Sometimes we are too busy to notice things that are right in plain sight. I enjoy browsing wikipedia just as I enjoy browsing a real dictionary. You never know what gems you will find when you aren't really looking for something in particular. Would it surprise you to know that wikipedia is just one of nine projects managed by the Wikimedia Foundation?

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What happens when a company goes bankrupt? Sometimes they fade away gracefully and leave only memories. Sometimes aggressive banking solutions pump needed money in and, like a phoenix, the company is reborn, better than ever. Sometimes, like in the case of The SCO Group "a company known more for the lawsuits it files than the products it makes" (Robert Mullins), they turn to lawyers to grasp at every straw trying to suck blood from any successful corporation they every had contact with. Enter Darl McBride, CEO of The SCO Group...

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You know that we here at JRSB take our cocktails seriously. There are so many and honestly, unless your job is to create, mix, and drink cocktails all day (like Jack, for instance) who has the time to ferret out the truly good ones and take notes? Worry not, Jack has your back. We have been remiss in covering rum in the past, but today we correct that omission. And boy do we correct it... rum, rum, rum on the bottom, rum on the top, and more rum is the essence of today's cocktail of the week. If you can only have one two? rum drinks, this just might be it - the Zombie!

koktelhuliganok.hu

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If you live in a major city you probably have broadband internet. Broadband internet is internet that works like this: you ask for some content and it is delivered. Dial-up internet is a little different - you ask for content then get coffee. When you return your content is there! According to some random statistics I found published on the internet, 55% of US households have broadband, while only 10% still use dial up. Broadband just isn't available everywhere but it is far better than it used to be years ago when you had to live in a major city to be able to get broadband speeds. 10 years ago I was still struggling with ISDN at 128kbps.

It came as a bit of a surprise to me that we are working on an interplanetary internet network when we have just only really entered the age of fast broadband here at home (on Earth, that is). My first thoughts were "Why do Martians need internet?" and "Did SETI actually find something they aren't telling us?" My second thought was "I know we are planning a moon colony, but surely there are easier ways to deliver fast access to internet porn?"

It turns out I had no idea why we need an interplanetary internet system. What NASA is trying to do is create a communications system they can use to carry data between the Earth and all of their various probes, rovers, orbiters, and spacecraft. Martians need not apply. What is even more interesting is that the system is all about communicating very very slowly, across huge distances. Packet speeds are such that a handshaking exchange between a Martian rover and Earth mission control takes 16 minutes! Dial-up users rejoice, at least your coffee is piping hot when your data gets there. At 16 minutes for a handshake, interplanetary porn isn't going to happen anytime soon.

You can find more information here at the IEEE Spectrum site

Today our wiki-thought will be centered around food, drink, and toxicology. As the saying goes "If it tastes good, it's probably bad for you". This is surprisingly true. An obvious example is of course alcohol. Most of us enjoy alcoholic beverages yet we know that if consumed in excess they lead to a large number of undesirable side affects. But what about things we thought were safe? What if most of what we consume is in fact toxic?

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Some of you may find today's Cocktail of the Week frustrating. Trust me and relax, it won't be. In fact, if you can just sit back and keep an open mind for just a minute or two we'll all be much happier. Today's cocktail is not the Manhattan, but Alice's father's Manhattan.

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Just the other day I went looking for seven. I began by thinking that I could find it with just what was in my hands: Holding up seven fingers, counting to be sure, I marveled at the simplicity of my discovery. But soon I became troubled. This wasn’t what I was searching for at all. This was seven fingers. I was looking at fingers, not seven.

Quickly I extracted from a drawer and arranged before me seven forks; this proved no better. Instead of fingers, now I was looking at forks. How was I closer? Where was seven hiding? This was tougher that I expected.

Wanting to see seven without looking at fingers or forks, I reached for paper and pencil and sketched a very large 7. Despite my hopes, I still hadn’t found seven. Although the numeral 7 wasn’t seven of something, which could be seen or touched, it was only a symbol representing seven. Since a symbol isn’t the thing it represents (or it wouldn’t be a symbol), I knew I had to look elsewhere. Where was seven to be found?

With a touch of despair, I wondered if maybe there simply wasn’t any such animal and my search for it hopeless. Maybe seven didn’t exist, and I so much the fool chasing after it.

No, that couldn’t be, for I saw seven dwelling in too many places, in fingers and forks, for example. But suppose I had made it up, created this thing called seven with my mind, invented a phantasm and gave it the name seven, a phantasm I kept around because it pleased me. No, this wasn’t an answer, this was short-circuiting the difficulty, dismissing the problem by saying it didn’t exist.

What if I was closer to the goal than I knew when I drew that numeral 7? Since the symbol for seven doesn’t need fingers or forks to dwell in, I was stripping off those things that hid the essence of what I was seeking. If the essence of a thing can be hidden by appearance, then it isn’t the eyes which will prove useful in seeing it.

I really like the posts on the front page here... maybe I'll not post more so this set will stay up front.

There is a method to our madness here today. You see, we've talked about CIA black sites and enemy combatants previously. We know we have a huge problem right now regarding what to do with all these people we've imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. Well Jackrabbitscrewball, as always, has a solution and you're gonna love it!

You'll just need to bear with me for a short stretch and then you'll agree this is pure genius.

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Breaking news: Les Paul is dead today at the age of 94. I think it's fair to say that without Les Paul, we would be left with only the ancient wind instrument melodies written by pop stars of the 18th century such as Beethoven and Bach. By allowing musicians to play using only their hands, Les Paul enabled vocals to be added to music, which until then had been purely instrumental.

Jimmy Page, in the 1977 interview with Steve Rosen, said of Les Paul "I mean he’s the father of it all: multi-tracking and everything else. If it hadn’t been for him, there wouldn’t have been anything really."

Is America taking civil defense seriously?

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It's Wednesday and that means it's time for another cocktail! Last week we visited the Negroni, a gin and Campari blend that really highlights the bitter aspects of Campari. Today we move to the light and sweet side of that spectrum with the Jasmine.

City Pages

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I'm getting tired of EULA (End-User License Agreement) spam. Everything we do seems to entail clicking through some egregiously long multipage document written in legal-speak. Even if I did take the time to read it, I wouldn't understand it. People don't read these at all and the implied contract by blindly accepting one seems farcical. EULAs are like bad advertisements, they are ignored.

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As I was adding the new RSS feed page the other day, I realized that not everyone understands what RSS feeds are all about. Yesterday I told Alice "I'm putting up an RSS feed page, is there anything you'd like on it?" Her reply was "What's an RSS feed?" So what is an RSS feed and why should you care?

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“That’s what you think!” We’ve either heard or said this phrase at some point in our lives. But if someone were to say, “It is raining out,” and if looking outside we saw rain, would we likely retort, “That’s what you think!”?

Although what one says is a measure of his thought, we don’t employ this phrase in plain meaning or to congratulate someone on articulating his thought well; instead, we use it disparagingly. We employ it when we wish to imply that what someone thinks isn’t what is, that what he thinks exists only in a subjective manner, only within him; that he lacks objectivity, that what he thinks is but errant thought, that his thinking isn't reflective of reality. We are saying that someone is deluded; we are saying that he is wrong.

Perhaps you are thinking, “Wait, aren’t all my thoughts by nature subjective since they occur only within me?” So true! for your thoughts are not my thoughts; my thoughts, not yours. That we all are possessed of such subjectivity, objectively is true, barring this big exception: having read what I have written and understanding it, haven’t my thoughts become yours; yours, mine?

Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images.

- Aristotle, De Interpretatione

The other day I was looking for interesting stuff on wikipedia. I typed in a word, then followed the disambiguation link into the realm of pure word play and fun. I clicked on something that interested me and to my complete shock found a page that had been defaced with spam. I clicked the history tab and found that there were 2 edits within just the last minute. One from some IP address 192.232.155.215 and another from someone called Cluebot. I don't spend a lot of time browsing wiki history pages so I was a bit confused at first. It turns out that Cluebot is a robot that runs automatically on the wiki servers to detect and revert vandalism.

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Wouldn't it just figure that the day I add Twitter and Facebook widgets to the pages here, they get shut down by denial of service attacks? On the Twitter blog, the co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone writes, "Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users."

While there is no doubt that no one wants to be the target of a DOS attack, I find it more than a little humorous that he likened the attack on Twitter to damaging attacks on banks and financial services. It's inconvenient, but I'm pretty sure we'll survive.

I'll try re-enabling the Twitter widget tomorrow.

9600 photographs and no photoshopping / post production edits. It's pretty amazing.

Today's cocktail of the week is an unusual one. Accounts of its 'discovery' in the early 1900's seem to be split between either the Frenchman Pascal Olivier, Count de Negroni and the Italian Count Cammillo Negroni who supposedly asked for an Americano cocktail with gin rather than soda. I find it more likely that an Italian asked for a drink kicked up a notch than a Frenchman crafting a cocktail with Italian Campari, but stranger things have happened.

iacopomasi.net

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Der erste August! A national holiday in Switzerland celebrating the beginning of the fight for independence. Actually, it was the beginning of trying to get away from paying taxes to the Austrians. But independence sounds better. The first of many constitutions to come was written on this day in 1291. The Swiss did not believe in monarchies or any other form of royalty. They were tired of the overlords and began their own loose organization of Kantons (states), namely Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden. Happy Birthday Switzerland!!

HOPP SCHWYYZ!