Sean’s Mental Walkabout

Doing a good job around here is like wetting your pants in a dark
suit; you get a warm feeling, but no one notices.
   -- unknown

As seen on the gtk-perl mailing list.

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Yes, it’s been a picture heavy couple of days, but what can I say, there have been some great pictures out there.

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Behold the glory of the interweb…

I think I may need to order up a poster.

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Welcome to living in the Police State. To ensure your continued enjoyment of constant surveillance, might I suggest a few key products.

First we have our ATT phone card. It has the advantage of routing all your calling information directly to the NSA, so you need not worry about whether you should call the NSA yourself every month to register all your phone conversations.

For those that don’t quite subscribe to the view point that All Your Base Are Belong to NSA, we’ve got a custom door mat that you might appreciated.

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From our friends at Ctrl+Alt+Del online (which Jimix turned me on to a couple months back):

Hehehe.

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I came across the following while looking for shower parts for our bathroom remodeling.

The next time I need to travel through time, fighting the Daleks, while smelling fresh as an Irish Spring, I know where to look.

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The name and the image caught my attention when looking through RSS. Given that finding a place we can all eat ends up being difficult at times, something like this might be quite helpful.
And I, for one, welcome the arrival of our Wheel ‘O Yum food dictators!

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I came across this on Science Blogs.

A question from yesterday’s final exam, paraphrased slightly:

Element X decays into Element Y with a half-life of 30 minutes. You are given a sample containing three times as many atoms of Y as X. If the initial sample was pure X, how long ago was it prepared?

One student wrote:

It seems like a lifetime ago…

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I just saw a link to this analysis of internet spellings of Aaarrgh on jwz’s blog. It is one of those fun uses of google, as well as an interesting look at word usage. There is also a fun flash version

When I was working on the Sydney Olympics in 2000, I was responsible for a big part of the “FanMail” delivery to Athletes from the FanMail.olympics.com website (it is long dead, don’t bother looking for it). We ended up writing a modified soundex based system, with some other hooks, after doing an analysis of mispellings from the 1998 games.

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Just noticed this buried in the middle of a Groklaw entry. 100 things we didn’t know this time last year is the year end almanac of BBC’s 10 things we didn’t know last week.

Among the best include:

12. Until the 1940s rhubarb was considered a vegetable. It became a fruit when US customs officials, baffled by the foreign food, decided it should be classified according to the way it was eaten.

19. The = sign was invented by 16th Century Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde, who was fed up with writing “is equal to” in his equations. He chose the two lines because “noe 2 thynges can be moare equalle”.

35. The name Lego came from two Danish words “leg godt”, meaning “play well”. It also means “I put together” in Latin.

48. A quarter of the world’s clematis come from one Guernsey nursery, where production will top 4.5m plants this year alone.

73. One in six children think that broccoli is a baby tree.

74. It takes a gallon of oil to make three fake fur coats.

88. A single “mother” spud from southern Peru gave rise to all the varieties of potato eaten today, scientists have learned.

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