The Onion:

47 U. MAJORIS STAR SYSTEM—Roughly 18 months after discovering the collection of common Earth sounds contained on the golden record placed aboard the Voyager probe NASA launched in 1977, extraterrestrial Richard Ellinger, 237, admitted Friday he still hasn’t gotten around to listening to the whole thing. ”The wind, rain, and surf sounds are pretty cool, but I usually sort of zone out when it gets to the crickets chirping, and then I just end up turning it off,“ said Ellinger, adding that he will sometimes put the record on as background noise when he’s cleaning his electro-biological habitat. ”And to be totally honest, I almost always skip that track with the mother kissing her baby. It’s like, ’Who cares?‘ you know?” Ellinger said he plans on taking a few things he likes off the record—such as the traditional Peruvian wedding song, the humpback whale calls, and the tractor noises—and throwing them on a mix with some Elvis Costello classics.

Each quote below is either from Al Gore’s Book Earth in the Balance or from the Unabomber’s Manifesto.

This is nearly imposable! I got a 50%, or equal to random.

Adam Mansbach in The New Yorker:

Dear Novelist,

So you’d be honored if I blurbed your book? Me too! I can hardly wait to dive right in. However, due to the overwhelming number of requests I receive, I have instituted a new, comprehensive pricing system. Before proceeding, please consult this chart for reference.

These hidden camera shots from Nightmares Fear Factory in Niagara Falls, CA tell me three things. 1. Bros love going to haunted houses together. 2. Bros are easy to spook. 3. We should call them “scarebros.”

One of the strangest and funniest chain of PR I have seen:

Mr. Lynch then accused of Oracle of being ‘inaccurate’.   Either Mr. Lynch has a very poor memory or he’s lying.  ‘Some bank’ did not just happen to come to Oracle with Autonomy ‘on a list.’  The truth is that Mr. Lynch came to Oracle, along with his investment banker, Frank Quattrone, and met with Oracle’s head of M&A, Douglas Kehring and Oracle President Mark Hurd at 11 am on April 1, 2011.

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/503333
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/503343
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/sep/29/autonomy-oracle

Ball is in your court Oracle!

Headlines always try to cram a lot of information into a small number of words, but some Bloomberg headlines are in a class of their own.

Via Beyond The Beyond.

“I remember when I was a kid,” Pelletier explains in the text within the brochure, “there was a rumour – I don’t know if it was true - that at McDonalds, the benches were made so that you wouldn’t spend too much time there.” It was from that thought the idea for the Slightly Uncomfortable Chair Collection (SUCC) came.

Via kottke.org.

Regret the Error does their annual round up of best corrections:

Best Recipe Error
A report from Reuters:

Celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson has apologized after accidentally recommending a potentially deadly plant in organic salads.
The chef and TV presenter said in a magazine article that the weed henbane, also known as stinking nightshade, made an excellent addition to summertime meals…
Henbane, or Hyoscyamus niger, is toxic and can cause hallucinations, convulsions, vomiting and in extreme cases death.
Worrall Thompson, who was discussing his passion for organic foods, had confused the plant with another of a similar name.
The magazine “Healthy & Organic Living” printed an urgent warning: “Henbane is a very toxic plant and should never be eaten. As always, check with an expert when foraging or collecting wild plants.”
Henbane, a close relative of deadly nightshade, was used by Dr Crippen to kill his wife in 1910, and is thought to have been the main ingredient in the poison Romeo took in Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet.”
The chef had intended to refer to fat hen, a weed rich in vitamin C, that is edible, media reports said…
Worrall Thompson was reported in the media as saying the confusion had been “a bit embarrassing.”

Via kottke.org.

Click through for more.

The Near Future Laboratory Top-15 Criteria for New or Interactive Media Art are…

15. It doesn’t work

14. It doesn’t work because you couldn’t get a hold of a 220-to-110 volt converter/110-to-220 volt converter/PAL-to-NTSC/NTSC-to-PAL scan converter/serial-to-usb adapter/“dongle” of any sort..and the town you’re in is simply not the kind of place that has/cares about such things

13. Your audience looks under/behind your table/pedestal/false wall/drop ceiling or follows wires to find out “where the camera is”

12. Someone either on their blog or across the room is prattling on about the shifting relations between producers and consumers..and mentions your project

11. Your audience “interacts” by clapping/hooting/making bird calls/flapping their arms like a duck or waving their arms wildly while standing in front of a wall onto which is projected squiggly lines

10. Your audience asks amongst themselves, “how does it work?”

9. The exhibition curators insist that you spend hours standing by your own wall text so that you can explain to attendees “how it works”

8. It’s just like using your own normal, human, perfectly good eyeballs, only the resolution sucks and the colors are really lousy..plus the heat from the CPU fan is blowing on your forehead which makes you really uncomfortable and schvitz-y

7. Someone in your audience wearing a Crumpler bag, slinging a fancy digital SLR and/or standing with their arms folded smugly says, “Yeah..yeah, I could’ve done that too..c’mon dude..some Perlin Noise? And Processing/Ruby-on-Rails/AJAX/Blue LEDs/MaxMSP/An Infrared Camera/Lots of Free Time/etc.? Pfft..It’s so easy…”

6. Someone in your audience, maybe the same guy with the Crumpler bag and digital SLR excitedly says, “Oh, dude. That should totally be a Facebook app!”

5. It’s called a “project” and not a “piece of art”

4. You saw the “project” years ago…and here it is again…now with multi-touch interaction and other fancy digital bells and Web 2.0-y whistles

3. Your audience cups their hands over various proturbances/orifices at or nearby your project attempting to confuse/interact with the camera/sensor/laser beam, even if it uses no such technology

2. There’s a noticeable preponderance of smoothly shifting red, green and blue lighting effects

1. People wonder if it wasn’t all really done in Photoshop, anyway

Via Bruce Sterling at Beyond the Beyond.

The Reg:

The first, most basic, skill: be able to distinguish the different versions of the web.

Web versions, 1.0 to 2.0

Version	Characteristics
Web 1.0	Programming model equivalent to that of a slightly up-market 3270 terminal. Forms are filled in with the sequence: tab tab tab tab tab tab bonk.
Web 1.00001	The beginning of the rich web experience: the first ever, primitive Javascript code fragment is written. It generates an unwanted popup, and snaffles your credit card details.
Web 1.1	No visible difference from Web 1.0, apart from IE showing the text 'Javascript error' in its status bar.
Web 1.2	Standard buttons are upgraded with smart 3D-looking GIFs. These react to mouseover events by bobbing up and down politely over their drop shadows. Remember when we were excited by this sort of scriptery? (None of your CSS cleverness then.) It seems so quaint now. It makes me want to cry, thinking about the good old days of ugly web pages loading slowly.
Web 1.3	When you get to the home page of a V1.2 site with FireFox, it displays badly. When you go to a V1.3 website such as www.fdms.com with FireFox, it tells you to eff off and get IE. (These traditionalists in fact would seem to prefer it if you used IE4.) The age of 'you aren't good enough for our website' has begun, reaching full fruition at Web 1.5, see below.
Web 1.4	Basic client-side validation added. Forms are filled in with the sequence: tab tab tab tab tab What do you mean 'invalid post code' you bloody thing? The dread phrase 'next generation of 3d smileys' is encountered for the very first time.

Via Tim Bray.

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH SAMUEL BRONKOWSKI AT HIS HOME IN TUCSON RESERVATION, BY GALEN PARR 5.1, DATED JUNE 17, 2078

SB: This one’s called, “Bruce Schneier and the King of the Crabs.” It mostly must have really happened, too – it’s how we lost Barbados, or Bermuda, or some island down there anyway.

GP: I don’t believe we have that one on file. But it would probably be Barbados, because that’s still a restricted zone. I don’t know why. I thought it was nuclear, though.

SB: Well, may well be I can shed some light on that. I personally don’t think this actually happened to Bruce Schneier, but that’s the way it was told to me, and it’s still worth telling. Story goes, ol’ Bruce Schneier was vacationing on Barbados with his dog once. And they’d go out walking on the beach, as men and dogs often do.

Via Schneier on Security.

W. Daniel Hillis for Physics Today at The Long Now Foundation:

One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. His reaction was unequivocal, "That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard." For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company.

Via Daring Fireball.

Posted by Listener Kliph Nesteroff to WFMU's Beware of the Blog.

Well, it's time to cast those ballots again with this relic of early TV: The Hoot Gibson Show. It "stars" an aging B-movie western figure of the same name. The real meat of this program lies in its sponsor. At the 6:50 mark the sponsor appears in the flesh, a Chinchilla salesman who could not deliver a line of script to save his life.

Via Justin.