Missing Mary Road

Canonical has revealed the style of the new default theme that will be used in Ubuntu 10.04. In a significant departure from tradition, Ubuntu is shedding its signature brown color scheme and is adopting a new look with a palette that includes orange and an aubergine shade of purple. Don’t matter much to me anymore though since I’ve moved to Mint. Try it for yourself.

Excellent commentary from The Register:

As the smoke clears following the case of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, the failed Christmas Day “underpants bomber” of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 fame, there are just three simple points for us Westerners to take away.

First: It is completely impossible to prevent terrorists from attacking airliners.

Second: This does not matter. There is no need for greater efforts on security.

Third: A terrorist set fire to his own trousers, suffering eyewateringly painful burns to what Australian cricket commentators sometimes refer to as the “groinal area”, and nobody seems to be laughing. What’s wrong with us?

If you get excited about the prospect of really, really fast broadband Internet service, here’s a statistic that will make heart race. Or your blood boil. Or both.

Pretty much the fastest consumer broadband in the world is the 160-megabit-per-second service offered by J:Com, the largest cable company in Japan. Here’s how much the company had to invest to upgrade its network to provide that speed: $20 per home passed.

The cable modem needed for that speed costs about $60, compared with about $30 for the current generation.

By contrast, Verizon is spending an average of $817 per home passed to wire neighborhoods for its FiOS fiber optic network and another $716 for equipment and labor in each home that subscribes

New Jersey police detained 68-year old American music star Bob Dylan recently, after a young officer failed to recognize him. A disheveled Dylan was wearing a hoodie, wandering around in the rain looking at a house for sale. The 24-year-old female officer was responding to a phone call from the occupants of a home that had a “For Sale” sign on it. The residents were called in with a report of an “eccentric-looking old man” in their yard

“We got a call for a suspicious person,” Buble said. “It was pouring rain outside, and I was right around the corner so I responded. By that time he was walking down the street. I asked him what he was doing in the neighborhood and he said he was looking at a house for sale.”

“I asked him what his name was and he said, ‘Bob Dylan,’ Buble said. “Now, I’veseen pictures of Bob Dylan from a long time ago and he didn’t look like Bob Dylan to me at all. He was wearing black sweatpants tucked into black rain boots, and two raincoats with the hood pulled down over his head.

“So I said, ‘OK Bob, what are you doing in Long Branch?’ He said he was touring the country with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp. So now I’m really a little fishy about his story. I did not know what to believe or where he was coming from, or even who he was. We see a lot of people on our beat, and I wasn’t sure if he came from one of our hospitals or something,” Buble said.

happy independence to ya’ll. read all about how it happened here. hope it was worth it.

Last year the National Debt Clock in New York City ran out of digits. The billboard-size electronic counter, mounted on a wall near Times Square, overflowed when the public debt reached $10 trillion, or 1013 dollars. The crisis was resolved by squeezing another digit into the space occupied by the dollar sign. Now a new clock is on order, with room for growth; it won’t fill up until the debt reaches a quadrillion (1015) dollars.

The incident of the Debt Clock brings to mind a comment made by Richard Feynman in the 1980s—back when mere billions still had the power to impress:

There are 1011 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

The important point here is not that high finance is catching up with the sciences; it’s that the numbers we encounter everywhere in daily life are growing steadily larger. Computer technology is another area of rapid numeric inflation. Data storage capacity has gone from kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes, and the latest disk drives hold a terabyte (1012 bytes). In the world of supercomputers, the current state of the art is called petascale computing (1015 operations per second), and there is talk of a coming transition to exascale (1018). After that, we can await the arrival of zettascale (1021) and yottascale (1024) machines—and then we run out of prefixes!

It’s been bad for folks living in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, for some time. The monsoon season has failed to deliver the goods. Crops are dying. People are starving. Wells have run dry. Naturally, the God’s are to blame. So the men folk and farmers have resorted to Plan B: All the area’s unwed, single girls are plowing the fields naked. Will the sight of these lovely ladies (I’m sure a few are hot) doing manual labor in the buff be enough to embarrass the God’s and make it rain? Hard. Only time will tell.

Said one local official: “Villagers believe their acts would get the weather gods badly embarrassed, who in turn would ensure bumper crops by sending rains.”

This naked plow tradition is not new, and has been practiced for years with coincidental results. Sometimes God’s send rain. Sometimes weathermen come to town and slap some sense into the townsfolk. But droughts are droughts and they suck. So desperate folks will try anything, no matter how crazy.

More than 500 employees of Keihin Electric Express Railway in Japan will be subject to “smile checks” every morning. Software will evaluate the quality of their grins, and alert them if they aren’t looking happy enough.

The smile-evaluating software takes a picture of Keihin employees every morning and assigns smile values to various parts of the face. It then adds those values and delivers a smile scan score. According to an article today in the Mainichi Daily News:

The device analyzes the facial characteristics of a person, including eye movements, lip curves and wrinkles, and rates a smile on a scale between 0 and 100 percent using a camera and computer.

For those with low scores, advice like “You still look too serious,” or “Lift up your mouth corners,” will be displayed on the screen.

Some 530 employees of the Tokyo-based railway company will check their smiles with Smile Scan before starting work each day. They will print out and carry around an image of their best smile in an attempt to remember it.

the pakistan cricket board has decided to remove shoaib akhtar from the 15 man squad for next month’s twenty 20 cricket championship for reasons best read yourself.

The PCB has withdrawn Shoaib Akhtar from the 15-man squad for next month’s World Twenty20, saying – in an unusually revealing statement – that he had been diagnosed with genital viral warts. Rao Iftikhar Anjum’s name has been sent to the ICC’s technical committee by the PCB as a replacement.

Shoaib’s participation had been in doubt after Intikhab Alam, Pakistan’s coach, said yesterday he hadn’t recovered sufficiently from a skin infection to play the three practice games the Pakistan squad is playing in Lahore.

“Shoaib Akhtar has been withdrawn from the World Twenty20 squad and Rao’s name has been sent to the ICC as a replacement,” a board spokesman said on Thursday.

The PCB’s unusually graphic press release said that a three-member medical panel appointed by the PCB had found that Shoaib was suffering from “genital viral warts and electrofulgration [a surgical procedure] was done on May 12, 2009.”

The panel added that “his wound though healing needs further care and treatment for another minimum ten days for the purpose of healing and to achieve skin cover. The Medical Board further recommended his re-assessment after 10 days.
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so drug testing in sport is fairly common now and getting stricter and stricter as years go by. so what do you think happened when a drug tester showed up at the belgian bodybuilding competition in brussells. all 20 of the participants ran off instead of peeing in a cup. can you imagine these giant men running off scared to pee in a cup. no shit sherlock, they didn’t get to be their size just by eating their greens and having their meat.

highlarious i say.

After 15 years of retreat, a huge sheet of ice is finally crumbling in Antarctica. The Wilkins is the eighth and largest ice shelf to fracture and fall apart in the last two decades along the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula.

The pattern of breakup, where the ice remains stable for centuries or even millennia, then almost over night, shatters into millions of bits like broken glass, is foreshadowing the fate of our northern ice floating in the Arctic.

The Egyptian government has sought to dispel rumours that a mobile phone text message “from unknown foreign quarters” is spreading around the country and killing those who receive it.

The extraordinary move by Egypt’s health and interior ministries follows press reports that an SMS containing a special combination of numbers killed a man in the town of Mallawi south of Cairo.

“He died vomiting blood, followed by stroke, shortly after he received a message from an unknown phone number,” the Egyptian Gazette reported on Wednesday.

World’s poorest countries are the ones hit hardest by the global credit crunch.  Ukraine has run out of money, inflation has run away with the money in zimbabwe, and umm… ethiopia has run out of coca cola.

The East Africa Bottling Share Company, which produces the soft drink in the region, last week temporarily shut its bottling operation in Ethiopia.
It said they had the Coca-Cola – but did not have the bottle tops.
Our correspondent says it sounds almost as if the Coca-Cola shortage is being treated as a national emergency.
When she visited a local bar she found it had run out of Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Sprite and Fanta. Mirinda was the only soft drink on offer.
It has been estimated that around 35,000 outlets throughout Ethiopia will be unable to serve Coca-Cola and sister brands until the shortage is resolved.

read it here.

all things pakistan have an interesting post which i was reflecting upon here. i hope they don’t mind me posting the whole thing here but it’s worth reading and i really think you should. it trivializes the whole islamization (which i have no issue with) along with extremism (which i do have an issue with), process spreading like a disease in pakistan. the so called ‘maulana’s’ have infiltrated most of the major cities as well and are now clashing with the local political groups. what i did want to bring to light is trying to give an understanding of how close minded and narrow minded such people are and how hard it is to reason or converse with them. and this is also why negotiations with them has been extremely hard as well.

As the politics of intrigue and rumor heats up, even more, in Pakistan and after the recent dramatic political events, the news of Pakistan’s most important existential battle – against the extremism of the Taliban and their ilk – seems to have slid off the front pages.

Yet, a news item in The News reminds us that the murderous militants are now setting their eyes towards District Dir, after gaining control of Swat. One got a better glimpse into the mind of one of the key players in the Swat saga, Sufi Mohammed, in an interview given to Daily Times’ Peshawar Bureau Chief Iqbal Khattak. Speaking in Mingora, the 74 year-old father-in-law of militant leader Fazlulah gives many important glimpses into his own thinking and priorities.

Here is the interview published in Daily Times:

You said in a 2005 interview with us that what Al Qaeda and the Taliban are doing in Pakistan is haram. Are Fazlullah’s activities over the last sixteen months also haram?
Sufi Muhammad: Yes, I said that about Al Qaeda, but not about the Taliban. Let me say…that debate on past happenings is disallowed in Islam. A hadith sharif says, what has happened in the past should not be discussed.

But how can we proceed without debating the past?
The hadith sharif says a Muslim should not discuss past happenings because he may not remember all the [details] and, therefore, he may…sin by not speaking the truth.

A majority of Swat residents do not think the peace deal recently signed between the TNSM and the NWFP government will last long.
God Almighty does everything; he builds and destroys countries.

Residents also doubt whether peace is possible in the presence of armed Taliban.
Everyone keeps weapons. People in Peshawar have weapons with them.

You support keeping weapons?
Yes, you can keep weapons with you.

Did you ask Fazlullah to surrender weapons after the sharia law deal?
Keeping weapons is halal in Islam.

President Zardari said recently that force would be used if the Taliban do not surrender weapons in Swat.
His statement is childish…immature.

With sharia law in Swat, there will be a complete ban on music and girls’ education, and people will be forced to grow beards?
There are five subjects — judiciary, politics, economics, education and the executive. The judicial subject will be with us, the rest is beyond our control.

The Taliban are kidnapping government officials and killing soldiers, yet you still hold the army responsible for ceasefire violations.
Kidnapping cases are taking place all over the world. The military violated the ceasefire.

The military says some of its soldiers were shot dead while bringing water.
No. This is not the case. The soldiers were not killed near any stream.

Are soldiers moving freely in Swat after the peace deal?
No. The military cannot move freely unless peace is restored.

After peace is restored, will the army leave Swat?
This is Pakistan’s army and Swat is within Pakistan’s borders. I will have no objection if a military cantonment is established here.

Locals say innocent people have been killed. Will the aggrieved families be able to get justice?
I have told you already: we will not discuss what has happened in the past. Sharia law does not allow this.

If a court summons a key Taliban commander, will he appear before the court?
If Caliph Umar (RA) can appear before a court, then why can’t others?

So Fazlullah will also appear in court if summoned?
If he does not… he will be acting against the sharia law.

What you did in Malakand in the 1990s and then in Afghanistan in 2001 you called ‘jihad’. Are Fazlullah’s activities over the last 16 months in Swat also jihad?
I do not want to speak on this.

What are Fazlullah’s plans after the peace deal?
He will support imposition of sharia law.

You have termed democracy ‘infidelity’. But Maulana Sami-ul Haq, Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Qazi Hussain Ahmad are taking part in the democratic process.
Democracy is not permissible in sharia law. I will not name [these leaders] but they are taking part in infidelity. I will not offer prayers if one of [these leaders] is leading those prayers.

Do you intend to export sharia law to other parts of Pakistan?
If people help me, I will. Otherwise, no.

randall munroe hit’s the ball out of the park with today’s xkcd and points out how news media doesn’t properly report news with a complete picture.

even though i’m not defending them, but they seem to have made a scapegoat out of aig and are butchering them to no end, yet their idea of numbers is beyond reason. see previous post about bad math skills.