Category: Useless knowledge

Information you have no need for. Ever. Usually about me, but possibly about other trivial crap in the world.

Fox sports usability

While catching up on with the latest news about the worthless fuckers who shot a man in an attempted robbery at the university where my wife works, I saw the following three indecipherable links to sports stories. Can you tell WTF they are supposed to say? If you were in charge of the Fox Sports web site, would you have a talk with your site layout designers?

fox-sports-01 “Another early playoff exit, another off-season of questions, Ken Rosenthal says. The big one? Who’s seen their last days in N.Y.?”


fox-sports-02“Which star do you want on the mound in October – Schilling or Clemens? After Sunday, Mark Kriegel thinks the choice is clear.”


fox-sports-03“The Lions have looked like contenders at times and pretenders at others. Alex Marvez breaks down the inconsistency.”


And those images showed up the same in Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer. It seems that someone needs a little lesson in CSS or usability and user interface design.  Sure, with squinting and reaaalllllly focusing on the images, you can just make out the text.  Personally, I think better coloring on the background would work that problem out just fine.

[tags]Fox Sports, User interface design, Usability, WTF[/tags]

If you love your children, you’ll get them proper protection

As a full-fledged member of the tinfoil hat self-protection society (note: I am not aware of an actual society with this name, merely making something up to promote the effectiveness of this post), I realize the importance of protecting not only my own brain from s00000per-sekrit thought-penetrating waves, but also that of my unborn child (note: I am not actually capable of carrying my unborn child, nor am I aware of any unborn children I might have in the future that would currently need protection).  While I can (and most certainly do) wear a tinfoil hat for my own protection, I’ve always wondered what I could do to protect my child properly.  Now, thanks to the brilliant minds at MummyWraps, I have a way to prevent my child’s corruption from evil-doers who would seek to infiltrate his thoughts with bad things.

From conception to birth, your baby undergoes the most rapid growth of its life, with incredibly fast cell-division taking your precious one from a single fertilised ovum to a beautiful baby in just 9 short months. However, such incredibly rapid growth also carries with it great risk of cell mutations that could cause major medical problems or even miscarriage.

Electro-Smog, or Electro-Magnetic Radiation (EMR) as it is more commonly known, is a complex and pervasive energy field radiating from both natural sources and from man-made electrical and electronic systems. EMR sources include cosmic rays, x-rays, radar, microwaves, TV and radio stations, cellphones, and all other wireless communication systems. International research has shown that prolonged exposure to EMR can be detrimental to human health, particularly that of unborn children.

Oh.  Well.  So they say they are protecting from stray electric and magnetic pollution.  I still think it’s a front for s000per-sekrit thought penetration electro-waves brain penetration protection.  And for $70, you can’t pass up that kind of safety.  (via Futurismic)

[tags]Tin-foil, s00per-sekrit, tinfoil hat, Brain protection, Thought waves[/tags]

Rush and those phony soldiers

Like many others, I heard about Rush and the phony soldiers comment. My response was approximately “Meh…”

Really – this is what Rush does. He says offensive things, trying to get a specific message across (in this case – soldiers opposed to the war are phony) while usually speaking carefully enough that if too many people get too upset, he can back pedal and truthfully say that he didn’t actually say what he is accused of saying. It lets his listeners and viewers feel comforted with the insults of those they dislike while leaving wiggle room for Rush to pretend he didn’t mean whatever gets him in trouble.

I would suggest to my (still above average and incredibly good-looking) readers that many well-known political commentators do this same thing in some manner, and most of their listeners eat it up the same with the ditto-heads do.

Yet for some reason, this particular comment really has riled up the Democrats. I am actually surprised at how upset many people have gotten over this. I heard his comment and promptly ignored it, thinking that the blowhard effect should push this away where it can be forgotten like so many other irrelevant comments. I suppose not everyone recognized meaningless hot air for what it is, and now we get wasted Congress-critter time so the liberals can finally play tough against someone in the whole war debate.

Thankfully, there is at least one source of commentary that took the proper action and made fun of the entire non-event to highlight how meaningless it really is.

Just hours after Sen. Harry Reid, D-NV, took the senate floor to call on radio talkshow host Rush Limbaugh to apologize for using the term “phony soldiers” during his Friday broadcast, a newly-formed, grassroots veterans organization endorsed the senate majority leader’s efforts.

Sadly, I think the source of the story will cause it to be ignored in favor of more sites supporting this silly uprising to condemn a talking head for, well, talking out of somewhere else.

[tags]Rush, Blowhard, Hot Air, Phony Vets[/tags]

The Blahg – breaking 1 million!

Now some folks might see that and think I am announcing a million hits to the site, or some other improbable event. While looking around at all the new things I could discover on the web today, I found a cool web site grading tool and decided to see how the Blahg ranked for SEO.

From that site, I thought I’d manually verify the rankings and statistics the reporting tool gave me. That’s how I found that the Blahg is ranked 810,958 in the world for web traffic. So I’ve broken the top million. I figure if I can knock out another 801,000 sites, I can be proud of my results. Of course, the question is do I knock them off the net, or just try to exceed their traffic levels?

[tags]The Blahg, Blahg tops a million, Alexa, Traffic stats, Web site grader[/tags]

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A single sheet of paper

Some time back, I discovered this website hosting images of what I consider to be artwork, generated from a single sheet of paper. If you hit the page and just look at the couple of sheets, you might think it’s OK, but fail to be impressed. Trust me — scroll down. Whoever did this is a master of patience and cutting skills.

singlesheet-artwork01.jpg singlesheet-artwork02.jpg

I have no idea how this could even be done, but to date, I believe my most artistic work has been something on the order of my creating some marble-ish spheres in raytracer POV-Ray. I can envision artistic goals, but lack the skills to achieve them. So things like cutting paper into cool final forms really impress me.

[tags]A single sheet of paper, Mad cutting skills[/tags]

Political test

Somewhere in my recent wanderings of the vast web-o-space, I found this political testing site which aims to give you a simplified graphic view of where you sit in the political spectrum. Attempting to expand the traditional political view from a simple left/right setting, the test gives results along an economic as well as social scale.

bothaxes.gif

Both an economic dimension and a social dimension are important factors for a proper political analysis. By adding the social dimension you can show that Stalin was an authoritarian leftist (ie the state is more important than the individual) and that Gandhi, believing in the supreme value of each individual, is a liberal leftist. While the former involves state-imposed arbitary collectivism in the extreme top left, on the extreme bottom left is voluntary collectivism at regional level, with no state involved. Hundreds of such anarchist communities exisited in Spain during the civil war period.

You can also put Pinochet, who was prepared to sanction mass killing for the sake of the free market, on the far right as well as in a hardcore authoritarian position. On the non-socialist side you can distinguish someone like Milton Friedman, who is anti-state for fiscal rather than social reasons, from Hitler, who wanted to make the state stronger, even if he wiped out half of humanity in the process.

The chart also makes clear that, despite popular perceptions, the opposite of fascism is not communism but anarchism (ie liberal socialism), and that the opposite of communism ( i.e. an entirely state-planned economy) is neo-liberalism (i.e. extreme deregulated economy).

It’s an interesting expansion from what most folks use in considering political leanings, I think, and while the overall test-to-rating process seems a little simplistic, it appears at least well thought out. And even if the results aren’t that accurate, they should help get a conversation going on political evaluations for those interested in such discussions.

So where do I personally sit in this scale? Well, I fell in to the quadrant where I expected I would be, but not quite as far from either axis as I had anticipated. See my standings below the break:

Continue reading “Political test”