Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Disease of the day: Bird flu in swine.

And you thought Scotty was making the whole thing up! Physics Web reports a glass breakthrough:

Scientists in the US have developed a novel technique to make bulk quantities of glass from alumina for the first time. Anatoly Rosenflanz and colleagues at 3M in Minnesota used a “flame-spray” technique to alloy alumina (aluminium oxide) with rare-earth metal oxides to produce strong glass with good optical properties.

Thanks to MarsNews.com for the link. Also via MarsNews: the ESA wants to build pretty Space houses on Earth.

Question of the day: Why does the MBTA have schedules? (by way of Boston Common)

Many thanks to Eric Talbot for reminding me of the “dramatic derailment” of yet another Breda train this Sunday. I have been remiss in not blogging about it, considering that I saw the wreckage with my own eyes.

Veronica and I were at the MFA Sunday morning for the Art Deco Exhibit. Sometime after noon we made our way to the MFA stop on the E line to head back downtown. No train came for a while, but on the E line you think nothing of that during rush hour, never mind on a quiet Sunday in August. But then a woman walked down the platform telling people there had been a crash.

On the other branches of the Green Line, if the T breaks down or goes out of service for repairs, then the MBTA puts up signs and runs replacement buses. Free replacement buses. Not so on the E line. We wandered over to a nearby bus stop and waited for the 39 to show. The first bus was full—not surprising, since it was carrying all the displaced subway passengers. The driver let on a few folks, then shut the door in our faces.

The next 39 to come along had some space on it. We had to pay, and we spent most of the ride speculating about the route of the 39, where it might leave us, and what had happened to that corpse of a Breda car we’d passed at the Northeastern stop. It looked to me like the far side of the car had been shorn off—I had bought the “accident” story—but it turns out that it just derailed. All over the rails.

Take a look at that bottom picture [BadTransit.com, same link as “the wreckage” above]. I’m surprised there was only one hospitalization. Imagine if we’d been standing on that platform at the time. There were little tourist kids at the MFA stop with us (not to mention my mother and a friend riding the T for the first time).

The stop pictured (Northeastern) is a really nice one. Most trolley stops are only a few feet wide, with (if you’re lucky) a low concrete barrier between you and a busy street (Comm. Ave, Beacon St., Huntington Ave.). Picture with me a Breda train derailing and scraping 25 people (or worse, students) off the platform into oncoming traffic at rush hour. It would be the end of the entire trolley system, and everyone would be taking the 39 or the 57 downtown from then on.

And none of it would have happened if we’d just bought the 100 new trains from Kinki Sharyo.

Codepoetry reveals the deep secrets of the Mac OSX color picker in The Colors! I’ve always wondered how to capture a pixel’s color (answer: with the magnifying glass) or get a color into the swatch list at the bottom of the color picker (answer: drag it from the swatch next to the magnifying glass). Note the link to HexColorPicker, exColor and Painter’s Picker.

Codepoetry also asks the eternal question: If I throw a cat out the car window, is it kitty litter? (one of the random quotes you get at the top of each page) and links to the cool tool LanOSD. I’m not sure what it does, but I’m sure it’s cool.

A couple of random kitty links:

• Mustang Sally writes LJ fic about Spike and her cats
• Mark Pilgrim uses googlefight for a kitten fight.

I tried the latter at home.

For a regular googlefight:

Number of results on Google for the keywords J/C and C/7:
J/C (1 930 000 results) versus C/7 (2 720 000 results)
The winner is:    C/7

A kittenfight yields:

Number of results on Google for the keywords J/C kills kittens and C/7 kills kittens:
J/C kills kittens (21 results) versus C/7 kills kittens (32 results)
The winner is:    C/7 kills kittens

I’m hoping to get a copy of this monkey gene and become a highly-productive fanfic writer again. But I hope to avoid any deadly monkey viruses while I’m at it.

There are ten (yes, ten) new drabbles up on the Stargate fic page, for the first ten episodes of Season 5. The Betas’ Choice for this batch is Black Widow, a drabble coda to “2001.” The Author’s Choice is Chaka Zulu, inspired by the real Shaka Zulu.

This brings the Stargate by Drabbles project up to 70 drabbles, a fine biblical number to go with Alas, Tollana. In a few months I may even reach a drabble of drabbles.

Math link of the day: a tribe who can’t count (thanks to Seema)

You may notice a subtle change in the blog design. I think I’ve finally tamed the wild, CPU-eating color switching script. It was especially slow on pages with lots of entries, like the category and monthly pages. Links are no longer colored.

Depending on your browser, it may take time or effort for the cached versions of the stylesheet and script to be replaced by their replacements. Color rotation should happen faster with the new version.

Font link of the day: Olympukes, for Seema

Once upon a time in America, you could walk into a church and get married. It wasn’t quite kidnapping a bride, but it was a reasonably unregulated process. Today in America, you need a blood test and a license to get married. Obviously the Pilgrims weren’t doing blood tests, so where did they come in?

I used to think that it was a simple public health measure to prevent the spread of syphilis (and nowadays AIDS) to the innocent spouse, but that’s not it. The truth is we’ve inherited our heavy regulations from the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. (If you had no idea, here’s a site about eugenics and the law in Vermont.) Eugenics supporters lobbied legislatures for pre-marriage health certification to keep the unfit from marrying, and therefore (to some extent) from reproducing.

So when you take that blood test, remember what it’s really for. Are you fit or unfit?

Crazy rumor of the day: Arlo Rose Working On Doomsday Widget

Here’s a link dump of the nifty and the novel in Mac software:

• ~stevenf describes CocoaBooklet, an app for printing booklets.
• Mac the Ripper, an all-in-one DVD ripping utility, is up to version 2.0.1.
• SafariSpeed will do that speeding-up-Safari hack for you.
• Bookpedia will catalog your books. (Well, you’ll catalog your books, unless you happen to have a bar code scanner handy.)
• Have you been waiting for the reincarnation of HyperCard? It’s no longer necessary to drink that poison Kool-Aid - HyperNext is here!
• iGetter is download manager for the Mac, for those of you who don’t use wget.
• Mike Matas has cool icons that come with a copy of his CatScan.

Weird link of the day: Innovation in India

I was waiting for a DNS entry to percolate down to my little mac, but then I thought, why wait? So I followed this macosxhint to get my mac to contact the one DNS server that already had a clue. It wasn’t really necessary, but it worked.

To check if a domain is having DNS troubles, try Quick Check. When Quick Check verified that the domain was one with the net again, I undid my DNS hack above. No harm done.

I love Quicksilver, but when it crashes, it drags the Finder down with it. Apparently I have it cataloguing too much; I followed the advice in this forum thread to turn off automatic rescanning of the catalog, and QS hasn’t crashed since.