These aren’t labeled as such, but these “Uncomfortable Plot Summaries” remind me of nothing so much as the asinine blurbs for shows in the old TV Guide. So often did they miss the point of a given show that I used to say they’d summarize the New Testament as “Jewish carpenter runs afoul of Roman law.”

Anyway, not all of these are funny, but any list that reduces Highlander to “Elderly immigrant destroys property” has to have a few other gems on offer.

Not I. However, IO9’s post here giving them a gentle smackaround includes a pitch- (and art-) perfect spoof of those insufferable Wonder Twins from the 70s cartoon. Do NOT miss this.

By now you’ve probably at least heard of the Deep Field experiments with the Hubble; basically, scientists pointed the telescope at an apparently vacant spot in the sky, but turned up the sensitivity and looked for a long time — and discovered that the “black” piece of sky was actually home to thousands of galaxies, some as much as 40 billion light years away.

Go here. Read more. Watch the video. Space is huger than you we can imagine, but this video gives us a little glimpse of the larger universe.

GM’s been talking about the groundbreaking plug-in hybrid Volt for a while, but now they’ve let the ad men and marketers (read: LIARS) start babbling, and as a consequence we’re now seeing press that suggests that the Volt gets a whopping 230 miles per gallon.

Mark Chu-Carroll over at Good Math, Bad Math explains why this is pure, unadulterated bullshit. The Volt’s cool and all, and in some circumstances could get even better mileage than that, but the mechanisms involved make traditional MPG figures pretty much useless.

The Volt leaves your house in the morning charged from the grid, and can go up to 40 miles without using any gas at all; after 40, though, the electric engine is charged by a small gas generator that will apparently produce about 50 MPG on its own. Consequently, people with short commutes might use zero gallons of gas a week, but people driving in from the burbs would use way more. Touting the 230 figure, though, is just a bunch of suits lying.

BoingBoing points us to Dara O’Briain:

Jesus, homeopaths get on my nerves with the old ‘Well, science doesn’t know everything.’ Well, Science knows it doesn’t know everything; otherwise, it’d stop. […]

Just because science doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.

If you’re of the right tribe, go read and enjoy Signs you’re a bad programmer.

Really, Microsoft? Really?

So, with most webmail tools, if you hit the “logoff” button, no amount of URL tomfoolery will allow a nefarious person to re-connect to your mailbox from the browser or session without your password.

This is As It Should Be.

I’ve just noticed, however, that Outlook Web Access apparently sees it differently. When you hit the logoff link in OWA, you get this warning:

At this point, the URL has shifted from our base OWA URL to something that ends with “/auth/logoff.aspx?Cmd=logoff”, which gives the user the distinct idea that their session has been zapped safely. Sure, it’s probably safer to quit the browser at this point, but in this age of weeks-long uptimes for even Windows boxes, who does that?

I sure don’t. However I just had a need to log into our support mailbox, and haven’t used OWA in at least 24 hours. The minute I pointed Safari at OWA, I was looking at my inbox. No login. No challenge. No nothing.

What the fuck?

Just click.

Check it out — SFW.

Here. (SFW)

If, in the course of my web reading, I encounter a video from YouTube that’s long, or if I’m doing so from a place with questionable or slow connectivity, my standard procedure is to open the video and immediately hit pause. the YouTube player is smart enough to accumulate the video and hold it for me, and when I come back to that page in 10 or 20 minutes, the video will play uninterrupted.

What, then, is the problem with the Comedy Central videos? No matter how long I let them buffer, they always stutter and pause and require additional buffering.

Does someone geekier than I know why their approach is so broken?

This never before seen pictures of Armstrong on the moon shows his face through the visor.

In 1977, the TRS-80 Model 1 was the shit. Gizmodo has more.

The LRO has taken pictures of the Apollo landing site; you can see the lander and even the astronauts’ footprints.

I end up using both — for a rich, formatted, in-house mail, Outlook is the winner — but what’s interesting is how much search SUCKS on Outlook compared to Mail.app. I can find mails in no time on the Mac side, but the Outlook search tools appear to be made of fail.

…you’ll be very sad if you don’t see the joy that is Star Trek II as an opera with action figures. Really. Click. Seriously.

Citicorp Center in New York is a striking building for lots of reasons, but the most obvious is that it sits on four huge “stilts” that allow one corner to hover over a church. Less obvious is its massive motion dampening system, developed to reduce wind-induced motion sickness in tenents.

Its most interesting aspect, though, is what happened when its structural engineer realized, several years after its completion, that his structure might not be as safe as it should be under significant wind loads, and what he did about it. Let’s be clear: when I say “not as safe as it should be,” I mean he realized the 59-story skyscraper might fall down.

Seventeen years later, Joe Morgenstern wrote a long piece in the New Yorker about what happened next; it’s online here and is well worth your time.

What is a petabyte?

Installing recommended updates and patches on our Exchange server resulted in (a) Windows Firewall being automatically enabled, preventing any access to Exchange and (b) the webmail client being completely hosed.

CompuServe is finally dead.

It is apparently impossible to log out of Outlook Web Access in a browser and then log back in as a different user without first quitting the browser. WTF?

Hellenic Shipping has created an interactive GoogleMaps mashup that shows the locations of their ships in real time. Globally.

(Via MeFi.)

JWZ has this rundown of the timelines for popular SF films. We’re already past Clockwork Orange, Escape from New York, Freejack, and (obviously) 2001.

Absent — since it’s not the actual timeline of the film, just of events referenced therein — is the original date of Judgement Day from 1984’s original Terminator film, which will be 12 years ago this August: 8/29/1997. Ouch.

Emacs on a G1.

Or something, since it’s now refusing to reimburse its workers for data plans on non-Windows Mobile devices regardless of how much they’re used for work.

There’s drinking the kool-aid, and then there’s really drinking the kool-aid. This is just silly and wrongheaded. That they’re couching it as a “cost cutting measure” instead of blatant logrolling is even cheesier; nobody thinks Windows Mobile is a viable platform.

In addition to the fancy new iPhone 3GS and related announcements (and don’t dismiss the $99 3G move; Apple’s now positioned for an even larger piece of the smartphone market), we also got a peek at Snow Leopard. The new rev of the Mac OS is a refinement release, not a major feature-laden milestone, but it does include one very significant new capability:

The other major demo was of the Microsoft Exchange support baked right in to Mail, Address Book, and iCal. “The Mac has Office, integrates with Windows IT services, but what’s missing is Exchange,” said Serlet. Apple licensed Exchange compatibility directly from Microsoft, so now it’s a snap to set up integration with Exchange Server 2007 or newer. It includes server auto-discovery support in Mail, integrated view of Exchange and personal calendars in iCal, support for scheduling meetings, accepting invitations, drag-and-drop contact integration, and more. This support should make it far easier to use Macs in most corporate environments.

Windows doesn’t come with Exchange support. You’ve gotta buy Outlook for that. Something tells me that Snow Leopard’s implementation here will be smarter than Outlook’s, too.

Oh, and the price? $29. That is not a typo.

Via DaringFireball, here’s Enderle’s predictions for WWDC this year:

“The question is whether they will use it for product launches,” said Rob Enderle, president of the Enderle Analyst Group. “It appears the answer is no since they are signaling that not only will Jobs not be there, neither will the new phones.” From the standpoint of consumers and even investors, he said, the developers conference isn’t nearly as important as Macworld.

Jesus, is this guy EVER right? He’s like tech’s own Bill Kristol. What a useless gasbag.

This video demo of a 1964 acoustic modem — at 300 baud — is pretty fantastic. It was all over the net last week; I’m just getting to it.

Some fun bits:

• It’s acoustic, obviously; there was no way to plug a phone line in otherwise.
• It has no digital circuitry at all — there’s no microcontroller, and no real command set.
• It does, however, still work — though loading Wikipedia over 300 baud is an exercise best left to museums.

300 baud predates me, but I did start at 1200. The jump to 2400 was enormous, and the jump to 9600 was even better — though it was a plateau, too, since the terminal controllers for the University mainframe ran at that speed, so here was no reason to go any higher until dial-up ISPs started happening.

Keep a giant waterbug as a pet and take pictures when it eats goldfish.

Three astronauts — Sally Ride, Buzz Aldrin, and Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell — are in a Louis Vuitton ad.

How about some knitted meercats in Star Trek uniforms?

Bynkii, under the heading “Some People Shouldn’t See Movies That Aren’t Documentaries,” discusses Star Trek fan neepery:

Now people are bitching about the size and kind of CANYON that a young Jim Kirk drives a late-60s Corvette off of.

Stop watching Science Fiction.

Not only is it just a little too hard for you, but you completely overlook the real crime of the scene:

THE LITTLE BASTARD LIVED AFTER TRASHING A GORGEOUS CAR LIKE THAT.

Shit…”where to you find canyons like that in Iowa”. Fuck, what’s next “You can’t go faster than the speed of light, and transporters are bullshit”. Thats just trying to find shit to not like about a movie. I bet most of these fuckers are “Lost” fans too. Note: “Lost” fans cannot, under any circumstances complain about continuity, reality, or logic errors. They have no moral highground whatsoever.

Spare us all. Just stop seeing anything that isn’t “The Bridges of Madison County” or gay cowboys eating pudding.

(Emphasis added.)

Palm will launch its much-anticipated and possibly make-or-break phone two days before Apple’s developer conference, where JobsCo is widely expected to drop new iPhone hardware and software.

Oops.

Over at JWZ’s LJ, there’s a long-exposure video of the galactic center moving across the sky.

Good: Cosmos is all up in Hulu.

Bad: Hulu pretty much sucks.

Worse: Hotel wifi so occasionally dodgy that Hulu’s suck is irrelevant. :(

If you’re a member of my tribe, you should definitely read A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Computer Languages.

A couple gems:

1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 – Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

and

1972 – Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix.

and of course

1980 – Alan Kay creates Smalltalk and invents the term “object oriented.” When asked what that means he replies, “Smalltalk programs are just objects.” When asked what objects are made of he replies, “objects.” When asked again he says “look, it’s all objects all the way down. Until you reach turtles.”

iSnort.

A previously NDA’d feature of Windows 7 has finally gone public; basically, Win7 comes with a virtualization-based “XP mode” that creates a virtual machine to host any apps that can’t run in a post-XP environment.

The real bonus here is that it allows Microsoft, like Apple before them, to make a break with backward compatibility. OS X was a quantum leap over System 9 precisely because they made no real effort to allow backward compatibility outside a “compatibility box” that was the next best thing to virtualization (since virtualization wasn’t really an option 9 years ago).

Microsoft has, so far, not made the same kind of break with the past, and that’s hamstrung the evolution of the platform. If they do this right, they’ll be able to make the same kind of leap with 7 or whatever comes after 7 that Apple made in 2000.

This is a good thing for everyone; I’m not a huge Windows fan, but I want Microsoft in the race in the same way I want the GOP in the race. Competition is good for everybody.

Penny Arcade takes on Rock Bank sub-branding.

Because, as this Slate piece makes abundantly clear, the movie people are just too bone stupid to realize they have to compete with it.

The days of controlling distribution with arcane contracts and weird periods of artificial scarcity are over. If consumers can’t legally watch what they want to watch when they want to watch it, it’s becoming easier and easier for them to do so in ways that result in zero revenue for the copyright holder. Do the math.

…it’s the 66th anniversary of the most interesting bicycle ride EVER.

Albert Hofmann joined the pharmaceutical-chemical department of Sandoz Laboratories (now Novartis), located in Basel as a co-worker with professor Arthur Stoll, founder and director of the pharmaceutical department. He began studying the medicinal plant squill and the fungus ergot as part of a program to purify and synthesize active constituents for use as pharmaceuticals. His main contribution was to elucidate the chemical structure of the common nucleus of Scilla glycosides (an active principal of Mediterranean Squill). While researching lysergic acid derivatives, Hofmann first synthesized LSD-25 in 1938. The main intention of the synthesis was to obtain a respiratory and circulatory stimulant (an analeptic). It was set aside for five years, until April 16, 1943, when Hofmann decided to take another look at it. While re-synthesizing LSD, he accidentally absorbed a small quantity through his fingertips and serendipitously discovered its powerful effects before his bicycle ride home.

Or, why restating the problem can be the best possible thing you can do. The context of the link is software development, but upon reflection it turns out that there’s pretty much always some benefit to be had by turning the problem around a few times.

(Of course, my answer to the actual dilemma linked would’ve been “join,” but that’s because I think in Perl.)

Pervasive computing is getting there, but the problem right now is that getting to the cloud of data involves the awkward process of hauling out your phone or laptop and doing a manual query. What if you didn’t have to, and what if you could solve the problem without spending more than $400?

I can’t possibly explain how cool this is. Just go watch.

(Yes, the MIT Media Lab is made of WIN.)

Have you played Settlers of Catan yet? The German-made game has become a global hit; my guess is Heathen Nation probably has a higher percentage of gamers — and thus folks who’ve seen it — than the public at large, but it’s interesting that Wired has noticed. It’s also interesting that Wired’s notice feels late despite the fact that I’ve seen no other mass-media treatment of it yet.

Don’t you want a Commodore 64 laptop? You know you do.

It appears Microsoft is just not quite able to kill XP after all; leaked HP memos suggest that zombie OS may live on until 2010, nearly nine years after its 2001 release.

For reference, nine years prior to XP’s release, we were all using Windows 3.1 (b. 18 March 1992) — or we were, if we weren’t still using DOS.