I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead -
For goodness sake don't call it deed!

Poems showing the absurdity of English spelling

So today while speaking with one of my house-mates who mentioned that polar bears are becoming at risk of extinction, she made a plea that they were so cute.

While I agree, the polar bears we see in commercials are actually cute - real polar bears will eat your face.... much like the ones seen here in the golden compass. (Note: the above bears are alive only because of the coke bottle in their paws)

Why didn't they eat the little girl? I don't know but how fucking awesome was that? Mother fucking bears! At first I thought the movie was going to suck but this scene is worth it. They should have just renamed the movie "Mother Fucking Bears." Why you might ask - because MOTHER FUCKING BEARS, thats why!

Back to my point. Stephen Colbert has it right to be afraid of bears. Bears will eat you. They are not nice and cuddly which tells me that my house-mate would be eaten in the wilderness.

It isn't as though they are that dumb either. May I present exhibit Wojtek (Polish for Soldier Bear). Wojtek would carry heavy artillery shells for the Polish during WWII. That is not the coolest part. The coolest part is the soldiers considered him part of the team and would sit around and smoke cigarettes and drink beer with him.

What kind of jackass play fights with a bear? Wojtek liked water so much he would drain the water supply if they didn't keep the shower locked. Imagine if the Polish had no soldiers and only bears.... it wouldn't matter how much technology the Germans had because no one fights an army of bears. Especially, beer drinking cigarette smoking bears.

In conclusion: If bears had opposable thumbs, we'd be the ones going extinct.

Mother fucking bears!

Veteran jazz musician and radio host Humphrey Lyttelton has died aged 86.

played with radiohead and he was a British Legend

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Jazz legend Lyttelton dies at 86

Which brings us back to the “why bother” question and how we might better answer it. The reasons not to bother are many and compelling, at least to the cheap-energy mind. But let me offer a few admittedly tentative reasons that we might put on the other side of the scale:

If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others — from other people, other corporations, even other countries.

All of this could, theoretically, happen. What I’m describing (imagining would probably be more accurate) is a process of viral social change, and change of this kind, which is nonlinear, is never something anyone can plan or predict or count on. Who knows, maybe the virus will reach all the way to Chongqing and infect my Chinese evil twin. Or not. Maybe going green will prove a passing fad and will lose steam after a few years, just as it did in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan took down Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House.

An idealistic though thought-provoking take on "going green." Be more proactive -- consume less and plant a garden.

-janelane, sign me up

The Green Issue - Climate Change - Environment - Energy Efficiency - Consumption - New York Times

I was dining the other night with a colleague, enjoying a respectable Russian River Pinot Noir, when he said with a steely firmness: "We'll pour our own wine, thank you."

This declaration of independence was prompted by that quintessential New York restaurant phenomenon: a server reducing a bottle of wine to a seven-minute, four-glass experience through overfilling and topping-up of a fanaticism found rarely outside the Middle East.

I know I'm being elitist here, a terrible thing in this political season, and quite possibly nobody in small-town Pennsylvania gives a damn how wine is poured. But I don't care and, come to think of it, last time I was in small-town Pennsylvania – at Gettysburg – I drank rather well.

Marchons, marchons ! Civilization

Roger Cohen: Of wine, haste and religion - International Herald Tribune

The evidence is now overwhelming that Mark Dowd was, in fact, sent back through time to kill the mother of the person who will grow up to challenge SkyNet. Please direct your attention to Dowd’s 25-page bombshell on a Flash bytecode attack.

Some context. Reliable Flash vulnerabilities are catastrophes. In 2008, we have lots of different browsers. We have different versions of the OS, and we have Mac users. But we’ve only got one Flash vendor, and everyone has Flash installed. Why do you care about Flash exploits? Because in the field, any one of them wins a commanding majority of browser installs for an attacker. It is the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 of clientsides.

So that’s pretty bad-ass. But that’s not why the fate of humanity demands that we hunt down Dowd and dissolve him in molten steel.

Look at the details of this attack. It’s a weaponized NULL pointer attack that desynchronizes a bytecode verifier to slip malicious ActionScript bytecode into the Flash runtime. If you’re not an exploit writer, think of it this way: you know that crazy version of Super Mario Brothers that Japan refused to ship to the US markets because they thought the difficulty would upset and provoke us? This is the exploit equivalent of that guy who played the perfect game of it on YouTube.

Big upz and mad Respekt for Mark Dowd.

Dowd’s Inhuman Flash Exploit

The Monty Hall Problem has struck again, and this time it’s not merely embarrassing mathematicians. If the calculations of a Yale economist are correct, there’s a sneaky logical fallacy in some of the most famous experiments in psychology.

Cognitive Dissonance in Monkeys - The Monty Hall Problem - New York Times

To my horror, I turn out to be a racist.

The University of Chicago offers an on-line psychological test in which you encounter a series of 100 black or white men, holding either guns or cellphones. You’re supposed to shoot the gunmen and holster your gun for the others.
...
Yet racism may also be easier to override than sexism. For example, one experiment found it easy for whites to admire African-American doctors; they just mentally categorized them as “doctors” rather than as “blacks.” Meanwhile, whites categorize black doctors whom they dislike as “blacks.”
...
Alice Eagly, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, agrees: “In general, gender trumps race. ... Race may be easier to overcome.”

The challenge for women competing in politics or business is less misogyny than unconscious sexism: Americans don’t hate women, but they do frequently stereotype them as warm and friendly, creating a mismatch with the stereotype we hold of leaders as tough and strong. So voters (women as well as men, though a bit less so) may feel that a female candidate is not the right person for the job because of biases they’re not even aware of.
...
But biases are not immutable. Research subjects who were asked to think of a strong woman then showed less implicit bias about men and women. And students exposed to a large number of female professors also experienced a reduction in gender stereotypes.

So maybe the impact of this presidential contest won’t be measured just in national policies, but also in progress in the deepest recesses of our own minds.

Our Racist, Sexist Selves - New York Times

First Human to Fail the Turing Test

GoodFellas was the definitive mafia film - and it is the story of one man, Henry Hill, one of the only survivors of a ruthless gang of robbers and killers.

Hill walked the streets of New York as a king - an associate of the Lucchese crime family. He stole big, he spent big and took vast quantities of drugs.

Then he got caught and spent 30 years in the witness protection programme, telling the police all they needed to know to put his mafia bosses behind bars.

"I couldn't walk around this neighbourhood ten years ago," he says standing, smoking outside Junior's diner in Long Island City. "There'd be bullets flying all over the place."

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Mafia king on the straight and narrow