halfacanuck

Latest tsunamis death toll headlines:

• Turkish Press: 71,000 dead
• Associated Press: 76,700 dead
• CNN: 80,000 dead
• Agence France-Presse: Wave toll could reach 100,000

We have a winner! Agence France-Presse, everybody! They used the biggest number yet in a headline. I'ma read AFP from now on!

As of right now a Google News search for stories with "toll" in the headline returns 7,310 hits.

What is a headline? A headline is, generally, a short sentence fragment written by an editor designed to summarize the story below it and interest readers enough to make them read at least the first paragraph of that story. What is it then that we, the readers, are really interested in, according to all those headlines and all those editors? Toll. Count. Numbers. And, of course, death. The death toll. The tsunami toll. The canteen attack toll. Toll rises. Toll climbs. Toll overshadows visit.

Toll overshadows visit? Let's examine that one. An attack on a military base killing 24 people is, it goes without saying, a very serious and sad thing. We have that on the one hand. On the other hand we have the first visit to Baghdad by a foreign head of state since the transferal of power to the new interim Iraqi government, as well as that head of state pledging his (major) nation's continued support in the Iraq war at a time when Bush's approval rating is woefully low and a clear majority of Americans think the war isn't worth fighting.

So what do we have here? We have 24 soliders killed in one attack on a military base while fighting a war. Sad? Without doubt. Newsworthy? Of course. But astonishing enough to "overshadow" Blair's show of solidarity in Baghdad, which has potential ramifications on a global scale, certainly far greater potential to affect the political and social reality in America than the canteen attack? I think that claim is dubious at best, if not downright moronic.

Let's shift the perspective a little. How's this for a headline? "Visit overshadows attack toll." That one works much better for me, to be honest. But the emphasis is now placed on the positive news of the day, and shifted away from the negative. The headline might be construed now as "pro-war" rather than "anti-war," if we really want to put such simplistic labels on an enormously complicated issue.

The question is this: why did the editor write the headline that way? Does it reflect his personal beliefs? Possibly, even probably, given the undeniable truth (no matter how much liberals hate to hear it) that there is a liberal bias in the media, if only because the vast majority of media outlets are based in cities, and cities are overwhelmingly liberal. But that's a whole other topic. The editor, presumably, thought his readers would be more likely to read the story if he phrased the headline as he did. We want to read about death. We don't want to read about geo-politics.

But that doesn't explain the use of the word "overshadows." That word, by definition, ranks the two things it is comparing in order of importance. It is, by definition, a statement of opinion. But whose opinion? His? Or his readers'?

The point I'm trying to make here is not just that a seemingly innocuous headline can contain far greater meaning than appears on the surface, but that the same headline – every headline – speaks volumes about how the media perceives us, the readers. Headlines are not just thrown together at the last minute (not usually, anyway): enormous thought is usually put into their construction, because the rules are complicated. They are, perhaps, the singlemost telling element from which to extract information about how they see us.

This metadata contained within headlines is there for everyone to see, if they look for it. Headlines, by their nature, are far more honest about how a newspaper sees its readers than the reporters and editors will ever be (at least as long as they work there). So what do the tsunami headlines tell us? What is the metadata within them?

It is, sadly, all too clear: we, the readers, are obsessed with death, particularly large-scale death, the kind most often labeled "tragedies," even though on a personal level any death is a tragedy. The metadata also implies that our interest in a story is proportional to the number of deaths involved, that 100,000 dead is somehow more compelling than 100 dead, or even one. But most of all it implies that we care a great deal about numbers. The catastrophe in Asia (at least, the metadata of the headlines for stories about the catastrophe in Asia) is not about individuals but about the particular subset of individuals who died, and the exact magnitude of that subset. It is about math, not humanity.

Is it true what these headlines are saying? Are we really that concerned with numbers and death? If we are then the tsunamis provide what approaches the perfect story: big, continuously updated numbers about how many people died. It is why we will never see the headline "18.6m Sri Lankans alive, well despite giant waves."

When we bemoan the lack of "good news" we must realize that in this respect the media is, overwhelmingly, a mirror to society, reflecting us back on ourselves. It is us with the death fixation and the compulsive urge to quantify, not the media. They simply give us what we want. What we want is death, preferably the deaths of many people, ideally somewhere far away, so that we can crane our necks and stare, express superficial grief without the substance of actually rolling up our sleeves to help or enduring real, personal emotions, and think "there but for the grace of God go I."

Physician, heal thyself.

Following Sunday's devastating earthquake that sent tsunamis smashing into Asian countries from Sri Lanka to the Maldives, Sri Lankan surfer Poom Khun accepted responsibility earlier today for the more than 50,000 resulting deaths.

"I felt it was time to come clean," he said at press conference in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo this morning. "I prayed for some gnarly waves in church that day, but for real I had no idea it would actually work. This is just doke, dude."

The 24-year-old surfer said that while he "pulled some totally radical aerials" from the giant waves, his causing the deaths of "so many innocent dudes and dudettes" was "a major bummer."

Khun said he was provoked into his unusual prayer request by the lack of "tubular barrels" in recent weeks.

"I was so over the lull, dude," said Khun. "I was totally aggro with God that day. I was like, 'Brah, dude, where's all the righteous pumping?' But if someone had said this would happen I'd be like, 'Sha. As if.'"

Khun said he most regrets causing the deaths of those victims who were "total Betties," "crippler chicks," "coolaphonic railer dudes" and even "beach bunnies," "seniors" and "random standers," but said he was less upset by the loss of the "brodads and donkeys."

"I mean I didn't want anyone to eat sand," he said, "but if you think about it some of those who bailed must've been totally unrighteous hodaddies. Maybe one of them was so heinous that many bodacious kahunas had to wipe out."

The part-time bartender said he will contribute to the massive relief effort currently underway, but hopes his money will go to people who are "nectar switch-foots" rather than "hiddie kooks and ballers."

"They can get bent," he added.

So the "control my Christmas lights from a web page" thing was a hoax. That sucks. Still, at least I didn't put it in my "Groovy sites" blogroll or anything, otherwise I'd look totally foolish.

Ahem. Anyway, it's just one in a long line of great hoaxes swallowed hook, line and sinker by the media and now, uh, bloggers. "Artist-hoaxster" Joey Skaggs has long been something of a hero of mine, especially since his fantastic bait-and-switch on Geraldo Rivera (who is, let's face it, a bit of an easy target, but is way too annoying to leave in peace).

But I guess there's a moral in this. Just as none of the media outlets that covered the Christmas lights story checked his claims for veracity, I didn't either. It raises the issue of trust, of course: I trusted his claim and blindly linked to his site. But the onus of responsibility is on me, not him. I am not exonerated by saying "How was I supposed to know it was a hoax?". If it's true that blogs are simply another part of the media, "citizen journalism" or "bottom-up journalism" or whatever you want to call it, then bloggers also need to look carefully at issues like media ethics.

If we're going to take it upon ourselves to be part of the media, if we're going to claim we now are the media, then we have to act like it. We have the exact same responsibilities to the public as do the traditional media outlets. Is there any intrinsic lower standard for "citizen journalists" than for those employed by newspapers or TV news shows? I would argue there is not. The burden of proof lies as heavily on me as it does on Tom Brokaw: obviously far fewer people read my blog than watch his show, but the weight of responsibility is not proportional to the size of the audience.

I've already been trained in media ethics, and already been employed (at least somewhat) in the traditional media, but the vast majority of bloggers haven't. Most have probably not given any consideration to whether they have any responsibility towards their readers. I would say they clearly do. Amateur journalists are not excused simply because they're amateurs. As cool and exciting as the "citizen journalism" concept is, it's in real danger of being undermined and discredited before it has a chance to succeed if we don't take seriously enough the issues traditional media has had centuries to contemplate and formalize, and no-one will be keener to see this discrediting than the traditional media, who've been roasted on the spit often enough over their own transgressions (think Rathergate, Jayson Blair, et al).

Journalists – in the traditional, old-media sense – have a great deal more to think about than simply if something is a good story or how best to write it. The legal issues alone, ranging from copyright law and plagarism through defamation and the thorny issues of personal privacy, are legion (and in parts confusing) enough that many books have been written on the subject (including this one, which I had to actually read). Then on a more abstract level is media ethics itself, another topic on which much has been written. A personal (as opposed to corporate) ethical code is perhaps one of the most important traits of a successful journalist, because it inspires trust. It's what separates Bob Woodward from Harold Fiske, for example.

That's not to say tabloid newspapers and the journalists who write for them can't make a useful contribution to public discourse – they can. But even tabloid journalists have a defined ethical code (believe it or not) which they've consciously formulated. It may not align with your code of ethics, or even most peoples', but it's there. In my opinion bloggers need to do this, too. Not only because their reputations depend on it, but because those who participate in the public discourse as creators as opposed to observers have a civic and, arguably, a moral responsibility to do so. Is your blog a tabloid, or is it a broadsheet? Is it the National Enquirer or is it the New York Times? It makes a considerable difference.

Amazing what tangents I can get onto from a Christmas lights webcam hoax, ain't it?

There's something very, very, very weird going on in the world, something weird enough to be astoundingly important to literally everything. This weirdness has been recognized by scientists for a long time, and yet most people are absolutely unaware of it. I'm going to try to explain it, but it might require a bit of mental effort to follow along. I hope it'll be worth it, because the phenomena is extraordinary and the ramifications mind-blowing.

First, imagine you have a sinkful of water, the surface of which is glassy smooth and undisurbed. Now drop a frozen pea into the water. What happens? You get ripples, waves of water, moving out from the point of impact across the surface of the water in concentric circles. What happens if instead of one pea, you drop two, a few inches apart from each other? They each create waves, as before. But what's interesting is what happens when the waves from each impact meet. Where a peak meets a peak, a higher peak is created. Where a trough meets a trough, a lower trough is created. Where a peak meets a trough, they cancel each other out and the water is flat, with neither a peak or a trough.

This is called "interference": the waves from each impact are interfering with each other. This phenomenon is not limited to water waves, but happens any time a wave appears in whatever medium, be it water or air or otherwise. It happens with sound waves when one speaker of a pair is wired incorrectly (the wires on the back switched). If the speakers are then oriented to face each other the music coming from them will reduce in volume, because a "sound peak" from one speaker will meet a "sound trough" from the other (incorrectly wired) speaker, and will cancel each other out.

The same thing happens with light. Light, too, can behave like a wave. This was proved in the 19th century by a guy called Thomas Young, who set up an experiment roughly along the lines of the crappy illustration to the right. He arranged a light source (in his case, sunlight) so that it shone through a screen with two slits in it, and from there onto a wall. Common sense would suggest that on the wall would appear two stripes of light, since it's shining through two slits. What actually appeared, however, was not two but a series of stripes, with the middle stripe being the brighest and the others diminishing in brightness as the distance from the center increased.

What was happening here? Well, the light shining through one slit was interfering with the light shining through the other. The peaks and troughs of the light waves were mingling in the same way water waves do. The bright parts of the pattern were where peak met peak or trough met trough. The dark parts of the pattern were where peak met trough and cancelled each other out. Hence the light-dark-light-dark pattern repeated across the wall. If one of the slits were covered up the interference pattern disappeared, because there were no longer two beams of light interfering with each other. One beam of light cannot interfere with itself, and caused what we would expect: a single stripe of light on the wall. This could only be explained, decided Young, if light were a wave, and behaved as waves do.

For a long time this is how things stood. Light is a wave, behaves as all waves do, and one beam of light is able to interfere with another to create interference patterns, just like ripples on the surface of water. Then Einstein came along and turned everything on its head.

I'm not going to go into details of how he did that, not because the general principles are massively complicated but because it's not important to the weirdness I was talking about at the beginning of this post. Suffice it to say that Einstein, never one to take any notice of prevailing wisdom, went ahead and proved that light is not a wave but is in fact made up of particles. The particles in question are called photons, and Einstein proved that a beam of light is simply a stream of these particles rushing from one place (the light source) to another. Because particles are discrete objects, distinct things, they are not waves and do not behave like them. Particles no more interfere with each other to create interference patterns than do pool balls or slices of pizza. Photons represent the smallest unit of light possible: they cannot be subdivided.

This caused, to put it mildly, a bit of a conundrum for scientists. On the one hand Young's double slit experiment proved, beyond all doubt, that light is a wave. On the other hand Einstein proved, beyond all doubt, that light is made up of particles. It is here the weirdness begins.

The conundrum has never really been solved, at least not in any way that makes sense on a human level, in any way that corresponds to reality as we perceive it. The solution is called the "wave-particle duality" and says, in simple terms, that light is both a wave and made up of particles at the same time, depending on how we measure it. Light changes what it is, and how it behaves, depending on the nature of the experiment we set up to examine it.

That's pretty weird, but it gets way weirder. What would happen if we repeat Young's double slit experiment but this time sending only one photon at a time? Since a single photon obviously can't interfere with itself, surely we would see two stripes of light, since there are two slits in the screen and the photon would have to pass through either one or the other?

What was seen, to the astonishment of all, was an interference pattern. This made absolutely no sense. Only one photon was going through one slit or the other at any given time, so where did the interference pattern come from? What were the photons interfering with? In effect, the light was acting like a wave in making an interference pattern, even though no wave existed, because only one photon at a time was sent through.

As with Young's initial experiment, if one of the holes were covered the interference pattern disappeared. The implication is staggering: the photon passed through one of the slits, but somehow "knew" that the other slit was there. It also "knew" whether the other slit was open or closed: when the other slit was open, the photon landed only where it "should" land to form the interference pattern (i.e. no photon landed in the dark gaps between the light stripes); when the other slit was closed, there was no such restriction.

How does a photon "know" how the apparatus is set up? How does a photon, an elementary particle, "know" anything?

The mystery deepens further with an experiment in 1999 dubbed the "quantum eraser." The scientists very cleverly devised a repeat of the one-photon-at-a-time double slit experiment in which they could detect which slit each photon passed through without affecting either the speed or direction of it. They did this using filters that polarized ("changed the orientation of") the photons going through one slit to a certain direction, and the photons going through the other slit to another direction. Thus when the photons hit the sensor they were able, by inspecting the polarization of each photon, to determine through which slit it had passed.

In all other respects it was identical to the previous experiment, with the only difference being they would be able to tell through which slit each photon passed. But when they ran the experiment something extraordinary happened: the interference pattern was not there.

How is this possible? How is it possible that simply by being able to know through which slit each photon passed they caused the light to stop creating an interference pattern? How could knowledge, or the potential to know, cause the light to behave differently?

We come at last to the weirdest, and most important, part of all. The scientists repeated the experiment once more, but this time they placed another filter on the other side of the slits, between the slits and the screen onto which the light was projected (their equivalent of Young's wall). This filter polarized the photons again, so that once they passed through it all the photons were oriented in the same direction, and thus the scientists could no longer discover through which slit the photons passed (they "erased" the potential for knowledge). Result? The interference pattern returned. The photons started behaving like a wave again.

Let's go over that again: the photons were still being "labeled" as having passed through one slit or the other, by the first set of filters, between the light source and the slit. Between the slit and the second filter the photons were still, at that point, potentially identifiable as having passed through either the first or second slit. Had the scientists observed them at this point, as in the previous experiment, no interference pattern would emerge. But because the photons passed through the second filter, which stripped them of the identifying "labels" they'd been given, the interference pattern came back.

The only difference -- the only difference -- is whether or not the scientists were able to tell through which slit the photons passed. It is the very possibility of knowledge that caused the light to behave differently. It is as if the light somehow knew what the scientists were trying to do (namely, treat light as both a particle and a wave simultaneously), and prevented them from doing it. Either we consider light a wave (for which the concept of "which slit it passed through" is meaningless, since a wave would pass through both) and get a wave-like interference pattern, or we consider it a stream of particles (each particle of which must go through either one slit or the other) and not get a wave-like interference pattern, since particles can't interfere with themselves. We cannot do both. We must pick. We literally decide what light is.

This is not me indulging in poetic license or hyperbole. These are not the results of some one-off never-to-be-repeated experiment by a crackpot inventor in his garage. These results have been repeated over and over, by many reputable scientists in different laboratories around the world, and form part of the canon of modern physics. There is, as yet, no explanation for why any of this happens. Perhaps there never will be. But it is clear that, at the subatomic level at least, abstract non-physical concepts such as knowledge and potential for knowledge have an actual, scientifically verifiable effect on real physical systems. We literally change the world just by observing it.

This is, as far as I'm concerned, spookier and more exciting than any ghost story. I hope you feel the same way (it would be a shame to come this far and get nothing from it). Suddenly things like psychokinesis and telepathy seem a lot less far-fetched...

I imagine no-one is interested in reading about my Christmas day, and to be honest I can't really be bothered to write about it, so here it is in pictures. Some of them were taken by me, some by my wife. Hover the mouse over the thumbnail for an almost pointlessly terse description:

But for an orphan, how can it be?

I'm sure you all remember John Shuttleworth singing "The Christmas Orphan" on Vic and Bob's Christmas Special in 1993. I certainly do. Imagine my delight, then, to discover he has a web site of his very own!

Even more remarkably, from there I further discovered that before becoming a retired security guard/versatile singer-songwriter John was in fact Jilted John, whose 1978 smash hit "Jilted John" is considered by at least two people to be "the best new-wave/punk single ever penned" (the other person being me).

I fear my amazement will be shared by perhaps three people in the entire world, but when you think about it it's a staggering coincidence: the author of a punk song to which I was listening just a few days ago turns out to be an obscure (but very funny) British comedian who made me laugh for about two hours eleven years ago. Or maybe it's not a coincidence, maybe it's just weird. Anyway, it was my Christmas present from the cosmos.

I hope your day is both merry and happy, possibly even festive, and that you eat until you're comfortably rotund. Barka da Kirsimatikuma Barka da Sabuwar Shekara!

Because I care so much about you, my readers (yes, all four of you), I've decided to eliminate, annihilate, rub out, exclude, discard and oust all the particularly nerdy posts I've written recently. But never fear! They're not gone, they're just missing! And when I say missing, I mean moved to my new, nerdy blog.

But never fear! I shall continue updating this one, of course, with my usual hilarious, profound and often arousingly disturbed insights into life. But now, when I feel like writing something nerdy, I can, without having to apologize for it. w00t.

I feel a cold draft. But never fear! I shall locate the source and stifle it, because I care so much about you, my readers.

That is all.

Samuel Tardieu takes a look at the Google AdSense terms and conditions and is alarmed by what he reads:

If Google choses to terminate the program when your balance reaches $9.99, you will not earn anything. [...] [P]eople indicating that they have placed AdSense snippets on their pages to earn money may not receive anything as it violates the terms. [...] you will probably be spammed to death. [...] It means that even if you use a robots.txt file to exclude portions of your site from being indexed, Google may well do so anyway.

I did consider the terms he refers to when I signed up, and it does indeed sound rather grim. But I felt at the time, and still feel, that there's a significant difference between what Google could do and what Google would do.

Almost all contracts with service providers contain clauses of a dubious nature (both legally and ethically speaking – take a look at the terms and conditions of your cell or ISP company sometime), but it's important to remember that those clauses are only really present to give the service provider some protection against exploitation. To address his concerns point by point (all quotes henceforth are from the terms and conditions):

In no event, however, shall Google make payments for any earned balance less than $10.

Yes, this one's a bit dodgy on the face of it, but I feel it's necessary given the nature of AdSense. Anyone can sign up for it, and many, many have. I'm guessing a large proportion of those sites generate insignificant revenue due to numerous factors (insufficient traffic, a lack of effort, etc.) – imagine how many AdSense accounts must be sitting out there with less then ten bucks earned, and imagine how much it would cost Google, simply in terms of administration, to verify and pay every single one of them. I have no idea as to the scale of things, but what if they were required to mail a cheque for $0.47 to 10,000 people? First they'd have to pay someone to ensure there was no fraudulent click-throughs (more on that next), then they'd have to pay for the cheque to be printed and finally pay for it to be mailed. In an ideal world Google would cough up that $0.47, but it's simply not realistic from their perspective. I understand this, and hope to generate more than ten bucks anyway...

Google shall not be liable for any payment based on [...] any amounts which result from invalid queries or invalid clicks on Ads generated by any person, bot, automated program or similar device, as reasonably determined by Google, including without limitation through any clicks or impressions [...] solicited by payment of money, false representation or request for end users to click on Ads

Yes, it's pretty broad. But it's there in case they need it, not so that they can arbitrarily decide to deny someone his ad revenue. While it could, conceptually speaking, apply to me when I say I put significant effort into this blog, maybe a little ad revenue will encourage me to continue, I don't think Google would win this one in court. I think when they say "request for end users to click on ads" they mean an AdSense customer artificially inflating his click-throughs via an appeal to his end users: that is, click my ads even if you wouldn't normally. A good analogy, I feel, is if CBS were to run occasional spots demanding their viewers buy some of the products or services offered by their advertisers. This would be patently inappropriate and unethical, and CBS would, rightly, get in trouble. Advertising works by someone, in this case me, offering content designed to attract an audience, who are also presented with targeted adverts. This clause is merely restating that normal paradigm in a legal context. As for the rest of it I think it stands to reason that Google would want to ensure that no-one inflates their revenue through the use of bots or similar, hitting the ads via open proxies. (This, of course, would be an extremely devious, and probably very effective, method for a third party to seriously inconvenience someone hosting AdSense. But I digress.)

Google may change its pricing and/or payment structure at any time

Very standard. Few contracts exist that don't contain this or something similar. The market is constantly changing, and so is the legislation surrounding advertising. Google, here, just wants to ensure it's able to react appropriately without getting sued.

You agree to indemnify, defend and hold Google, its agents, affiliates, subsidiaries, directors, officers, employees, and applicable third parties (e.g. relevant advertisers, syndication partners, licensors, licensees, consultants and contractors) (collectively “Indemnified Person(s)”) harmless from and against [...]

Again, your standard "you cannot sue us nor our friends under any circumstances" clause. This kind of thing is almost entirely useless, since the merit of any lawsuit is judged by the court, not by Google's lawyers. If a judge considers me wronged he will happily ignore the entire clause, and probably take the opportunity to make trenchant remarks about its content.

Google may retain and use for its own purposes all information You provide, including but not limited to Site demographics and contact and billing information. You agree that Google may transfer and disclose to third parties personally identifiable information about You for the purpose of approving and enabling Your participation in the Program, including to third parties that reside in jurisdictions with less restrictive data laws than Your own

Well, of course they need site demographics: that's how they target ads. And they kinda need my billing information to pay me. The sharing of information with third parties is specifically limited to that necessary to approve and enable my participation in the program (I assume they're reserving the right to do such things as credit checks, maybe, or searches for prior fraud convictions). I have no problem with any of that. When it comes to my "personally identifiable information" I'm a realist: I can't keep it secret. My mailing address is, by definition, public knowledge. It's true that Google might share my information with Nigerian 419 scammers, but I assume they don't, and that they limit their information sharing to reputable, law-abiding companies. I might be naive, but I'm willing to trade a little "privacy" for access to Google's AdWords customers (including major corporations), none of whom would consider advertising on my blog otherwise.

You grant Google the right to access, index and cache the Site(s), or any portion thereof, including by automated means including Web spiders or crawlers.

Google has to index your site in order to figure out what ads are most suitable for the content. That's what makes AdSense more effective than blindly sticking a banner at the top of your page: someone reading a blog post about, say, persimmon is more likely to click an ad for a site selling persimmon seeds than a site selling discount sneakers. Samuel's concern that this clause allows Google to ignore robots.txt (in which the webmaster can exclude certain web crawlers from certain sections of the site) is, in my opinion, unfounded, because robots.txt is an entirely voluntary standard: Google doesn't have to obey it anyway. They do obey it, though, as both my hit tracker and Google's own AdSense help pages testify.

To wrap it up, then: yes, the clauses Samuel cites could, potentially, be abused by Google. But they know very well the bad publicity that can come from such abuse or even potential for abuse, and Google's success is founded partly on its reputation as a company that does no evil. All in all I believe their track record at least mostly confirms they practice what they preach in this regard, and thus I chose to sign up with AdSense rather than a company I know far less about.

Thank you to the 0.017% of people still reading.

Here's a fun new game you can play if you're desperately bored and lonely: "The Six Degrees of Wikipedia." In this game one starts at a random entry on Wikipedia and attempts to arrive at the entry on BDSM I've taken the liberty of formalizing it a little, and thus here is my version of the rules:

• You must do it in five clicks or fewer
• You must arrive specifically at the BDSM entry linked above
• You are not allowed to backtrack: each click is your final answer
• You can only follow links to pages within Wikipedia itself, i.e. that have "en.wikipedia.org" in the address, and the link must be within the article body itself, not in the sidebar, etc.

Here's one, for example:

The Virgin of the Rocks to Leonardo da Vinci to Illegitimate child to Sexual intercourse to Taboo to Sexual activities to BDSM.

A miserable failure! That was seven degrees. Gah! How about this:

Sexual Personae to De Sade to Perversion to Paraphilia to Bondage and discipline to Sexual bondage to BDSM.

Seven again! Despite going right to an entry related to sex! This is harder than it seems. Last try:

Carl Bridgewater to Life imprisonment to Myra Hindley to Sex Pistols to Penis to Sexual activities to BDSM.

Seven! Unbelievable. But just to prove it can be done, here's the chain that started it all in the first place:

The Six Bullerby Children to Astrid Lindgren to Corporal punishment to BDSM.

There! Done in only four degrees. As you can see, it's not only the funnest game ever invented by a Russian (Tetris who?), but also educational. So give it a try and let me know of your successes and/or miserable failures...

Yes, I'm afraid it is so: I'm experimenting with Google's AdSense program. Why? Well, I have a few reasons. First: cha-ching. Second... Okay, that's mostly it. I was kinda curious about how it works and all, but not that curious. The main reason is that there's a tiny possibility it might bring in some money.

I've been considering it for a while, but never could get over the nagging suspicion that putting ads on my blog was somehow exploitative, or inappropriate, or presumptuous. After all, this is little more than a personal journal slash soapbox, and most people don't expect to get paid for their journal.

Except this isn't really a journal. Journals are private, and one person is both author and audience. While some blogs, it must be said, do read a lot like someone simply making their private journal public (and, often, taking out the juicy bits), I don't believe this blog is like that. Or if it is, it's not meant to be. I realize I have an audience, and I do my best – most of the time, anyway – to be either interesting or entertaining. Sometimes, in moments of heady folly, I even try to do both simultaneously.

Thus I am not writing and maintaining this site for myself. I didn't spend hours and hours making it look decent for myself, and if I want to make myself laugh I can simply look through my shirt collection. I started it with the hope that people would want to read my blog, and people, it seems, do.

I am in effect, then, not just the author of this thing but the editor, designer and publisher too. While it sometimes may not seem so I do spend a considerable amount of time on it, and in every other field of publishing authors, editors, designers and publishers get paid. That is my justification, or perhaps excuse, for putting up some ads. I hope it's not too laughable.

I'm not expecting to make a great deal of money from the ads – partly because I don't recall the last time I actually clicked on one myself – but that's also partly why I'm doing it, as I said: I'm curious as to how, and if, it will work. But you never know: perhaps I'll make enough to rent a movie a month, or something. Even a small financial reward is still a reward.

So don't hate me because I sold out. Ads are easy for you to skip your eyes over, and I think the color scheme I picked is not gratuitously noticeable. Maybe if I expect to make even a little money from this endeavor I'll treat it more (and more consistently) as a real publisher, designer, editor and author would. Perhaps it will emphasize the responsibility that I have to you, my audience, and I'll be less tempted to neglect it, and more inclined to take it seriously.

We'll be back right after these messages.

BeastMatch: "the worlds first contact site for petlovers BY petlovers." It's a joke. Right? No, come on. It's not real. Surely. It isn't. ...Right?

#428609

<WDeranged> i just had a chickhan dinnhar and 4 hours of entertainment brought to me
<WDeranged> sometimes life is nice
<patrick``> macdonalds happy meal with a free toy?

Oops.

Since my last entry I've been looking for solutions to the comment spam problem, and found what I think is the perfect solution – at least as far as stopping automated spamming scripts goes...

It's called SCode, and it's a Moveable Type plugin that displays an image with an obfuscated four-digit security code and requires that the user enters the same code into a field in the comment form.

You've seen this idea before, of course: lots of sites use it to verify that it's an actual human doing something (registering for an email account, or whatever). The idea is that without using fairly sophisticated OCR techniques a computer can't get the code right and thus can't register or post comments or whatever the code is protecting...

Of course, it won't work against actual humans posting spam to my blog, but an actual human would probably leave only one or two comments rather than over a hundred. It also means that people using text-only browsers won't be able to comment, but really they should be used to that by now.

Please let me know if you have any problems with it.

Update: This guy has a good idea regarding how to disincentivize comment spam:

[Search engine] software needs to be able to recognize the difference between links produced by the blog owner(s) and those contributed by readers and spambots.

Once you can identify the difference between those two types of links, you simply stop using the second type of link when calculating rank.

Since Google's PageRank and other similar technologies is the reason comment spam even exists, if search engines were smarter with regard to processing reader-submitted content then the whole problem would be solved. Perhaps we need a new tag, or even a specific DIV class name, to indicate content not authored by the owner of the page, which indexing software could then identify and ignore (or give less weight to) the content...

So this morning I logged in to my blog and saw that I had over a hundred new comments. Naturally my first assumption was that people just really liked my latest post about kitten rape. Alas that turned out not to be the case: they were all comments advertising a Texas Hold 'Em web site, which seems to me an extraordinarily ineffective way to advertise, but there you go.

It's tempting simply to block the offending IP addresses, but unfortunately they used a bunch of proxy servers to connect to my site, making their real IP address inaccessible. (That said there is a way I might be able to get their real address in future, if the proxies they use are not truly anonymous. I'm going to poke around in the MT source code to see if I can make that work.)

A couple days ago one of the employees of the company that makes Moveable Type (the blogging software I use) addressed the issue of comment spam, and mentioned something called MT-Blacklist. This nifty plugin will scan comments before they are posted for their spam-ness, and will deny those that appear to be related to, say, Viagra or gambling. I'm going to give it a whirl tonight, I think.

So anyway if you see any spam comments with links to dubious web sites please don't click them. Don't encourage the bastards. Instead, track them down and inject them with HIV. It's a kindness.

Update: MT-Blacklist refused to cooperate, so I ended up doing something else.

We attended our least physically significant child's "Christmas concert" earlier this evening, and I've been thinking for some time on how best to sum it up. I believe "like hell, only cute" captures it pretty well. It was like being raped by a kitten. There was a seemingly interminable stream of children all ready and willing to perform very enthusiastically. My personal favorite was "The Twelve Months of Christmas." At least, I think that's what it was called. It sure felt like it.

I can't help it. I just do. I look forward to "the holiday season" with as much anticipation as I look forward to St Valentine's Day, which is to say with barely concealed contempt. In fact it's worse even than that, because I can happily ignore Feb 14 completely, with only the briefest of reminders to shatter my illusion of normality (for example, my wife buying me a valentine card).

But Christmas (and Kwanzaa and Hanukka and every other goddamn thing) is impossible to ignore. It's not just the commercialization that gets to me (though that aspect does make me want to gather together the advertising executives responsible for every single Christmas commercial broadcast since I was born, shut them in a vast darkened hall and drop ten thousand angry vipers onto them through a hole in the roof), it's the thing itself.

Now, we usually spend Christmas with my wife's parents, and you can't get much more Christian than my wife's parents (though I hear the Pope is fairly religious too). But even then it's not much different than Christmas with my parents. (I should probably qualify that. Christmas with my parents generally involved cracking into the presents after cracking into the alcohol which was consumed by all with gusto until, just after the Queen's Speech, a fierce battle would ensue over the merits of Her Majesty and monarchism in general. The "debate" would then inevitably escalate into shrieks, unfair accusations and door-slamming, often with at least one family member driving home in disgust, which was completely pointless because everyone would be happy again by supper time. Anyway, Christmas with my wife's parents is nothing like that, of course, because we have perhaps a bottle of wine between ten of us, but there are similarities, and I should probably close this paranthetical remark now.)

We wake up. We say "Merry Christmas," or "Happy Christmas," we have breakfast, we spruce ourselves up, we sit in the living room with all the presents, physically restraining the children who are by this point foaming at the mouth, trying to delay the inevitable because we know as soon as we release them they will dart like hounds to the gifts and have them sorted, dispatched and opened with astonishing efficiency, and the air will be alive with shreds of brightly colored paper and the monstrous baying of the children, and then we'll sit there wordlessly for a moment while it sinks in that the fun's over for the day and it's all downhill from here. Then one of the kids, barely visible inside the vast mountain of gifts he or she received from adults who should know better, will say "But I wanted a Barbie and/or GI Joe" and I'll have to leave the room to avoid commiting a holiday homicide.

So what is "Christmas"? More importantly, what do I think should happen? Should we spend all day in silent prayerful contemplation, our gazes fixed adoringly on an eight-foot tall plaster rendition of Christ? Should we take the money we would've spent on stupid toys that break or grow tiresome the very same day and spend it instead on a vacation somewhere? I like that idea, but it's still not what Jesus would do (though he didn't live on the edge of the Arctic, of course). What would Jesus do? And why do we give each other presents in the first place?

"Because baby Jesus got presents from the Three Wise Men!" I hear you announce, but that's completely different. It's not evidence that we should give each other gifts on his birthday, it's evidence that God approves of baby showers. ("Thank you, everyone. Gold, frankincense, myrrh and a little squeezey pump thing for getting out ear wax.")

I have no idea what Jesus would do, but I'm pretty sure it would involve neither heavy drinking nor children high on greed, nor great prickly trees. It would probably have something to do with helping poor people, let's face it. It's the artificiality and the artifice that gets to me, I guess. And the Old Navy commercials.

What am I going to do about it? Nothing. I shall sit there as usual pretending to be celebrating the birth of either the son of God or one of the most remarkable leaders of men ever to have lived, depending on your perspective. I shall sip my eggnog and nibble my cake and wonder what Jesus would do, and especially what he'd do if confronted with an Old Navy commercial. I like to think it would involve lightning.

So AOL accidentally nuked 10,000 Instant Messenger users a few days ago, coincidentally right around when mine stopped working. They say they're scrambling to fix it, which I assume means some poor schmucks are pulling database files off a tape backup.

They claim to have 50 million subscribers which, if true, means I was one of the lucky 0.02% to have my account erased. That's a 5,000-1 shot. I should buy a lottery ticket.

And people have been saying that Google Suggest is useless... Here's a fun game to while away the, er, seconds:

What's your Google Suggest number? That is, how many letters of your name do you have to type into Google Suggest before your name appears on the suggestion list, and at what position does it first appear?

The upshot is that you type your name, slowly, and observe the suggestions from Google. As soon as your name appears in the list, stop typing. Count the letters (not including any spaces) and note what position you appear in (with 1 being the top) and... that's your score. (If you try it and haven't the faintest idea what I'm talking about, you might want to make sure both cookies and Javascript are enabled in your browser.)

My score is 5.4, meaning I type "ross t" and "Ross Thomas" appears fourth in the list of suggestions. Helps having a famous namesake. "halfacanuck," on the other hand, scores a less impressive 6.3.

So read the rules (for there are some twists) and give it a shot. Or not. I don't really care. But if you do, leave a comment! Or not. Etc.

Via Darren Barefoot and various other people, here's a guy who gives new meaning to the word "nerd":

I now present my demonstration of why the probability of finding a suitable candidate fulfilling the three above-noted requirements [i.e. a girlfriend] is so small as to be practically impossible

One assumes his bad luck with women isn't due to him spending the entire date calculating on a napkin the probability of them having sex later that night, but to be honest it doesn't seem all that unlikely, either.

I guess I'm a bit late with this one, but I couldn't resist commenting on Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson's remarks about Canada. For example: "They better hope the United States doesn't roll over one night and crush them. They are lucky we allow them to exist on the same continent," and "Without the U.S., Canada is essentially Honduras, but colder and much less interesting." (Video: QuickTime, Windows Media.)

Here are some more choice quotes:

• "Conservatives, as a general matter, take the position that you should not punish your friends and reward your enemies. And Canada has become trouble recently." – Coulter
• "It's always, I might add, the worst Americans who end up going there. The Tories after the Revolutionary War, the Vietnam draft dodgers after Vietnam. And now after this election, you have the blue-state people moving up there." – Coulter
• "They don't even need to have an army, because they are protected, because they're on the same continent with the United States of America." – Coulter
• "We exploit [Canada's] natural resources, that's true. But in the end, Canadians with ambition move to the United States. That has been sort of the trend for decades. It says something not very good about Canada. And I think it makes Canadians feel bad about themselves and I understand that." – Carlson
• "I think if Canada were responsible for its own security – you would be invaded by Norway if it weren't for the United States." – Carlson

No wonder Media Matters for America is getting its panties in such a knot, as are the commenters and much of the blogosphere.

As usual when feelings are hurt there's an element of truth to what they say. Canada and the US do have a symbiotic relationship – we need each other, for sure – but it is undeniably more akin to an oxpecker picking ticks off a warthog: if the relationship suddenly ended the former would die while the latter would merely lose weight.

And it must be said – no, really, come on, be honest – that Canada's history and culture really isn't very interesting. Once the land was explored and settled not a whole lot else happened besides the War of 1812, Confederation and the invention of basketball.

What's more while saying we could get invaded by Norway might be a touch hyperbolistic it's certainly true that we are completely reliant on the US for our security, just as the oxpecker is on its big and scary warthog. Further, the "brain drain" from Canada to the US is a real problem. Carlson was overstating, of course... and that's where we get to the crux of the matter.

Both Carlson and Coulter are professional shit-stirrers. They get paid to annoy liberals and they do it very, very well. Their names are so synonymous with irritating right-wing posturing that I'm amazed anyone seriously considers them "media" any more. Carlson might be a host on Crossfire but, as Jon Stewart said recently, he's still a partisan dick.

But that's okay, because that's what he does for a living. He's a dick by trade. What he says about Canada might sting Canadians (and, as I said, only because there is an element of truth) but it's important to realize that neither he nor Coulter mean a great deal of what they say. And that's what makes conservatives much more politically effective than liberals: they like to speak the unspeakable simply because it infuriates their opponents so much.

Can you think of a single liberal commentator, "media" or otherwise, who is as effectively annoying as Tucker Carlson or Ann Coulter? I don't believe I can. Jon Stewart might qualify, at a pinch, but he's nowhere near as controversial. Al Franken, too, occasionally comes close, such as when calling Rush Limbaugh a big fat idiot.

But let's face it, Rush Limbaugh is an easy target. He is a big fat idiot, and even conservatives will acknowledge that privately. If you really want to rile people up you need to go bigger. Attack values and principles, not preposterous radio hosts slash drug addicts, not even comically inarticulate presidents. Coulter and Carlson's attack on Canada was not really about the nation itself, it was about liberalism. It smacked slightly of paranoia, to be sure, because all bullies have deep-seated self-esteem issues, but ultimately it was transferred malice, and that's why it was so effective.

The sad thing, of course, is that conservatives who aren't as smart as Coulter and Carlson actually took them at face value and have now added Canada to their list of places to hate irrationally. Stupid is as stupid does, I suppose.

But I say fuck arguing about the "liberal bias" in the media. There's a case to be made both ways and we can never win it. I say it's time to start training some smart young liberals to be as deliciously bitchy and offensive as Coulter and Carlson, who can go head-to-head with Limbaugh and Savage in the field of satirical battle. Stewart and Franken can't do it alone. We need backup, and we need it quick.

Liberals take themselves way too seriously. It's not fun, it's boring, and we come across as whiners. We need to get in touch with our bitter sides and learn to pour out vitriol. That's not "sinking to their level," in my opinion, it's raising up to it. Maybe government subsidization of bowties will do the trick.

The astute amongst you may have noticed a subtle hint on my old blog that things have changed around a bit. You're right! Have a beer. Or a smoothie. I've switched from Blogger to MoveableType (MT) hosted on my own server.

There are lots of reasons for me doing this, but here are a few:

• It lets me do stuff like that. What you just did – "click here to read more" – without jumping through Javascript hoops. I tend to write quite long posts sometimes, and I think that feature makes the main page way more tidy.
• The MT template system is much more flexible and powerful than Blogger's. I'm not really using that power right now, but I intend to add cool new features as I go along.
• This blog is hosted on my own server, which means if things do go wrong (and Blogger does seem to have its problems sometimes) I can fix them myself. Also this means I can implement a proper hit tracking system instead of relying on a fairly crappy third-party hit counter.
• MT supports such nifty things as trackback autodiscovery, entry categories (which I'll add sometime soon), and a bunch of other stuff that's way too nerdy to go into details about.
• MT has tons and tons (and tons) of plugins that add features. I've not investigated many yet, but I will be.

All in all I decided that it was worth switching over, despite being a lot of work (two days in total) and despite everyone having to update their links and bookmarks and feed URLs again (sorry).

I've imported all my Blogger posts and also all the Haloscan comments, so as far as content goes it should be identical.

If you see any problems please let me know.

So I just rediscovered Bloglines. I say "rediscovered" because I've been aware of it for a while, but didn't really grasp how cool it is until I checked it out again this afternoon (or, possibly, the really nifty stuff has been added since I last looked).

Bloglines is an online web syndication (or "feed") browser. What this means, essentially, is that certain sites (blogs in particular, but also some news services etc.) allow their content to be accessed and republished by outside parties via special interfaces called RSS and Atom. In other words, when you set up an account (for free) on Bloglines you tell it what sites you like to read every day and, if that site has an RSS or Atom feed, Bloglines will trot off and grab the content from that site and display it to you within the Bloglines site itself.

Why is this useful, or even any different from visiting the web site itself?

Well, the difference is that Bloglines has a little sidebar with a list of all the sites you've subscribed to and -- here's where it gets cool -- it knows whether the site has been updated since you last visited it and, if so, how many new posts (or news stories, or other pieces of content) there are. Thus instead of going through a dozen bookmarks to check if any of them have anything new to read, you simply go to your Bloglines page and can see at a glance if there's been an update. Think of it as a bit like email, only with web sites.

If that's all there was to it I'd not be particularly excited about it (yes, I'm excited about it. Snide comments welcome). That's how RSS and Atom work, and I've been using a similar standalone program called NetNewsWire Lite to read feeds for ages. What makes Bloglines so damn cool is that unlike NetNewsWire Lite it's able to read not just RSS and Atom feeds but also pages from Xanga, LiveJournal, the new Google Groups 2 service, Yahoo! Groups, Topix.net and can even pretend that an email mailing list is a feed too, showing it along with the "real" feeds in the sidebar.

This means that I can check every single site I read on a regular basis, from Reuters headlines to a bunch of blogs (including, finally, Xanga) in one place and without having to check each manually to see if there's anything new, saving me vital seconds every day. If that doesn't deserve a w00t I don't know what does.

Go out and sign up for Bloglines immediately, and then of course add my blog to your subscriptions. Because it's what all the cool people do.

Yes, I'm a nerd.

My wife and I went grocery shopping today and picked up a three-pound pack of ground beef, since we seem to get through quite a lot of it. This isn't in itself unusual, nor was the manner in which we collapsed spent into chairs whilst the various children who congregate in our house, some of whom are alleged to be ours, unpacked the groceries. When the smallest child (who shall remain nameless, for what follows is partly her fault, and there's nothing cowardly about me placing partial blame on a seven-year-old) presented me with the ground beef and asked what should be done with it, I replied that she should put it on the island and I would deal with it.

The plan was to unwrap the beef, separate it into three one-pound portions, wrap them, and put them in the freezer. Thus I would avoid the normal disaster that unfolds when it comes time to use the stuff, namely me trying to hack apart a frozen mass of beef with a ludicrously large knife, growing more and more frenzied by the second, until I either a) succeed in breaking off a chunk or b) stab myself through the hand.

At this point I too must accept partial responsibility for the ensuing events. Had I gone to work immediately and parceled the meat up there and then, none of this would've happened (though I still insist that Jeremy -- not her real name -- is mostly to blame). I didn't, in fact, do that, astonishing as it may sound to those who know me. What I did do was decide to nip onto the Internet for a few minutes first, possibly have a smoke, that kind of thing. Within 13.8 seconds of opening my laptop lid I had of course forgotten all about the beef, and four hours later went to put a pizza in the oven for supper.

I strolled to the freezer and pulled out the pizza, swiveled jauntily on my heel and made my way over to the stove, and, in the corner of my eye, saw the beef still on the island. I pulled open the oven, slid the pizza in... and realized that something about the beef wasn't quite right, but I couldn't place it. I closed the oven and gave my full attention to the meat, and noticed immediately (for nothing escapes my profound observational skills) that someone, or something, had been gnawing at it.

When I say gnawing, I actually mean taking really quite large bites out of it. And by that I mean taking really quite large bites through the plastic wrap and, in parts, through the polystyrene base, but only on the side nearest the edge of the island. Something like an inch and a half of meat was gone from one entire side, I noted meticulously.

Naturally my first thought was that my wife was the culprit, because boy, does she ever love her steak tartare. But in this case I knew it could not be so, since she'd left for work long before. I then turned my focus onto the children. It is widely known that children are barely above the level of the beast, and ours in particular do, it must be said, occasionally remind one of living in the same house as a small herd of warthogs. Am I suggesting one of them had stooped so low as to eat raw ground beef directly from the packaging, and also eat the packaging, while the others kept lookout and whispered frantic encouragement? Yes. Yes I am.

Upon probing them, however, I was greeted with such expressions of wide-eyed innocence that even I, a heartless cynic, momentarily forget the savagery of their true nature and concluded they were not the perpetrators of the horrific crime scene upon which I had stumbled. It seemed as if my investigation had come to a dead-end. I turned back to the kitchen, my face a picture of despondency.

But wait! I stopped dead in my tracks. Could it be that the dog, whom I shall call Winston (for that is his name), was looking at me somewhat guiltily? I met his gaze. Our eyes narrowed and locked. Sweat formed on our brows. He tensed. I raised a single eyebrow. For untold seconds we stared unblinking at each other, like two titans meeting over a chess board, or a pair of gunslingers in a town of insufficient capaciousness. The mournful wind bounced a tumbleweed between us, but neither did it distract. Like Kennedy and Khrushchev were we in this Herculean clash of wills. And then... And then he crumbled, averting his eyes with a tiny submissive whimper, the whimper heard around the world. I had broken him! Yes. Yes, now it was all so clear! It wasn't my wife who had munched surreptitiously on the tasty protein carelessly set aside in the kitchen. It wasn't any of the various children, sunk in depravity as they undeniably are. It was him all along!

But the pulse of glory victorious was soon replaced with bitter self-recrimination. What kind of a detective, what kind of a man, would not have turned his attention to Winston before any other? Why did I not immediately deduce the link between the missing beef and this constantly hungry, infamously disobedient hound? Why did I not recall at once his daring late-night forays into the garbage bag, his apparently insatiable lust for fresh meat? Suddenly it all clicked. What a fool I was!

I shook myself out of it. Yes, perhaps I should've made the connection sooner, but I had made it, and that was the important thing. But as logical as that seemed, as true as it may have been, yet my anger increased with every step back to the canine-caused carnage. How could I have been so stupid? Am I really that short-sighted? I ripped the remains of the plastic wrap from the meat and threw it approximately in the direction of the garbage bag. Winston, who has apparently been secretly trained since birth to show up the very nanosecond even the possibility of food is considered, unwisely decided then was a good moment to approach me for scraps.

Well, that was the final straw. A tiny but vitally important blood vessel burst deep inside my brain and I flew into apoplexy. Plunging my fingers into the fleshy pulp of beef slightly back from the point to which it had been violated I tore off the contaminated strands and, shaking with blind rage, hurled the dripping mass wildly at the dog's head. I did it again and again and again. Very soon I'd stripped off another half-inch from the edge of the meat, all of which I flung furiously at Winston, until there was no more bad meat to remove. I took a deep breath.

It was then it occurred to me that tossing handfuls of succulent grade A beef at a permanently famished carnivorous animal was not perhaps the most heinous of punishments I could possibly devise. I looked at the dog. He was wolfing down the last remaining morsels, near-orgasmic joy afire in his eyes. I sighed and tried half-heartedly to conjure up more fitting penalties, but by then my anger was abating. The beef-throwing had soothed me and reason was resuming its seat. I divvied up what was left of the godforsaken stuff and encased it in GLAD Wrap, then deposited the now significantly-less-than-one-pound chunks in the freezer.

So what is the moral of this story? It's tempting to say "procrastination can only lead to extra work," but that's too easy an answer. I believe there are really two lessons here: first, don't ever get a dog. Actually, that's it. Just don't get a dog. Or, if you do get a dog, fit extensions to the legs of your kitchen island. Or remove all his teeth. Or turn vegetarian. And never trust Jeremy with meat. But it's much simpler just to not get a dog, or, if you already have one, set it free. It'll be happier that way. And even if it isn't (say, if it's immediately and fatally run over by a truck), you'll be happier. Trust me.

My life is, as you know, a helterskelter whirlwind of frantic activity. One day it might be sitting for several hours at a time staring blankly into space; another day it might be descaling the kettle (though, to be fair, I've not actually done that in quite some time, because we have no C.L.R. and vinegar isn't quite up to the task of removing the quarter-inch-thick layer of limescale clinging tenaciously to the element).

Following are the most interesting things to happen in my life recently:

• I got a commission to write a story for Urban Male Magazine, Canada's answer to Maxim. The pay isn't great (which is to say really, really quite bad) but it's planned to be a double-page spread so it'll look good in my portfolio.
• I called the travel editor of the National Post to find out if she read the story I sent to her over a week ago, and it turns out she's been away and couldn't find the email. Greatly relieved. So I sent it again. Hopefully I'll hear back from her this time, along the lines of: "Dear Ross, You're the most fantastic writer the world has ever seen, bar none. I will pay you one half of one million dollars for this story."
• I am still distressingly close to the beginning of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. The time I take to finish it might itself be measured on a geological scale.
• I found a new(ish) browser that I'm very partial too. It's called Camino and it's based around the same rendering engine as Firefox, but is much more lightweight. This means new windows open pretty much instantly instead of taking a couple of seconds like they did in Firefox, page loading is quicker, and I can once again boast that I use an obscure browser. Also, it's only for Macs. Suckers.

As you can tell, the last few days have been unusually exciting. I realize this post strayed wildly into "uninteresting personal diary" territory, but I intend to make up for that with a scintillating post after I've made supper. Whirlwind, I tells ya.