Still wondering why you should join Google+?

Even after the world's most brilliant stick figures tried to make the case?

Well, you may already know this, but just in case not, here's another reason I just happened across. After a brief moment of terror, I mean.

It turns out, though, that Picasa did not delete everything I'd ever uploaded. Blogger is merely reflecting the new Google policy:

Picasa Web Albums and Google+ 

[...]

You get more free storage: Google+ provides free storage for your photos, which are automatically resized to 2048 pixels. Like Picasa Web, video uploads 15 minutes or shorter are free.

Actually, if you follow the quoted link and scroll to the bottom, you'll see that you don't actually have to join G+ to get unlimited image storage. (With the minor annoyance that, at some point, you'll have to resize your images to the 2048 pixel limit yourself, before uploading, rather than having Picasa do it for you on the fly.)

Anyway, a good bit of news, I thought.

(Now, will Picasa yet allow you to upload animated GIFs?)

I hate to say I told you so, BUT

When the best you can say about your current status is, hey, at least I did better than Michele Bachmann, I think you don't even have Joementum.

 ← An ad accompanying the article just added to the lulz. If you've spent any time reading political websites this past decade, you'll recognize it as an obvious piece of Newsmax (slogan: "We are 1%! (less wingnutty than WorldNewsDaily)" clickbait. However, I think for once we can all agree on choice (c).

I can get out and run faster than that!

Due to a serendipitous click on the latest Google Doodle, which unsurprisingly led here, and probably some luck of the draw, I happened across an encouraging story about NASA. However!

NASA’s twin lunar Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory probes were launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in September. The first moon probe is slated to arrive in lunar orbit beginning on Saturday, December 31. The second prove will enter the moon’s orbit on Sunday, January 1.

Nearly half a century ago, we could get there in two and a half days!!!1! This must be Obama's fault!!!1!

Actually, due to the liberal bias at NASA, the long trip time was a design choice. It pays off in increased fuel efficiency, as the welfare queen rocket gets a free lunch gravity "assist" from the hard-working Earth and Moon.

And, as Don "I for one welcome our bot overlords" McArthur is no doubt already furiously typing, it's not like there's any need to carry food, water, and air.

Also, the mission acronymizers should be taken to task for shamelessly pandering to Python fans, the set of whom intersects with 99% of spaceflight fans, for some reason. Or maybe I project.

__________

There's a pretty cool rendering of the travel path starting at about 3:08 of this video:

(post title: John Connor)

At the risk of publicizing yet another way to spam on Twitter ...

... I have to say that this is pretty clever:

(alt. video link)

For the originators of the idea, I mean. This is truly a one and done thing. (Why am I trying to appeal to spammers' better angels?)

(h/t: bad banana blog. Yeah. That guy.)

E-commerce is hard!

(The truncation of the e-store's slogan was purely serendipitous.)

Probably just as well that I don't have a camera handy

The moon is behind a narrow strip of cloud, and it's lighting up the whole thing. Covers an arc at least a quarter of the way across the sky, pretty much perpendicular to its normal path, as though it had suddenly decided to make a right turn at Albakoikee and was leaving a wake, or spraying a cloud of exhaust from its retro rockets.

As to the title, it's not that I fear I'd be unable to capture the beauty. Oh, no. It's that the CIA doesn't like us taking pictures of their chemtrails.

I think we can safely say there have been worse promos for a teevee show

(alt. video link)

(h/t: KK, via email)

Hey, look who finally made to the big time

Link to the article, for the few of you who haven't already memorized it.

Line of the Day: 2011-12-28

What's in a name?

Collett lured Elvis to the opposite end of the lagoon with a heaping helping of kangaroo meat while Faulkner plunged, fully clothed, into the water.

True story! Ripped from context!

(h/t: KK, via email)

"Lying or stupid?" is never easy to decide upon with Michele Bachmann

You know, all of these kind of questions really aren’t about what people are concerned about right now.

You mean, besides all the people who constitute your base, amirite?

But on a more hopeful note, as I noted elsewhere, "David Gregory challenged Republican presidential hopeful..." is a phrase all too rarely seen. Who knows, the new year is just around the corner …

I know, I know. You're thinking, I see someone got into the champagne a little early.

Oh, and here is a post by someone famous (maybe!) ...

... that I read in the print edition and kept forgetting to pass along: "Who Wrote Shakespeare?", [ostensibly] by Eric Idle.

Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2011

Over at Vagabond Scholar, Batocchio carries on the tradition started by the late great Al Weisel, "The Best Posts of the Year, Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves." More than five dozen of them, for your sampling and reading pleasure, and hopefully, in many cases, your pleasant discovery.

This year's participants: A Blog About School | Addicting Info | Balloon Juice | Bark Bark Woof Woof | BeggarsCanBeChoosers.com | bjkeefe | Blue Gal | Brilliant at Breakfast | Chicago Guy | Chimpanzee Tea Party | Connecting the Dots | Cookblog | darrelplant.com | David E's Fablog | Diary of a Heretic | driftglass | Fried Green al-Qaedas | His Vorpal Sword | Hysterical Raisins | I Plan and God Laughs | I'll Never Forget The Day I Read A Book | J-TWO-O | Just an Earth-Bound Misfit | Kiko's House | Lake and Local | LanceMannion.com | M.A.Peel | Mad Kane's Political Madness | Mario Piperni dot Com | Mental Floss | Mikeb302000 | Mister Tristan | Mock, Paper, Scissors | Newshoggers | Norwegianity | p3: Persuasion, Perseverance, and Patience | Perrspectives | Poor Impulse Control | Pruning Shears | Psychopolitik | Rawrahs | Sarah, Proud and Tall | Self-Styled Siren | Shakesville | Simply Left Behind | Stonekettle Station | Strangely Blogged | Stump Lane | TBogg | The Debate Link | The Hunting of the Snark | The Inverse Square | The Rude Pundit | The Satirical Political Report | They Gave Us a Republic | This Is So Gay | Tildology | Tom Watson | Vagabond Scholar | Watergate Summer | We Are Respectable Negroes | Whiskey Fire | World O' Crap | Zaius Nation | Zencomix.

There is also a Twitter hashtag that you may want to check in on: #jonswift2011.

Thanks again, Batocchio.

---

From a quick first skim, so far, Thers has my favorite title.

I have not actually read all of them yet, but right off the bat, I want to recommend Tom Levenson's piece, "I’m Shocked! Shocked To Find That There Are Neutrinos Going On Here." [Added: and from a link in that article, have a look around Matt Strassler's site. Maybe start with his About This Site page.]

Bleg

Any post on this blog from the last year stand out in your mind?

As especially good, I mean. Not all those other ones.

Why I'm asking: Batocchio is putting together the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2011 and has very kindly asked me to participate in the tradition started by Jon, "The Best Posts of the Year, Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves."

Here's the 2010 edition.

Drop any suggestions you have in the comments, or in my email inbox, or twitter stream, or what have you. Thanks.

Stream of consciousness. Or something.

So, last night, I'm waiting at JFK to pick up some people, and since traffic on the ride down had been heavier than expected and I'd had little else to do besides drink coffee, I headed for the men's room.

"Hmm, that's odd," I thought. "Seems a bit late in the year for a bug to be hanging out in the urinal." But there it was.

Sometimes I overthink these things, so just as I often break stride to avoid stepping on ants, I directed my stream below the bug. But then I couldn't resist seeing if I could, you know, make it move, so I started inching the stream upward to just below it. The bug didn't move. I finished recycling my coffee and stepped away from the urinal. Automatic flush kicked in. "Oh, no! I am guilty of negligent homicide insecticide entomolocide whatever!"

But then even with water pouring down the back wall, the bug refused to budge. "Must already be dead," I thought. "But boy, it's really stuck on there."

And then, walking towards the sinks, I noticed a bug in the next urinal. And the next. And the next. And then the light bulb finally came on. A story I'd heard somewhere bubbled up, and I remembered thinking when I'd heard it, "What a smart idea."

Oh, yeah. We of the stand-up-to-pee persuasion like nothing finer than having something to aim at. But I wonder if the designers ever thought about people who feel that ridiculous guilt about killing bugs? Or, who knows, maybe that made me aim even more carefully.

And yes, it was Terminal Four.

(Pic source, obvs.)

Kind of like a waiting room, with the teevee tuned to FoxNews

On my first trip to North Korea in 1989, I made a nuisance of myself by randomly barging into private homes. I wanted to see how ordinary North Koreans actually live, and people were startled but hospitable.

The most surprising thing I found was The Loudspeaker affixed to a wall in each home. The Loudspeaker is like a radio but without a dial or off switch. In the morning, it awakens the household with propaganda. (In his first golf outing, Comrade Kim Jong-il shoots five holes-in-one!) It blares like that all day.

(source)

It's the perfect time of year for an Easter Egg!

Go to the Google and type in let it snow.

Or just click here.

In either case, let that new tab or window be for a while.

Okay, I'll stop helping now.

(h/t: MK, via email)

P.S. It was about 60° here in the northeast US today. Oddly enough, I did not hear James Inhofe or any other Republican member of Congress use that as a reason to hold a photo op.

Well, since you asked ...

• Email threads ("Conversations?") look like Facebook. You've already done that once.
• In a case where there are several areas filled with text on the screen, and one does want to pack as much text as practical onto the screen, I like boxes around things, not just horizontal lines between them. It's easier for my eyes to stay focused on what I'm reading. See, for a good example, the NYT's home page. This applies to both the particular conversations and the lists of messages, as in the Inbox.
• The icons on the new toolbar take longer to recognize than the old toolbar's text-labeled buttons. Out of the corner of my eye, so to speak, they're just gray blobs. I actually have to stop and look at them, if you know what I mean. And despite their apparent minimalism, the toolbar takes up more space. More on the new toolbar.
• I don't like the way the "folders" (Labels) list expands and contracts in response to my mouse hovering over it. Just leave it static, and let me decided to expand it with a click. I've chosen which items to display in the list, again, so to speak, so I can see the things I want out of the corner of my eye.
• The shades of gray color scheme wouldn't be so bad if the ads in the right column weren't filled with bright blue text. I mean, I know you're offering a free webmail service as a way to get me to look at ads, but come on. Yes, I'm aware there are themes available to change the look. None of them addresses this problem satisfactorily (although I have to admit, the Planet theme is pretty cool). How about a theme that makes things look like the soon-to-be old Gmail look?

I grant that some of these things are in the category of Dumb User Dislikes New Things Instinctively And Will Soon Get Used To, but still, you asked. I don't see what the new design buys me, even if I imagine getting used to it. I can't see that I'll be getting anything new out of it, so why force what appears to be nothing but, literally, a new look upon me?

Feeling old? Maybe this'll help.

Always nice to encounter someone worse off than you, amirite?

(h/t: FS, via email)

See what happened because Obama cut the defense budget???1?

Which I don't doubt at least a few wingnuts will exclaim, in response to this news:

U.S. drone hijacked by GPS hack?

A U.S. stealth drone in Iranian hands was hijacked by using software that spoofed GPS coordinates, forcing it to land at those coordinates, the Christian Science Monitor reported today.

The really disturbing part?

Military officials have known about the aircraft's GPS vulnerability since 2003, according to a published report cited by The Register.

Which only proves once again that Obama uses time travel because he hates America so much.

(minor housekeeping note)

The post label the myth of "voter fraud" and the reality of voter suppression is suddenly not allowed, and I'm guessing it's because the new Blogger interface simply does not care for scare quotes.

I put this post up just in case someone linked to the old label; such links should be updated to point to the new label, the myth of voter fraud and the reality of voter suppression. I will be adjusting the labels on the old posts momentarily.

Sorry if you clicked over just to read a post that is boring even by the "standards" of this blog. (Ah, good, scare quotes are still okay in the post body.) As partial compensation, and because I believe that if there is anything more important to modern humor than scare quotes, it is Venn diagrams, allow me to pass along this fine image, sent to me by MK. You even get to click it to big it!

Your chickenhawks are coming home to roost

Following is something several of my political junkie friends and I have been saying for years, but let us not quibble about precedence, and instead be glad that someone with a larger megaphone has also come to these realizations.

Mr. Dionne, the floor is yours.

Newt Gingrich and the revenge of the base

It is one of the true delights of a bizarrely entertaining Republican presidential contest to watch the apoplectic fear and loathing of so many GOP establishmentarians toward Newt Gingrich. They treat him as an alien body whose approach to politics they have always rejected.

In fact, Gingrich’s rise is the revenge of a Republican base that takes seriously the intense hostility to President Obama, the incendiary accusations against liberals and the Manichaean division of the world between an “us” and a “them” that his party has been peddling in the interest of electoral success.

The right-wing faithful knows Gingrich pioneered this style of politics, and they laugh at efforts to cast the former House speaker as something other than a “true conservative.” They know better.

The establishment was happy to use Gingrich’s tactics to win elections, but it never expected to lose control of the party to the voters it rallied with such grandiose negativity. Now, the joke is on those who manipulated the base. The base is striking back, and Newt is their weapon.

The rest.

On a closely related note, the Education Fund of Americans for Democratic Action is conducting a "Congressional Briefing on Voter Suppression" tomorrow. If you're in the DC area, they'd love to have you join them. See the Facebook event page to RSVP and to see who else is going, and get more info here.

Nothing against Capt. Picard, but ...

... just in case you wanted something a little different from the familiar, here is a squirrel doing a facepalm. You're welcome!

Especially you, David Miscavige!

(Swiped from Ecoconsultancy: "The 21 most horrific social media facepalms of 2011.")

Line of the Day: 2011-12-19

-- Christopher Hitchens, via Buzzfeed

[Added] Oh, you wanted to see an even younger version of Hitch? Jack has kindly provided.

Believe it or not, SOPA could shut this down, too

Because there is music in the background, from time to time. Music about which some giant soulless conglomerate could claim WE HAZ COPYRITE!!!1!

Politics aside, this is why the Internet was invented, and why it is the greatest invention of all time: "The 30 Most Important Cats Of 2011."

Some of the commentary is pretty good, too.

30: The Saddest Kitten Of All Time

Kitten: "Sadness is not a temporary affliction to be shrugged off and discarded. It is a mode of being; a way of life; a heaviness on the soul that can never be lifted because its weight is the weight of existence itself."

You: "JESUS CHRIST LIGHTEN UP YOU ARE A KITTEN."

#24I haven't yet* watched all the videos, but I will say that of the still pix, #24 is my favorite. (As always, clikit2bigit.)

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* (h/t: MK, via email, who suggests a healthy consumption rate: "12 days of Christmas = 30 most important cats.")

The caption for this picture is NOT "The bus driver said, 'Hold my beer and watch this.'"

Yes, it's probably in bad taste, since there were some sad consequences. Sorry, couldn't help myself. My inner eight-year-old said, "Cool!"

One of these gingerbread men does not have a last name

(h/t: MK, via email)

Apparently, you can now see my blog posts on my Google+ page

From now on. Assuming I clicked all the right buttons, I mean.

Q: Why would you want to see my blog posts on Google+?
A: Four letters: xkcd.

If it works, thank this page.

[Added] It may require switching to the new Blogger interface to make this happen. This may only be a temporary requirement: I did have to switch to make this post appear on my G+ page, because the particular Setting referred to in the page linked to above does not appear under Settings in the old interface. I will have to wait until I put up another post to see if the setting change I made under the new interface persists, even though I have switched back to the old interface.

[Added2] It does appear that you have to be using the new Blogger interface is you want the Google+ posting to happen as described above; i.e., the pop-up prompt did not appear, nor did the auto-posting happen when I switched back to the old interface and put up a new post. If you really hate the new interface and want your Blogger blog posts to appear on G+, you can do this by hand: switch to the new interface, click "Share" under the post(s) you want to share, switch back to the old interface. Tedious, I grant.

Sometimes, less really is less

The new Gmail toolbar (top) versus the old Gmail toolbar (bottom):

(embiggen)

Maybe it's just me,* but sometimes words are just plain better than icons. I think this is particularly so in an application that has keyboard shortcuts: the words serve as a mnemonic. And note also how the old toolbar takes up less space, despite having two more buttons.

I'm betting that had I not put the old toolbar under the new one, it would have taken you considerably longer to puzzle out what the buttons in the top one do.

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* It's not. It's really not. Trust me on this.

Snarky picture of the day

An oldie, maybe, but new to me:

Swiped from John D. Cook, who says he got it from David Walsh.

What's the only force that can make good people do evil things?

"It's just high school kids being kids and administrators doing what they do on a daily basis -- keeping kids safe," Carney said …

"Carney" being Riverhead High School superintendent Nancy Carney and "keeping kids safe" being suspending students for Tebowing in the school hallway.

(h/t: Twitter trending topics | title: cf.)