Random Linkage

Get off the computer and spend New Year’s eve with your friends and family!

For those that don’t:

• Spiders engage in freaky sex.  Some reproduce via what is essential vaginal fisting, while some are just crazy fast (but at least they make us male humans look good, in comparison)
  

  A male orb-web (Argiope bruennichi) spider will actually break off the tip of his own genitals and leave his “manhood” in the female’s sexual orifice, effectively blocking future male’s efforts to inseminate the female. When her sex hole is blocked, copulation typically lasts for only eight seconds with subsequent males. Normally, male spiders copulate for twice as long, [emphasis mine] though redbacks can last as long as 31 minutes (and if that seems impressive, check out how a bite from the Brazilian wandering spider can stimulate an hours-long erection).

• 15 of the funniest political cartoons of the year
• 400-year-old “sealed” tomb, 100-year-old Swiss watch?  Time travel?  Aliens?  I’m betting on Lara Croft family heirloom.  No possibility archaeologists are just wrong on their suppositions
  

  Archaeologists are stumped after finding a 100-year-old Swiss watch in an ancient tomb that was sealed more than 400 years ago.

  They believed they were the first to visit the Ming dynasty grave in Shangsi, southern China, since its occupant’s funeral.

• Security researchers crack SSL with 200 PlayStations
  

  A team of security researchers and academics has broken a core piece of internet technology. They made their work public at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin today. The team was able to create a rogue certificate authority and use it to issue valid SSL certificates for any site they want. The user would have no indication that their HTTPS connection was being monitored/modified.

• Ladies, if you have to undergo mastectomy, know that you probably have more options for reconstruction than your doctor tells you
  

  Uneven information about reconstructive options is a subset of a larger problem, said Dr. Amy K. Alderman, an assistant professor of plastic surgery at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor. Only one third of women undergoing operations for breast cancer said their general surgeons had discussed reconstruction at all, according to a study by Dr. Alderman of 1,844 women in Los Angeles and Detroit that was published in February in the journal Cancer.

  “In the big picture, it would be great if we could just get doctors to tell people they have an option of reconstruction,” Dr. Alderman said.

• Blizzard starting new video series Battle Reports in which videos of complete Starcraft II battles are viewable to give gamers an idea of what this game will be like.  Check out the first battle now (via ArsTechnica)
• Initial word of the first in-depth study on a cell-phone/cancer link is not so encouraging (via Gizmodo)
  

  Nearly five decades ago, Americans learned that one of their most treasured habits—smoking—was lethal. This year, we could get more scary news, when scientists announce the results from Interphone, the largest-ever study to investigate whether cellphones cause cancer.

  Interphone researchers are pooling and analyzing the results gathered from studies on 6,400 tumors sampled from patients in 13 countries. If the final results mirror the preliminary ones, the world’s three billion cellphone users might want to dial back their talk time. Israeli researchers participating in Interphone found that people who use cellphones regularly are 50 percent more likely than non-users to develop brain tumors. And a joint Interphone analysis from the U.K., Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland reported a 40 percent increase in tumor risk in people who use cellphones for more than a decade; the study found no discernable risk for people who have used cellphones for fewer than 10 years.

• Hip-hop album covers, redone in Lego (via Level Up)
• Wired’s Game|Life reviews predictions for 2008 made in 2007
  

  I’m sure some SKU reconfiguration or another will come in 2008, accompanied by a price drop to $300 for this holiday for the low end and $400 for the high end.

  Oh: burned by overestimating Sony. And you wonder why I drink.

• Early reports suggest that these computer gadgets may just stick around and revolutionize the way we do things.  So what do you thing - passing fad, or life-changing long-term technology shift?
  

  In a way though, my wife is right. After a year of looking closely at computers—at what they are doing all over the country, what they are likely to do before long, and what their effects are expected to be upon us all and upon our descendants—I must say that these machines are indeed awful [emphasis mine], in just about every sense the dictionaries assign to that word: inspiring dread, appalling, objectionable; solemnly impressive; commanding reverential fear or profound respect; sublimely majestic.

  . . .

  Computers monitor experiments. They analyze, tabulate, and sift findings, thus fostering the discovery of newly appreciated relationships and proving new theses. Not only in the physical sciences but also in biology, in archeology (see the article beginning on page 634), and in the humanities as well. Through analysis of the recurrence of certain words, a computer furnished convincing evidence that 11 Federalist Papers widely thought to have been written by Hamilton were by Madison.

• Following up on last week’s photo tips from Ars, here’s a link to David Pogue’s guide to taking better photos, hosted at the New York Times (via LifeHacker)
  

  Exhale and pull elbows in for steady shots: Especially if you’re not rocking a vibration-control lens on a DSLR rig, this body-steadying practice can make all the difference for no-flash shots.

• Headline shocker of the day: Eating At Buffets Plus Not Exercising Equals Obesity
  

  ScienceDaily (Dec. 23, 2008) — In small towns in the Midwestern United States, people who eat out often at buffets and cafeterias and who perceive their community to be unpleasant for physical activity are more likely to be obese.

• Weirdest science news of 2008 according to MSNBC
  

  How do you follow an act like glow-in-the-dark kitties? The competition for our second annual Weird Science Awards includes an ample helping of animal weirdness, ranging from see-through fish to a four-eared feline. But 2008 saw plenty of all-too-human oddities as well, including the world’s oldest marijuana stash and the “lost” Amazon tribe that wasn’t.

• Argument against Kennedy assuming Hillary’s senate position (via Victoria Kos)
  

  We know in our hearts that Charles Gibson and Katie Couric, who mercilessly grilled pro-life, Christian Sarah Palin with the poor white twang, would pull in their talons–if given the chance to dialogue with Caroline. Yet there is no evidence that Caroline Kennedy knows any more about Waziristan than did Sarah Palin; there is a great deal of evidence that it is far more difficult for a nobody mom of five to make it through the electoral process into national politics from Alaska than it is for a Kennedy daughter of a President to be appointed from the Upper East Side to fill a liberal New York Senate Seat.

• Noam Chomsky talks about the November elections.  And in typical Chomsky fashion, he makes sure to speak to you, whether you are conservative or liberal, to let you know how wrong you are about your political beliefs.  Oh, and it’s damn long, but still worth reading if you can stomach Chomsky
  

  In other respects, the outcome was pretty familiar. So, once again, the election was essentially bought. Nine out of ten of the victors outspent their opponents. Obama, of course, outspent McCain. If you look at the—and we don’t have final records yet from the final results, but they’re probably going to be pretty much like the preliminary results a couple of months ago, which showed that both Obama and McCain were getting the bulk of their financing from the financial institutions and, for Obama, law firms, which means essentially lobbyists. It was about over a third a few months ago. Probably the final results will probably be the same.

  . . .

  The response to the election was interesting and instructive. It kept pretty much to the soaring rhetoric, to borrow the cliché, that was the major theme of the election. The election was described as an extraordinary display of democracy, a miracle that could only happen in America, and on and on. Much more extreme in Europe even than here. There’s some accuracy in that, if we keep to the West. So if we keep to the West, yes, it’s probably true that it couldn’t have happened anywhere else. Europe is much more racist than the United States, and you wouldn’t expect anything like that to happen. On the other hand, if we look at the world, it’s not that remarkable.

• I suspect it will be no surprise to many of my readers to find that landline-free house numbers are up 10% this year
  

  This latest study spanned from January to June 2008 and included responses from 30,150 adults and 11,238 children less than 18 years of age from 16,070 households, making for a 19 percent increase in respondents from last fall’s study. Overall, NCHS found nearly a 10 percent increase in wireless-only homes to 17.5 percent—that’s more than one in six households. Approximately 16.1 percent of US adults—or 36 million—live in wireless-only households, while 17 percent (12 million) children live in households with nothing but a cell phone.

• If I had known there were secretaries who liked to sit on the boss’ lap while taking dictation, I would have signed up for that managerial training course long ago
  

  SECRETARIES who prefer to sit on their boss’s laps while taking dictation may not like this new office aid, but for more efficient business it holds promise. The mechanical secretary is a little thirty-pound gadget called the Peirce (spelling correct) magnetic wire recorder. As the boss talks into the mike, his voice is transferred into electrical impulses. These are changed into magnetic impulses which magnetize a fine steel wire. When played back, the magnetic impulses revert to electrical impulses and are amplified into high fidelity soun [sic]

• Just how vulnerable are modern electronic voting systems?  Take a class and learn first-hand how to throw the election (kinda, sorta, but not exactly)
  

  As part of his advanced computer science class, Rice University Associate Professor and Director of Rice’s Computer Security Lab Dan Wallach tests his students in a unique real-life experiment: They are instructed to do their very best to rig a voting machine in the classroom.

  . . .

  “What we’ve found is that it’s very easy to insert subtle changes to the voting machine,” Wallach said. “If someone has access and wants to do damage, it’s very straightforward to do it.”

• “Hacking” in to an email account, finding a short homemade pr0n video, and demanding more naughty-movies?  Not likely to work out well in the end (hint - he got busted)
  

  I have a copy of 4 webcam video clips of you and [your boyfriend] having sex… you know what i’m talking about…! have attached one of the video clips as well as prove that i do have them…if you don’t want me to send them to all your friends and professors, send me a video clip of you stripping slowly and masturbating til orgasm (must be able to see your entire body including face…and clearly) and pics of yourself similar to those shown (in terms of position and clarity). If you do this, then i will not send to anyone else and noone else will see them, and you wil not hear from me again. However, if you tell anyone about this or report this, then I will send them to everyone you know.\

• Idiot sentenced 15 years for YouTube video on turning remote controlled car into bomb detonator
• Watch where you point that thing!!!
  

  BURBANK, Calif.—Five teenagers have been arrested in Burbank for allegedly shining a laser beam at a police helicopter.

  Investigators say the juveniles, ages 13 to 16, were booked Saturday night for investigation of felony shining a laser at a law enforcement aircraft.

  Those convicted of pointing lasers at aircraft can face penalties of up to three years in prison and a $2,000 fine.

• Yield to your future robot overlord
• How to fold an origami Millennium Falcon
• Perhaps only the comic geeks can truly appreciate this, but MaximumPC has done some work and gotten a slew of Comic-Con 08 cosplay photos up.  Naturally, most of you pervs will probably just look for the hot chicks in exotic outfits.  That’s OK, I confess I picked out a few of my favorites as well, just based on babe hotness and apparent freakiness
• What we get from the year-end 2.6.28 Linux Kernel

• A guide to ripping your DVDs to any media device or player you care to use
• The winners and finalists from every season of “The Biggest Loser,” what they are doing now, and how well they’ve maintained their weight loss
• Why Fat Women are the Happiest - hey, that’s not my phrase.  It’s an actual quote from a doctor:
  

  FAT women, especially those in middle age, are usually happier than thin women because they are better equipped to withstand the nervous strain brought on by the active pace now required of middle age women, according to Dr. McPhedran, of Toronto.

  Women of 40 and 50 are expected to manage the household, take an active part in club and civic affairs, and still be fresh for parties in the evening.

  All this is contrary to nature, and a reasonable degree of plumpness cushions the body against physical shocks and strain.

• Jeff Atwood, of CodingHorror fame, long ago wrote a smart guide to how to create hyperlinks.  I could stand to study some of this and be better about my own linking, honestly
• Scientists making laser-eye surgery better
  

  A new technique called Patterned Scanning Laser uses a computer instead of a human to apply laser pulses to burn away abnormal blood vessels. Instead of manually operating the laser, the pattern of one or two thousand laser pulses is automatically applied.

• 25 Winter snow and Christmas related high resolution wallpapers
• Rock, Paper, Shotgun on the 12 games of Christmas