Hulleye Comes By!

the one and only jean luc picard blogs. fictional blogging is kicking ass lately. first there was vader, then chewbacca, and now picard himself.

A vital part of engineering has broken down on the Enterprise.

It’s the laundry machine.

The security risks of Windows’ hidden features.

the artsaypunk has posted a video about a kick ass stage play of everyones favourite plumbers.

neil gaiman speaks on the myth of superman.

Selecting a mate is the most crucial decision of our lives. We spend a huge amount of time and energy trying to find that special someone. Our appetite for a relationship fuels a billion-pound industry of matchmaking services. Yet we’re often not satisfied. A 2005 survey of more than 900 people who had been using online dating services revealed that three-quarters had not found what they were looking for. We seem as much in the dark as ever about who is a suitable match.

Let’s start with the conscious part. There are some things we all find attractive. Men tend to desire women with features that suggest youth and fertility, including a low waist-to-hip ratio, full lips and soft facial features. Recent studies confirm that women have strong preferences for virile male beauty — taut bodies, broad shoulders, clear skin and defined, masculine facial features, all of which may indicate sexual potency and good genes. We also know that women are attracted to men who look as if they have wealth or the ability to acquire it, and that men and women strongly value intelligence in a mate. Preferences for these qualities — beauty, brains and resources — are universal. The George Clooneys and Angelina Jolies of the world are sex symbols for predictable biological reasons.

MP George Galloway has said it would be “morally justified” to assassinate Tony Blair, but stressed he was not calling for his death.

In an interview with GQ magazine he was asked whether a suicide bomb attack on Mr Blair would “be justified as revenge for the war on Iraq”. He said it would be morally equivalent to Mr Blair “ordering” Iraqi deaths.

“Yes it would be morally justified. I am not calling for it, but if it happened it would be of a wholly different moral order to the events of 7/7. It would be entirely logical and explicable, and morally equivalent to ordering the deaths of thousands of innocent people in Iraq as Blair did.”

He was also asked whether he would alert the authorities if he knew Mr Blair was to be assassinated by Iraqis.

Mr Galloway replied: “My goodness this is a moral maze…”

you remember galloway don’t you?

i posted this a long, long time ago, but it’s one of my favourites and since my readership has increased significantly since then, i thought i’d share it once more.

what everyone already knew, weed and lung cancer got no links. sciam link here.

A study published in the latest issue of Social Science Quarterly is the first to examine the effect of Wal-Mart stores on poverty rates. The study found that nationwide an estimated 20,000 families have fallen below the official poverty line as a result of the chain’s expansion.

This year’s Atlantic hurricane season will be “above normal”, according to the US climate agency.

The first sequences of nuclear DNA to be taken from a Neanderthal have been reported at a US science meeting.

Brazilian archaeologists have found an ancient stone structure in a remote corner of the Amazon that may cast new light on the region’s past.

Caterpillars wake up and smell the corn.

this reminded me of escher.

you can download your very own camera. here’s a guide on how to use it.

Last year a friend of mine upgraded from GirlFriend 6.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it’s a memory hog leaving very little system resources available for other applications. He is now noticing that Wife 1.0 is also spawning Child Processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomena was included in the product brochure or the documentation, though other users have informed him that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application.

Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself such that it is always launched at system initialization, where it can monitor all other system activity. He’s finding that some applications such as PokerNight 10.3, BeerBash 2.5, and PubNight 7.0 are no longer able to run in the system at all, crashing the system when selected (even though they always worked fine before). During installation, Wife 1.0 provides no option as to the installation of undesired Plug-Ins such as MotherInLaw 55.8 and BrotherInLaw Beta release. Also, system performance seems to diminish with each passing day.

Some features he’d like to see in the upcoming wife 2.0.

When operatives of the Priory of Semen discover that Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa using his own sperm, (Warning: Not safe for work link containing adult content) a group of young hotties get embroiled in the mystery that finds them seeking the master’s bodily fluids at all costs. Such is the yarn woven in Hustler Video’s The Da Vinci Load…

remember i posted about bruce schneier holding a movie plot security terrorist threat plot contest? well, the results are just fascinating.

There’s no garbage clips to weed through, just 500 full length cartoons organized alphabetically: Futurama, JLU, Thundercats, The Snorks, Super Mario, Transformers, X-Men, and more.

guidi’s got a blog goin. stay tuned for some amusing facts, scams, and geeky discussions at his space. i really should edit my blogroll one of these days. i promise i will soon. in the meantime, do subscribe to his feed. well worth it it shall be. welcome to sphere guidi.

try this out… purty cool experiments with visual spaces…. and a great time killer.

thanks ali.

well this was the may two-four long weekend. i had no particular plans and it seemed as if it would end up just an ordinary weekend. friday night was awesome and ended up going to watch stephen wright. he is one funny man and i think mumbles more than bob dylan. heh. saturday i caught on my battlestar galactica season 2 viewing and a friend kindly invited us over to watch planes take off and land at the airport. weird enough as that was, i headed over with my wife and went to his place where we met up with !nk and ali nawab and a few other friends.

as desi’s generally do, we all spoke about making the most of the summer and making great plans of rafting and camping and being all outdoorsy, especially since we have shitty, long winters. as desi’s generally do, these plans never work out and someone let it be known that night. somehow or the other, we ended up incorporating the camping plan within the next hour and drove over 250 km at 2 in the morning for a campsite right there and then. unfortunately, one of our cars broke down about two hours en route . troopers that we are, we had to car towed back to toronto, and then proceeded back to algonquin park where we found a spot at mew lake about seven hours after we were actually supposed to. not bad for a plan that was conceptualized a few hours before in a city over 250 km away after midnight.

exhausted, cold and tired we pitched tents and got a fire going just before it started raining on us. rain turned to snow soon after. we had been prepped for temperatures hitting lows of about 10 degrees. here we were, in the middle of nowhere and its dropping below freezing with the wind chill. not fun at all i tell you. in the ten years that i’ve lived in canada, i’ve never felt that cold in my life. was great fun nevertheless. just had to make sure that we got the fire going as soon as possible and never let it burn out. some of us passed out as soon as we got there. was so cold we had to sit as close to the fire as we could. salman ended up melting his shoe because of this reason. tried to stay warm in any which way possible.

on the plus side, jeff brought along some deer meat which he had hunted and i have to admit it was some of the best tasting meat i’ve had in the longest of times.

anyway after some odd 36 hours of fun, i’m back at home in a soft, warm bed and glad for it. good night.

In an interview with SciFi Wire, actor James Callis, who plays Gaius Baltar, says that the new season of Battlestar Galactica which is currently filming and set to start in October, will be much darker, remorseless and relentless. For those of you not from this planet, Battlstar Galactica is probably the best television show I’ve ever seen, surpassing Firefly and Star Trek: The Next Generation in my books.

he gave a speech. you can read it here. it’s funny.

this man, local from toronto, makes art from chewing gum. it’s brilliant. how cool are these images. each image is 100% chewing gum. as explained on his site,

Each Gum Blonde is 100% chewed bubblegum on a plywood backing. No paint or dye is used. The colour is inherent to the gum - the mixing of colour takes place inside the mouth during chewing using an endless variety of flavours made by an endless variety of companies. Kronenwald has a dedicated team of chewers and prefers the texture of Trident. However, he does not chew gum himself unless he must.

he also blogs here.

Shoe maker Asics Corp. has developed some special super-light shoes for Japanese astronaut Takao Doi, who will join a US space shuttle mission in 2007.

“In an environment of no gravity, human muscles become atrophied and astronauts need to train themselves on machines,” said Takehiro Tagawa, who developed the far-out footwear.

The first samples, with a soft heel and flexible sole, weigh only 130 grams (4.6 ounces) each and incline slightly upward toward the toes.

“By having the slant, the shoes would stretch a wearer’s calf muscles even in the no-gravity environment,” Tagawa said.

They also include a gap dividing the big toe from the others, similar to traditional Japanese socks known as tabi which are often worn with sandals.

“The divider makes it easier to stand firm,” he said.

Since everything from bookeeping to fitness specialists are outsourced from India, how about space explorers? NASA administrator Griffin on a visit to Indian space facilities in Bangalore has signed an agreement to explore the moon with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). This agreement will see NASA instruments on a 2008 Indian moon mission, and further cooperation is being explored. An Indian paper has a different take on the visit. Interesting answer by Griffin on NASA outsourcing to ISRO.”

well maybe not. so these guys instead of trying to go faster than light, have figured out a way to make light go backwards. which just sounds really confusing but if you read this, it’s not too bad to figure out. good luck.

Get yer Richard Feynman fix on at Google Video, particularly this 50-minute video of The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. A bit more Feynman at YouTube.

Be glad you don’t live in the US.(too bad if you do). If the poll described in this article is correct then Americans (at least the majority of them) get the leaders they deserve.

via AAL

thanks shb. i miss you. click on image to be able to read.

how to make a fire using a condom to save your life one day.

A recently discovered type of African monkey is different enough from others that it needs to be listed in a separate genus, scientists have decided.The monkey, which lives in Tanzania, was first described last year. At that time it was listed in the genus Lophocebus, which includes the mangabey.

remember the “find the bands” viral image by Virgin i posted about a few months ago, well anyway, you’ll enjoy this game by lonely planet in trying to figure out world cities.