Isotropic

Yeah, Isotropic was basically unreadable for a couple days again. I don’t recall ever seeing a load average over 1000 before. In theory, once the old cluster hardware and configuration is replaced, things will be much better. However, expect more downtime in the near future as my hosting provider gets the new [...]

According to this BBC News article, “An unwitting passenger arriving at Japan’s Narita airport has received 142g of cannabis after a customs test went awry, officials say.”. Against regulations, an agent hid the training sample in a real passenger’s bag rather than a training bag. Apparently he has been doing this regularly.
Imagine [...]

Steve Ballmer is in no way disappointed with Windows Vista. It is selling “incredibly well”, he told a press conference in Herzeliya, Israel today. “Vista sells on almost 100 per cent of all the new consumer PCs around the world,” the Microsoft CEO proclaimed. He added that the operating system was also selling on, “45 percent [...]

According to Akismet, 89% of all comments are spam.
For some peculiar reason, 90% of the spam I get shows up as comments on a single post — my ancient Wikipedia and Nupedia. (Ancient is ambiguous; although the permalink is from 2001, this blog didn’t exist before January 2008, when I dumped several items from [...]

I couldn’t miss the chance to refer to an article titled “Critters with attitude”. (Critter is one of my favorite words.)

To accompany the article So you think humans are unique? we have selected six articles from the New Scientist archive that tell a similar story. We have also asked the researchers involved to update [...]

I’m sorry you’re likely to get hit.
I’m sorry you were hit.
I’m sorry I hit you.
I’m sorry I got caught hitting you.
I’m sorry if my hitting you was misconstrued as an attempt to cause you pain.
“The news is full of headlines about Senator Clinton’s “apology” for her tone-deaf comment about the RFK assassination…. But from a [...]

Language Log’s ongoing ridicule of the BBC’s science reporting continues with Parrots and children: still silly season at the BBC:

There are people writing purportedly serious stories for the British Broadcasting Corporation who think that a grey parrot has the cognitive ability of a normal six year old human child. Have these people never met [...]

After following an ever more tenuous chain of links, I ran across a multi-screen screed of character destruction, only to find the sweet irony of this signature: ‘”If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” - Mother Teresa’
I’m often surprised that humanity has survived as long as it has. Viewed [...]

“The key point is this: You are not Microsoft’s customer. You are not the person they want to delight.”

Sorry for the very slow site the last day or two. This is unfortunately shared hosting and the load average has been getting high the last few days; it was over 130 earlier this morning. For now I’m assuming it’s a similar problem to the one in March — no details from provider [...]