Clearly the most hilarious song I’ve heard in the last year: “Whorehoppin’ (Shit, Goddamn)” by Eagles of Death Metal.

(If you haven’t figured out yet how the internet works: google “mediafire” and the songname. Arr!)

A great documentary about people with superior autobiographic memory:

“Do you remember every movie you’ve ever seen?”
- “Sure!”
“And you remember when lots of television shows started?”
- “Anything.”
“60 minutes?”
- “Tuesday September 24th ’68, the first Sunday show was September 19th, ’71.”

And they are not simply one-trick ponies – knowing what weekday was at a given date, or television shows. They remember nearly everything they did and that happened to them in their lives, down to the age of about 10.

“It really makes you wonder why we aren’t the normal ones, but they are. I mean, they can remember barely anything.”

(The six subjects that have been studied so far are not autistic.)

Wikipedia will be down for 24 hours, starting at 05:00 UTC tomorrow. The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate. If passed, these bills would “seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia”.

(EDIT1, January 18th 1am: that’s how Wikipedia looks like at the moment!)

(EDIT2, January 18th 2am: I just saw this ad on a news website.)

(EDIT3, January 18th 3am: google.com)

(EDIT4, January 19th: open letter by Neil Gaiman and “musicians, actors, directors, authors, and producers” against SOPA and PIPA).

“It is the opinion of the English Wikipedia community that both of these bills, if passed, would be devastating to the free and open web.
Over the course of the past 72 hours, over 1800 Wikipedians have joined together to discuss proposed actions that the community might wish to take against SOPA and PIPA. This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation. The overwhelming majority of participants support community action to encourage greater public action in response to these two bills. Of the proposals considered by Wikipedians, those that would result in a “blackout” of the English Wikipedia, in concert with similar blackouts on other websites opposed to SOPA and PIPA, received the strongest support.
On careful review of this discussion, the closing administrators note the broad-based support for action from Wikipedians around the world, not just from within the United States. The primary objection to a global blackout came from those who preferred that the blackout be limited to readers from the United States, with the rest of the world seeing a simple banner notice instead. We also noted that roughly 55% of those supporting a blackout preferred that it be a global one, with many pointing to concerns about similar legislation in other nations. Read the rest of this entry »

Derby Square Bookstore, 215 Essex Street, in Salem, MA – what a wonderful place!

And after browsing through these pictures, imagine how the owner of the shop looked like.

Exactly!
Wow.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have always wanted to know what the true background of non-capitalizing “ee cummings” is – the usual story is that “he preferred it like that”.
It turns out, the internet (all hail!) doesn’t help, for once.

Cummings’s publishers and others have sometimes echoed the unconventional orthography in his poetry by writing his name in lowercase and without periods, but usual orthography (uppercase and periods) is supported by scholarship, preferred by publishers today. Cummings himself used both the lowercase and capitalized versions, though he most often signed his name with capitals.

The use of lowercase for his initials was popularized in part by the title of some books, particularly in the 1960s, writing his name in lower case on the cover and spine. In the preface to E. E. Cummings: the growth of a writer critic Harry T. Moore notes ” He [Cummings] had his name put legally into lower case, and in his later books the titles and his name were always in lower case.” According to his widow, this is incorrect, She wrote of Friedman “you should not have allowed H. Moore to make such a stupid & childish statement about Cummings & his signature.” On 27 February 1951, Cummings wrote to his French translator D. Jon Grossman that he preferred the use of upper case for the particular edition they were working on. One Cummings scholar believes that on the rare occasions that Cummings signed his name in all lowercase, he may have intended it as a gesture of humility, not as an indication that it was the preferred orthography for others to use.

Critic Edmund Wilson commented “Mr. Cummings’s eccentric punctuation is, also, I believe, a symptom of his immaturity as an artist. It is not merely a question of an unconventional usage: unconventional punctuation may very well gain its effect… the really serious case against Mr. Cummings’s punctuation is that the results which it yields are ugly. His poems on the page are hideous.”

– Wikipedia

Decimation (Latin: decimatio; decem = “ten”) was a form of military discipline used by officers in the Roman Army to punish mutinous or cowardly soldiers. The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning “removal of a tenth”.

A unit selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten; each group drew lots (Sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning or clubbing. The remaining soldiers were given rations of barley instead of wheat and forced to sleep outside the Roman encampment.
Because the punishment fell by lot, all soldiers in the group were eligible for execution, regardless of the individual degree of fault, or rank and distinction.
The leadership was usually executed independently of the one in ten deaths of the rank and file.

– Source: Wikipedia via Sara and Matthew

(New tag: language)

Must see. I mean it.

Most of you know how important sound is to me, and I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard what this little device does to the sound of my laptop.

A friend of mine owns one, and after trying it for a couple of hours I had to get one. They are cheaper in the States, but also very affordable in Germany. Increasing the sound quality by 500% for 42€ sounds like a good deal to me.

You can find the Logitech Z305 for example on Amazon. And no, I did not get money for this review. I wish I had!

For the first time in the German history I can remember, investors were so desperate yesterday that they lent €3.900.000.000 to Germany, not only without asking for interest, but actually donating €250.000 so that Germany would accept their money. The interest yield was a negative 0.0122%.

Pretty insane. If someone wants to lend me some money, and I have to pay back less than I received, let me know.

(In comparison, Italy currently pays an interest rate of over 7% when lending money from investors/banks)