Factoid of the day

In Philadelphia, in 2007, Greenpeace accidentally issued a press release containing the words "In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE]."

Which is just perfect.

Cheers to robhu for the link.

The results of drunken scrabble

[Poll #1059377]

Making a stand

Republican mayor of San Diego stands up and says that he'll sign a gay marriage bill. Breaks up completely on several occasions, clearly finds it very hard to go through the whole thing.

I know that to many people, seeing someone doing "the right thing" won't come across as terribly special. I mean, after all he's just saying that he'll give people the rights they should have had anyway. But he's making a big political move there, placing his career on the line, and probably alienating large numbers of the people he's known for years. Recognising and applauding it is something I heartily approve of.

video here. Cheers to onceupon for the link.

When authoritarians get loose

This is fascinating. A large, complex world-sim was played with a large group of people. Beforehand they were divided up according to their results on a personality test designed to find out how authoritarian they were. The authoritarians all played a game together, and then the wishy-washy liberal types played a game together. They weren't told what the test was about, or how they were being split up.

Can you guess which group managed the planet reasonably well and which one managed to have a nuclear war and over a billion people dead of starvation?

Latest firefox plugin

XBMC - right click on a video on youtube, select "Send to XBox". Run into other room, watch on big TV.

Wifi

I'm currently transferring files from Ed's old hard drive to the Terastation. I'm getting around 18megabits/second throughput. Is this a reasonable amount to be getting? Or is there a problem?