Grow is a strange little Rube Goldberg-like game where you try to determine the order in which to drag various items into the middle. Each time you drag an item, the items you’ve already placed grow and interact with each other. The goal is to drag all the items in the right sequence to advance them all to their maximum levels. The maximum score is 20,000, I haven’t managed to get that far. There are quite a few possible sequences that do this, as well as some sequences that don’t reach the maximum but do produce fun effects
Ever wonder where you fall in the Geek Heirarchy? — via Wil Wheaton Dot Net
William Gibson discusses his tech life, the ad that inspired Neuromancer, and his latest book, Pattern Recognition. He says, Between my wife and daughter who still lives at home, I’m always the one with the slowest computer. I don’t find that being really up on all the latest tech ever does me any good
The mysterious dark energy that is pushing apart the universe appears to be the constant force that Albert Einstein once predicted, according to measurements made by the Hubble Space Telescope
Pupils in the UK as young as 14 will be allowed to leave the classroom for two days a week to learn a trade under plans to tackle skill shortages and motivate disillusioned children
Clumsy Britons risk life and limb keeping up with the latest trends such as wooden flooring and micro-scooters — providing they survive putting their trousers on in the morning
A man and his wife ducked behind a refrigerator when bullets began exploding in their oven. It seems the rocket scientist in question had put the ammunition and three handguns in the oven for safekeeping before leaving on vacation. After returning from their trip Tuesday, the wife turned on the oven to prepare dinner and the bullets ignited
Andre Gainey found out the hard way that in the state of New York it’s illegal to drive while watching porn. Police said the 35-year old man from Clifton Park, New York, was watching a adult movie called Chocolate Foam
on Tuesday night while driving his Mercedes Benz in the town of Schenectady when he was spotted by an officer at a stop light
Aloysius, apparently sharing my love of penguins, has found another silly, yet addictive, Flash game where you throw snowballs at penguins. If you hit the penguins, they get embedded in the target and their little feet wiggle. Entertaining
British doctors will be able to prescribe maggots to National Health Service patients with infected wounds from Friday onwards, because the NHS had realised maggots were a cheaper and more beneficial way of treating wounds than using conventional medicine. Patients would be able to treat themselves at home and avoid the possibility of picking up a hospital infection. Maggots have been used for centuries to rid wounds of decaying flesh, but after the discovery of antibiotics their use went into decline
Peace protesters won a landmark ruling that police acted unlawfully by forcing them to return home as they made their way to an anti-Iraq war demonstration. About 120 demonstrators are expected to claim hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages after the High Court ruled in a test case that the human rights of activist Jane Laporte had been breached
Drugs based on CSIRO’s research into the influenza virus have been shown to be effective, in laboratory tests, against a sample of an H5N1 influenza virus currently infecting chickens in Asia
Sigh! The Shag exhibition wraps up this weekend in Sydney. Josh Agle aka Shag
will be at The Studio for Official Book Signing, 2-4pm this saturday aka tomorrow.
If you haven’t checked out this exhibition, do it! You have to see a Shag painting in real life to truly appreciate the actual colours and textures. The only downer, was that a few paintings weren’t finished in time for the Sydney show. These are going to be shipped directly to Melbourne damn it! But they will be in the catalogue at least.
Bye, bye Shag.
Check out this great wiki entry that explains the most common Slashdot trolls and in-jokes in detail.
Hot grits, anyone?
The page cannot be fucking displayed
This is without a doubt one of the best error pages ever!
Remember, Microsoft just bought the Catholic Church.
The Australia-US Free Trade Agreement has become the expensive trade agreement as sugar growers claim $600 million from taxpayers in compensation, because the Howard government buckled to the retarded monkey boy over sugar
Lindows, the company that provides a Linux OS for the desktop, has changed its name to Lin—s — pronounced Lindash
— in compliance with court orders in Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg
The federal Government has moved to give greater powers to spy agencies to intercept people’s e-mails. The Telecommunications (Interception) Amendment Bill 2004 also allows warrants to be sought in connection with the investigation of a wider range of serious offences, including terrorism. The bill, if passed by parliament, will allow recording of calls to ASIO public lines
Teresa Nielsen Hayden has a great breakdown of why author manuscripts are rejected:
- Author is functionally illiterate.
- Author has submitted some variety of literature we don’t publish: poetry, religious revelation, political rant, illustrated fanfic, etc.
- Author has a serious neurochemical disorder, puts all important words into capital letters, and would type out to the margins if MSWord would let him.
- Author is on bad terms with the Muse of Language. Parts of speech are not what they should be. Confusion-of-motion problems inadvertently generate hideous images. Words are supplanted by their similar-sounding cousins: towed the line, deep-seeded, incentiary, reeking havoc, nearly penultimate, dire straights, viscous/vicious.
- Author can write basic sentences, but not string them together in any way that adds up to paragraphs.
- Author has a moderate neurochemical disorder and can’t tell when he or she has changed the subject. This greatly facilitates composition, but is hard on comprehension.
- Author can write passable paragraphs, and has a sufficiently functional plot that readers would notice if you shuffled the chapters into a different order. However, the story and the manner of its telling are alike hackneyed, dull, and pointless.
(At this point, you have eliminated 60-75% of your submissions. Almost all the reading-and-thinking time will be spent on the remaining fraction.)
- It’s nice that the author is working on his/her problems, but the process would be better served by seeing a shrink than by writing novels.
- Nobody but the author is ever going to care about this dull, flaccid, underperforming book.
- The book has an engaging plot. Trouble is, it’s not the author’s, and everybody’s already seen that movie/read that book/collected that comic.
(You have now eliminated 95-99% of the submissions.)
- Someone could publish this book, but we don’t see why it should be us.
- Author is talented, but has written the wrong book.
- It’s a good book, but the house isn’t going to get behind it, so if you buy it, it’ll just get lost in the shuffle.
- Buy this book.
There’s also a nice stab taken at the whiny authors who submit their rejection notices to RejectionCollection.com.
Perl, a high-level programming language that was critical in the initial construction of the Internet, is undergoing major renovations from author Larry Wall with the help of the Perl development community. The general release is about 18 months away. Although Wall still is designing Perl 6, there is a good sense of what it will include. One thing is certain: Perl 6 will look vastly different from its predecessor
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