Quartz City

myimages/readyinfographic-pf.jpg” alt=”" hspace=”10″ vspace=”10″ align=”right”>Silly me, of course I should have realized that the FARK’ers were going to be all over this. One of the best FARK photoshop contests ever.

He is 65 million years old and was at one point the king of the Cretaceous period. Now he likes tacos and is traveling the world. Scott Listfield takes pictures of dinosaurs, and creates paintings about astronauts and dinosaurs. Astronautdinosaur.com is the domain name.

Communist chic hits mainstream.

Massine Productions GmbH hopes to recreate a 10,000-square metre (107,600 sq ft) replica of East Germany, complete with surly border guards, rigorous customs inspections, authentic East German mark notes, and restaurants with regulation bland East German food.

Back in 1991 I distinctly recall saying something about how there would eventually be a paintball knockoff game where one side is the East Germans, the other side are the guards with the object being to cross Checkpoint Charlier without getting hit.

Specifically, what happens in Nashville when the bridges ice up and drivers forget to slow the hell down. Watch the video, sit back and let the hilarity ensue.

Just as a FYI for folks playing around with NewsMonster and want to delete it. Annoyingly, there’s no uninstaller for it yet, but these instructions seem to work correctly.

Just realized something… Is there anyway we can get Mars to be included in the Axis Of Evil? There would have to be an invasion…

Mark Pilgrim outlines some anti-bot strategies in “How to block spambots, ban spybots, and tell unwanted robots to go to hell“

A thread on rec.arts.sf.written excerpts a weirdly prescient description of a space shuttle re-entry crash from Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Inferno:

“One of those days,” Corbett said. “First, a twenty-six hour hold while we replaced one of the solid boosters. That was only irritating. We lost one of the three main motors going up. Then after we made orbit one of the fuel tank clamps jammed. Either of you know what a space shuttle looks like?”

“Yes.” “No.”

“Well, the tank is big and bulky and cheap. We carry the main motors down aboard the dart, the winged section, but we leave the tank to burn up in the atmosphere. If we couldn’t get the tank loose there wouldn’t have been any point in going down.”

“Did you?”

“Sure. We fired the orbital motors in bursts until the clamp sprung open and let us loose. Then we had to use more fuel to get back to our orbit. We were supposed to dump cargo and change orbit, but there wasn’t enough fuel. We had to go down.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. I spacewalked out and looked at the fuel tank clamp. I swear there was nothing wrong. But maybe the metal fatigued, or maybe the hatch over the clamp lock got twisted–anyway, we were halfway down and going like a meteor when we got a burnthrough under the nose. I heard the maintenance techs– they were the cargo I couldn’t jettison– screaming in the instrument room, then the whole nose peeled back in front of me. I woke up by that ferryboat. The crowd pushed me along to Minos, and he threw me into the whirlwind.”

A recent article in comp.sys.mac.comm talks about how to change the attribution line in Mail.app (using OS X 10.2.x).

1. Edit /System/Library/Frameworks/Message.framework/Resources/English.lproj/Message.strings in TextEdit.
2. Change REPLY_MESSAGE_PREFIX and REPLY_MESSAGE_24HOUR_PREFIX to whatver
   you want, such as “%%@ said:\n\n”
3. Save your changes

Don’t forget to make a copy of the original file before you start editing things.

The Fed’s ready.gov web site o’ paranoia is just oozing tons of infographics ripe for the picking. The nation’s parodists have been working overtime. See the results here, here, here, here, and here. Once you’re done with the tour, be sure to pick up a t-shirt or BBQ Apron for the coming nuclear inferno.