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You Can Pick Your Friends, You Can Pick Your Nose, But You Can’t Pick Your Friend’s Nose

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc Tagged with , , January 3rd, 2012 @ 11:34 am

This BoingBoing post from just before Christmas explains just what boogers are and speculates on why they get eaten. There was a theory propagated a few years ago that eating your boogers was good for you, because it helped expose your immune system to already-dead versions of the germs that try to infiltrate your body and make you sick, not unlike the basic theory behind vaccination.

I don’t know if that’s particularly valid or not, and there doesn’t seem to be much more substance to the theory than that doctor’s public pronouncements, but the next time you see me with my knuckle up my nose, that’ll be my story and I’m sticking to it. I am also reminded of a bit of greeting card doggerel:

If you kiss your honey
When your nose is runny
You may think it’s funny
But it’s SNOT

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Careful What You Wish For

By Brian Filed in Tech Tagged with , , , , , , March 24th, 2011 @ 11:32 am

Receently, tech website Ars Technica asked the rhetorical question “Why don’t we use HTTPS for everything?” (HTTPS, for the non-technical of you, is the “Secure” form of the basic HTTP protocol that the web uses. Wikipedia explains it in relatively easy-to-understand terms here.)

The answer Ars got from one expert is that many websites use third-party caching services like Akamai to deliver graphics and other page elements, and the encrypted nature of HTTPS makes it more complicated to do that (I am greatly oversimplifying for brevity’s sake). There is also some mention of the expense of implementing the necessary secure certificates, but that’s brushed off as easily rectified.

And yet this morning there’s news that Iranian hackers have been able to breach SSL transactions by spoofing certificates for major websites like Google and Yahoo. That BoingBoing post links to this post from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which provides a very detailed analysis of what the hackers were able to do and what that particular threat implies for web security as a whole.

It’s disheartening to think that such a basic level of security on the Internet is not as secure as it has traditionally been represented as being, and worrisome that the breach was not particularly complex in its nature (certificate spoofing? In 2011? C’mon..). Luckily the exploit was quickly noticed and quashed, but I think Ars has its real answer right there.

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Random Linkage

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc Tagged with , , , , , , , , May 3rd, 2010 @ 11:52 am

Things too good to pass up but not good enough to merit their own posts:


This post at English Russia.com remembers some of the more prevalent urban legends that were common among Russians during the Soviet era. A lot of them involve being poisoned by evil Western imperialists, as you might expect, particularly through our evil blue jeans, but there are also the apparently universal legends about rats in food products, certain products being notorious aphrodesiacs, and the occasional corpse in the tanker truck.

Those of us who were paying attention to the Internet back in the early 1990s remember a time before the “World Wide Web”, when the online universe consisted of several distinct provinces: Usenet, FTP servers and “Archie” searches, and “gophers”. Gophers were publicly available databases that contained all sorts of things, but usually documents pertaining to a particular university’s research or something similar, named after the mascot of the University of Minnesota, which created the first one. The advent of the web collapsed most of those distinct information sources into one giant black hole of information, but there were still gopher sites on line right up until the last couple of years. This post at BoingBoing tells us that one guy captured a snapshot of everything he could still find on gopher sites in 2007 and saved it all as one big database of about 40 gigs’ worth of data. Because it’s almost all text, the data can be compressed into 15GB, at which point the guy ought to just copy it onto a USB flash drive and put it on his keychain for safekeeping.

Gizmag reports that the University of Granada in Spain has developed an improved artificial skin that uses a compound of fibrin from real skin samples and a seaweed derivative called agarose. It’s stretchier than previous artificial skin materials, making it a better candidate for use with burn victims.

I always enjoy the posts from TV writer-extraordinaire Ken Levine, but I was especially charmed by his fond recollection of actress Elizabeth Montgomery. He nursed a crush for her for years (and, seriously, who hasn’t) but only ever got to see her from afar despite his involvement in many TV shows over the years. Sadly, she passed away about a dozen years ago at the early age of 62, but through the magic of television will be wiggling her nose for us forever.

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Myth…Busted

By Brian Filed in Atheism/Religion Tagged with , , , , , , , , April 21st, 2010 @ 12:01 pm

Last week, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, the stars of MythBusters, were in town to accept the 2008 Outstanding Lifetime Award in Cultural Humanism from the Harvard Humanist Society.

Adam, who is not only an atheist but, as he mentions, a fourth-generation atheist, delivered a wonderful acceptance speech that references Carlos Castaneda’s philosophical tome “The Eagle’s Gift” as his inspiration to expand his consciousness through science and reason. The folks at BoingBoing not only transcribed the speech, they made a cool looking webpage just to display it.

Jamie’s remarks haven’t been similarly posted yet, although one commenter at that link who was apparently there said that he started off by saying “What he said.”

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How To Be A Ho

By Brian Filed in Blogs Tagged with , , , , , March 13th, 2008 @ 1:53 pm

No, this has nothing to do with Eliot Spitzer and “Kristen”, it’s about that other kind of whore: bloggers.

The other day, Mark at Going Like Sixty clued me in to this list of “The 50 Most Powerful Blogs” that appeared in the Manchester Observer (the Sunday companion paper to The Guardian) last weekend. Unsurprisingly, it also turned up yesterday for the requisite dose of snark and derision at MetaFilter.

Mark said that he only reads one of those fifty on a regular basis; I count six of them on my daily blogcrawl (and, yes, one of them IS “I Can Has Cheezburger”, thank you for asking) and another one that is a frequent-but-not-daily stop (Huffington Post). But I have close to 150 feeds in my RSS reader, so it’s fair to say that my net casts out far and wide beyond the biggest fish.

The MetaFilter crowd was a bit huffy about not making that list, even though lists like these should in now way be confused with reality, but I don’t know if this is a list anyone wants to be on. Are we really supposed to believe that “I Can Has Cheezburger” is 1) powerful and b) more powerful than “The Drudge Report”, which almost brought down Bill Clinton’s presidency? And if online gossip websites like PerezHilton and TMZ are “powerful”, then maybe I’ve been underestimating just how doomed civilization really is. It doesn’t help that the article doesn’t tell you what it means by powerful; do they mean these sites have the most visitors, that they generate the most revenue for their advertisers, or that they sway public discourse in some important way? Again, if that third one is true, it means that silly cat pictures with bad spelling and grammar have become the Bible and the Communist Manifesto for the 21st Century. Let that sink in for a moment.

People have been ranking and rating blogs in a myriad of ways for almost as long as we old-timers have been blogging. So this particular article is decidedly old hash warmed through and shouldn’t affect anyone’s reading anymore than the Bloggie Awards or the circle-jerk they call SXSW. On Boing Boing (#2 on this list), Cory Doctorow, the Busiest Man On The Internet, was egotistical kind enough to link to his own article at Information Week wherein he pontificates on how you, too, can be as elite, famous, and good-looking as he is. (Hint to all those SEO bloggers out there, it has NOTHING to do with you)

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And Green Monkeys Might Fly Out Of My Ass

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , March 20th, 2007 @ 12:52 pm

greenmonkey.jpg

Yesterday at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow had a link to this recent post by computer security expert Bruce Schneier commenting on an FBI notice sent to state and local officials saying that “terrorists might try to get jobs as school bus drivers”. Not that there were any actual reported cases of this happening, merely that someone thought this was something terrorists might try.

So Cory added a few of his own suggestions for things to warn people about. I liked this one especially:

Terrorists could infiltrate the world’s car companies and manufacture large, fuel-inefficient vehicles like Hummers. Once America has gone all SUV, the resulting carbon emissions would contribute to polar melting and global warming, causing devastating hurricanes through the southwest, killing and displacing millions of Americans. Ban car companies now, or the terrorists have won.

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