Some smart folks have created tunable Tesla coils, and are busy playing music with them – including Lady Gaga covers. Yes, there’s video.
Well, if they’re on the case, I feel better already
The CDC has a blog post up about how they’d respond to the zombie apocalypse — and, more generally, how you should prepare for one. Or, you know, any other sort of disaster.
As it turns out, I’m not the only person that misses the old BR
Remember what Banana Republic used to be like, before douches took over? The product descriptions were stories, the gear was wonderful, and you got the impression you were dealing with humans, not a faceless corporation.
Yeah, me too. I wore the shit out of some Ghurka shorts back then, too. Turns out, we’re not the only ones who miss ’em.
Obviously, the market loved the approach — after the founders sold to the aforementioned douches and the brand became something else entirely, another company started doing something very similar. Heathen HQ has a bunch of Peterman stuff, too.
And as long as we’re lamenting dead brands, pour a little out for Willis & Geiger; they were the real deal, to be sure.
Today in Ape Law
Today’s Deep Geek Post
Some brilliant and insane person has written an x86 emulator in Javascript, on which they’re running the Linux kernel, all of which runs in a web browser.
Seriously, go look. It’s just a command line, so you need to be at least that nerdy to do anything, but it’s sort of mind boggling.
(Update: Edit; hat tip to Rob for calling out my error.)
Oh, lovely. The 4th Amendment is basically over.
SCOTUS says cops can come in if there’s exigent circumstances, and that it’s quite okay if they create those exigent circumstances themselves. In other words, law enforcement can now basically enter your home at will, and good luck fighting them in court afterwards.
I’m sure this will never be abused at all.
The Vincent Black Shadow Returns
Well, sort of. The Black Falcon is a modern rework of the ’52 Black Shadow.
No word yet on its performance against an F-111.
Because surely at least one of you needs to know this
Strictly for my geeks
(If you’re still reading and are concerned about a green muppet, you have clearly disregarded the post title.)
Ron Paul Is Objectively Pro-Flood
He’s been railing against the whole idea of Federal flood control this week.
It’s not like I think any Heathen think of Paul (either of them) as anything other than kooks, but I point this out to remind you that there are actually people out there who think of him as reasonable perhaps only because they don’t realize how kooky he is.
I have no words to describe this
Mike Nix posted this on his Facebook wall. As much as I’d like to assert that he is the little boy born in 1962 whose fondest dream was to own a monkey, that is not the case. It is this man:
(Yes, that man is for real.)
WTF? Indiana Dismisses 4th Amendment
The Indiana Supremes have rules that cops can enter your house whenever they want, and that you do not have the right to prevent their unlawful entry.
Old enough to read Heathen is old enough to feel older
So go look at this. It’s way more damaging than the now-tedious-and-overreaching Beloit list ever is.
I think the most shocking one to me was the fact that, when initially cast as Frodo, Elijah Wood was 18. He is now 30.
Surprise, Surprise, Fox Loves Lies
Michelle Obama invited a number of poets, including rapper Common, to the White House. Cue Fox outrage about some “gangster rapper” in favor of “killing cops,” complete with extraordinarily selective readings of his work to support their pathetic attempts to stoke white, right-wing outrage.
Jon Stewart’s on it; just go check it out.
You can’t make this stuff up.
A Lime Is Optional
VEGAN BLACK METAL CHEF would like to show you how to make pad thai.
(There may be more updates later, if you enjoy this sort of thing.)
Osama.
I’ve thought for a while that I’d put together a longer post about the death of Bin Laden last week, but there’s not a lot I can say about it that hasn’t been said better elsewhere, except to answer questions put to me directly. I have definitely been asked where my outrage is about an extrajudicial activity like this, given my “rule of law” bent so well documented here.
On that point, I’m pretty unbothered. OBL was pretty clear in what he wanted, what he was responsible for, and what he planned to do in the future. He’s not some made-up boogeyman; plenty of sources agree on his role in the resurgence of xenophobic jihadism in the Middle East. (If you haven’t, please do go read The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright’s Pultizer-winning account of the rise of Al Qaeda.) Bin Laden was a bad guy and an enemy of peaceful people everywhere; as the President noted in his announcement, he’s killed no small number of Muslims. And, unlike the bulk of the people we housed at Gitmo these last 9+ years, we actually KNOW he was guilty.
So, Eichmann aside, I don’t have any problem at all with this move. I don’t even have a problem if the mission parameters were structured to make live capture essentially impossible despite giving lip service to the idea. I’d feel the same way about Mullah Omar, but probably not about many other folks — I mean, these guys are avowed terrorists who want to kill Americans. They don’t stop being that just because they’re not holding a gun right now. Again, unlike most of the folks we nabbed and stuck in extraconstitutional hell, there’s no doubt about the names at the top of the AQ masthead. (Indeed, my point all along was that people like Maher Arar were detained, tortured, and otherwise assaulted without any evidence of wrongdoing — and then released with no recourse.)
So what of torture and intelligence gathering? Folks are definitely making lots of noise about this, and Bush apologists are saying that waterboard-gained intel is what put us on the path to Abbottabad. Well, opinions vary, but even if we did it was still wrong. However, I’m not alone in thinking it wasn’t torture, if only because of the timeline. Evidence points to real intel, not waterboarding, as the source of this leak. Or, as the Economist pointed out, if the elimination of Osama Bin Laden was a triumph for the tactics of a TV hero, it was Lester Freamon, not Jack Bauer.
Which, finally, brings us to the most cogent and clearest analysis of all this comes from Radley Balko. In his view, dead or not, Osama won. You should read this, even if you skip most of the rest of these links. He set out to harm America, and he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Food for thought.
HOWTO: Save your vintage Porsche when floodwaters approach
Step 1: Obtain enormous air bladder.
Step 2: Place air bladder in yard.
Step 3: Park car on bladder.
Step 4: Inflate, and tether to house
Step 5: Enjoy.
This makes me very sad
Apparently, today it is possible to buy a child’s home chemistry kit that includes no actual chemicals.
Sigh.
Finally, a real advance in facial hair
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Monkey Tail Beard.
Did Osama Have Good Backups? The IT Lessons of the bin Laden Raid
No, really:
Granted, it’s not every IT administrator who has to deal with a C-level executive in a remote office losing confidential company data because an elite armed military force broke into the place he was staying and took it. That said, there’s a number of lessons that IT administrators can take away from this week’s news.
It’s short and interesting.
Tom Tom: Jackasses
The makers of the Tom Tom line of GPS devices sold information about their customers’ driving habits to law enforcement, enabling the cops to then create speed traps in just the right spots.
Ghost Park of Wichita
During the winter, I rode by this bizarre abandoned amusement park in Wichita pretty much every week en route from the client to the airport. I’m glad someone else noticed it. It opened in 1949; it apparently closed in 2003.
Dear Intarwub
Please make us one of these hamburgers.
John Yoo, Asshat Deluxe
Bush’s “torture lawyer” has put himself through some rather torturous logical twists in order to conclude that it was a mistake for Obama to kill Bin Laden.
Report From The Suburbs
If anything, the Houston Press understates how awesome the Arcade Fire show was. Whoa.
Dear Intarwubs: Please make these happen
I want some coffee joulies.
What I want to do on October 17
Go see this documentary at the New Orleans Film Festival.
How to tell your Drupal administrator is evil
They installed this.
More on Tuscaloosa
There are lots more resources online about the Tuscaloosa storm, but the most useful I pulled from this Metafilter post: a zoomable “slider” graphic showing before-and-after satellite photos of the tornado’s path.
There are also some similar graphics at the Tuscaloosa News site.
Finally, my friend Quin — a Malleteer, former Army Ranger, and EMT working in Tuscaloosa — was interviewed by the Washington Post for a story that is worth your time.
Today’s Heathen Pronouncement
You have wasted your weekend until and unless you have watched Fight For Your RIght Revisited. Now. Make time. Starring Elijah Wood, Danny McBride, Seth Rogan, Jack Black, Will Ferrell, and John C. Reilly as the Beasties, and hilarious cameos a-plenty.
About 30 minutes.
Today in Heathen News
Thanks to the herculean efforts of Chief Technological Heathen, the developer formerly known as LHHFFH, the entire archives of Miscellaneous Heathen are finally online again. And, for the first time, they’re actually all stored in the same system — all prior “complete” incarnations of Heathen included some static page copies of the earliest entries, from November 2000 through July 2001.
The takeaway? Good CHRIST I post a lot. Anyway, here’s a few newly-restored delights for you:
- Hello World, which started it all.
- The 2003 series about the water heater: One and Two.
- An amusingly dated post that references Japanese scotch.
- A recap of Carl & Joy’s wedding
- It’s nice to make predictions and come out right
- Something that only Mike and I will find funny
- Oh, Fafblog, how we miss you
- November 24, 2004 was a pretty big day for Heathens
Enjoy.
Roll Tide.
This is not Bear, but it may as well be.
He is Gene Stallings, the only coach who won a championship in Tuscaloosa between Bryant and the incumbent, Nick Saban. Stallings is legitimately legendary in his own right — he was one of Bryant’s Junction Boys in the fifites back at A&M, and coached under Bear at Alabama from ’58 to ’64 before he came back to take the big job in 1990. Coach Stallings retired in 1996, but continues to keep a home in Tuscaloosa.
This is how a 76-year-old man came to be standing in a parking log, surrounded by debris and destruction, grilling burgers for tornado victims.
Roll Tide.
Dept. of Whoa
Whoa.
This past quarter, Apple actually made more money than Microsoft. Not “they had a better profit margin;” I mean they netted more actual dollars by a margin of $5.99 billion to Microsoft’s $5.2 billion. N.B. that Apple also has a higher market capitalization than MSFT — $323.53 billion as of this writing, vs. $215.44 billion for the “giant” from Redmond. (It’s worth noting that MSFT’s revenue for the period ($16.428B) was much lower than Apple’s ($24.67B), which is interesting in two ways: one, MSFT is just plain doing less business than Apple; and two, they’re still making more profit per dollar of revenue.)
This is not the result of Apple being overvalued, either, by traditional metrics — their P/E is well within the normal range for a company like theirs even if you discount how much cash they’re sitting on (nearly $30 billion, which is enough to, say, buy Sony (who once referred to Apple as a boutique firm) or Dell (whose founder once suggested Apple be closed and sold off) outright).
(Yes, Microsoft DOES have about 30% more actual cash, but they’re carrying about that much debt, too — and Apple has none, so it evens out.)
The point of all this: Should well all start rallying around the scrappy underdog from Redmond now?
A new low for SCOTUS’ conservatives
They’ve pretty much just killed the whole idea of class action lawsuits.
Couldn’t Stand the Weather (Updated)
Alabama’s getting hammered by a massive tornado, and that includes areas near and dear to Heathen Nation. Here’s a roundup of the links sent my way in the last hour:
A little roundup of Alabama tornado links:
- Video from, reportedly, McFarland and 15th street; apparently the mall is mostly unscathed, but pretty much everything else at that intersection is gone.
- More video from the same spot
- Live video from an apartment balcony from a college student, god love ’em.
- DCH apparently okay despite earlier reports of destruction
- More video from the local CBS station, showing the size of the storm — more than a mile, apparently.
- Another still of the tornado itself
- More (breathlessly narrated) video from a student.
- Another twitpic
- A camphone shot from the north side of the UA campus, facing south towards the stadium
- Absolutely horrifying video shot by Crimson Tide Productions; I think we can forgive the heavy background breathing given the subjejct.
Also, not to make light, but no more HotNow, Tide faithful.
Reports put the wind at 177 knots, which would put it well into F4 territory.
Finally, there’s a longrunning live feed at ABC 33/40. This storm started in eastern Mississippi, and is still causing havoc east of Birmingham.
No clear word on any campus damage, but one bystander stated that it was possible to see Coleman Coliseum from the parking lot of University Mall. If true, that’s mindblowing.
Ol’ Mohney notes that this guy’s Twitter stream has lots of updates.
Oh, deer.
I have two words that will make you click this one
“Chaos Monkey.”
Remember that Amazon Web Services outage last week? One firm that relies heavily on AWS was untouched: NetFlix. Why do you think that is?
Here’s a hint:
We’ve sometimes referred to the Netflix software architecture in AWS as our Rambo Architecture. Each system has to be able to succeed, no matter what, even all on its own. We’re designing each distributed system to expect and tolerate failure from other systems on which it depends.
If our recommendations system is down, we degrade the quality of our responses to our customers, but we still respond. We’ll show popular titles instead of personalized picks. If our search system is intolerably slow, streaming should still work perfectly fine.
One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS is called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most – in the event of an unexpected outage.
This is just cool
We’ve all seen annoying, silly animated GIF files before, but the odds are that you haven’t seen anything as cool as these animated GIFs they’re calling ‘cinemagraphs’ that seem to capture a single moment somewhat longer than a photo, but less immersive than actual video. Here’s an example:
In truth, they sort of remind me of the moving pictures in the “Harry Potter” world newspapers.
Definitely check these out. There’s more here.
Dept. of Surprising Facts
Buried in this “list of things” story at the Houston Press is staggering notion that John Tyler, the 10th President of the United States and a man born in 1790, has two living grandchildren today, in 2011.
- Lyon Tyler, Jr , born in 1924, and
- Harrison Ruffin Tyler, born in 1928, who maintains President Tyler’s home in Virginia.
This is, of course, only possible because President Tyler had many children between two wives; his oldest schild was born in 1815, but his youngest wasn’t born until 1860. The surviving grandchildren are sons of Lyon Gardiner Tyler, his fifth child from his second wife. Lyon Sr. was born in 1853 — when Tyler the elder was about 63.
Further, Lyon Sr. had these surviving sons quite late as well: he was about 71 and 73 for their arrivals. But that’s the kind of age spread you need to have living people with grandfathers born during the Washington Administration.
Wow.
Excellent advice
To hell with frou-frou drinks. “Drink alcohol. Quite a bit. Mostly bourbon.”
Happy Passover
This is brilliant:
High Speed + High Def == High Awesome
Romney’s Problem
Courtesy of the Onion:
Though Mitt Romney is considered to be a frontrunner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, the national spotlight has forced him to repeatedly confront a major skeleton in his political closet: that as governor of Massachusetts he once tried to help poor, uninsured sick people.
Romney, who signed the state’s 2006 health care reform act, has said he “deeply regrets” giving people in poor physical and mental health the opportunity to seek medical attention, admitting that helping very sick people get better remains a dark cloud hovering over his political career, and his biggest obstacle to becoming president of the United States of America.
“Every day I am haunted by the fact that I gave impoverished Massachusetts citizens a chance to receive health care,” Romney told reporters Wednesday, adding that he feels ashamed whenever he looks back at how he forged bipartisan support to help uninsured Americans afford medicine to cure their illnesses. “I’m only human, and I’ve made mistakes. None bigger, of course, than helping cancer patients receive chemotherapy treatments and making sure that those suffering from pediatric AIDS could obtain medications, but that’s my cross to bear.”
“My hope is that Republican voters will one day forgive me for making it easier for sick people — especially low-income sick people — to go to the hospital and see a doctor,” Romney added. “It was wrong, and I’m sorry.”
Another link you’ll have to trust me on
Just click it, okay? There’s no way you’d follow the link if I actually used the words “euthanasia coaster.” Trust me.
I can’t decide which part is more awesome
It’s that (a) his name is apparently “Coco Crisp;” or (b) his hair looks like this.
Perhaps the wrongest tote bag EVAR.
Oh, just go look.
Today in Nerd Culture
Perhaps the most popular and enduring of Doctor Who’s companions was Sarah Jane Smith, who first showed up with the Third Doctor in 1973, but who was best known for her adventures with the floppy-hatted, long-scarf-wearing Fourth Doctor through about 1977. Gamely played by Elisabeth Sladen, Smith was sort of the viewer’s proxy in riding along with the Doctor’s various adventures — attractive, sure, but not the almost pure cheesecake of some later companions (cough Leela cough, not that I minded at the time).
She even resurfaced in the recent revival, appearing opposite Tenth Doctor David Tennant a few times as an older, wiser Sarah Jane. So loved was she by the Doctor Who faithful that she got her own show for a few years, even.
Sadly, though, Elisabeth Sladen died today, of cancer. She was 63.
3:08 of Really, Really Cool
Go watch this set of really fantastic time-lapse shots. The bits of the Milky Way are just astounding. Hat Tip: Rob.
Dept. of The Nonspecifically Cool
[This pretty much rocks](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQtCPTspsag even though I don’t completely understand the principles involved. Just watch it anyway.
Oh, TSA. You never disappoint.
They’ve decided that complaining about how ridiculous the TSA is is a sign you might be a terrorist.
This is obviously retaliatory bullshit. Even so, nobody will reign them in.