I'm reading a Goddamn book, thank you very much.

So Mozilla just released Firefox 3 TODAY, Download Day 2008. I'm ridiculously stoked -- I'm using FF3 right now, and I'm practically vibrating with excitement and joy at its Godlike perfection. My almost religious devotion to the thing reminds me of an xkcd comic where a character suddenly has a moment of clarity regarding Firefox, which then quickly subsides (thank God). Anyway, you can get Firefox 3 at Firefox.com, so get it now, because they're trying to set the record for most downloads EVAR.

Oh, and here's the comic:

BoingBoing had a little blurb about a National News article about the South China Mall -- the largest mall in the world, and also one of the emptiest. The idea of dead malls was intriguing, and the article points to Deadmalls.com as a source of information and photographs pertaining to hundreds of dead malls throughout the U.S. I took a look at the South China Mall's official website, mostly because I read an excerpt of a description of "Amazing World", their little outdoor fun park. It sounded tantalizingly like Engrish, so I took at look the the page in the hope that I would find more. Here it is. If you think it seems a little too well translated at first, trust me. It gets a lot funnier. Enjoy.

So over the past couple of days on BoingBoing, I've noticed a disturbing amount of posts regarding alarmingly paranoid airport security. For example, this girl was wearing a necklace with a pendant in the shape of a tiny revolver on it. The pendant was solid metal, with no moving parts, yet it freaked out the (Canadian) security guard, who dropped the whole "ya never know when they'll invent a gun with NO MOVING PARTS" defense. It was pretty weak sauce. Less than two days later, I found this post, in which a guy with a Transformer on his t-shirt isn't allowed to board the flight with the thing on, because the picture of the Transformer is holding a picture of a gun. As the post says, what's he gonna do, threaten people by brandishing the shirt at them? In the end the guy had to change his shirt. And here's the worst of it: this poor guy has a tattoo of a bomb on his shoulder. He hasn't tried to board any flights yet, but I have a feeling he won't be allowed on if that thing's visible.

So yesterday was the 25th anniversary of WarGames, an excellent movie about Matthew Broderick nearly starting World War III by unknowingly hacking into NORAD's missile command center using his massive 80s home computer. Even though the technology depicted in the movie is hilariously ancient, the film has aged well, and Christopher Knight of "The Knight Shift" blogging excellence has written a great little retrospective on the effect that it had on the cultural importance of computers, especially the Internet.

Slashdot says that John McCain wishes to continue George Bush's illegal wiretapping operation, on the grounds that our Founding Fathers didn't have terrorism in mind when they wrote the Constitution. Mm-hm. I bet those weaklings didn't even know what war was. They probably couldn't even conceive in their tiny little minds the possibility that the U.S. might be invaded or attacked by a foreign power some time in the distant and foggy future. John McCain is so right, guys. Right?

Anyway, on to the weirder news. Some Mexican woman was caught trying to smuggle a statue of Jesus made entirely out of cocaine across the border. Apparently she was paid by some guy to do it, but I think it should be obvious to any rational person that attempting to get through a border checkpoint with a crack Jesus in your trunk is only advisable under impossibly desperate conditions. In other words: it's really not a very smart thing to do. BoingBoing Gadgets found these crazy platform shoes that have GameBoys embedded in the heels. Oh, what the Japanese will do for entertainment . . . although I myself would probably get a pair of those, if only for the little Pikachu inside the heel. It's like a shrine to Pokemon in a shoe, and who doesn't love Pokemon?!

To round everything off, I'll leave you with this fantastic picture of these excellently-costumed Stormtroopers (probably some of the 501st) having a little stare-off with some cops in London. I bet those suckers wished they had guns, didn't they?

BoingBoing just put up a post showing a creepy short film involving a girl drawing with a giant smiling pencil. It's quite good, although really strange. Apparently it was made by a student at Savannah College of the Arts, and the blog post also links to a making-of video that does absolutely nothing to explain what happened in the film. Nonetheless, I rather liked it. Link

Teddy recently pointed me to some hilarious YouTube videos advertising a fictitious product known as PowerThirst. It's a great parody of the huge energy drink craze we're seeing now, with a bunch of crazy made-up buzzwords like "menergy".

A few days ago, I was reading BoingBoing and this post happened to catch my eye, since I've read a bit about Tor and onion routing. I read the thing, and went on and read the actual Instructable, of course. The post mentioned a novel, Little Brother, that it said had inspired not just the one Instructable, but a whole series of HOWTOs. At that point I looked the book up on Wikipedia, and despite the small article size, it had a link to Cory's (the author's) site, right in the middle of a sentence stating that it was available for free there as a Creative Commons download. Obviously, I sought out the download and got it in HTML and started reading the thing. I liked it enough to download the PDF version and put it on my PSP (I use bookr as a portable PDF reader). Over the next couple of days, the only book I read was Little Brother. I finally finished it at 2 in the morning three days after I downloaded it, having gone to bed at 12. And boy, was it good. If you need convincing and you're a Neil Gaiman fan, know that Gaiman himself recommends that book over "pretty much every other book" he's read this year. Now that's something.

Little Brother is about a San Franciscan high school junior named Marcus Yallow whose school constantly spies on its students using gait-recognition cameras and arphids and SchoolBook laptops that watch their every move. Marcus likes to subvert the school's security by nuking arphids, hacking his SchoolBook so he can do whatever he wants on it with impunity, and putting sharp gravel in his shoes so the gait-recognition cameras can't spot him. One day, Marcus and his buddy Darryl ditch school in order to go investigate the latest clue from the current ARG that they're playing. While they're in the Tenderloin looking for clues, a huge explosion goes off, destroying the Bay Bridge. Pandemonium ensues, and Marcus and his ARG team end up nearly getting crushed in the crowd trying to get to the BART station near by. They move against the crowd and make it to the street above, where they realize that Darryl was stabbed by someone in the crowd. Marcus tries to flag down police vehicles to help, but they ignore him, until he jumps in front of a military-looking Hummer full of guys carrying rifles (who turn out to be part of the DHS), who then abduct him and his friends and take him to a secret prison where they interrogate them, thinking them to be enemy combatants. They take a special interest in Marcus because his cell phone is encrypted, and he refuses at first to give them the password for it. Eventually, he gives up all his passwords, and the DHS lets him and his friends go back to San Francisco (sans Darryl), with a warning that they'll be watching him. Marcus and Co. find out that in their absence, SanFran has become a police state, with everyone being surveilled by the DHS. They embark on an epic adventure of awesomeness, using technology and smarts to outwit the DHS and get them out of San Francisco.

The best part is, Cory Doctorow really knows what he's talking about when it comes to computers, so every time the book gets technical, it's all real. Not like all the crap one finds in movies like Hackers (although everyone loves Hackers, especially me), where they somehow managed to get everything wrong despite having 2600's Emmanuel Goldstein on hand as an adviser.

So read that book. You can download it if you'd like to try it before you buy it, because this guy definitely deserves your money.

In other news, I have somehow made some sense of the term "Human Condition", although I'm still no fan of it and I won't endeavour to explain it here.

Reading Bruce Sterling. Listening to Incubus.

A friend of mine in Lit class and I were discussing our Lit final today. We were told by our teacher (Tarz!) that the final essay would be on the "Human Condition". This was a term that we were familiar with, but had never properly learned the meaning of. In fact, Ethan (the friend) and I began to doubt that even the teacher knew what she was talking about when she referred to it. In a flash of oddball connection, I equated the ambiguity of "Human Condition" with the buzzword appeal of "Web 2.0". And it makes sense. What is Web 2.0? Nobody knows. Not even Tim O'Reilly, who started the damn thing. Everyone uses it, though. "Web 2.0 this, Web 2.0 that, and did I mention Web 2.0?" You use that magic word and it's like BAM! -- instant credibility. It's exactly the same with "Human Condition". What is it? No one knows. Not even Wikipedia. I mean, look it up! I quote:

"The human condition encompasses all of the experience of being human. As mortal entities, there are a series of biologically determined events that are common to most human lives, and some that are inevitable for all. The ongoing way in which humans react to or cope with these events is the human condition. However, understanding the precise nature and scope of what is meant by the human condition is itself a philosophical problem."

What's that supposed to mean? Correctly translated, that whole paragraph is distilled down to its essence: "What?" And yet people use it. And that's the interesting thing. Everyone pretends that everyone else knows what it means, so they too use it in ridiculously vague context ("Dude, that play totally explored the Human condition.") in order to appear as though they know exactly what everyone else is talking about. It's a vicious cycle, see. The more people don't know what it means, the more they use it. Thus the innumerable reviews of random cultural elements that name-drop in the form of the words "Human condition". I mean, if Human condition is really as much of a buzzword as Web 2.0, then it's basically the same thing, because buzzwords intentionally mean nothing. So why not title my final essay "Julius Caesar and its effect on Web 2.0"? And who's for a Human Condition Conference to rival O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Conference? It makes sense, the way I see it. Funny, really, how these little meaningless verbal trends find their way into mass media and education and all.

In other news, Weezer is releasing their new album this month. It's called Weezer. Big surprise. For fans, this one's the Red Album, as if you already didn't know. Anyway, I hear that the single with "pork" in the title is really good, so snag that if you can. Also, I'm done with my Lit project, which makes me worry free for a whole week. That was totally blogworthy.

I was just doing my math homework a few minutes ago. Hero's and Brahmagupta's formulas. If you're familiar with either of them, you'll know that it's a real pain to use either of them, even with a calculator. The number of keystrokes required numbers in the thirties. I realized this when I started the homework. So, I devised a shortcut.

You know how TI's have their own built in language? I implemented Brahmagupta's formula, Hero's formula, and the distance formula in that language on my calculator. Now, it takes me less that seven keystrokes to get the answer I want. Here are the programs for you to enter on you calculator and enjoy the benefit of solving Hero and Brahmagupta problems in ten seconds flat.

Hero's formula:

Prompt A
Prompt B
Prompt C
(A+B+C)/2 -> X
Sqrt(X(X-A)(X-B)(X-C)) -> Y
Disp Y

"Sqrt", of course, denotes the square root sign.

Brahmagupta's formula:

Prompt A
Prompt B
Prompt C
Prompt D
(A+B+C+D)/2 -> X
Sqrt((X-A)(X-B)(X-C)(X-D)) -> Y
Disp Y

The distance formula:

Prompt X
Prompt W
Prompt Y
Prompt Z
Sqrt((X-W)^2+(Y-Z)^2) -> A
Disp A

W is the second X value and Z is the second Y value.

May you save many hours on your math homework henceforth.

Listening to Slayer. Reading Drew Carpyshyn.

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It's been a while since my last post, so I thought I'd kick off what I hope to be a more productive period in my blog with some random news and Internet goodies. So here goes.

Here's a precious one for those of us who hate people: Poopsenders, also known as Shitsenders for the profane among us. These guys'll send a package of animal doo-doo to any address you specify. Anonymously. They put a business card in the bag of poo in the package which says "You've been pooped on. Wanna know by whom? (Look on back of card)" or something to that effect. Seeing as the card in question has its back in a steaming pile of shite (not a typo), your unfortunate victim will have to open the bag, reach in there, and take the card out to see the back, which says: "We'll never tell". Mission accomplished.

In other news, some group of Russian scientists thinks that the Large Hadron Collider, the largest particle accelerator ever made, will open a hole in the time-space continuum. A lot of other scientists (read: everybody else) is pretty sure this sucker's gonna prove the existence of the enigmatic Higgs Boson, a so called "God Particle" that endows all other elementary particles with mass. This latter prediction, I believe, is the more probable one, but the conspiracy theorists out there might want to have their anti-brain wave helmets on when the LHC goes on-line in case aliens from the future step through the gaping hole it creates in the middle of Switzerland. That's where it's located, by the way. Oh, cruel irony: the Swiss, the most unassuming, harmless people ever, shall be the first to experience extreme nuclear death at the hands of hostile extraterrestrials. The Canadians will be next, mark my words.

Anyway, that's all I can do for now. Gotta go chill with Lee. I'll write some more over the weekend.

Listening to Weezer. Reading Cormac McCarthy.

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