blacksundae

As obsessed as I am with all things LOL, I know internet memes have a short shelf life. That being said, maybe THIS is the lolcats phenomenon’s last valiant attempt at bringing the funny.

…or if we’re lucky, maybe it’ll never get old!

(Especially hilarious: Taft)

[via some commentor on the Comics Curmudgeon]

Ever wonder what the hell the name of that Ikea coat rack means? Check this out.

At my last job, we had an Ikea kitchen cart in the office. I insisted on referring to it by its weird-ass Ikea name: FÖRHÖJA. Turns out it means “augment.”

…but you really should inspect things before you buy them.

(AP) A man who bought a smoker Tuesday at an auction of abandoned items might have thought twice had he looked inside first. Maiden police said the man opened up the smoker and saw what he thought was a piece of driftwood wrapped in paper. When he unwrapped it, he found a human leg, cut off 2 to 3 inches above the knee.

*rimshot* [via MonkeyFilter]

The Prague Post:

Made of the skins of about 160 animals — some say donkeys, others say calves — the manuscript measures a king-size 90 x 50 x 22 centimeters (roughly 36 x 20 x 9 inches) and weighs 75 kilos (165 pounds), requiring two people to lift it.

According to the National Library’s Web site (www.nkp.cz), legend holds that a monk was sentenced to be buried alive for a breach in Benedictine conduct. In order to forgo his punishment, he agreed to make the most magnificent book the world had ever seen in honor of his brotherhood. The catch was that he was given just one night to complete this Herculean task.

Around midnight, the monk realized he would not be able to finish by daylight, so he invoked the devil to help him, selling his soul in the process. As a tribute to his helper, the monk included a quirky image of the devil within the manuscript, thus giving the book its nickname.

The real story of the Codex Gigas is not fully known, but no less intriguing.

Read on. This is via an excelent MetaFilter post that also includes a link to high-res images of the book in its entirety.

Some say donkey, some say calves… I say, “Bound in human flesh and inked in human blood.”

Fortean Times:

October 1853, on a hilltop in Lynn, Massachusetts, a group assembled to create the New Messiah. They had not come to pray or to praise God: they were actually going to build Him out of metal and wood under the supervision of spirits. When the body was complete, they believed it would be infused with life to revolutionise the world and raise mankind to an exalted level of spiritual development.

The spirits gave their instructions through John Murray Spear, a former minister of the Universalist church and recent convert to spiritualism. Born in Boston in 1804 and baptised by his namesake John Murray (the founder of the American branch of the Universalist church), Spear has been described as a “gentle, kindly, ingenuous” man who possessed a beautiful simplicity and an idiosyncratic mind 1.

Read on. He sounds like he was a really cool guy before he went bat shit.

My co-worker Tommy changing the marquee at the theater where I manage.

Geoff Ryman:

We want FTL interstellar travel with no more inconvenience than a tour of duty on an aircraft carrier. Mom can ring us up from 30,000 light years away to have a real-time conversation about why we haven’t married yet. She’s still alive when we get back home. Everything is recognizable, comfortable. In Star Trek, we get to the stars without having to change.

Mass market SF doesn’t imagine how different interstellar flight will make us. And I don’t mean the usual posthuman stuff. I mean different culturally. I mean getting back home to find 200 years have passed and that everything we loved and believed in is gone. Yes, some SF has done just that, notably The Forever War. So why isn’t the space pilot coming back from the distant past an SF stereotype? Answer: because that’s not what the SF wants.

Big SF, the stuff that sells hugely or is found in movies, is not really about the future; we know that. It’s also not about the present, though that’s our excuse when people point out that SF couldn’t predict its way of a public restroom. SF, especially mainstream commercial SF, copies the past onto the future, to make it comfortably entertaining. The future will be just like the more exciting parts of the past only with better toys. Perhaps that’s because so many people now fear the future, rather than welcome it as a wonderland of possibility.

So I wrote a jokey Mundane Manifesto. It said let’s play this serious game. Let’s agree: no FTL, no FTL communications, no time travel, no aliens in the flesh, no immortality, no telepathy, no parallel universe, no magic wands. Let’s see if something new comes out of it.

Read on. It’s an interesting speech, although I disagree with him on the value of interstellar travel, and his last line destroys whatever chance he had of getting across to his target audience. Anyway, it’s basically Dogme 95 for SF lit. Not necessarily my cup of tea, but food for thought. [via Futurismic]

UPDATE: I cross-posted this to MetaFilter, and it led to a really wonderful discussion. Be sure to check it out.

Apparently Windows users are 20% more interested in religion, whereas Mac users are 6% more interested in intellectual property law. Huh. I hate feeling typical. [via Boing Boing]

From the Boing Boing comments:

Vista is a glossy megachurch in Texas. OSX is clearly Santeria.

My mother used to have a joke about a supposed National Sex Week. Well, according to this BBC News article the governor of Russia’s Ulyanovsk region is offering prizes to couples who have babies in exactly nine months. He wants couples to take the day off work today to have sex. Not sure if it’s with pay. Maybe the prospect of winning the latest model Ulyanovsky Avtomobilny Zavod SUV is enough.

William Sellers at the University of Manchester, UK, argues that this type of comparison can be misleading. “Such calculations can accurately predict the top speed of a six-tonne chicken, but dinosaurs are not built like chickens, nor do they run like them,” he says.

Instead, Sellers and colleague Phillip Manning used an approach they dub “evolutionary robotics” to generate new estimates of the top speed of several two-legged dinosaurs. They built computer models featuring the leg bones, muscles, and skeletal structures of five groups of dinosaur: Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor, Allosaurus (which looks like a miniature Tyrannosaurus [albiet more gracile and sporting the typical three digits on the front limb, as opposed to rex's two. - Shannon]), the slightly smaller Dilophosaurus, and the chicken-sized Compsognathus.

To begin with, each model could move in a huge variety of different ways, too many to analysis properly. To narrow the problem down, Sellers and Manning generated a virtual population for each group, containing lots of models with slightly different gaits. They then raced these models against each other. Those that fell after only a few steps were culled while the fastest went on to spawn another generation of slightly modified gaits.

After hundreds of generations, this simulated evolution arrived at an efficient, workable gait for each dinosaur. The same method has previously been used to model the gait of extinct hominids, but “we are the only people to have tried this on dinosaurs,” Sellers says.

Read on.