Illustrated BMI Categories

I was explaining to my boss that I am obese the other day and he refused to beleive me. Unfortunately most of the pictures in this archive are of women. They are pretty easy to fit into catagories. Overweight women are not unattractive. There are a few men. The guy who is just shy of normal looks almost malnourished. The overweight guys don't look overweight. Either guys hide fat better than women, or fat is way more dangerous on men 'causing the medical industry to set comparatively different standards.

Illustrated BMI Categories - a photoset on Flickr

Anyway, it’s not really about the dance scene vs. the hacker scene: it’s about two hugely popular hit songs vs. a tiny in-group that can’t be proven to have used the word at all.

There is an interesting conversation going on here about the origins of the word w00t. Basically, the question is, did w00t come into gamer slang via l33t speak, and therefore the hacker scene, or did it come into general usage online because of the 1993 hit song "Whoop, There it is!"

At the core is that there is absolutely no written evidence of use of the word w00t as an exclamation by people in the hacker scene prior to about 1998. There is a use in the hacker scene in 1995, but it is a proper noun (a crew called "w00t'z kidz"). Jason Scott drug up evidence of use on Usenet in 1994, but it was in the context of Magic Cards (D&D is another claimant to the origin of the word). Sans evidence, the verdict must go to "Whoop, There it is!" My memory, and that of several others, is that w00t was used in the hacker scene long before 1998, mostly on IRC. Although I'm not positive that w00t has no relationship to "Whoop, There it is!" I am pretty sure that it was used far earlier than internet archives seem to indicate.

So here is the question; Does anyone out there in MemeStreams land have any mailing list, BBS, or IRC chat logs from before 1998 that include the word w00t, in particular its use as an exclamation? I know some of you are pack rats and have lots of old stuff lying around. Looking for evidence, and not "I recall" or "we used to."

Need your help with w00t

Voters at Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year 2007 poll have chosen "w00t" as 2007's most iconic word. M-W says that the word is a gamer's acronym for "we own the other team," but I'm inclined to think that that's a backronym, a back-formed acronym created to explain a word already in use.

I am simultaneously amazed and annoyed at the misattribution of this word.

w00t is Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2007 - Boing Boing

Search engine Ask.com deployed a new tool today that allows users to purge records of their searches from the Ask.com database. Initially announced in July after talks with the Center for Democracy and Technology, the AskEraser feature was created in response to growing concerns about the privacy implications of search engine data retention.

Ask.com adds new "AskEraser" search privacy feature

Is this the right way to get persistent storage in EC2?

FuseOverAmazon

FUSE filesystem backed by Amazon S3
Overview

s3fs is a fuse filesystem that allows you to mount an Amazon S3 bucket as a local filesystem. It stores files "natively" in S3 (i.e., you can use other programs to access the same files). Maximum file size=5G.

Its quite useful and stable, e.g., can be used to easily copy daily backup tarballs to s3.

To use it:

1. get an amazon s3 account!
2. download the source, compile it (I've used fc5/ppc and f7/i386) and slap the binary in, say, /usr/bin/s3fs
3. do this:

/usr/bin/s3fs mybucket -o accessKeyId=aaa -o secretAccessKey=bbb /mnt

That's it! the contents of your amazon bucket "mybucket" should now be accessible read/write in /mnt

FuseOverAmazon - s3fs - Google Code

skullaria wrote:
My son is 11. One has to keep that in mind. He loves doing animation.
I found this flash movie he did last night and published it.

I am so glad that he IS homeschooled - he's a wonderfully compassionate boy who just happens to like...DOOM. I've been teaching him flash for the last year or so, but I was particularly enamored of this one - it is fairly fast to load, and he's done a great job with his sounds, which is something he's just starting to work with.

I have to wonder, if he were in 'regular' school, could he even show a teacher his animation without being labeled a potentially problematic child?

OK, got it working in IE. It doesn't like some browsers.

In any event, what I'd say is beyond the risk that some teacher might interpret this as a threat, that the use of a tool like flash would never be encouraged or facilitated by a public school because it isn't common place. Schools tend to support and encourage interests and talents that are both popular and approved by the entire parent body. The schools can't afford to support anything that only one or two kids are interested in and they can't support things that offend parts of the community.

The result is that students with interests like violin tend to get a lot of support, both emotional and material, from the school community. Students with unpopular interests, like animation, for example, don't get much support either inside the school or in the community at large. As far as the school is concerned this doesn't even count as an extra cirricular activity because it isn't officially sanctioned. Its the same as watching television when it comes time to consider things like honors society membership or university admissions.

I think this tends to encourage a lot of medicore violinists, almost none of whom touch the things once they graduate from high school, and discourage a lot of potentially great talents and interests of various sorts, many of which cannot survive in a public school in any way because students honestly expressing themselves will invitably offend some segment of the parent population who have silly ideas about the sort of concepts children are mature enough to handle.

Ultimately, children would be better off if schools attempted to understand and provide support and guidance for their personal individual extracirricular interests rather than providing children with a preset menu of group activities and telling them that they have to pick some, but this would require a lot of personalized attention that is both expensive and fails to serve an institutional goal for which the school system receives funds (such as promotion of the fine arts, or athletics). Children would also be better off, particularly in high school, if parents would not try to protect children from being exposed to eachother's self expression, but thats obviously never going to happen.

RE: My son's DOOM cartoon

- Walk up to random people and say "WHAT YEAR IS THIS?" and when they tell you, get quiet and then say "Then there's still time!" and run off.

- Stand in front of a statue (any statue, really), fall to your knees, and yell "NOOOOOOOOO"

Sooo pissed I heard about this late!

Koala Wallop :: View topic - Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day: 12-8-7

For the seventh consecutive December, the magazine looks back on the passing year through a special lens: ideas. Editors and writers trawl the oceans of ingenuity, hoping to snag in our nets the many curious, inspired, perplexing and sometimes outright illegal innovations of the past 12 months. Then we lay them out on the dock, flipping and flopping and gasping for air, and toss back all but those that are fresh enough for our particular cut of intellectual sushi. For better or worse, these are 70 of the ideas that helped make 2007 what it was. Enjoy.

Virgil made the list with Wikiscanning. Congratulations, Virgil!

(Interestingly, one of the other ideas was also one Virgil came up with a few years ago, but didn't pursue perhaps due to discouragement from several friends.)

Several of the year's best ideas were also memes here, including:

Lap-Dance Science - Something in the Way She Moves?

The idea of Lite-Brite Fashion makes for an interesting contrast to the story of Star Simpson.

Pixelated Stained Glass - Pixelated Glass Window in Cologne Cathedral

The Radiohead Payment Model - Fans Decide How Much To Pay, and Radiohead’s Warm Glow

Wireless Energy, or Wi-tricity.

Weapon-Proof School Gear - My Child's Pack.

For commentary on the Ideas of years past, see 2004, 2005, and 2006.

The Year in Ideas, 2007 | The New York Times Magazine

I was surprised to see Bolton calling the NIE a quazi-putsch in the press this weekend. Apparently Rudy's foreign policy advisor isn't the only one who feels this way. So which is it? Is this simply a new, improved CIA or is it an example of technology undermining hierarchal relationships?

More importantly, in 2008 will I be faced with having to select between a Republican candidate who wants war with Iran in spite of this estimate and a Democratic candidate who wants to pull out of Iraq immediately? Why is our country ruled by oversimplifications?

k wrote:
I still think that if more tech minded people would bitch up a storm to their congresspeople rather than than bitching up a storm on the internet and then returning to a cave to hack some code, some progress might be made.

Advice to congress is either useful because it helps them understand the issue or useful because it represents political power or useful because it represents money. In this case there aren't enough people who run wifi access points and are going to vote based on this legislation to represent polticial power and these people don't have lots of money to donate to candidates. So only the first point is relevent and with the EFF and other organizations I think the public internet user is pretty well represented there. So, basically, I don't think lack of action is the problem.

I think the problem here is structural.

The news media makes money by praying on people's fears.
Politicians get elected by pandering to those fears.
Politicians like to pander to fears in cost free ways.

In this case there really isn't much else that Congress can easily do to help fight child pornography. They could raise taxes and fund more law enforcement, but thats not easy. This policy change is easy because it doesn't cost them much money and it throws a bone to the child porn fighters. So Congress proceeds in spite of the fact that there are some legitimate objections. Those objections stand in the way of the interests of Congress, and so they are ignored.

The real problem is that this same issue keeps coming up over and over again, and Congress keeps selecting these cost free solutions, and keeps ignoring the objections. Overtime a body of bad policy accumulates to the point where you're fining a coffee shop owner $300,000 for failing to report the otaku kids to the center for missing and exploited children. You have to pull together a bunch of bad law to get there.

The same thing is going on with copyright. It is astounding to me that the exact same politicians are still ratcheting up penalties year after year. Its become completely insane. But they are still at it, because bit by bit the IP industries get what they want, and they pay for it.

I'm not sure what its going to take to break these cycles. I thought the internet might help... might help people focus on other things than the fear the mass media constantly seeks to breed... I'm not sure anymore...

As to the way the bill was brought, I agree it was fast tracked in a disturbing way, but per the article : "the Democratic leadership rushed the SAFE Act to the floor under a procedure that's supposed to be reserved for noncontroversial legislation." I'm not sure if they're using some kind of official Congress-defined usage of "noncontroversial" or not, but if I may apply, post facto, the results of the vote (that'd be only 2 Nays), it would appear to at least meet the dictionary definition of the term, provided you accept that our representatives do actually represent our voices.

I think he means non-controversial among policy wonks rather than non-controversial among politicians. He is arguing that the political vote occured before the wonks had time to reach concensus about the details. Oh well, I guess there is always the conference committee...

RE: Thought Crime