Casiello Family Weblog

(via MetaFilter)

The best journal article title I’ve seen in a while: Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans

Dave Barry takes on the telemarketers again. Yeah!

“But the ATA [American Teleservices Association]surely doesn’t WANT you to call again. It’s inconvenient! And to insist on calling somebody who doesnt want to be called, even if you have the legal right to call, well, that’s just plain rude.”

philly.com has an interesting story about the various news sources people use, and the misperceptions about the Iraq war they have.
The full study is here. Essentially, people who relied on Fox news had the highest levels of misperception, followed by the Big Three networks and CNN, finally print media and PBS/NPR had the fewest misperceptions.

The Internet as a news source was not examined. I’d like to see those numbers. Also, the right answers to the questions polled were all in line with a Democratic viewpoint. It would be interesting to see a study where the right answers corresponded to a typical Republican stance, I wonder if the same news sources would be as reliable an indicator of misperceptions in the opposite direction.

(via MetaFilter)

The Fanimatrix

What New Zealand Matrix fans do in their spare time.

From the FAQ:

Q. Is that copy of NMap on Medusa’s machine trying to port-scan itself?
A. Shutupshutupshutupshutup….

(making the rounds of the blogosphere)

Middle Earth – via Yahoo maps

(via Dan Gillmor)

Apparently so, to the FBI.

(via Slashdot)

As mentioned before, MIT is putting their course materials online. The first batch of 500 courses is up.

Linc, we found your hair.

(via devnull)

This is cool…a database app that figures out any actor’s Bacon number. It’s amazing how many even old-time actors have low Bacon numbers. I mean, come on, Mary Pickford? Ollie???

(via devnull)

I love this clock!

(via MetaFilter)

A cool puzzle game, from, well, a vacuum cleaner manufacturer.

(via dive into mark)

According to this bug report:

“2002-04-23: This just got upgraded to Hixie-P1 because there is a StarGate SG1 episode that uses Netscape 4, and the only reason appears to be that if they’d used IE the “Access Denied” text wouldn’t have been blinking impressively.”

The Doctor will see you now! Woo-Who!

The Worcester librarians are making sure library records are disposed of quickly, in opposition to the so-called Patriot Act which allows law enforcement agencies to get search warrants for medical, educational, library, and bookstore records by claiming the records may be related to a terrorism investigation. Not proof, not reasonable suspicion, just the claim is good enough.

It also includes a gag order, so anybody served in this way isn’t allowed to talk about it!

The Patriot II Act will do away with even the need for a court order.

Here’s the American Library Association’s response to the Patriot Act.

The Patriot Act is already being used against non-terrorist criminals.

(via Dan Gillmor)

ICANN responds to Verisign’s ‘hijacking’ of .com and .net domains.

“VeriSign’s change appears to have considerably weakened the stability of the Internet, introduced ambiguous and inaccurate responses in the DNS, and has caused an escalating chain reaction of measures and countermeasures that contribute to further instability.”

“VeriSign’s change has substantially interfered with some number of existing services which depend on the accurate, stable, and reliable operation of the domain name system.”

Verisign’s response? Thanks, but we’ll keep doing it.

It’s also reported that the page includes a web bug, but it looks like it’s just javascript collecting browser stats and installing a cookie to track repeat visits. Lots of sites do this, it doesn’t seem all that sinister.

UPDATE: ICANN told them in no uncertain terms to cut it out, and this time, Verisign backed down.

(via devnull)

SCO hates Linux, even though SCO distributes Linux, because SCO hates the GPL.

“At the end of the day, the GPL is not about making software free; it’s about destroying value.”
— Darl McBride, SCO CEO, in a recent keynote speech.

But SCO llikes Samba, even though Samba is GPL.

Go figure.

Yes, it be Talk Like A Pirate day again, ye scurvy bilgerats!

Don’t let me catch ya talkin’ like no land-lubber, or it’ll be Davy Jones’ locker for ye! Arrrh!

“Such a product does not exist, sir! You must have dreamed it.”

(via MetaFilter)

A satellite plunges to earth – from 3 feet.

“As the NOAA-N Prime spacecraft was being repositioned from vertical to horizontal on the “turn over cart” …, it slipped off the fixture, causing severe damage. … The 18′ long spacecraft was about 3′ off the ground when it fell.”

It seems a gang of technicians had purloined the screws that hold the satellite to the cart for their own cart. The NOAA-N crew didn’t notice the missing screws and tried to turn the satellite over.

I hate it when that happens!

(from NewScientist)

(Couldn’t resist that headline!) The ‘coolest thing in the universe‘ is in Cambridge, MA. The head researcher gets it right: “Nothing in the Universe that we know of is naturally this cold” He makes no claims on what scientists on other planets may have come up with.