Friends

Our work here will not be complete until every Wikipedia page contains an "In Anime" sub-section.

• Crucifixion - In Anime.
  
• Asperger syndrome - In Anime.
  
• Previously, previously.
  

Is there a blog that highlights the stupidest Wikipedia events? I subscribe to the RSS feed of the Lamest edit wars article, but I find that insufficient.

Hellfire holidays: Round 2 of the Pervert's Grand Tour.

A creative leap of imagination is needed to picture Covent Garden, now given over to flower markets and Body Shops, as the city's most sordid red light district, where, in the seedy Shakespeare's Head, waiter-pimps would set gentlemen up with ladies like Oyster Moll, who would "open the wicket of love's bear garden to any bold sportsman who has a venturesome mind to give a run to his puppy."

netik

You might be wondering what they did about that.

The answer is absolutely nothing.

John called SFPD, went down to the police station in person and filed a report (case 091-062-114), and after several followup phone calls over the next few weeks was told:

Apparently prosecuting hit-and-run drivers is beneath the notice of our police department, and the piece of shit driver who almost killed us both gets off scott free.

Which brings us to this story I came across yesterday:

Streetsblog: A Troubling Story of SFPD Bias Against Bicycle Riders

And now to the very disconcerting part about the police. As I tried to get information from three SFPD police officers on the scene of the crash, two of them showered me with unadulterated disdain for bicyclists and pedestrians. One officer said she thought bicyclists and pedestrians are always at fault in crashes and that they are stupid for not watching out for drivers. She was very upset with cyclists running red lights. She told me the bicyclist was at fault in this crash without any knowledge that a witness was saying the opposite.

Another officer complained that bicyclists should be ticketed a lot more, then he said that he thought San Francisco bicyclists should all be moved to Treasure Island, where presumably they wouldn't be in the way. [...] When it dawned on him that his bigotry might make it into my story, given the bright pink SFPD press badge dangling around my neck, he made a slightly menacing reference to memorizing the information on my pass.

In a follow-up interview today, Corujo said that when he was being interviewed by the officers they seemed to have a preconceived idea of what happened, and were fixated on confirming whether the woman had lights on her bike.

"It seems like they were trying to bias the story to even out the score or something," said Corujo. "I don't know if they were even listening to the idea that [the driver] had made an illegal turn."

Ultra-Orthodox rabbis decry Internet's 'terrible impurity'

Leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis on Friday told their flock to shun the Internet, claiming that even sites meant for the arch-conservative religious community contained "lies and terrible impurity."

Those who enter the world of the Internet "will never return," they warned ominously in a letter published by three ultra-Orthodox newspapers.

"Many Jewish souls have already fallen into its trap."

The 21 rabbis noted that private use of general Internet sites is already strictly prohibited for members of the Haredi community, as the ultra-Orthodox call themselves. "Recently, the so-called Haredi sites have gone overboard," the rabbis said, adding that "they disseminate forbidden slander, gossip, lies, terrible impurity and abominations."

Haredis recently made headlines in Israel as thousands took to the streets to protest against a car park and an industrial company that operate on Saturday, which they consider a grave desecration of the Jewish holy day of rest.

Dear Lazyweb,

I want to put two embedded videos side by side. I want each of them to have a 1 pixel border around the embed box. (E.g.) In Safari and Opera (no idea about IE), you can do:

<EMBED ... STYLE="border:1px solid">

But in Firefox, the border does not show up. One way to accomplish it in all three is this:

<DIV STYLE="border: 1px solid; width:480">
<EMBED ... WIDTH=480 ...></DIV>

which is dumb because you have to specify the width twice, and also because that doesn't let you put the embeds side by side unless you wrap a TABLE cell around each of them.

Any other ideas of how to make this work?

Is it a bug in Firefox that EMBED and OBJECT ignore the CSS "border" attribute?

UPDATE: Problem solved.

DNA Lounge update, wherein the ground opens up and fails to swallow us, and a tagger is rewarded.

Giant Panda Genome Reveals Why It Eats Shoots and Leaves

The panda genome gives clues to understanding the panda's strict bamboo diet. It turns out that pandas have mutations in two copies of a taste gene called T1R1, which encodes a protein that senses the savory taste of meats, cheeses, broths and other high-protein foods. These mutations may have robbed pandas of the ability to taste meat, pushing them toward their bamboo diet, the researchers suggest.

Pandas possess all the requisite genes for digesting meat, but none of the genes required for digesting bamboo, Wang and colleagues found. The researchers guess that pandas rely entirely on communities of gut microbes for extracting nutrients from bamboo.

Previously.

DNA Lounge update, wherein the War on Fun gets some national press, plus fake bands.

Academic researchers have implanted a wireless brain-machine interface into a locked-in subject who is almost completely paralyzed.

The system uses brain electrodes to read signals meant for jaw and mouth muscles. An FM radio is used to transmit these brain signals to a computer, which transforms them into recognizable sounds. Currently the system is only able to produce vowels, but with more electrodes and more powerful algorithms it should be able to scale up to fully vocalized words.

Previously, previously.

As Feigel puts it: "mechanical action of quantum vacuum on magneto-electric objects may be observable and have a significant value."

Of course, nobody is getting a free lunch here. "Although the proposed engine will consume energy for manipulation of the particles, the propulsion will occur without any loss of mass," says Feigel. He even suggests, with masterful understatement, that this might have practical implications.

So basically, you can create thrust by interacting with virtual particles that don't actually exist. It's not quite a zero-point generator, but it still relies on pushing against fiction.

I guess it works basically the same way as turning electricity into thrust by pushing against a planetary magnetosphere, but without the planet?

Well, SPF sure is working great. Nicely done, guys. I'm not sure I've gotten a single piece of spam that SpamAssassin didn't flag as SPF_PASS.

Temperatures dropping, spam rising. Lately I'm getting dozens a day that SA doesn't catch. Tragedy.

1. Google CEO Schmidt is a douche. Schneier responds. "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." This is the same guy who blacklisted CNET for publishing personal info about him that they found by googling.

2. Facebook changed their privacy policy, and largely screwed the pooch. Where by "the pooch" I mean "you" and by "screwed" I mean, if any of your friends ever posts a quiz result or installs any other app, the author of that quiz/app is able to get all of your Facebook details -- name, gender, city, friends, photos, pages, etc.

   To be clear: installing an app doesn't just give away that information about you. It gives away that information about everyone who has friended you, and there is no way for them to opt out.