Month: May 2009

I may actually have to pick this game up.

Disturbing final song and everything.

I mean, Portal’s
bloody cheap now. Of course, so was Tomb Raider Anniversary, and that might take me a while to run through. I think that this is the secret: wait until the cool games are sufficiently old enough that you can buy them for cheap and play them on obsolete computers.

Hey: I’m lame. I admit it.

Moe Lane

Giant, scary-looking bug given computer control chip.

What could possibly go wrong? (Via Steve Jackson Games)

The Army’s Remote-Controlled Beetle
The insect’s flight path can be wirelessly controlled via a neural implant.

A giant flower beetle with implanted electrodes and a radio receiver on its back can be wirelessly controlled, according to research presented this week. Scientists at the University of California developed a tiny rig that receives control signals from a nearby computer. Electrical signals delivered via the electrodes command the insect to take off, turn left or right, or hover in midflight. The research, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), could one day be used for surveillance purposes or for search-and-rescue missions.

Ah, DARPA: Eager to have you show them; to show them ALL!!!!! since 1972.  Not that I mind… just so long as they avoid putting the X-Ray lasers or psionic hallucination projectors that DARPA-of-course-doesn’t-have on these suckers.  Mad science is all very well, but WiFi isn’t what you’d call secure, you know what I mean?

cyborg_x220

I’m missing the “Outrageous” part of Outrageous Military Experiments.

The 10 Most Outrageous Military Experiments, via Fark.

Going down the list: the plutonium one might be a bit dicey, although I presume that the accident victim was brain-dead already. The hallucinogenic warfare one, likewise kind of ethically challenging. And the psychic vision one… well, no moral objections there. But the rest of them seem pretty straightforward. Pretty impressive heroism there on the part of the volunteers, even. Especially the guys that volunteered for bioweapons vaccine testing.

Your random evocation of Opus for the day.

No real reason.


George the Kiwi: ALBATROSS. Just be glad your wife didn’t leave you for an albatross.
Ronald-Anne: Good, George, confront your feelings.
George the Kiwi: My puny kiwi wings weren’t big enough for Delores. Oh no, oh no… she had to have AN ALBATROSS. With great big huge LONG WINGS. He was on hormones. You heard me, read my beak: HORMONES.
Opus: Uh, maybe we shouldn’t confront those particular feelings.

A STORC choice to make.

“Your sluggardly, world-weary defeatism can inspire those with the energy and passion to do what you can’t or won’t.”

I meant to link to this Jim Treacher post a couple of days ago.  He decided to take as inspiration the unsung hero of Animal House. No, not Bluto:

Stork. Continue reading A STORC choice to make.

Bill Burton petulant about CIA photo goof.

You know, I don’t really expect anyone from this administration to be gracious, or even polite, to either Republicans or conservatives.  It’s nice when it happens, but by and large the the executive branch doesn’t like us, they downright hate having to pretend that they do, and they get petulant about the whole thing.  So if it had been Brother Caleb or Michael Goldfarb asking this question, I’d expect that Bill Burton would be a bit of a schmuck about replying.

But why is he sneering like this to Ben Smith?

A photograph posted by the White House to the photo sharing website Flickr includes an image of a document with the letters CIA printed beneath what appears to be the word “secret.”

[snip]

The other words on the visible portion of the document aren’t easily legible, and a White House spokesman, Bill Burton, dismissed it as innocuous in an email.

“Uh oh. Please don’t tell me that the enemy is now going to know what our fax coversheets look like. (That is indeed what it is.),” he emailed.

Aside from the fact that, actually, we don’t want the enemy to know what official fax cover-sheets look like – apparently, Burton is ignorant of the term ‘trashing‘; God only knows what he thinks ‘social engineering‘ refers to – this wasn’t a particularly gracious answer, particularly since the White House thought that the situation was important enough to remove the photo anyway.  Also, given that (as Ben noted) something like this cost a British counterterrorism officer his job earlier this month, you’d think that this might have resulted in a more serious response.

I’m being sarcastic, of course.  Nobody mentioned in this piece really expected any better from the White House.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Much as I hate to disagree with Jonah Goldberg…

…and I do hate to disagree with Jonah – still, I feel compelled to note the following with regard to this video:

  1. Olivet Nazarene University is a dry school. A seriously dry school.
  2. The students in that video made no attempt to hide their location. Or their names.
  3. No actual drinking took place in that video.
  4. I think that we can also assume that there were multiple takes for most of those shots.
  5. In other words, this was five college students making a movie. With a soundtrack. Probably a script. Definitely a tripod – those weren’t hand-held camera shots. I’ve been playing with video footage myself lately, and it’s not easy.
  6. Most importantly, that was an interesting movie. Not the easiest thing in the world to find on YouTube, honestly.

So I think maybe their parents aren’t completely wasting their money.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.