Dark Lord of the Petulant?
What is Darth Vader’s diagnosis?
The manipulations of Anakin Skywalker, also known as Darth Vader in the “Star Wars” saga, have long been ascribed to the Dark Side of the Force. Now, psychiatrists suggests that the actions of the Jedi Knight could be used in teaching about a real-life mental illness.
A letter to the editor in the journal Psychiatry Research explores just what is wrong with Vader. French researchers posit that Vader exhibits six out of the nine criteria for borderline personality disorder. Unstable moods, interpersonal relationships, and behaviors are all characteristics of this condition, according to the National Institutes of Mental Health. It affects 2 percent of adults, mostly young women.
via Yahoo Movies
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Addendum: I’m clearly not blogging enough when I wrote it as [blockquote] on the first pass…
Spain, not Japan? Seriously?
Apparently There Is A Meat Vending Machine In Spain
Spain is a magical place. How do we know this? Because they apparently have a meat vending machine.
Said vending machine is located outside a 100-year-old butcher shop and allows customers to buy meat around the clock. The vending machine features meats, sausages, sandwiches and other goods on a seasonally rotating basis.
3 Men In A Boat, sort of…
Jack Watkins, 25, and engineers Chris Hayes, 24, and Dave Sibley, 25, have succeeded in crossing Italy’s Lake Garda in a huge, inflated bouncy castle. “Great Britain has such a great tradition as a seafaring nation and we really feel we have played no role at all in adding to this,” admitted intrepid waterman Hayes. “That said, it was possibly the most fun we have ever had and we really never believed this most frivolous of dreams would ever be realized.”
This demands an American attempt to do the same. Lake Mead, anyone?
Top 10 Reasons the GOP Would Let the World Be Destroyed by an Asteroid
Too good not to share, too long for facebook, not good enough to spam everyone with… that’s exactly what this blog is for.
Top 10 Reasons the GOP Would Let the World Be Destroyed by an Asteroid
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Assume that a huge “planet killer” asteroid on a direct collision course with the earth has been spotted – nine months before its projected impact. President Barack Obama proposes an emergency program, in conjunction with the Russians, to knock the asteroid off course before it destroys our planet. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_russia_asteroid_encounter
The Republicans in the Senate promptly mount a filibuster against the enabling legislation, thereby delaying action, leading to the destruction of the planet and to the end of all human life.
Now for the top 10 reasons why the GOP let the world be destroyed:
10. Didn’t want to offend teabaggers who believed Obama was an alien born on the asteroid.
9. Furious over Obama’s refusal to declare the asteroid’s approach an act of terrorism and then bomb Iran in response.
8. Believed tax cuts for the rich would be a more effective response.
7. Just trying to prevent another big tax and spend government program.
8. Said, “Hey, if the asteroid hits in 2010, it will be during the one year gap when there is no inheritance tax, which means we’ll all avoid the ‘death tax!'”
7. Trying to save the world sounded like more of that sissy environmentalism crap.
6. Preferred private enterprise based solutions like corporate sales of anti-asteroid ointment.
5. Refused to accept the scientific consensus on the asteroid’s trajectory until they had absolute proof in the form of the earth’s destruction.
4. Said, “There were no asteroid attacks during Bush’s term. So it’s Obama’s fault and why should we bail him out?”
3. Insurance lobby wanted action delayed until they’d sold more “asteroid policies” (payable only in the event everyone on the planet was killed in an asteroid impact and if claim was then promptly made thereafter).
2. Wouldn’t support Obama’s proposal because the asteroid protection would have applied to illegal aliens as well as U. S. citizens.
And the number one reason why the GOP let the world be destroyed . . .
1. Allowing Obama to save the world could have helped the Democrats in the 2010 and 2012 elections and even the apocalypse was better than that!
Note: If you look closely, you’ll see that there are actually 12, not 10, reasons given. Somehow, when it comes to right-wing lunacy, 10 just isn’t enough.
disclaimer: not original, collected on the internets tubes
via Flyertalk
I’m NOT drunk, the video game.
via Kotaku
Commodore Nostalgia
via Slashdot, Programming Books, part 3: Programming the Commodore 64
Prologue about the book itself is worth reading, but the following really resonated for me:
Now I know that there is already plenty of old-fart nostalgia on this blog — a lot of people have interpreted Whatever happened to programming? as a yearning for the days when you had to do everything from first principles, which wasn’t really what I meant. But I do, I really do, miss the days when it was possible to understand the whole computer.
I’m not claiming that I ever had the level of mastery that people like West and Butterfield had. I was never really a big machine-code programmer, for one thing — I wrote routines to be called from BASIC, but no complete programs in 6502/6510. And I’ve never been a hardware hacker at more than the most trivial swap-the-video-cards level. But I did have a huge amount of Commodore 64 lore internalised. I knew which memory location always held the scan-code of the key that was pressed at that time; and where the screen memory-map began; and which locations to POKE to play different pitches on the various channels of sound, or to change the screen or border colours. I knew hundreds or thousands of those little bits of information, as well as being completely familiar with the horrible BASIC dialect that was in one of the ROMs. In short, I knew the machine in a way that I don’t even begin to hope to know any of my computers today; in a way that, I am guessing, no-one anywhere in the world knows their machines.
I miss that.
I know exactly what he means.
Long, nostalgic ramble after the break. Consider yourself warned.
Continue reading “Commodore Nostalgia”
“B’Bye”
A couple of years ago, links this article went round the office as an example of how bad Vista was, and how not to design software. It didn’t sit well with me.
Anyway, I ran into it today and re-read it, and this particular point stood out:
So now we’ve got exactly one log off button left. Call it “b’bye”. When you click b’bye, the screen is locked and any RAM that hasn’t already been copied out to flash is written. You can log back on, or anyone else can log on and get their own session, or you can unplug the whole computer.
…as the culmination of his whole argument. To me, in context, it just reads as a “reductio ad absurdum” against the very showing why Microsoft did the RIGHT thing in making a flexible UI.
Then again, I am at least a sigma, and maybe two, into the “control, customizability and flexibility freak” side of things when it comes to computers. I run Gentoo Linux on my server, and if I pitched Windows on my day to day machines, it would be for Gentoo (or some other very customizable Linux distro) and not for something more out of the box like Fedora or SuSE (let alone the MacOS!)
The REALLY interesting question, to my mind, is how do you design an interface that scales in depth – to be accessible enough for someone newly sitting down at a system to be able to use it while at the same time allowing an experienced user to optimize his or her own processes – for one trivial example, I don’t want to have to pull the battery in order to get a “real” shutdown or hibernate of my laptop before a flight or a long day away from it: how long it’s going to be before I need it again is something that the software isn’t going to know, but I’ll usually have a pretty good guess of when I shut down.
As these things go, I’ve found Microsoft’s “big” products (Windows and Office) to be some of the better software out there in that respect, although I haven’t needed to play around nearly as much with Office customization since I moved to Office 2007. Vista and Windows 7 were (IMO) HUGE UI improvements over 2000/XP in my view.
Rip Torn: Bank Robber???
Actor Rip Torn charged with breaking into Conn. bank while drunk and carrying a loaded gun
SALISBURY, Conn. (AP) — Actor Elmore “Rip” Torn has been charged with breaking into a Connecticut bank and carrying a loaded handgun while intoxicated.
State police say the 78-year-old Salisbury resident was arrested Friday night after police found him inside the Litchfield Bancorp with a loaded revolver.
The “Men in Black” actor has been taken into custody and booked on charges including burglary and possession of firearm without a permit. He is being held on $100,000 bond and is scheduled for a Monday appearance in Bantam Superior Court.
Forget men in black, his SF great role was Centauri in The Last Starfighter.
Cat vs. Bear
A letter I sent to the Chancellor of UCSC and the Chief of Campus Police.
I spent an hour stuck in UCSC local traffic trying to get to class, only to be forced to turn around by (expetive deleted) protesters while a campus PD officer stood and did nothing. Then spend another half hour stuck in traffic getting away from campus.
Continue reading “A letter I sent to the Chancellor of UCSC and the Chief of Campus Police.”
Server upgrade
I doubt many folks are still reading it, as I know my handful of old friends who read regularly are all on Facebook now and seeing my updates there. Nevertheless, my file/web server has been down for a week or two and is only back up. It’s pretty much been totally replaced, hardware-wise.
Specs (aka Geek porn) after the break. Photo (at Aveek’s request) to be provided in a forthcoming update.
Continue reading “Server upgrade”