lluad

The World Health Organization have come out publicly against homeopathy. Discussing third world childhood diarrhea they say:

We have found no evidence to date that homeopathy would bring any benefit. Homeopathy does not focus on the treatment and prevention of dehydration.

Uhm... isn't dehydration the one thing that homeopathic treatments actually do treat?

Math factoid of the day:

190 is the largest number with the property that it and its distinct prime factors are palindromic in Roman numerals.

Livejournal's spell checker doesn't think "batshit" is a word. It also doesn't think "blog" is a word, though, so I'm not going to pay it too much attention.

Nor, apparently, is "livejournal" a word. I'm seeing a trend here.

from bisky

The Omnivore's Hundred is a list of foods the gastronomic Andrew Wheeler thinks everyone should try at least once in their lives.

( Read more...Collapse )

For Liv, mostly

( Red Chicken CurryCollapse ) ( Red Curry PasteCollapse )

Both recipes slightly adapted from Far Eastern Cookery, by Madhur Jaffrey

... and it's a meme.

But I followed the directions, and the result was so damn good I had to post it.

Stolen from wurmfood.

Here are the instructions:

Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random. The article title is the name of your band.
Go to http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3. The final words of the last quote on your page are the title of your album.
Go to http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ The FOURTH image on the page is your album cover. You can choose to go to http://www.flickr.com/groups/flickrsocial/pool/ if you prefer a more dynamic, less philosophical cover.
Design your cover. Layout and presentation are up to you.
Post your cover, along with these instructions. In the comments your friends will tell you what kind of music you play and the name of the album's single.

Band name: Crossroads
Album name: Nothing is as far away as one minute ago

macbook:~/abacus3/monolith steve$ ./makeHostre.pl regex.h inaddr.zone.gz root.zone.gz

Unmatched ( in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/( <-- HERE ?:((?:https?|ftp)://[^"<>\s]+(?:[a-z]|/[^"<>\s]+)|([a-z0-9][^<"@\s]{0,80}@)?((?:[a-z0-9_-]{1,63}\.)+(?:a(?:[cdfgilmnoqtuwxz]|e(?:ro)?|r(?:pa)?|s(?:ia)?)|m(?:[acdghkmnpqrstvwxyz]|u(?:seum)?|o(?:bi)?|i?l)|c(?:[cdfghiklmnruvxyz]|o(?:op|m)?|at?)|t(?:[cdfghjkmnoptvwz]|r(?:avel)?|e?l)|n(?:[cfgilopruz]|a(?:me)?|et?)|b(?:[abdefghjmnorstvwyz]|iz?)|g(?:[abdefghilmnpqrstuwy]|ov)|i(?:[delmoqrst]|n(?:fo|t)?)|p(?:[aefghklmnstwy]|ro?)|s[abcdeghijklmnortuvyz]|j(?:[emp]|o(?:bs)?)|e(?:[cegrst]|d?u)|l[abcikrstuvy]|k[eghimnrwyz]|u[agkmsyz]|v[aceginu]|d[ejkmoz]|f[ijkmor]|h[kmnrtu]|o(?:rg|m)|r[eouw]|y[etu]|z[amw]|w[fs]|qa)(?![a-z0-9_-]))|((?:1(?:2[012345689]?|9[012345689]?|1[6789]|7[012]?|8[89]?|3\d?|5\d?|6\d?|4\d|0)|2(?:[45]|2[012456789]|0\d?|1\d|3\d)|9[01236789]|4[013457]?|5[2356789]|3[23458]?|6\d?|8\d?|7\d)\.(?:1(?:0\d?|1\d?|2\d?|3\d?|4\d?|5\d?|6\d?|7\d?|8\d?|9\d?)?|2(?:[6789]|5[012345]?|0\d?|1\d?|2\d?|3\d?|4\d?)?|3\d?|4\d?|5\d?|6\d?|7\d?|8\d?|9\d?|0)\.(?:1(?:0\d?|1\d?|2\d?|3\d?|4\d?|5\d?|6\d?|7\d?|8\d?|9\d?)?|2(?:[6789]|5[012345]?|0\d?|1\d?|2\d?|3\d?|4\d?)?|3\d?|4\d?|5\d?|6\d?|7\d?|8\d?|9\d?|0)\.(?:1(?:0\d?|1\d?|2\d?|3\d?|4\d?|5\d?|6\d?|7\d?|8\d?|9\d?)?|2(?:[6789]|5[012345]?|0\d?|1\d?|2\d?|3\d?|4\d?)?|3\d?|4\d?|5\d?|6\d?|7\d?|8\d?|9\d?|0))|([0-9a-f]{1,4}:[0-9a-f:]*:[0-9a-f]{1,4}))(?![0-9a-z])/ at ./makeHostre.pl line 76.

.... alrighty then.

Software development makes your eyes hurt.

radparker posted another of the OkCupid which-political-bent-are-you quizzes, and I was vaguely interested enough to do it myself.

( Politics memeCollapse )

The OkCupid folks riddle their paste-this-html-in-your-journal with 1x1 gifs, linked to their website with advertising Alt text. I wonder how effective that is as an SEO technique?

So, I've spent the last few evenings installing MythTV - a TiVo-esque digital video recorder setup on a linux PC. It's rather good.

We now have TiVo-style pausing of live TV and recording and so on, onscreen display of local weather forecasts and radar, our NetFlix queue, news feeds and lots of other stuff. And a nice web interface for searching listings and scheduling recordings. And streaming of recorded or live TV to any of the computers in the house (even to the laptops via the wireless network).

I'm quite pleased with the end result. I may need to write a bit of code, though, to add a button to the remote that'll display the IMDB info about the current show onscreen...

( Geek ContentCollapse )

Very, very good. Has most of the good bits of Civ2, Call to Power and Alpha Centuri. It's avoided most of the bad bits of all of them.

You can micromanage, but you don't need to. Some minor sprite bugs and a little less minor audio bugs, but nothing other than cosmetic.

Highest "I'll just have one more turn..." rating since Civ2 or MoO2. Passable eye-candy too.