Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!

The following is from a SF Gate article on evolution.  I can't help but wonder how many of the votes are from outside the US.

Hic Sunt Dracones

Despite how the above picture may appear, the head of the creature doesn't actually look down and to the right.  It's all an optical illusion that causes the head to appear to follow you.  It looks even more impressive when you move about. (910KiB)  (Note: movie requires the Xvid codec.  I also have no idea who shot it.)

Here are the plans (963KiB), for anyone who wants to try it themselves.  There's also a cropped and resized version (320KiB) that's optimized for printing on an 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper.  You'll still need the original plans for reference, though, as the some directions were in the parts that got cropped.

Baking Entry

Following in the footsteps of Shan's Baking Up Another Tasty Meme entry (Nov. 23^rd), here's a recipe for key lime pie that I got from Di.  I probably won't get a chance to make it until this weekend, and even then, I doubt anyone who reads this will be able to have any (unless there's a suprise trip to Fredericton, but it's not like my cooking is that good), but here it is anyways.

You will need:

• A 9-inch baked pastry shell
• 3 eggs, seperated
• 14oz of sweetened condensed milk (about 1 1/2 cans)
• 1/2 cup concentrated lime juice
• A few drops green food colouring (optional)
• 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
• 1/3 cup sugar

Preheat oven to 350°F.  In a medium bowl, beat egg yolks; stir in sweetened condensed milk, lime juice, and food colouring if desired.  Pour mixture into prepared pastry shell.  In a small mixer bowl, beat egg whites with cream of tartar until soft peaks form; gradually add sugar, beating until stiff but not dry.  Spread on top of pie, sealing carefully to edge of shell.  Bake 12 to 15 minutes, or until golden brown.  Allow pie to cool, then chill 3 hours or until set.  Refrigerate leftovers.

For a lighter filling, fold one stiffly beaten egg white into filling mixture.

Wireless Troubleshooting

I recently got my wireless router back from D-Link. (It had been sent in for repairs to fix its habit of power-cycling every 30 seconds or so.)  Since it came back, I've been happy with the results I've been getting (no mysterious power-cycling or sudden losses of connectivity), with one minor exception.  Since I got it back, I've had issues connecting to idun (this machine) immediately after I reboot loki (my Windows machine).

Following a reboot, I am unable to connect to the webserver on idun from loki (although I can telnet into it and get the HTTP 400 error page), nor am I able to SFTP (although I can SSH), nor export an X-Windows program that is any more complicated than xterm.  What's more, it's only idun that these difficulties arise with.  I have no problems connecting with any protocol to sovereign (DNS server and router) or the XBox.  The problem immediately rectifies itself if I reboot the wireless router (which is acting as a switch, since its WAN port is unplugged and unconfigured), unless, of course, I reboot loki again.

I've been to D-Link's site, and their FAQ and knowledge base is a little less than helpful (consisting largely of things like "How do I disable SSID broadcast", you know, the sort of general technical support questions that 2 minutes with the manual or a cursory glance at the router's config interface would reveal).  So basically, has anyone else had these problems, and how did they fix them?

Mozilla Tip Number… Uh… One!

The following is a tip for anyone using Mozilla Firefox 1.0 (although it may work in other versions of Firefox, or other Mozilla-based browsers).

By default, Firefox 1.0 places two search engines at the top of the list of installed searchbox plugins: Google and Yahoo.  Now, personally, I can't stand this, if only because I find it makes more sense to look for the Google plugin in the same spot as my other Google ones (Images, News, &c.).  Unfortunately, the documentation doesn't mention how to turn this off.  So here's a brief (non-technical, or as non-technical as I can manage) explanation of how to do so:

Type about:config in the address bar and hit enter. Enter search in the filter and hit enter; you should see a number of results, but we're only interested in two of them. If you want all of your entries to be sorted alphabetically, modify the values for browser.search.order.1 and browser.search.order.2 to blank strings (double-clicking on the entry brings up the modify dialog).  However, if you want to display the search engines in your own personal order, then modify the value to be the name of the engine as displayed in the search box's drop-down list. (For example: If I wanted Wikipedia to be the first engine displayed, then I'd change browser.search.order.1 to have a value of 'Wikipedia (EN)', as that's the plugin name.)  If you want to change the position of more than just 2 engines, then right click and create a new string called browser.search.engine.3 for the third entry, .4 for the fourth, &c.

One day I may get around to making an extension to let you customise this, but right now I can't be bothered.  (Thanks goes to Gnerma, from the Mozillazine forums, who helped me find the appropriate settings that needed to be modified.)

Imperious Caesar, Dead and Turn'd to Clay, Might Stop a Hole to Keep the Wind Away:

Slather on the makeup, light up a clove cigarette, and put on your best all-black-outfit, because today's entry is about death.

We'll start out with some writings about death on a grand scale.  The latest issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (home of the Doomsday Clock) has an article called Rethinking Doomsday, in which various possible vectors of terrorist attacks are examined to determine just how worried people should be about them.  The conclusion is fairly obvious (a nuclear attack is the most likely to succeed, and any chemical, biological, or nanobot (!!) attacks are likely to be largely ineffective, and even then a nuclear attack by a terrorist group is far less worrying than the prospect of an accidental launch by a nuclear state), but there's still some interesting information in it.  For example, the Tokyo subway attack that's always brought up as an example of terrorists using chemical weapons, used 5 seperate packages and killed a grand total of 12 people, and that was in an enclosed area with a large number of people.  (Even more interesting: "Shoko Asahara, the leader of the group, aspired either to be Japan's prime minister or to kill as many of his countrymen as possible."  Talk about being a sore loser…)

Or how about smallpox? Remember all the hubbub about smallpox?  Well, it turns out that the vast majority of people who were vacinnated between 25 to 75 years ago remain immune.  And the vaccine shortage?  Well, somehow 80 million doses of unknown origin have been mysteriously discovered.  (Which, of course, raises the question:  just how do you lose 80 million doses of anything?)

Here's something else interesting, which comes from a related article about possible terrorist attacks coming from within the US:  "U.S. District Judge James Cohn rules that Jordi [ex-US Ranger who plotted to bomb abortion clinics, gay bars, and certain churches] is not a terrorist because federal laws require that plots have an international component to be considered terrorism."  How's that for odd?

Moving on to death on a more personal level, I recently discovered thanatos.net's gallery of death masks.  There's a large collection, including ones from as far back as 2300 BCE, along with chimps,  poets, philosophers, criminals, authors, revolutionaries (both famous and infamous), and some people for whom a death mask just seems fitting.  The death mask for Mary, Queen of Scots, is particularly interesting, as it looks less like a bust, and more like the head to a china doll.  And, since I've got to make the title on topic somehow, there're also these two.

As a final note to this long-winded and rambling entry (at least, more so than normal): I'm positive that CBC must have gone digging through their archive of Putin photos just to find the perfect "Evil Overlord" photo to accompany this article.

1 Part Gin, 3 Parts Tonic Water, Ice, and a Slice of Lemon

Proving that the Catholics really do have saints for everything: November 11^th is the feast day of Saint Martin of Tours, patron saint of alcoholism, reformed alcoholics, vintners, wine growers, and wine makers.^*  In other words: cheers!

^* Not to be confused with the patron saints of brewers (Feb. 6^th (two of them), May 4^th, June 5^th & 8^th, Aug. 10^th, 14^th, & 28^th, Sept. 28^th, Oct. 18^th, & Dec. 4^th & 6^th), distillers (Aug. 25^th), vine growers (Jan. 22^nd, Feb. 6^th, April 2^nd, July 6^th, & Aug. 10^th), vine dressers (Jan. 22^nd) or wine merchants, bar staff, bartenders, and bar keepers (all Feb. 6^th)  No word on when the feast days for the patron saints of champagne bottlers, champagne growers, and champagne makers are, though.  (Which all goes to show: if there's one thing the Catholics know, it's how to take care of their drunks.)

Free From Moths, Silverfish, Rust and Dry-Rot, and Men With Matches

The following is for anyone who has Dave Higgins' Project Gutenberg search plugins for Mozilla (the ones that are available from mycroft) installed.

Sometime between the plugin being uploaded (Feb 2004) and now, Project Gutenberg changed the manner in which they performed searches.  This, of course, left the plugin completely useless.  As a remedy, I've rewritten the plugin to use the new search format.  Unfortunately, it will take several weeks to get uploaded to mycroft, so until then I'm hosting them here:

• Project Gutenberg author search
• Project Gutenberg title search

Just un-archive the files into the searchplugins directory located inside your main Mozilla directory.  The sidebar results (for non-Firefox users) could use a bit more polish, but I currently can't be bothered to work at it.

What Else Is There To Think About, Except My Job, My Dirty Job?

I'm not sure where this came from originally (I received it from a friend, who shall remain anonymous), or if it's under any sort of copyright law.  However, as a bit of a film buff and a fan of Orson Welles, I couldn't not pass it by.

So, first, some background: as most people are aware, Orson Welles had difficulty finding good paying work in Hollywood after the negative attention Citizen Kane received from the media empire of William Randoff Hearst.  The sheer number of projects he started on, but never got beyond a screenplay or initial test shots, is massive, and it would take several pages just to list them all.  However, by the end of his career he was paying the bills by doing voice acting.  (His final film roll was as the voice of Unicron for Transformers: The Movie.)

Among the various things he recorded was a set of three commercials for frozen peas, frozen fishsticks, and beef burgers.  The spots have become somewhat infamous in various circles (and parodies of them appeared several times on the short-lived Critic series), largely because of the existence of a short out-takes recording that features Welles running through the lines and arguing with the director.

That recording is what I was sent.

It's almost too much to listen to, as a man of great talent (and with an amazing voice) reads through material that is pure drivel.  It's almost depressing in some respects.  Despite that, I still recommend film buffs or Welles fans listen to it.  It's just one of those things you have to hear at least once.

I Do, You're Lucky the Bar's Open to You

As a fun current event thing, I'm taking bets on when the winner of the US presidential election will be definitively known.  No money is involved, but you do get bragging rights if you're correct.  You can also chose the same date as someone else, I don't really care that much.  The only date you probably shouldn't chose is anything past Dec. 8th, which is the day the electoral college meets (second Wed. in Dec.).  Extremely cautious probably won't want to chose anything past Nov. 30, which is around the date that the state results have to be in to the electoral college.

Just post your choice in the comments.  Current guesses:

• Me: 4 weeks (which is Nov. 30th)
• Dmitrii: 2 weeks (so Nov. 16th)
• Jon: Nov 30th
• Aaron: 2AM EST (so Nov. 3rd)
• Greg: End of the month (so Nov 30th as well)
• Craig: Nov. 29, 11:37AM (Kathmandu time, GMT +5:45) (Now that's just being too specific)

Update (1PM Nov. 3rd): Word is that Kerry is calling a press conference in an hour or so in order to concede defeat.  That places Aaron as the only person who's even remotely close to having guessed the correct time.

Bush, Kerry, and… Vlad the Impaler?

Some days truth really is stranger than fiction; so I can thank Dmitrii for sending me this link that shows the relationship between George W. Bush, John Kerry, and the "Son of the Dragon" himself, Vlad Ţepeş (aka Vlad the Impaler, but better known as Vlad III Dracula).

There are, however, several errors that I can immediately spot.  The first being that the main tree page identifies Vlad III as Vlad the Monk, a title that doesn't belong to him, but rather to his brother, Vlad Călugărul. The second is that the page linking Vlad to the House of Windsor lists Vlad II Dracul as "Vlad II, Dracul the Dragon"; in other words: Vlad II, the Dragon the Dragon. Basically, nothing terribly major (at least, nothing a couple of lists of Romanian rulers won't help you sort out), but errors nonetheless.  I also can't find where they came up with Mircea Ciobanul (Mircea the Shepherd) being Mircea III, as he was at least the 4th Mircea to become Prince of Wallachia. (The others before him being:

• Mircea cel Băn (Mircea the old), father of Vlad II Dracul
• Mircea, son of Vlad II Dracul and brother of Vlad III Dracula
• Around 1488 a Mircea was Prince of Wallachia whom I can't quite identify. Vlad III Dracula's brother was murdered in 1447, according to all accounts, yet the Romanian site claims that this Mircea was him.  It's unlikely to be the grandson of Vlad III Dracula, as his son, Mihnea cel Rau (Mihnea the Evil), hadn't even come to power yet; likewise with Mircea Ciobanul's father, Radu cel Mare (Radu the Great).
• Mircea, son of Mihnea cel Rau and grandson of Vlad III Dracula.)

Addendum:  Interestingly enough (or, at least, interesting to me), while the title Voivode Vlad (also found on the House of Windsor page) is technically correct, it's much like saying 'King George' without specifying which George you're talking about.  (Voivode was the title given to the ruler of various provinces, including Wallachia. Therefore Vlad Dracul, Vlad the Monk, Radu the Great, and Mircea the Shepherd should all also have the title Voivode attatched their names.)

On an unrelated note: I finally upgraded to MT3 over the weekend, a change brought about by the recent lack of updates to the MT master blacklist (which MT-Blacklist 2.x relies on to a lesser extent than MT-Blacklist 1.x) and due to the fact that a free 5 User Commercial license (normal cost: $199.95USD) is available to anyone who signs up for the Six Apart Professional Network.  I haven't spotted any problems yet, but I also haven't tested all of my plugins.  Any problems anyone encounters should obviously be reported to me.