entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

One man's quest to earn the Most Human Human award at the Turing Test.

The author calls it an essay, but i believe that it's more apposite to label his article a manifesto regarding the ownership of data.

Why has this man been donating well-made art forgeries to museums for the past three decades?

"Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin have something in common: they are both cowgirl politicians.  In this, they are symptomatic of the too-narrow ways in which the United States is willing to accept women as leaders."

There is a 14-year-old girl who lives in poverty in Uganda who said to her chess coach, "Coach, I will be a grandmaster someday."

A woman who has no amygdala and no fear.

If i told you that 80% of the antibiotics sold in the US were sold for farm animals, you might be skeptical of my claim; but would you believe the FDA?

The Best Magazine Articles Ever

If Ken Thompson calls himself a programmer, not a developer, or an engineer, then anyone who shares that profession should follow suit.  I don't care that this article is over 20 years old, damn it.  Now get off my lawn.

Scientists from Tübingen, Germany, show that people really walk in circles when lost.

You might remember that i quite enjoyed I ♥ Huckabees; this long essay about the movie is what i would have written if i were in any way qualified to write about philosophy.

I found real-sugar Dr Pepper at Lunardi's this weekend and was compelled to purchase it.  But does it make a difference?  Unlike Throwback Pepsi, which recipe lacks the modern Pepsi's fatal flaw of citric acid, Heritage Dr Pepper and modern Dr Pepper have the same list of ingredients, except of course for sugar versus high-fructose corn syrup, and both of which contain 40 grams of Sugars.  I thought the taste of the Heritage was milder than what i remembered from my last regular DrP.  Would my assessment hold up to a triangle test?

I brought a can of Heritage to work and poured it into two cups and some regular DrP into another.  My two coworkers picked the regular as being distinctly sweeter, but i could not discern any difference.  More testing is needed.

Via vanmojo, a tale in two parts of legislative ignorance, intolerance, and irresponsibility.

• Via iayork, an interview with Judge John E. Jones III, who presided over the Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District case, and whose judgement was a thorough and scathing indictment of Intelligent Design. mmcirvin does this much better than i do. If i were king, i'd swap out Scalia from the Supreme Court for Jones right now.
• Via wolffire, an article about Biodynamics; i was under the impression that it was merely an alternative version of organic farming. I was stunned to find out just how insanely ludicrous it actually is. Needless to say, when i run a vineyard, i will not be calling any of these clowns for certification.
• Via someone i can't recall, climate scientists correct data that indicated that the oceans were cooling. This is a clinic in how science works. Feel free to print this out, roll it up, and whack the next global warming denier across the nose with it.

If you're in the Bay Area and have the time this weekend, please drop by Blossom Hill Crafts and visit their pottery sale.  2wanda will be selling her pottery and her soap, and besides pottery you can also find jellies and photography for sale.

If not, then please enjoy mjg59's précis of fruit fly ovary extraction.

Some of you might dismiss bitrot as a quaint element of hacker folklore, but you'd be WRONG WRONG WRONG.

devonapple brought to my attention this little device that, by judicious application of microwaves, extracts oil and gas from plastics, rubber, and just about anything that has a hydrocarbon base, and leaves a remainder of pure carbon.  The video linked therein is a mediocre production, but it's still impressive.

I wasn't expecting Creationist nutters in the Wikipedia Oort cloud discussion page.

I've been meaning to share this with you for months now, but i kept forgetting.  Something whipartist posted reminded me about it.

Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe.  Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon.  One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena.  And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry.