Jun01
…in science fiction. H. G. Wells was as ignorant of evolution as any creationist is.
…in science fiction. H. G. Wells was as ignorant of evolution as any creationist is.
Asking the important questions: why are women louder during s3x than men?
Also, who invented clothes?
What is with people with that name and imprisoning people? #Cuba #Cleveland #Mysterious
Is it possible? Even if it’s very unlikely, it’s such a high payoff that it’s worth devoting some resources to. In the mean time, I’m much more focused on making it affordable to just get into orbit.
I like me some chiles, but these people are nuts:
Mr. Bosland claims to have broken the two million Scoville mark in February 2012 with his Trinidad Moruga Scorpion. That is the same strength as police-grade pepper spray — a substance no sensible person would let travel through his digestive tract. Mr. Bosland hasn’t yet submitted paperwork to Guinness for the official record, and his claim really burns up Mr. de Wit, who insists his pepper is still the hottest. Only chemical chromatography that measures several samples for their average level of capsaicin, the chemical that gives peppers their bite, can establish a record claim. But Mr. Scott, one of the few people on Earth who has tasted both varieties, says the Moruga Scorpion is clearly hotter.
I used to grow habaneros on the patio (and I still have a container of dried ones, years old, to spice up a chili), but I hadn’t realized that they were now growing peppers in the mega-Scoville range.
Yeah, that national conversation about guns is coming along just fine:
Eddie Maxwell sent a mass email to state legislators at 10:54 p.m. on Jan. 27, warning them that even attempting to introduce a gun control bill was, in his opinion, a violation of state law.
Mitchell responded from his public, ALHouse.gov email account at 11:59 p.m., telling Maxwell: “Your folk never used all this sheit (sic) to protect my folk from your slave-holding, murdering, adulterous, baby-raping, incestuous, snaggle-toothed, backward-a**ed, inbreed (sic), imported criminal-minded kin folk.”
“That’s not the type of reply I expect to receive from a state legislator,” Maxwell replied on Feb. 11.
Obviously his expectations are too high.
…has converted to Islam.
Of course he has.
And no, I don’t really know what kind of conclusions to draw from this, about either him or Islam.
Can you do it and survive? Asking the important questions.
So, I’ve been trying to set up a page for my book at Amazon. So far, color me very unimpressed.
The Advantage site has a form to fill out with book description, author bio, and three reviews. It very clearly states:
You don’t need to use HTML to fill out the edit boxes below – just type normally. However, if you’d like to use advanced formatting, you may use HTML to indicate breaks, boldface or italics.
<P> = a paragraph break <BR> = a line break
<b> </b> = boldface <i> </i> = italics.
Example: The <b>quick</b> brown fox <i>jumped over</i> the lazy dog.<BR>
Well, I kind of like paragraphs. Call me crazy, but that’s just how I roll. So I put in some <p>s, and bolded the names of the reviewers.
When I saved my work, it didn’t display the HTML properly, instead showing the code. Moreover, it had removed the second two reviews, and attributed the first one to the second reviewer.
I scratched my head, and went back int to edit, reinserting the other two reviews, and straightening out the reviewer names. I hit “View” and got exactly the same thing. HTML still in the code, no graf breaks, and the second two reviews disappeared, with the wrong reviewer name on the first.
I send a complaint to Amazon (via a web form, so I have no record of it, unless I had the foresight to copy it somewhere, which I didn’t). Here is the response:
Dear Vendor,
I apologize for the inconvenience caused.
Please be informed that when you update any information using update item content and then click submit button, everything will get disappear. However please be informed that the same will appear on the website in 5-7 days.
I request you to update the information without using HTML tags.
As you have the limit to add only 3 reviews, I request you to write back to us with the reviews that you wish to add and we will do the needful.
Thank you for selling with Amazon,
Sowjanya Reddy T.
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage
So, they can’t show me what the page is actually going to look like until it goes live, and despite the fact that they clearly invite me to use HTML, they then request that I not do so. Which means that I can’t do so much as break paragraphs.
I’m kind of gobsmacked. I mean, this is fricking’ Amazon.
Every day my inbox (or rather, my spam box) is flooded with spam telling me about how “auto rates” are going down (presumably it means insurance, though the word is often not mentioned). Usually, the subject is something like “The president has passed a new law reducing your rates,” or “Washington has passed a new law…”
Well, today, I got my first Pope auto-rate spam:
Subject: New Pope Equals Lower Auto Rates? Yes – See Why.
- – - – New Pope Announcement Has Major Impact On Your Auto Rates – - – -
The new pontiff – Francis The 1st is already having a dramatic impact on auto rates. Did you know the month a new pope is elected is always the safest month to drive of the year? This is why major auto insurers have come together to lower auto rates to $3.75/month for drivers who sign up during the month of March who reside in low-risk driving zip codes
See if your area qualifies for the new rates by visiting the link below and entering your zip code. Should you qualify, expect your rates to drop and budget accordingly.
Needless to say, I didn’t click on the link below, but you have to give them marks for creativity in coming up with idiot bait.
It’s not the War Room. The administration says that it would be illegal for North Korea to end the armistice.
Well, that should settle it.
Just in case you don’t think he has a screw or two loose:
New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg expressed concern that private jet owners could clog up the city’s homeless shelters.
It’s frustrating that some of the screwiest people can become billionaires. Or presidents and mayors.
Am I the only one struck by the almost Dickensian poetry of that name for a White House spokesperson? Particular as it seem oxymoronic. Are we supposed to use the first, or last name as a guide to the veracity of statements made? Given the many absurd statements coming out of this White House, particularly lately, I’m going to go with the former.
I just got this email from them:
Steve Mims mentioned you in a comment.
Steve wrote: “The ACLU wholeheartedly supports Senator Paul’s efforts to make the Obama administration explain why it feels it has the right to kill Americans on American soil when they are not attacking America.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/03/06/Exclusive-ACLU-backs-Rand Simberg“
Apparently the bot that makes these connections is confusing me with Rand Paul, to the point that it’s actually substituting my name for his.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, I’ve deleted the link to the Facebook discussion, per comments.
[Update a while later]
OK, here‘s a safer link to the original FB post.
I just go this from the UK, subject, “Contract Dispute”:
Attention:
We seek an attorney who handles breach of contract matters.Let us know if
your firm takes such cases.Thank you
Edward Scholes.
No attachment, no web site to click through, nothing, but it has a return address and a reply-to of someone with that name. What is the purpose of this?
I guess one (bizarre) possibility is that it’s exactly what it would appear to be — someone looking for an attorney, and spamming the Internet to find one. It’s not like it costs anything. But you might get a lot more responses, many of them scams themselves, than you know what to do with.
This is fraudulent. It’s actually a chimp.
I know it’s not Friday, but whatchagonnado?
There’s a lot more to it than the amygdala.
And there’s a lot more to the human mind than we can even now imagine.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Speaking of which, is our sense of smell driven by vibrational modes? If they can figure this one out, smellovision can’t be far behind.
Well, it’s easy to see why this guy would want to be sure women are disarmed:
Jerome is an expert on what kind of guns can be used to protect someone, since he is the kind of guy that people buy guns to protect against.
But according to him, you don’t need an AK-47 or M16 to stop him from raping you. It’s just overkill. When Jerome bursts into your bedroom, you don’t need that much firepower, says the guy bursting into your bedroom.
Senator Feinstein needs to bring Jerome down to D.C. as an expert witness so he can testify on just how much firepower a woman needs to defend herself from him. And maybe Piers Morgan can have him on too.
This is just insane.
To the disappointment of thousands who signed the petition, the Obama administration recently informed us that it has, and will have no plans to build a Star-Wars-style death star. Now, there may indeed be good reasons to forgo this addition to the nation’s defense, but the first one listed, that it would cost 850 quadrillion dollars, was based on an extremely flawed estimate. Which isn’t surprising, because among the people doing the estimating, only one has any experience in aerospace engineering (and probably none in costing of such projects). ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Bummer. That scientist says he’s not seeking a mother to bear one.
Apparently all the dehairification down there is making crabs an endangered species. Is the EPA and PETA going to get on the case? I mean, if they can declare a mud puddle on a farmer’s road a wetland and prevent him from filling it, why can’t they force all those college students to grow their hair back and create habitat?
Not a very effective one, though:
To break the sound barrier, you’ll need to drop the steak from about 50 kilometers. But this isn’t enough to cook it.
We need to go higher.
If dropped from 70 kilometers, the steak will go fast enough to be briefly blasted by 350°F air. Unfortunately, this blast of thin, wispy air barely lasts a minute—and anyone with some basic kitchen experience can tell you that a steak placed in the oven at 350 for 60 seconds isn’t going to be cooked.
From 100 kilometers—the formally defined edge of space—the picture’s not much better. The steak spends a minute and a half over Mach 2, and the outer surface will likely be singed, but the heat is too quickly replaced by the icy stratospheric blast for it to actually be cooked.
I think I’ll stick to my IR grill. Though it might be fun to apply for a NASA grant as a suborbital research payload.
A pr0n flick shown in background during a television news discussion.
Charlie Sheen says that Tony Villar is lying. I mean, they’re both so intrinsically credible.
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The President’s Auto Insurance
by Rand Simberg on June 17, 2013 at 2:22 pmOne of the most amusingly stupid categories of spam I get is emails about how “Congress passed a bill” or “The president signed a law” resulting in lower auto insurance or (as they often idiotically say) “driving” rates. They sometimes try to tie it into current events. Here are two nutty subject lines today:
“President’s G8 Summit Meeting Yields Lower Auto Ins. For All,”
and
“Following meet with Putin, President announces lower auto ins. for all.”
Sadly, there are enough idiots out there that this probably does work. Until we come up with some cost for emailing, spam will persist.