entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

Via thequietquiet, a video of acrobatic ball kicking and juggling.  Fake?  Maybe, but still pretty good.

If you're curious to know what 2wanda's and my relationship was like early on, you should rent Prime, ( VORSICHT: SPOILER )

Another fine Improv Everywhere stunt (thanks, en_ki).

Lyndon LaRouche asks, "Is the Devil in your laptop?" (thanks, tritone).

racerxmachina let me know that SJSU's president issued a letter banning blood drives on campus due to the FDA's policy that bans gay men (or, indeed, any man who's had sex with another man) from donating blood.  A tough decision, but i support Kassing's rationale and i hope that his efforts (among those of other campuses) get the FDA to reconsider the policy once we get someone in the White House who isn't an utter imbecile.

Some of you might have heard about the explosion that melted part of the MacArthur Maze, but you have not heard the whole truth.  Please pass this along!

mouseworks notes that Stephen Boursy has passed away.

This is just over a year old, but it's another look at the poor deranged souls that litter the Internet.  Jef Poskanzer, a long-time hacker and creator of thttpd (which i run to serve my Web sites), was slimed by a couple of very paranoid repo men.  These guys are like very bad Bond villains ("Hmn - I guess you're too smart for me.").

I recently, despite the clear and evident bogon flux, purchased a bottle of Penta.  (Seriously, one of the first things you'll find on that site is, "Bill Holloway and his son Michael have always been obsessed with water purity."  Sounds like something General Jack D. Ripper would say.  Lucky for Michael that dad Bill didn't deny Mrs. Holloway his essence.)  After consuming it and detecting nothing special in its taste, nor later any feeling that would indicate superior hydration, i looked online to find proof of its serpentoleaginous nature.  I quickly found it mentioned on "Water cluster quackery", which linked me to a page on James Randi's site.  So i then decided to follow the Randi-Holloway saga.

The thing that depresses me is that this particular brand of quackery has been out for over 3½ years.  It faded a bit but has come back strong, somehow becoming an Olympic sponsor last year.  The price for Penta is brutally high, even for bottled water.  How long has it taken other snake-oil phenomena to die?

I figured i could run my own test regarding the most easily proven claim: that their water boils at a higher temperature than regular water.  Unfortunately, i don't have thermometers that are that precise.  I will have to resign myself to no longer patronizing their lies.

ADDENDUM: Thanks to the Wikipedia entry, i noticed that Randi's latest newsletter says that the British Penta team might pick up the JREF challenge that was dropped almost four years ago.

The formidable Thib has passed on this story to me. It's pretty standard stuff... until it runs off the rails in the last paragraph.