A Stew of Links To Enrapture the Unwary

This one is a 2-fer. Interface geeks and Star Wars nerds rejoice: Dan O'Bannon and the the tactical displays in Star Wars.

H/T to Borepatch for this one:  Armor Penetration and the Medieval Longbow.

Found this in Wired. Ever wanted to see a Zombie-decapitating Slingshot? Didn't know that you wanted to see that until just now?  The Slingshot Channel on Youtube.

Things I Didn't Need To Know

From an article in the WSJ (membership required) about how great it would be to eat bugs. 

The average person consumes about a pound of insects per year, mostly mixed into other foods. In the U.S., most processed foods contain small amounts of insects, within limits set by the Food and Drug Administration. For chocolate, the FDA limit is 60 insect fragments per 100 grams. Peanut butter can have up to 30 insect parts per 100 grams, and fruit juice can have five fruit-fly eggs and one or two larvae per 250 milliliters (just over a cup). We also use many insect products to dye our foods, such as the red dye cochineal in imitation crab sticks, Campari and candies.

I was happier when I was ignoranter.

Dumb As A Box Of Hair

“When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it."* 

This article leads off with a description of a miscreant who was arrested soon after he robbed a bank, in broad daylight,  wearing no mask or disguise.

Astonished was he when the cops nabbed him in short order, as he had rubbed lemon juice on his face assuming it would conceal his image from cameras.

This is the kind of thing that makes the words "jury of your peers" scary. 


*Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999, vol. 77, no. 6, pp. 1121-1134.

Add Cats, Tails, Rocking Chairs; Mix Thoroughly

What HE said:

The dinosaurs smell a change in the air, and roar their defiance.

Borepatch has a fantastic post up about the way the internet is changing public access to heretofore filtered cliques and classes. I'd planned on writing something similar but he did it better, so go read his.

Even my favorite conservative outlets on radio and the intertubes suffer from the same arrogance - witness their leg-wetting over Harriet Miers or their barely-disguised fear of a Sarah Palin candidacy - and one knows that they are also part of the same niche. They may not be dinosaurs, but they are, oh, say, pterodactyls, and they are headed for the same destiny as their bigger, landlocked brethren. Give me the facts, gentlebeings, and I'll take care of the decision-making.

In the end, I really don't care what they think - I'm smart enough to figure it out on my own.