Mat Bowles

OK, the thing is, now I'm working in a job that doesn't allow me much time online, and the journey home is fairly long, by the time I'm in and caught up, I've less time (currently) to post. So here's a backlog of links for you, because I know you've all missed them...

Firstly, linkfrenzy is back, despite drjon's insane interpretation of Aussie copyright laws, and is also catching up with a massive backlog of Links From The Dawn Of Time, including three methods of making tinyy Daleks. How cool is that?

jonnynexus has a bit of gaming history with a scan of the contents page of White Dwarf #77. The last one before Ansell moved it to Nottingham. Pay close attention to the words spelt out by the first letter of each line. Of course, this humble non-RPGing gamer thinks better to have a miniatures based White Dwarf than no White Dwarf at all, and better to have a Games Workshop making products still than a dead company and some 'good old days', but I'm very aware that most gamers will remain of the GW = EEEVIL mindset no matter how many times actual real facts are presented to them. Yes, I'm biased, but I do not in any way regret the years I spent working for them. Although Ansell was an arse, they're right on that point.

Next up, LJ polls! Everyone likes a good poll, right? Ongoing discussion of 'best SF film ever' is added to by bagrec who first asked his readers for nominations and then put upa poll of the finalists. talvalin, who I met [properly] for the first time Friday, had a similar poll a few weeks back. And yes, I had meant to link to Richard's first nominations post while they were still open, I acquired one of those 'life' things and forgot, sorry...

pickwick has a poll about knowledge of scientific theories and experiments, and asks What other experiments and theories should everyone know about? So go tell her, mm'kay? Also, can anyone else out there confirm that Occam's "simplest possible solution" for pretty much everything was in fact "God did it", or am I talking out of my backside with miss remembered facts again?

Met the_vin Saturday at the Imperial War Museum, and a look through his archives gives this Zombie!Christ video that is, well, disturbing in its hilarity.

Now, how about a bit of filth? Political point making, Belgian style, in which a rather nice looking young lady offers the world 40,000 blow jobs in order to get publicity for her campaign. Umm, yeah. Well, she certainly got my attention. Then we have, well, not to put too fine a point on it, Muppet Porn. Yeah, um, even I found that one a bit disturbing. Amusing, but a bit weird.

Finally, for those complaining about the Eurovision block voting, a proper academic study of the voting patterns, revealing something we sort of know anyway. Besides, Anglophone nations tend to vote for songs in English, why is it a surprise that slavonic countries like to vote for slavonic songs?

Yeah, that's folder one cleared out. More to follow at some point.

K, in no particular order...

• Scotland's interesting message to alien life


• Miss Freddie is talking about dice and music:

Been reading about indeterminacy (think John Cage), and I just had a thought. Dice Music. Assign each note to number on a D12(?). Roll. A lot. Assign lengths of notes, dynamics, other markings, to different dice. Even assign the choosing of instruments to the dice. Brass, Woodwind, Strings, Voices? Then Trumpets, Trombones etc...

What sort of dice can you get? D20s, D6... what else?

Interesting comments thread there, with some daft suggestions as to where to go next.

• wpts has launched a Does my web site suck checklist, the bulk of which I agree with wholeheartedly (and some of you will have read the draft of my forthcoming rant about flash sites and navigation already - Vincent agrees)


• dm_of_the_rings has the most recent episode upDwarven Diplomacy. If Gimli is to be comic relief, at least he can be cool comic relief. And yes, that feed address is just for the comic, the full feed is 20sidedtale, but I'm a little feeded out at the moment so I used my mighty Wordpress fu to just syndicate that category.
• On the other hand, just reading the comic feed means missing out on stuff like this review of the Fate Diablo II clone:

Fate is one game where I think the “clone” moniker is deserved. Fate is more or less a straight-up Diablo clone. It duplicates the mechanics and play style of Diablo II right down to having the same windows with the same information that are opened with the same hotkeys.

On the subject of Diablo: play_diablo, set up by theweaselking, I have every intention of joining in properly once I've gotten myself a decent connection speed.

• davidnm has decided to abandone pretence of being a serious scientists, and explains how we could be descended from alien colonists:

It goes like this. Suppose you want to colonise a planet, but you want to avoid either the War of the Worlds scenario (bumped off by native life) or the 'terraforming by accident' scenario (your intestinal flora or whatever outcompete everything else on the planet). Basically, you need to make your proposed colonists fit in with the local environment.

So, you find some local dominant species to use as a template.

OK, he's not being serious, but still...

• Some official communities are starting to show ads. I have nothing further to add to that statement, but isn't it great that they started doing so just before the annual State of the Goat on news?


• Was going to write this up properly but I doubt I'll ever get around to it so, lj_nifty: Using Firefox 2 to quickly add RSS feeds to your LJ account:

Firefox 2 has a nifty feature for easily subscribing to RSS feeds

Since discovering this feature hack, I've added over 50 new feeds to various filters. Hence me being a little feeded out; I keep meaning to cut down but, y'know, they're all so cool. I'm not sure if non-paid users can use it to discover new feeds, but if not, or if you want something set up, it's so easy to do I'm happy to oblige.

Phew, that was a longer one; question: Would people prefer I cut this sort of thing, or is having all the links there easily more preferable?

I know there are some physicists and other science types hanging around, this looks very cool, but it's way beyond my normal abilities to get the basics of science.
Quantum computer solves problem, without running

“In a sense, it is the possibility that the algorithm could run which prevents the algorithm from running,” Kwiat said. “That is at the heart of quantum interrogation schemes, and to my mind, quantum mechanics doesn’t get any more mysterious than this.”

From jackthomas

Oh yeah; the performancing plug in for Firefox is great, as is the Livejournal Hook extension; both are on addons.mozilla.org