Hulleye Comes By!

so who needs a lesson in 13375p34k.

Just back from V FOR VENDETTA. More thumbs up than a Chernobyl pianist. Superb. Splendid. Heartening. Go see.

“There are people who are going to hate this movie; people who don’t like to think, the brain dead, the fools. Referencing the still unseen film, one member of a politically minded film forum was quick to declare: “You can’t make a movie about a terrorist now without endorsing bin Laden”. It’s that mindset, which has become so ingrained in all of us since 9/11, that makes V for Vendetta so unsettling. At times it almost feels like you’re watching something forbidden, like you’re seeing something you shouldn’t be allowed to see. It’s shocking that a movie like this, especially in these times, ever actually got made. It’s even more unbelievable that it was made by a major Hollywood studio. It’s fun to accuse Hollywood of liberal activism, but you don’t expect this kind of real filmmaking bravery from corporate America or a company like Warner Bros. It’s a purposefully uncomfortable film, one that will affect different people differently depending on what you bring in with you.”
–Joshua Tyler, CINEMA BLEND

quoted from William Gibson’s Blog.

Japan’s ruling party has approved the blueprint of a law to allow military use of its space program, breaking another taboo in the officially pacifist country.

The law would be largely symbolic since Japan has already launched spy satellites, but is meant to ease concerns about building high-end satellites and to help the space program become more internationally competitive…

The venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica is launching an unusual public war to defend itself against a scientific article that argued it’s scarcely better than a free-for-all Web upstart.

On Dec. 15, the scientific journal Nature ran a two-page “special report” titled “Internet encyclopedias go head to head.” It compared the accuracy of science entries for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the online version of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Founded in 1768 in Edinburgh, Scotland, Britannica is painstakingly compiled by a collection of scholars and other experts around the world. Wikipedia came to life in California five years ago under a “user-generated” model: That is, anyone who wants to can contribute, or change, an entry.

The Nature report, published in the journal’s news section, said there was not much difference between the two. For every four errors in Wikipedia, Britannica had three. “Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries,” the study concluded.

The article was immediately cited by dozens of newswires, papers and magazines around the world. Leslie H. Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of Britannica’s editorial board, said he first heard about the article from his son-in-law, who taunted him, saying, “Your Britannica is no different from Wikipedia,” Mr. Gelb recalls. “He was tormenting me.”

Now, Britannica’s editors are firing back with a strongly worded open letter demanding that Nature retract its article and a 7,000-word rebuttal on its Web site.

Read the rest here.

since pakistan is still blocking the blogspot domain, i have been informed that you can access this blog using pkblogs, using the following URL - http://www.pkblogs.com/halai.

so i’m back from vacation. had a grand time. cuba is a brilliant place, assuming you don’t mind a socialist dictator. this was the view that i woke up to every morning. it was an all you can drink and eat place where we were staying. i saw some lovely sunsets too, went swimming with dolphins , hung out at some beautiful beaches, saw a replica of the US capitol building, and much, much more. interesting propaganda posters are also splattered all over havana. this is one of them. a friend helped translate the billboard for me.

i asked my coworker gonzalo for help translating this. it didn’t make much sense to me until then. he says it’s like “the bush plan will take away your right to rest and relax with your friends on the park bench like you always used to.” the part that didn’t make sense to me was literally “the right to rest and to singing friendship” - basically he said that was a poetic way to express the idea and emotion of close friendships.

the bush plan announced in 2003 included making coming to the U.S. easier for cubans who want to leave cuba, as well as making it more difficult for u.s. citizens to travel there. so essentially, the bush plan will take away your friends.

best part about the whole deal, my wife, who holds only a pakistan passport did not require a visa to get there. i think it is the only nation on the planet that i have been to using a pakistani passport without requiring a visa.

another interesting fact, whenever any local cubano asked where the two of us were from we replied, “canada”, and then they persisted in asking us where we were originally from. when they found out that it was pakistan, they were extremely intrigued and every single person who asked me knew where pakistan was and what our entire history is and that there are currently over 1000 doctors in cuba helping out with earthquake relief. the same cannot be said about 7 out of 10 americans who have asked me where i am from.

also the country boasts a near 100% literacy rate. high school is mandatory, and if you do not score 96% or higher in high school, even university is mandatory. if you score higher than 96, you have the option for university, which is obviously free.

i’m gone to varadero. back in a week.

i dare you not to laugh. chum fm is a local radio station here in toronto.

Scorpions can have up to 12 eyes.

The skin of an average adult weighs 6 lbs (2.7 kg).

The octopus doesn’t have a blind spot.

The toaster was originally invented to heat laboratory samples.

An average lightbulb is turned on and off 5,312 times before it burns out.

let’s see how many levels you can clear on this one.

okay so these are pretty damn awesome. some of the best lego creations ever. my favourite is the one pictured above of han solo frozen in carbonite.

just wasted an hour playing this. good luck to all.

hilarious anti-piracy video from 1992, but we won’t blame you from thinking it was the 80’s.

One of the world’s most powerful supercomputers has conjured a fleeting moment in the life of a virus. The researchers say the simulation is the first to capture a whole biological organism in such intricate molecular detail. The simulation pushes today’s computing power to the limit. But it is only a first step. In future researchers hope that bigger, longer simulations will reveal details about how viruses invade cells and cause disease. Klaus Schulten at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and his colleagues built a computer model of the satellite tobacco mosaic virus, a tiny spherical package of RNA.

From Scientific American: An international team of scientists has discovered a massive new planet thanks to an effect described by Einstein 70 years ago. Microlensing–which occurs when a star crosses in front of another star and bends the light from the more distant star, magnifying it like a lens–predicted extra brightness for a red dwarf star roughly 9,000 light years from Earth. Based on the more than 1,000 images from the MDM Observatory in Arizona, team leader Andrew Gould of Ohio State University and his fellow astronomers calculate that this new planet has roughly 13 times the mass of Earth–making it about the size of Neptune–and orbits its star at about the distance of the asteroid belt in our own solar system.

Web 2.0 company or Star Wars character?

well well, look who made the news again. he think’s we’re satanic now. that’s hilarious. here’s a bunch of his comments. i’ve mentioned him before too.

how to surf porn safely. here’s an introduction to the topic.

it’s ridiculous how tough these little critters are. just check out the extremities they can survive in. pretty darned impressive.

so ya’ll who think we live up here in blocks of ice and hang out with polar bears, here’s a reality check. these here are photos of buildings in Canada’s Nunavut territory, “where high winds, freezing temperatures, and the difficulty of transporting raw materials pose some interesting architectural constraints. all of the buildings [shown] are in the city of Iqaluit, except for the flying saucer, which is in Igloolik.

via BB

hey, so yeah i’ve been a bit irregular in posting around here, though i’ve been reading other blogs a bit. i suppose i should explain that. i got outsourced recently and thus wihout a job and since then been a bit busy with some courses i’m doing at the same time, along with spending time with the wife, catching up on movies that i had been meaning to watch, reading three books, and making plans for heading out to varadero for a week or so. went to see david copperfield last week as well which wasn’t as fun as it was when i saw him two years ago, especially since he did pretty much the same illusions. recently i caught the blue man group as well which was significantly more fun. anyway, will try and get a bit more regular soon enough.

as the headline says, orwell would be proud. big brother is watching. congress caves in to wiretapping.

err…wow. i can’t even imagine how much creativity and knowledge of history and literature this takes.

so you remember the time when pathan’s got rejoicing because this guy was forced to marry a goat? well anyway, he wasn’t the only one. theres this british chick who just married another mammal of non-human species. in case she’s wondering, here’s a guide to copulation for the wedding night. she also kinda lucked out since her mate, is one of only two species aside from humans that have sex for pleasure.

so they found water on enceladus. the ramifications of this are astounding and astrologers all over the world are getting hardons.

new google acquisitions, writely and measuremap.

i-want-a-batmobile/

1966 batmobile/

1989-keaton-batmobile-replica

chicks love the car

Batmobile

batmobile history

how stuff works

wikipedia