The Encyclopedia Britannica announced this week that they would no longer publish a paper version of their 244-year-old enterprise.
I believe Josh Marshall has nailed down the proper reaction to this over on Twitter:
With demise of encyclo britanica, sad my kids will never know a hard 2 navigate, poorly written, 300 lb set books that got outdated each yr
Longtime Heathen R. supplied this anecdote from his father, who still lives in our former state. Both R. and his pop are, like Heathen, Cracker-Americans:
Went into vote in the primary. Went to the Democratic side, manned by three elderly black volunteers. “I want to vote.” “You don’t understand, sir, this is the Democratic side.”
Sigh.
I am:
In celebration thereof, we’re heading to the Mythbusters live show this evening, preceded by some happy-hour tomfoolery at Samba.
The debut of Buffy was fifteen years ago. In the comment thread under the linked MeFi post, someone pointed this out:
If Buffy were real, she’d be 30 years old.
Yikes.
You know what this world needed? A double-barreled version of the M1911.
Given the difficulties involved using .45ACP in conventional double-stacked pistols, my assumption is that this thing is utterly impossible to hold for anyone with hands not absurdly larger than average.
But it’s still just the right kind of ridiculous to be awesome, so there’s that.
Yesterday would have been Douglas Adams’ 60th birthday.
In his honor, tomorrow I will turn 42.
These things are fucking ridiculous — people call them “tree lobsters,” for Christ’s sake — but the good news is that they only live on one tiny island off the coast of Australia.
Or, rather, that USED to be the case. Some do-gooder environmentalists have bred the damn things with the intention of releasing them into a wider habitat, clearly without checking with the human residents of wherever that might be.
“Hey, why not mount a video-capable digital camera on the end of a drill?”
Stay with it. There are several iterations.
This is what we found:
A bit of commentary, left to right, top to bottom:
Naturally, I have no device in my home that will read any of these disks.
Reached for comment, Agent Rob described this as “not out of place on southeast Hawthorne.”
We have a First Amendment in this country for a reason. Remember “Voltaire,” people.
Seriously.
When Irish Eyes Are Smiling has never been this menacing before.
An Iowa man has been arrested for “criminal mischief with cheese.”
The TSA is apparently now trying to threaten and intimidate journalists into ignoring the “scanners don’t work” story.
Awesome.
(In case you don’t know: this is the title reference.)
I just want to point out how awesome the supporting photograph is.
Why on God’s green earth did Microsoft present the summary of various types of Sharepoint 2010 site templates as videos and not just text? Are we post-literate? WTF?
In Australia, spiders flood YOU.
Jesse Thorn has a great piece on Transom you should go read.
TSA Out Of Our Pants explains how the porno-cancer-scanners are effectively useless.
Which is, of course, no surprise.
Grantland has the only bracket worth playing this year. My money’s on Omar, and Barry agrees.
I will note, however, that I’ve apparently long since reached the age where even really amazing whisky is younger than I am.
(h/t @hedrives)
Warner Home Entertainment has a new plan for how consumers can easily and safely — and affordably! — convert their DVDs to digital files for use on other devices! Let us rejoice!
Public Knowledge has the punchline and a takedown, because this approach is so hilariously far of the mark as to make us wonder if it’s some sort of performance art.
For the lazy (and who among Heathen Nation isn’t?), here’s their plan:
What people are actually already doing, of course, is somewhat simpler:
The studios, of course, hate that this second alternative exists, and that people do it all the time despite the fact that it’s technically illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
It seems unlikely that “Disc to Digital” will be very successful, but I could be wrong. Some people are voting for Santorum, after all.
From The Awl we get the altogether bizarre information that, in 1992, Ian McShane recording an album of mellow covers called “From Both Sides Now.” Included are such hits as “Really Love To See You Tonight” and, freakishly, “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway” from Genesis.
Even worse, apparently at no point does the record include the word “cocksucker.” My head hurts now.
(Do I really need to tell you a link on the word “cocksucker” isn’t safe for work?)
The empathetic take on the pro-life movement is something I think few on the other side give much thought to, but it goes like this: If life really does begin at conception, and that single-celled embryo is a fully ensouled being, then pretty much any position on the issue other than “no abortions, ever, except maybe in medically necessary scenarios” becomes untenable.
Now, it should not escape notice that taking this position means you disagree with the notoriously liberal (?) American Medical Association about when biochemical life begins, but it is what it is: if this is where you are with the issue, then there are really no options for you if you’re an ethical person.
However, it’s not as simple as “gosh, if this is what all those folks believe, no wonder they act this way.” In fact, it’s worse than that, because while this is clearly the argument they’d like to make, it’s also abundantly clear that they don’t actually believe anything of the sort. They want to make this argument, but they have no interest in any implications of the argument beyond control of the reproductive process. Put another way, their actions (and lack thereof) make it abundantly clear that they only care about the single-celled embryos inasmuch as they allow control over women. Other contexts where such embryos are endangered, or in which they die, are completely uninteresting to them.
Read both links.
This is awesome. These guys created remote controllable buggies for DSLRs so that they could get close enough to actual no-shit lions to take some pretty amazing pictures.
ZOMG this is amazing.
I guess the folks out at Grace Church in the Woodlands got tired of being the other Houston megachurch, so they’ve decided to make a play for being Houston’s most homophobic megachurch by calling out Mayor Parker for her stance on gay marriage.
Local columnist Charles Kuffner may have the best take:
Unless Pastor Riggle believes Mayor Parker is going to take over the County Clerk’s office and give out marriage licenses as she sees fit, and also take over the Attorney General’s office to prevent any consequences for that, I’m puzzled as to what exactly he thinks she is doing that is wrong. Well, except for the fact that he thinks being gay is icky, because it forces him to spend so much time thinking about what gay people do so he can always be in a state of disapproval about it. You really should be more considerate to the gay-obsessed pastors of the world, Mayor Parker.
Seriously, I get that there exist fiscal conservatives with whom rational discourse is possible. I even know one or two. Where the disconnect happens is when some of these people support the GOP as it exists in 2012. Essentially zero secular fiscal conservatives exist in the Republican Party, and none of have any power or influence on the GOP’s direction, platform, or actions. The near-perfect “party discipline” imposed on Republican elected officials means that opinions outside the platform are essentially irrelevant.
There is no room for you in this party if you would take steps to allow gay Americans to marry. There is no room for you in this party if you think global warming is a problem worth addressing. There is no room for you in this party if you think we should work to ensure access to health care for all Americans, like every other modern democracy. And most of all, there is clearly no room for you in the GOP if you are at all interested in repudiating the excesses of its most conservative, most reactionary, and most hateful segments, because doing so might alienate the base. And so it remains in the GOP’s best interest to encourage precisely those excesses.
Vote GOP, you’re voting for more or less exactly what comes out of Mitch McConnell’s mouth, which differs from what Rick Santorum says only by slight degrees.
This country needs a functional conservative party that actually IS conservative and not some sort of frightening theocratic anti-science, anti-gay, anti-immigrant clusterfuck. It would be nice if the GOP filled that role, but it’s abundantly clear where they’ve made their bed.
There is not the tiniest hint in the text that Space Stallions wasn’t an actual Saturday morning cartoon ca. 1982, but it’s actually an art project by an animation student.
I mean, at least until Hollywood gets ahold of it.
(h/t Rob)
…but it still strikes me as pretty cool that I can deposit checks into my account using my smartphone.
I saw links to this all last week, but only finally clicked it thanks to a link from Heathen Ceaser in Louisville.
Holy cow, am I glad I did:
The robots aren’t remote-controlled. They’re preprogrammed and autonomous, yet are still working in concert.
Whoa.
Somehow, Tyrese Gibson came across an email address he thought was for the ex-girlfriend of Kanye West, when in fact it belonged to and entirely different Amber. Madcap hilarity does in fact ensue.
Congress is considering a law that would make it illegal to protest near anyone with Secret Service protection. I smell lawsuits!
I’ve already gotten my first birthday card, and I won’t turn 42 for another 11 days.
It’s cool that my first card this year is from a bourbon distillery, right?
Ars Technica has noticed something interesting in their logs: Apparently, folks at Apple have been visiting the site using iPad 3 hardware and running iOS 6.
Yes, it does appear the new iPads will have a higher res screen.
(H/T: Rob).
Via Heathen Rob over on the Twitters, we find this excellent quiz. Can you tell which lines were uttered by the theocratic dictator of Iran, and which by GOP presidential frontrunner Rick Santorum?
Japanese Bug Fights!!!! Now you can know, experimentally, whether a scorpion could beat a centipede in a fight.
Yes. Blood sport for bugs. We’re not kidding. Remember, proportionally speaking, these guys are WAY buffer than the MMA dudes.
Because there’s just a touch of noise at ISO 102,400.
I think all thoughts of the Heathen camera platform switching to mirrorless just went out the window. Wow. Just wow. (Also wow: $3500.)
The whole Digital Photography preview is online, but it’s really only for photo nerds.
…that I whiffed a golden opportunity yesterday re: the deaths of certain jackasses, but in truth I was just super busy.
We are better off without the likes of Andrew Breitbart on this earth, and who knows? Maybe God agreed. Breitbart created controversies for personal gain by selectively and dishonestly editing videotapes, and then calling it “journalism.” He was more interested in personal enrichment and a broken, fundamentally selfish and un-American ideology than in anything else. I was criticized in private correspondence yesterday for dancing on his grave, but the likes of Breitbart are a cancer on American discourse. He and his ilk encouraged the worst impulses of their audience and, in so doing, led them to false conclusions as a party trick. To be worthy of the title “journalist,” you need to be working to inform and educate the public. What Breitbart did was sick, craven manipulation designed to float his own boat and aid his ideological fellow travelers, and he did it in a way that makes Murdoch’s Fox look subtle.
I am sad for his family, and whatever friends he may have had. I am sad he made the choice to use what was clearly an exemplary intellect in such a morally bankrupt way. I am sad that his financial success means we will see more of this kind of media hooliganism, not less.
But I am absolutely not sad that he will make no more such noise.
Another in the series of “I’m scared of new things!”: Pro photog whines about Instagram.
We can add former FBI agents to the list of subject-matter experts who find the TSA an utter failure and waste of time.
I’d point out respected authorities outside DHS or the TSA itself who say the opposite, but there aren’t any. Guys who know what the hell they’re talking about when it comes to security, air travel, or fighting terrorism are all pretty united on how useless the TSA is, though.
Lest you forget, the author reminds us a a very key point: the TSA has never stopped an actual terror plot. NEVER. Not once.