obfuscated.org

• Wired News: Bob Dylan: Technology Sucks - Noting the music industry’s complaints that illegal downloading means people are getting their music for free, he said, “Well, why not? It ain’t worth nothing anyway.”
• vi Search: using commands of vi to search - How…. clever? (This was put together by some of the guys at Snap.)
• Osama bin Laden lusts for… : HTTabloid.com - Now we know why “My Perogitive” was playing in Afganastan on 9/11.
• What’s New in Edge Rails: The Ins and Outs of ActiveResource - A good overview of the New World Order in RoR 1.2

• apophenia: Research on Social Network Sites - danah boyd is trying to put together a roundup of social networking papers accepted by refereed journals.
• Autopia - The interesting and unfortunately unsupported tidbit from this piece: One human life = $3,500,000.
• Wired News: This Global Warming Fix Stinks - Wired gets it all wrong. This plan is awesome. How else are we going to create the perma-smoggy sky from all the awesome dystopian future flicks?

• Democratic Underground - Can a jet fuel/hydrocarbon fire collapse a steel structure? An experiment. - This is awesome. I’ll bet that JFK was somehow killed by a rabbit cage as well.
• Google wants people to stop googling | CNET News.com - I’ll take “ships that have sailed” for $1,000, Alex.
• times - How a wingnut sees the NY Times. The “150 Iraqis Killed” article is the best.

• Rum and Monkey: The Personality Test Generator - I got Yao Ming.
• CNN.com - NSA eavesdropping program ruled unconstitutional - Aug 17, 2006 - She declared that the program “violates the separation of powers doctrine, the Administrative Procedures Act, the First and Fourth amendments to the United States Constitution, the FISA and Title III.”
• Bowen is final cut as U.S. team set 12-man roster - NBA - Yahoo! Sports - This is a real shame. Bowen is the best lock-down defender in the league. With him on the team, coach K would be able to immediately shut down any opposing player who gets hot. Lacking their #2 wing defender (Kobe) as well, the team will definitely be less good defensively than they could be.

• alexking.org: Blog > I’ve Left FeedLounge - Alex King leaves the feed reader I’ve been using for the last few months. Creative Differences with the other founder. Which is too bad, because despite its sporadic performance problems, it really is a pretty good service.
• New York Daily News - Basketball - The $15 Mar-vels - $15 for shoes that are probably pretty comparable to the $100 version of the same thing.
• Ten CSS tricks you may not know - Hooray for sneaky CSS hacks.
• ZOMBIES! - the ACME Theatre lets ZOMBIES! run amok. Or something.
• Artest defends actions during Detroit community service event - NBA - Yahoo! Sports - Another sound voice comes out in favor of the doctorine of preemption
• Did Humans Evolve? Not Us, Say Americans - New York Times - USA! USA! USA!
• Everybody loves Eric Raymond - Bruce Schneier Facts - Looking for proof that you’re some sort of a nerd? If you find this page funny, you’ve got it.
• YouTube - Colbert Lampoons Ramesh Ponnuru - I went to highschool with this guy. And then he turned in to Anne Coulter. How sad.
• Boing Boing: TATP: about that pyro stuff in alleged plane-bomb plot - From the comments: ” Ultimately, all solutions to terrorism issues are political, not technological, as the origins are political. It took years for the British to figure this out; finally, they sat down with the IRA and said, “What the hell do you want?” The IRA had slowly progressed from blowing up people to blowing up cars to finally calling in bombs that were going to go off at 2 AM when the streets were deserted. “If you don’t mind, please keep this bomb from going off. We found out killing people makes us unpopular. Thanks!”
• Google Analytics Blog: We’re open! Instant access now available - Google Analytics is definitely the coolest web stats application I’ve used so far.

• Bokardo » Apple Making Huge Social Software Push? - More things that aren’t difficult to install but are nice to have out of the box.
• ebaumsworld.com Celebrity Soundboards - Pranks - Online Games Flash Cartoons, Funny movies, funny pictures, Jokes, Prank phone calls and more - Everybody loves soundboards
• flickrshow : Simple javascript slideshows for Flickr - For those times when linking to Flickr is just too hard.
• Glaser Designs A4 Portfolio - Yes, I am just clicking on things from 37s and thinking that they’re cool. This laptop bag definitely is.

• YES.com - KKJZ 88.1 FM 24 Hour Lookup — Ok, so this is cool. You can search for playlists on radio stations, including top 10/100/etc. lists and the like. Very neat.
• Ajaxload - Ajax loading gif generator — Could anything possibly be more Web 2.0?
• City Pages - No. 1? — USA! USA! USA!
• Wondermark by David Malki ! - 220: In which a Plan comes together — I’m waiting for a terrorist plot that involves couples sitting window-asile in attempt to take up the entire row.
• A brief tirade about totaphobia… (plasticbag.org) — Of course I agree 100%.

Microsoft and Yahoo are building new datacenters right next to an NSA data mining facility. That’s great! I totally trust Yahoo, Microsoft and especially the NSA to do the right thing and not spy on American citizens. They’ve earned my trust!

Probably this is all just coincidence. We all know that big corporations don’t help the NSA monitor internet traffic and VOIP calls like AT&T did, and the government’s not even all that interested in online search engines. It’s not like the Feds would sue Google for search data.

Man those Australians are wacky!

The 56-year-old man was at a nudist colony near Bowral, about 60 miles southwest of Sydney, Sunday when he spotted what he believed to be a funnel web spider hole.

Ambulance workers, including a helicopter crew, were called to the scene after the man poured petrol down the hole and then lit a match in an attempt to kill the offending arachnid.

“The exploding gasoline fumes left the man with burns to 18 percent of his body, on the upper leg and buttocks,” the NRMA Careflight helicopter rescue service said in a statement.

If you’re interested in science, it’s hard to find more authoratative sources than Science and Nature. Both provide rigorously peer-reviewed research, so you don’t have to worry so much about the speculation and science ficiton creeping in to the letters and journals they publish.

Now, I mention this today because it’s just now came to my attention that HOLY CRAP NATURE HAS A TON OF RSS FEEDS AVAILABLE. I’m not 100% sure what I’m going to do with all of those feeds. What’s worse is that I don’t even have an excuse for not importing them, because they offer a handy OPML file listing each and every one of them.

So there you go: Today’s science news PSA. Have a nice day.