wonkette, I'm sorry to say)

Wouldn't you know I'd happen across this just as it's getting warm out

Not that I'm complaining about the beautiful day, but I sure do wish I read about pykrete a few months earlier.

Forget about ice-9:

Pykrete is a super-ice, strengthened tremendously by mixing in wood pulp as it freezes. By freezing a slurry of 14 percent wood pulp, the mechanical strength of ice rockets up to a fairly consistent seventy kilograms per square centimeter. A 7.69 mm rifle bullet, when fired into pure ice, will penetrate to a depth of about thirty-six centimeters. Fired into pykrete, it will penetrate less than half as far—about the same distance as a bullet fired into brickwork. Yet you can mold pykrete into blocks from the simplest materials and then plane it, just like wood. And it has tremendous crush resistance: a one-inch column of the stuff will support an automobile. Moreover, it takes much longer to melt than pure ice. But as strong and eco-friendly as it is, pykrete remains forgotten today save among glaciologists, who express bafflement over why no one has made use of it.

Though the name suggests it, pykrete has nothing to do with Guido van Rossum. Rather, it was named for its inventor, Geoffrey Pyke, "who the Times of London once declared 'one of the most original if unrecognized figures of the present century.'"

For a brief time during World War II, it looked like the next big thing. Churchill, Mountbatten, and FDR all loved it. A fascinating story.

Inuitively, it still sounds like a great idea.

;)

Hat tip to Wired's Tim Maly: "How to Make an Indestructible Snow Fort."

The fine print

Couldn't help but click when NewEgg's ad appeared among the Google results.

[ + ]

I can haz movie rights?

2 Quebec Inmates Climb Rope to Helicopter to Escape Jail

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 17, 2013

SAINT-JÉRÔME, Quebec (AP) — Two Quebec inmates climbed up a rope into a hovering helicopter to make a daylight escape on Sunday from a jail northwest of Montreal, the authorities said.

[...]

The jail’s warden told the police that two inmates, identified as Benjamin Hudon-Barbeau, 36, and Danny Provencal, 33, had grabbed a rope dropped from the helicopter to make their getaway, Sergeant Richard said.

The police tracked down the helicopter used in the escape on Sunday afternoon to Mont-Tremblant, about 53 miles from the jail, but only the chopper’s pilot was still at the scene. The pilot was taken to a hospital, Sergeant Richard said.

???

(Emph. added.)

[NYT]

A phrase ripped from context

But even in context, it still caused me momentary brain-lock:

... middle class and wealthier white men — the population that tends to submit DNA data to recreational sites ...

[Added] And here's another:

A computer motherboard called Grouphug ...

Why I wish I went to the home page of Wikipedia more often

Read the full article here, if you like. I don't judge.

.
.
.
.
.

Yeah, okay, I read PART of it. Of course I had to click right to the Death section, for example.

Which brought into view the beginning of the References section, whose first entry …

^ ^{a b c d e} "The Man Who Has Jonah Beaten". The Morning Bulletin (Rockhampton, Qld). November 16, 1937.

… will appeal to fans of that very serious, thoughtful Leader of Conservative Thought.

Interesting juxtaposition with the start of this post, now that I think about it. Of course, our Jonah's got a bit more work to do on the controlled aspect.

(pic. source: Tintin)

---

Update

2012-10-24 06:34

Further evidence that it's all connected, or that the vast left-wing conspiracy is even larger than we thought: screenshot of the home page of The Trustworthy Encyclopedia, right at this moment.

Line of the Day: 2012-08-27

He had a pet rock, which ran away from home because it was starved of affection.

("He" being The Least Interesting Man In The World, Mitt Romney.)

Great line! Who said it?

You would not believe me if I told you, so I will just link and then we can all sit around wondering how it got to be April 1st so quickly.

(h/t: Gabe Ortiz)

So, uh, do I type "thanks!" into the search box?

Bet your google.com looks different from my google.com, today.

[ + ]

Talk about a stew of conflicting emotions . . .

Meet the new Borg, same as the old Borg

Probably this has been going on for a while, but it's the first time I've seen it.

Let's get scared!

As I tweeted back to Brad DeLong, dog-lovers are going to be impossible to be around for the next few days:

How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy

Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia? A biologist’s science- fiction hunch is gaining credence and shaping the emerging science of mind- controlling parasites.

Click, if you dare.

And can't you just hear Carl Zimmer cackling?

(pic. source, pic. source)

Each?

Sounds like either way too many or not nearly enough, don't you think?

A Thousand Dildos For The Military Wives

In other sexytime news from PCMag (??? (well, both stories refer to robots, kind of, I guess)), iPhone users don't put out on the first date as frequently as Android users. But they do put out more frequently than Blackberry users.

Good. Because there's nothing more tedious than a self-loathing Ruby script.

The process doesn’t daemonise itself ...

Wait. Wait wait wait. That's not the weird part.*

I happened across the above while looking to see if a semi-spammy-seeming email had anything behind it.

On a thoroughly unrelated note (except chronologically), and my weakness for nerd jokes aside, I did next find what I was looking for, and did the first thing you always do with a new search engine: type in your own name. Which didn't return much, but did lead me to discover that a phrase of mine apparently went sorta viral about a year ago.

I guess I have an OpenSalon post from The Majority Report to thank for that. So, thanks, Sam! (Or whoever actually runs that blog.) And let us hope a seed or two got lodged in Matt Bai's ear.

---

* (The part to which I refer starts at 0:24).

(alt. audio link | transcript)

I think I only ever saw that once, when it originally aired, but I've never forgotten it. (Although admittedly it did blur a bit -- if you know me AFK, you might have heard me say that the weird part is "a different golden retriever.")

Wow. I agree with the GHEMRotRSTF on something!

Looks like even Erick Erickson gets why SOPA and PIPA are bad. Good for him.

Also, Paul Ryan completely changed his tune, thanks to grassroots political pressure. Keep up the good work, everybody.

Want more details? See the EFF's recent article, "Blacklist Bills Becoming Hot Button Issue in 2012 Election."

Also.

[Added] Useful links in Comments.

From the cabinet of curiosities

Not to get all ageist, but how old is this can of Cameo Copper Cleaner that I just found?

[Insert picture here as soon as digital camera is at hand.]

A suggestion is given by one of the selling points on the label (colors orig.):

Modern plastic container leaves no rust rings, marks or scratches on porcelain tile or other surfaces. Easy to handle, no mess, no soggy cans!

And how about on the other side, at the bottom of the label?

You'll find the Woman's Touch in every Purex product •

I mean, who puts the bullet point at the end of the line anymore?

Price stamped on top has some sort of weird mark, which I think signifies a foreign currency of some kind:

17¢

---

Not to get all paranoid, but right after I finished composing this post, the next ad I saw (on some other site) led me to a place where I was invited to …

Sign up to contact Senior Dating Elite Club members!

Evidence that The Singularity is upon us

Examine this picture closely. It's okay. It's for Science.

(embiggen)

Notice anything odd?

Hint: which model do think has the best body?

Won't someone think of the children who are trying to make a living with Photoshop?

(h/t: TC, via email, and Rebecca J. Rosen)

An update on Mr. Mullet

Looks like that Amish splinter group is about ready to join up with the Scientologists, perhaps as their Grand Inquisitors.

Federal officials have arrested seven Amish men in Ohio and charged them with violating the Hate Crimes Prevention Act in connection with a string of beard-cutting incidents.

[...]

Mullet, who formed the breakaway Bergholz Clan in 1995, has been accused of running the clan like a cult. Mullet, according to an FBI affidavit, “has forced extreme punishments on and physical injury to those in the community who defy him, including forcing members to sleep for days at a time in a chicken coop on his property and allowing members of the Bergholz clan to beat other members who appear to disobey” him.

The affidavit also alleges that Mullet has been “been ‘counseling’ the married women in the Bergholz clan and taking them into his home so that he may cleanse them of the devil with acts of sexual intimacy.”

The rest.

(previously | previously)

(h/t: @Mike_Forester, for the RT)

A semi-scammy, semi-spammy new thing on Twitter

Weird:

Ceciliadxp Turns out _fat_, drunk, and stupid IS a way to go through life. Take THAT, Dean Wormer. A tweet reading '@bjkeefe... dlvr.it/wrYJR

I think this is the first time I've had my content misappropriated for commercial use in that way.

Clicking the dlvr.it link in the quoted tweet takes you to a page on some site called adf.ly (http://adf.ly/50856/bjkeefe.blogspot.com/2011/11/oh-hey-turns-out-fat-drunk-and-stupid.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter, in this case).

This site, AdFly, is apparently a link-shortening service whose shortened links first bring people to a page displaying ads. After five seconds, a "Skip Ad" button appears. Clicking that button then takes you to onto the desired destination, presumably the link supplied to adf.ly to begin with.

I should say that a quick look around indicates that AdFly itself appears to be on the up-and-up; e.g., clear domain ownership, a good review (as far as these sorts of things go, at least), and they even have their own Twitter feed. AdFly is not hiding what they're about. However, it seems to me that eventually, more and more people will come to know what clicking on one of their link entails and they'll start avoiding them. And in any case, even AdFly's sales pitch ("Earn more than $4.00 / 1000 visitors to your links") hardly makes the whole thing seem worthwhile. Except, of course, to people like "Cecilia Hackworth" who will automate the process of gathering links based on keywords and use them to spam social media sites.

I suppose I don't think using AdFly-shortened links should be out and out banned by Twitter* and other social media sites. However, I do think Twitter and the others should not allow AdFly links that are masked by being sent through a second URL-shortening service. And, I guess, I'm not particularly thrilled by having a link to my site appear to be associated with this service.

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* Twitter, as you probably know, will show the expanded URL if you hover your mouse over a shortened URL, at least for the more well-known shortening services, so in this case, hovering over the dlvr.it link shows that you're going to be directed to an AdFly page. And there's always LongURL.