Lavonardo

It’s quite a women’s marathon, when the contestant with the fastest time does not win, and four out of top five are men.

Not the best publicity for Nike, who organized the event.

EDIT: whoopsie, turns out taht Nike relented and has now turned to calling the fastest athlete “a winner”, which while far better than being “not a winner”, is still quite a stretch from being “the winner”.

Someone at Apple seems to have had a very bad december thus far:

Exhibit A: first thinksecret shuts down following a settlement.

Exhibit B: then Fake Steve Jobs is hit with a second suit, the company hoping to silence another voice with money. And in a truly Kafka-esque moment, the plaintiff is threatened with loss of assets unless three bad entries in the blog are retracted, each one of them being more or less obvious (the “just a single button in the iPhone” hovering even near a real issue).

I’m betting on zealous lawyers, not company policy.

Lawyers whose bumbling actions will probably end up in the doghouse on account of massive amounts of bad publicity.

Something to check out instead of fumbling in the photon-deprived outdoors, struggling in downtown filled with christmas-crazed shoppers or just being generally bored.

• A deck of Fatpack cards sure would come in handy when playing the originally imaginary Cripple Mr Onion from Discworld.
• In RIAA’s “enlightened” opinion, no-one is authorized to rip any cds they’ve legally bought.
• As the Mitchell report sheds light on the unsavoury doping practices of the MLB, a call goes out to add further typograhical notation into the record books beyond the inevitable asterisk to be glued onto the likes of Bonds and Clemens.
• For those awkward “got to design a new gadget”-moments Buglabs has revealed a modular solution.
• Ruby on Rails hit 2.0 a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully all the existing documentation is still more of less valid.
• Finally finished Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End the other day, and liked it far less than originally anticipated. Last week boingboing noted that the novel has officially been released gratis on the web.
• Considering the season, the non-sequitur humor offered by the lolcats (and other critters) at icanhascheezburger.com is much appreciated.

Not everybody’s taking the alterations to Tuntematon Sotilas well.

And the yellow media is lapping up the storm - after all it’s not often when they can savour the idea of actually shooting the president.

Everybody need some time, and with these links it’s easily spent.

• The release of Amazon’s electronic book draws close, if Steven Levy’s Newsweek article is to be believed (and yeah, hopefully it’s the lead article of the international edition as well).
• Jesper Juul has written a thorough history of matching tile games. Doesn’t sound too exciting, until the list is perused: Tetris, Bejeweled, Puzzle Bobble, and many others whose addictive qualities would be cause for banning in most european states.
• History of digital tampering is much longer than expected - beginning with an overlaid image of Abraham Lincoln back in 1860s.
• Somehow the feature wishlist for next Windows release (codenamed “7″) is more than a little bit underwhelming.
• Not being allowed to die in the house of parliament has justifiably been voted to be the most ludicrous law in Britain.
• Cost of the Iraq War? About 1.3 trillion dollars. So far.
• Domo Arigato, Battleship Legoto.
• An eponymous site lists the recognized biodiversity hotspots of the world.
• freerice.com = charity and vocabulary enhancement. I so need to establish a firm presence above level 40.

hetilainaa.fi has employed the multiply crowned skijumping champion Matti Nykänen as their new spokesman for supremely high interest quickie loans.

I certainly would expect people to think of yet another reason not to stumble into the trap of easy money by just recalling the phenomenal inability of the fallen hero to judge between sensible and no-so-sensible needs.

Here we go again. It’s so hard to hold back the stream of links.

• M.C. Escher’s Relativity as interpreted in Lego.
• Gamasutra interviews Textfyre’s David Cornelson.
• Airport horror stories, part n: overstepping the bounds of authority.
• Why, of why there are so few comics in finnish bookstores?
  Monopoly of taste (or lack thereof).
• Beatdowns throughout history.
• How to characterize bottled water (with a selection of nifty symbols thrown in for good measure).
• The 2008 Linux Kernel Summit was not held in conjunction to the Ottawa Linux Symposium.
• Top 100 images from Hubble Space Telescope.
• Fake car sunroof. Presumably for people with fake cars.

Three big numbers, all courtesy of slashdot.

The english wikipedia has hit two million, that much has been established. But the indentity of the two millionth article has not (mediawiki does not number individual articles).

Firefox has hit 400 million downloads. The estimated market share is 17.4%, of the hits to this blog 35.6% (down from the >50% figures on account of masses of image searches via google, it would appear).

Bioshock has hit 1.5 million shipped units. And probably singlehandedly rescued the publisher from the low pressure front generated by the delays of GTA IV (coding issues) and Manhunt 2 (ratings issues).

Also from the site:
Music industry to introduce “ringle”, a CD single with an on-board ringtone.
And a very good exposé on the writing methods of Bioware.

Recent arrivals.

• Game business from a finnish perspective.
• Geeks of Doom.
• Yet another finnish mobile communications blog (updated impressively often).
• Yet another finnish mobile communications blog (this one updated less regularly).
• Textfyre has a blog (but no published games yet).
• Finnish metal news-blog.
• Eliminating creationism from the science aisle, one bookstore at a time.
• Inspired rants, very inspired indeed. And very finnish.

(Something odd happened the first time this got posted back in july, apologies to those seeing this double.)

I sincerely hope that the customreceipts.com is a joke…

After all, spreading bits of paper with embarrassingly big numbers on them can lead to nothing good.

[ via boingboing. ]

The thus far failing perpetual energy machine has a blog devoted to following the progress.

Sweet. This means that tidbits no longer need to be sought out amongst the regular news.

As the newest chapter in the ongoing saga, Steorn issued a press release today in which they postpone their demostration of free and limitless energy until further notice.

Perpetual energy will not be demonstrated today.

Not an entirely unexpected announcement.

It’s now been almost a year since the bold claims on infinite energy by Steorn.

Tomorrow their Orbo technology will be revealed in London. To a skeptical audience, I’d expect.

The other bit of dodgy technology from last summer (also referenced in the original article), the limitless data compression technology from Meliavolume seems to have disappeared, more efficiently than the company’s web presence.

… make Ville a slow author.

Yeah, no use trying to formulate the majority of last week into sensible entries, so here goes in trusted stream of consciousness-style.

• Got sick, summer flu is never nice, it’s been half a decade since the last mentionable one (on account of which missed both AC/DC and Ozric Tentacles).
• Petteri Koponen got drafted as the very last player on the first round. And immediately shipped to Trail Blazers. Portland got aggressive behind their #1 pick, and Koponen ought to fit well into the team’s accelerated rebuilding theme as one of the point guards struggling for starter job.
• Carcassonne continues Catan’s trail into XBLA. And continues it rather well.
• No tickets for the two first days of Tuska materialized miraculously.
• Justice was served, the judge who valued his pants at 65 million lost the case.
• Smashing Pumpkins got greedy, real greedy, with their upcoming Zeitgeist album. Then again, a chainstore-specific bonus track is as emblematic of our times as anything.
• Blade Runner turns 25 years old, and the effects haven’t aged, as the 50% of the Mythbusters testifies.

Just when you thought lawyers were restrained and full of professional conduct: the interweb proudly presents Robert Tourtelot.

Why, certainly!

• One more great map from strangemaps, this one showing which US state matches with which country size- and GDP-wise. Finland = Colorado, which ain’t bad at all.
• Photographs of speed. Some seriously great snaps.
• The end is nigh: multicore programming is hard.
• With candidates like these, the seven new wonders are bound to be boring. Where’s teh internet from the list?
• Been a happy google reader user for quite a while, but with their recent data loss issues, having another RSS-reader might be worthwhile. Or not. Anyway, seems that there’s quite a selection of the tools available.
• Sushi books.
• Editing CSS isn’t exactly the best fun available, a good editor makes it less of a chore.
• Airlinemeals, just the thing to check before a transatlantic crossing in the cattle section of a 757.
• The 65 million dollar pants-case makes it to the court. By the description the session was high on surreal, and fortunately low on understanding the accuser.

[ image nabbed from goopymart's photoset on flickr. ]

Seems that the newest installment of the McClane vs. the world saga gets a Really Stupid Name [tm] in Finland.

Whoever cooked the idea of calling this baby Die Hard 4.0 is due an extra clue. Or two. They’re pretty small, and easy to swallow.

Randomly selected surfing destinations for the selective traveller.

• An amazing collection of geographically alternate earths. A lot of science, very little fiction, pretty maps. Worth a peep.
• If nothing else, Joel Kotkin launches half a dozen new words in his article on superstar cities.
• A nice selection of textbook disclaimers (yes, this is an anti-intelligent design page).
• Kickassclassical, for those awkward moments when you cannot recognize a piece if classical music featured in media (odds are 2.21 to 1 that it’s Carmina Burana anyway).
• JPG magazine, looks like best-of-flickr on paper. Which is not a bad thing at all.
• Angry Alien produly presents: 30 second editions of popular movies, as acted by animated bunnies. The hotel room wrestling scene of Borat is deeply disturbing even in this format,
• Boo hoo, bad microsoft, allegedly turning e-mail back five years by replacing the HTML-renderer in Outlook. Here’s a clue: no HTML in e-mail. Have two, actually, they’re pretty small.

MPAA obviously does not practice what they preach.

Or maybe they can justify their fullscale ripoff of the ForestBlog used of their page. With any evidence of it carefully edited off.

Of course, MPAA not having played nice with anybody lately, their virtual get out of jail-card expired ages ago.

[ via srpnt. ]