Seahorses, I Love 'Em (& other Links of Interest)

[bi]

ils:

Apparently it's real, but I've never tried installing it myself. Any brave Christian souls up to the task?

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And via Crooked Timber: Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation, in case anyone hasn't heard about it before.

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I'm pretty sure this has been linked on the ZBB before, but I ran across The Empire That Was Russia again the other day. Phenomenal early colour photography, and a nice break from talking about school shootings.

From 1900: The Ladies' Home Journal predicts the year 2000. (Might be interesting to compare with Mark's look back from the other end of the century.)

A brilliant, fanciful feature on the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel.

[Salmoneus]

On those predictions:

1. The population bit isn't ridiculous, if you take the lower figure. The bit about new countries joining the union wasn't ridiculous, but was fucked up by American foreign policy (OK, it probably was never the most likely option, but it was a viable possibility in 1900).

2. That's not that wrong, at least in Britain, I don't know about America. There have been huge waves of population movement first to the suburbs and then to the countryside, with only the very poor and the very rich remaining.

3. Well, that WAS sort of right, until the aerobic/callisthenic movement was discredited by fascist elements.

4. OK, that's bollocks. Might still happen, though, eventually.

5. Express trains at 150mph? Air-conditioning? Travelling with windows down? No coal, no water stops? Check. OK, the average train speed isn't that high.

6. Removal of the horse? Check. Don't know about the prices, I'll admit.

7. OK, that would be reasonable if not for the aeroplane. Still, it's only recently that aeroplanes have been preferable to surface transport in this country, and it might end if fuel prices increase. They've still not completely replaced ships for long-distance freight. They ARE weapons of war.

8. OK, submarines aren't that powerful (though they've come close sometimes) and replace airships with aeroplanes.

9. Check.

10. Not that far out.

11. Err... no.

12. Some of that's reasonable. A lot of it would be possible if we wanted to do it.

13. What's with the giant melon obsession?

14. Not quite, though might be possible soon.

15. Exagerated maybe, but...

16. In some languages...

17. No, but some progress.

18. yup

19. Yes, though i don't understand the piano bit.

20. Partly, and the rest maybe soon

21. Sort of

22. If only!

23. Yes

24. yes

25. yes

26. STOP WITH THE GIANT FRUIT!

27. hmm

28. no

29. not quite

Conclusion: not that bad. I'm guessing it's a hoax.

[Anguipes]

I notice that 26 and 13 are duplicates... hrm...

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The giant fruit fixation is pretty amusing, definitely.

Conclusion: not that bad. I'm guessing it's a hoax.

It is unusually accurate as futurism goes, but seems legit FWICT. Some of the details of the speculation seem period-authentic (like "there will be no wild animals except in menageries," manifesting that weird inorganic utopianism so widespread in the "smoke is progress" era), while in other places the accuracy isn't very remarkable (it wasn't very daring to say that "photographs will reproduce all of Nature's colors" in an era when the first colour photography was already underway).

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I notice that 26 and 13 are duplicates... hrm...

Error in transcribing the original, maybe.

[Praesidium]

Seemed kind of obsessive about getting rid of all the horses.

[Bryan]

Why I don't care for militant, pedantic atheists: Richard Dawkins illustrates. I'd love to hear the results if someone asked him "what's your sign?" at a nightclub.

Peter Kay's a talentless imbecile.

[frumpwallow]

The Conet Project a collection recordings of short wave number stations. this stuff makes me shiver, with the strange music and monotone voices. ugh, gives me nightmares...

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The Conet Project a collection recordings of short wave number stations. this stuff makes me shiver, with the strange music and monotone voices. ugh, gives me nightmares...

Wow. That's deeply creepy, like listening to deranged phantoms. The Swedish rhapsody station with the little girls' voice is especially frightening for some reason.

The phenomenon isn't quite "unreported" as the site claims: histories and espionage memoirs make reference to the shortwave system. But I realize now they didn't remotely convey its spookiness.

[FFF]

The music on the Swedish one made it worse.

Apparently, the internet really sucked in 1996.

[frumpwallow]

yeah, the little girl is particularly creepy.
i ran into these once on my own as a small child. i was just playing with my dads shortwave radio one night and ran into one. scared the living hell out of me. gave me nightmares for weeks. my parents didnt know what it was, so it became this grue that just lurked in the back of my mind until i read about them online some years ago.
now i have several clips on my ipod just so i can confuse and horrify unsuspecting passengers in my car...

[Raphael]

The music on the Swedish one made it worse.

Apparently, the internet really sucked in 1996.

Most of the particular pages on that page do suck, but generally, I like those old very simple websites, just text and links and some graphics here and there. It's nice when a website has very little bells and whistles.

IMO the really bad time came a couple of years later, when almost every web designer seemed to think that his job was about showing of every wb design method he had ever learned.

[bi]

Coelacanth, Raphael:

My guess is, much of the suckiness is because many of the big tidy spiffy fonts which are now commonly used didn't exist back then. Also, the NYT, BestBuy, and Clorox front pages look at least borderline OK to me. (I think the NYT "Please open your window to the width of this line of text" was written by someone who didn't know that <center> can be applied to images. (Or did he avoid applying <center> to images for religious reasons? Who knows...))

[tron cat]

Clintony.

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Mr. Sprinkles didn't want any trouble, but the trouble didn't care. (Linked via The Weblog because of the hilarious faux-academic discussion in the comments thread.)

[Kuh-five]

http://crazytelemarketer.ytmnd.com/

"People have DIED because of telemarketers!"

"Your family lets the phone ring? You son of a bitch!"

"Are you kidding? You don't compare yourself to rape?"

[frumpwallow]

i generally avoid ytmnd like the plague, but that was worthwhile. she thinks telemartketing is much more of an invasion than gangrape? christ....

anyway here is an old government video on the "truth" about radioactivity. all i have to say is:
"as potent and irresistable as the evil spirits of the indians."
also, any mutations that occur as a result of radiation "could be an improvement."

and part 2.

Edited because I just found a more complete version of the video.

[Wycoval]

Google maps directions from NYC to London.
Good luck on step #24.

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Google maps directions from NYC to London.
Good luck on step #24.

A-ha, the joke's on them!

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Potential Earth-like planet found orbiting Gliese 581.

Orthodox "modesty buses" incite controversy in Israel.

Rush Limbaugh shows us what he's learned from the Imus controversy.

As a postscript to recent gun control arguments, here's an interesting graphic of gun deaths in the US from the New York Times.

Her text-fu is quite good.

Two people spend months licking an enormous candy ball.

[Drydic]

BBC link on the planet just because I can't seem to get ils' link to work. NO offense intended.

[Mashmakhan]

Why I don't care for militant, pedantic atheists: Richard Dawkins illustrates. I'd love to hear the results if someone asked him "what's your sign?" at a nightclub.

Dawkins is right.

He's also an asshole, unfortunately. A pity, really; I liked some of his books. But I've just never seen the point in proselytizing unbelief.

On the cat and beard study:

I agree, and Kay was completely harmless too. Despite being a catholic, he never insisted that anyone else share his beliefs (unlike some catholics I know). All he said was that he believed in [a] god. For all we know, it might not even be the Christian god. What's more, Dawkins made those accusations only after reading a normal run-of-the-mill biography on a normal, run-of-the-mill, and HARMLESS comedian.

I like to think that I am also an athiest (for the most part) but even I know that science is just another belief system, like every other religion. So when these well-known athiests publicly attack people with other belief systems, and especially when these people aren't enforcing their own beliefs on others, Atheism becomes just as bad as Christianity is in the hands of bible-thumping evangelists. Then I just tell myself that it's the person's problem, not that of the belief itself.

[gsandi]

I am not sure what the focus of the thread is, but if it has anything to do with its (present) title, it's not trivial any more (for me). Looking for life, or at least for habitable planets, outside the Solar System, is one of my many interests, and it's a serious business (in my view).

Malaysia is probably not in the forefront of research in the matter, but the observatory of Geneva, a km or 2 from where I work, is, and - those of you who can read French may appreciate the following news item on this exciting new discovery:

http://www.letemps.ch/template/tempsFor ... cle=205659

This is the first time that there is good evidence for an extrasolar planet harbouring reasonably good conditions for maintaining life. We could well be disappointed by further research, but it is still exciting stuff.

I sure hope to live to see the day when extraterrestrial life is first confirmed.

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So much for something that I find really important.

[bi]

gsandi:

Well, I proposed that this thread become a catch-all thread for weird articles on weird news and non-news. (I also proposed that the thread go into NotA, but well...)

Mashmakhan:

Non-news: Sorry, but Science Is Not a Belief System.

"In science, we accept or reject based on evidence that can be independently verified; we don't believe."