Dear United States Air Force (USAF): The Internet domain mildenhall.af.mil is an air force base in the UK. The domain mildenhall.com is a tourism website in Suffolk. Please send your classified documents to the first one, not the second.
Post 1010: Half-way to Australia 2020
A witty headline, eh? OK, well, only a little bit witty. But I missed marking the major milestone of Post 1000 on this website, so I thought this would be the next best thing.
The annoying thing is, I don’t have anything to say about the Australia 2020 Summit right now, and I have plenty of other things to write about. So let’s pretend you didn’t see this post, and I’ll write the update later, OK?
Saturday Reading, 8 March 2008
I think I might make this a regular feature? Should I just use some automated social bookmarking tool to generate the page?
- Over at New Matilda, Ben Eltham has written a fine summary of The Super Seasprites Saga. He links to an explanation of the sunk cost fallacy which probably contributed to this monumental fuck-up.
- Laurel Papworth’s piece 2020 Summit: Objective Journalists vs Passionate Blogging, which I’m planning to respond to at length some time this weekend.
- A piece from The New Yorker, Scents and Sensibility: What the nose knows, which ponders, amongst other things, why one molecule smells of spearmint when its exact mirror image smells of caraway. (Hat-tip to 3 Quarks Daily.)
- And for a change of pace, try the selection of First Dog on the Moon cartoons which were published in Crikey through January and February.
Four pieces feels about right for today.
I’ve changed my mind about Newstopia
I didn’t like the first episode of Newstopia on SBS last year. I thought Shaun Micaleff was trying too hard to sound like he was being satirical. “I. Am. Telling. A. Joke. Now. And. I. Am. Clever.” But last night I changed my mind. I watched the latest episode online: he’s relaxed into the role, and much lolz. Maybe I’m finally over the fact that I found Mr Micaleff to be a painful arsehole back when he was at the Uni of Adelaide with me. (Weren’t we all, though.) Maybe it’s because I was, as Christian Kerr alleges, the first person to play him Supernaut’s I Like It Both Ways.
Big Scary, Little Scary
Which of these images do you find the most frightening? Which the most beautiful? Which the most relevant to human existence?
On the left, the highest-resolution image of a virus ever taken. It’s the Epsilon 15 Bacteriophage (i.e. a virus which infects bacteria), and if you count viruses as being alive then it’s one of the most abundant forms of life on Earth.
On the right, a photo of what one guy found growing under his co-worker’s computer monitor. There’s a full image gallery. Hat-tip to Boing Boing.
Zombies in Plain English
The folks at Common Craft are worried about you and your brain at Halloween. That’s zombie season and they want you to be prepared. To help, they made this 3 minute video that will enure you survive, brain intact. Wacky Canadians. (Hat-tip to Peter Black, kinda.)