Yet Another Place for Luca to Not Post Things

May
6th

Sun

most-awkward-moments:

Get your crazy cat lady starter kit here.

The way ReCAPTCHA works is they take two scanned words, one of which has been properly identified, and one of which hasn’t, and they ask you to enter both of them. Obviously, they can only check your answer for the one they know, so ‘uertion math_formula_I-can’t_unerstand’, ‘weird_Asian_characters Booption’, ‘bar_chart dstiv’, and ‘problem? theresnothingthereomgfsqtqteuf’ would work in each of these cases.
…As you’d know if you tried entering the CAPTCHA rather than just demanding a new one each time it looks hard.

Get your crazy cat lady starter kit here.

The way ReCAPTCHA works is they take two scanned words, one of which has been properly identified, and one of which hasn’t, and they ask you to enter both of them. Obviously, they can only check your answer for the one they know, so ‘uertion math_formula_I-can’t_unerstand’, ‘weird_Asian_characters Booption’, ‘bar_chart dstiv’, and ‘problem? theresnothingthereomgfsqtqteuf’ would work in each of these cases.

…As you’d know if you tried entering the CAPTCHA rather than just demanding a new one each time it looks hard.

Get your crazy cat lady starter kit here.

If you’ve ever had to sort dates, you should know that “year”, “month”, and “day” are not atoms. They are strings of digits of decreasing significance:
Europe: 2 0 - 0 5 - 1 9 8 2
Japan: 1 9 8 2 - 0 5 - 2 0
America: 0 5 - 2 0 - 1 9 8 2
Let’s be clear: only one of these makes any sense, which is why it’s been made the ISO standard. Well done, Japan.

Get your crazy cat lady starter kit here.

If you’ve ever had to sort dates, you should know that “year”, “month”, and “day” are not atoms. They are strings of digits of decreasing significance:

Europe: 2 0 - 0 5 - 1 9 8 2

Japan: 1 9 8 2 - 0 5 - 2 0

America: 0 5 - 2 0 - 1 9 8 2

Let’s be clear: only one of these makes any sense, which is why it’s been made the ISO standard. Well done, Japan.

(via most-awkward-moments)

Mar
25th

Sun

On Spoilers

So, The Hunger Games (film) came out a few days ago, and people are getting upset about spoilers being posted.

I’m generally very unconcerned about spoilers, so maybe I’m missing stuff, but…were people this was when Harry Potter films came out? This lovely lady wrote an entire novel of spoilers some time ago—long enough ago that we’re all discussing spoilerific details of it in the open, because there’s generally accepted to be a statute of limitations on spoilers. (The movie does differ in some important ways, but I don’t know that it differs in any SPOILABLE ways.)

Maybe there shouldn’t be a limit on how long we have to respect spoilability. New people are being born and learning to read (or watch films) so spoilers still effect them. Will (has?) Harry Potter turned into a Romeo and Juliet, where everyone knows they both die years before ever reading the play? Will the comic pages happily publish that Harry was his horcruz? Am I supposed to tag this post with “Harry Potter spoilers”, “Citizen Kane spoilers”, “Star Wars spoilers”, and “Romeo and Juliet spoilers”?

Of course, even if we do identify and segregate spoilers, some things won’t be the same. You won’t grow up discovering who the Half-Blood Prince was the same time as everyone else, and you probably won’t read the child-oriented Philosopher’s Stone ten years before you read the more mature Hallows. But things that can be spoiled today can be spoiled in a hundred years.

Mar
17th

Sat

theboywhopaints:

distr4ct:

um

are you seeing what i’m seeing or

For the implied to be naked part, I remember in an interview Leven said that her an Alex were told to spice up the sexual chemistry. GUYS.

Or it could just be Katniss washing up in a stream. IDEK.

You’re ignoring the worst part: two teenagers HOLD HANDS! For god’s sake, CHILDREN are going to be watching this FILTH! NONMATURE MINDS WILL BE CORRUPTED!

(via theboywhopaints)

Mar
15th

Thu

Post-Happy Dance high-five.

Mar
14th

Wed

Vlogbrothers on June 28, 2007

John Green:

So, Hank, as a project, I propose that you and I over the next week give several gifts to Kiva.org—maybe the Nerdfighters will join us.

Maybe, John. Maybe over 15 000 Nerdfighters will join you, especially when it’s really free.

Mar
12th

Mon

nrdc:

Good News for Consumers: Fuel Economy on the Rise

New cars and trucks are getting better fuel economy and saving consumers money at the pump. Recent reports are showing an on-going upward trend, one which is expected to accelerate as new standards ramp up.

According to researcher Michael Sivak and his colleagues at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, U.S. automobile sales in February hit their highest mark—23.7 mpg—since they started collecting in October 2007.

Read more.

Average mpg is up to 23.7 mpg? Um….my brother drives a twenty-year-old standard Tercel and gets around 40 mpg. My dad drives a ~5yo standard Corolla and gets close to 40 mpg. My mom drives a ~3yo Prius and probably gets close to 40mpg. (I bike and take the bus, so my marginal fuel consumption approaches zero.)

Seems like average mpg in 2012 should be able to beat twenty-year-old cars, maybe? No?

It has done way the hell up, though. Nice. But let’s try to do reasonably well, not just less terribly.

Mar
9th

Fri

Here you go my children, learn the actual facts before you go around blindly listening to whatever someone says, and acting on it. — Wesley Ssushicatt

From the video: “And [the LRA] haven’t struck again in six years. …what’s going on in Syria is way more extreme than what’s going on, or what has went on, excuse me, when Kony was striking.”

From Human Rights Watch, probably the most credible entity with regard to human rights issues around the word:

Between December 14 and 17, 2009, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan rebel group, carried out a horrific attack in the Makombo area of Haut Uele district in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, near the border with Sudan. In a well-planned operation, the LRA killed more than 321 civilians and abducted more than 250 others, including at least 80 children. The vast majority of those killed were adult men who were first tied up before LRA combatants hacked them to death with machetes or crushed their skulls with axes or heavy wooden sticks. Family members and local authorities later found battered bodies tied to trees; other bodies were found in the forest or brush land all along the 105-kilometer round journey made by the LRA group during the operation.

And 2010 if you want something more recent.

So, yes, the LRA isn’t going so strong in Uganda right now, and yes we shouldn’t be propping up Uganda’s asshole government, and shouldn’t be giving money to Invisible Children, but to claim that, because the LRA is largely out of Uganda, they must no longer doing anything bad is dangerously false. While the US is sending a lot of help to the evil Ugandan government (partly because they fight evil extremists in Somalia), the the military advisers Obama sent over to fight the LRA are largely intended to operate in South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with approval of those nations.

Syria and Uganda are not the only two countries in the world.

If you’re getting your news from the TV, you’re doing it as wrong as if you’re getting it from random YouTube videos.

Side notes: There is no credible evidence that Kony is dead, and the KONY 2012 video does eventually mention that the war is not in Uganda.

And because making fun of Rush is in vogue right now:

“Obama Invades Uganda, Targets Christians.” — Everybody’s favorite political commentator

Sometimes you just gotta beat up a few Christians. Isn’t that why we elected a Muslim in the first place? ;-)

(Source: wesleh, via anniephantom)

» Hunger Games girls for Seventeen Magazine

I keep seeing Jacqueline Emerson(?) and thinking it’s Kayley Hyde. Instead of Foxface, I’ma call her Owlface, because it amuses me.

(via odairbear)

Mar
5th

Mon

fillmyeyeswithstars:

seriously.

I always investigate. Someone needs to deal with the scary noises, and as a male in my twenties, I necessarily consider myself invincible and therefore the best choice.

People occasionally knock on my door in the middle of the night. My solution is to go out and talk to them. Sometimes they’re looking for some random guy. Sometimes they want a light. Sometimes they want a hug. So far, none has wanted to murder me in the night. So that’s nice.

(Source: way-s)